The first time I saw Camille I was impressed with the way her eyes seemed to shine in a powerful way.

She looked young, maybe too young , she was petite...well formed yes, but very young-looking and yet there was maturity in her eyes. The kind of maturity you find in people who have lived a lot, not necessarily in time, but in experiences.

Our exchange was short, to the point, and I was very impressed with her, with her demeanor and her views.

I offered her a job, I invited her to come for casting but my mind was already made up, in fact that very night I began to change the script with her in mind.

She was what I was looking for, but I wasn't going to let her know that, not just yet.

To my delight the casting went very well, as I suspected it would, she was a natural but she needed some training, she had to learn how to suffer.

My first inclination was to slowly show her where we were going. In the film we were about to shoot she was going to be killed under torture at the hands of a serial killer. To make matters more interesting, in the story she's role-playing with the killer, who happens to be her lover, and she realizes, when it's too late, that he's not playing, he means to kill her.

Perhaps the idea of a serial killer, a nut, was a bit of a cliche, but there it was, written and ready. Looking in retrospect, perhaps it would've been interesting to make it more like a game that got out of hand.

But I had to ask myself the question. Could it happen? Could a game get out of hand? Of course it could if the people involved lost control of their sanity. I decided to keep the idea of a serial killer who indulges in some kind of freak ritual.

One of Camille's roles was the girl who gets killed, the other role was her twin sister who becomes involved in the investigation and falls in love with the defense lawyer. I was playing the part of the defense lawyer so I had the perfect excuse to justify getting closer to her, I found her extremely attractive.

Our discussion was honest and forward "You will be tied up, tortured and killed. It will begin as a game and at the first cut you have to realize that it's not a game. For now we will concentrate only on the killing part. We will forget the character for the time being and concentrate on the situation."

The place where she was going to start her training was the same I had used for three other trainees previously. Marie, who would play the role of a previous victm of the killer, another actress who was going for the part of a girl who falls in the hands of an interrogator who tortures her for information to incriminate someone in a crime, and finally Margot, who was helping me work out a series of scenes in a script I was writing, the script that I was now planning to work with Camille.

The steps I would take were already planned in some detail.

There was a long beam across the ceiling. It was high enough to hold someone up, almost hanging. It had hooks on opposite ends so I could tie someone up there, with arms open, cross-like.

I have a fascination with the cross since I was a kid and somehow I have managed to worm it into my work.

I told Camille to put a t-shirt I had prepared on top of her underwear and to return. She went away to change while I prepared the ropes and the camera, my nice, old VHS camera, one that I bought in NY just to play with.