Abdellatif Kechiche, the director of Blue Is the Warmest Color, acknowledges in a new interview that winning the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival was merely a “brief moment of happiness.” He now feels the movie should not be distributed at all.

“According to me, the film shouldn’t be released. It has been soiled too much,” Kechiche told Telerama, a French magazine. “The Palme d’Or had been a brief moment of happiness; then I’ve felt humiliated, dishonored, I felt rejected, I live it like I’m cursed.”

Kechiche also said that he was close to replacing star Léa Seydoux early in the film because he couldn’t “unblock” her emotional performance. It’s worth mentioning that Seydoux has been the most outspoken about her tough time on the set, claiming that Kechiche “burst into a rage” when she botched up one take after they’d done 100 of the same sequence in a succession. Kechiche states in a Telerama interview that he pondered replacing Seydoux with Sara Forestier or Mélanie Thierry.

From the initial showing, a long sex scene between actors Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos was scrutinized. Exarchopoulos was outspoken about her experience filming the sequence during the Toronto International Film Festival, causing a storm of criticism.

“He warned us that we had to trust him — blind trust — and give a lot of ourselves,” Exarchopoulos stated during a news conference in early September. “He was making a movie about passion, so he wanted to have sex scenes, but without choreography — more like special sex scenes.”

Kechiche is now concerned that a narrative of his three-hour love drama has been constructed that hinders viewers from “entering the room with a clean heart and a watchful eye.” Anyone who has heard the buzz will find it difficult to ignore. “In advance, they will ask: ‘Did this man not harass the girls? Did they not cherish [the experience], too, and they do not dare say it?” he tells the magazine.

The film Blue Is the Warmest Color will be released on October 25th.