Asked where he gets his ideas, director François Ozon answered with a story about a writer who can no longer say where hers come from.

SWIMMING POOL (2003) stars Charlotte Rampling as Sarah Morton, a British crime writer who retreats to her publisher’s house in the south of France to finish a new book. The publisher is played by Charles Dance, and the character of Sarah was partly modeled on Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. Ozon sent the script to Rendell before production and asked her to imagine the book Sarah would write.

The solitude ends when a young woman named Julie, played by Ludivine Sagnier, arrives unannounced and uninvited, bringing men home at night and leaving a mess behind her in the kitchen.

Ozon and co-writer Emmanuèle Bernheim had both previously worked with Rampling on Under the Sand, and Sagnier had appeared in two of Ozon’s earlier films, giving the pairing a history that feeds the tension on screen. Yorick Le Saux’s cinematography holds the warmth of the south of France at a distance that keeps it from ever feeling safe.

What begins as a study of writerly irritation turns into a crime plot that may or may not be fiction within the fiction.