Ludivine Sagnier and Louis Garrel at Cannes Photo by Matt Carr

Honoré has been known to admit that he did not want to cast Garrel in Love Songs at first because he didn't know if the actor had any singing ability. Garrel brushes aside this assumption, light-heartedly claiming that Honoré was trying to create "a myth" or "a kind of legend" around the film's production. According to Garrel, Honoré had told him about the actors he was considering for the role of Ismaël, and a day later Garrel called up Honoré and said: "OK, why don't you try to make me sing?" Garrel was undaunted by the singing aspect of the role, having already performed onstage in Don Giovanni while in drama school. Comparatively, performing the songs of Alex Beaupain was less taxing than Mozart: "You feel really stupid when you sing opera because you open your mouth like this," explains Garrel stretching his mouth wide. "So for me it, it was really easy to do."

Garrel did, however, struggle a little to settle into the idea of lip-synching to the songs while acting "because it takes time to feel free." As an actor, it is important, he notes, to control your facial expressions but "when you sing you can't". Garrel expresses his admiration for Depp's performance in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: "I love Johnny Depp," enthuses Garrel. "I saw that sometimes he's not lip-synching perfectly but you don't care. You don't care. He's really good."

Ismaël, Garrel's character in Love Songs, has no family or history, and even after Julia's death, he remains integrated in her background and family. This is important to Garrel's understanding and interpretation of the character. Referring to Antoine Doinel, the fictional alter ego for François Truffaut in a number of his films, Garrel quotes Stolen Kisses in which Doinel says: "I choose a girl for her and for her parents." Says Garrel, "that was a key for the character... this man feels so comfortable in the family of Julie. And that's a big thing in a love story: to feel so comfortable with the family of your love." But conversely while Julie's family is a place of retreat and comfort, Erwann, the young student who falls for Ismaël, represents an escape from familial responsibilities and constraints. That Ismaël is not tortured by his relationship with Erwann is remarkable to Garrel "because homosexuality in films in general is treated like a social problem." He points out that Julie's family "is not [Ismaël's] family, so they can't reproach him to being homosexual. He's completely free... you don't think, 'Oh, what a problem it's going to become for him to explain that to his own family.'"

The social message of the film is important to Garrel and he does not shy away from expressing that a more positive portrayal of homosexuality on screen is needed: "Because if I were gay, [and] I'm not gay yet — maybe one day — but if I were gay, I'd like to see movies where homosexuality isn't always a problem." Asked what he thought the message of the film is, Garrel's response is nothing if not romantic: "I was reading a book of Jewish proverbs and we found this little phrase that we put in the movie. 'Love me less but love me long.' I mean that's a perfect conclusion, no?"

Despite coming from a long lineage of filmmakers and actors (his grandfather was actor Maurice Garrel, his father is director Philippe Garrel and his mother, Brigitte Sy, is an actress), Louis Garrel was not always certain a life in cinema was his destiny, too. Despite being cast at age 5 in his father's 1989 film Stolen Kisses, he initially had other dreams: "I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was a kid. Then I started to take drama lessons and there were a lot of girls, and I didn't like too much the company of men, I mean in a group. I like to have a friend, one-on-one, you know. But the group [mentality] of men for me is horrible. So I started to take theater courses and there were lots of girls — a very feminine universe. And that was something that I felt that I needed and that I liked to have."