Director’s statement regarding The Sleeping Beauty

As opposed to "Bluebeard", I would like to deal with this tale, not as a story that two little girls tell each other, but as the story of a little girl who is born into a world she has no clear idea of, and so fabricates a child’s world of her own.

What comes before adolescence are just the long, gentle, and cruel "unfinished" moments of childhood. Even if that’s where the fairytale aspect of the tale begins.
That’s how she creates a character for herself, and becomes an adolescent who thinks she knows all about life.
But life isn’t a fairytale, and a teenage love-affair, like a precocious motherhood, imposes a different view of things.
It brings you "back down to earth", as the saying goes.
So it’s not a fairytale, but a tale about the beginnings of life.

                                                                                     Catherine Breillat