“I always give my best when I’m inspired by the director,” said Italian actress Monica Bellucci during the 72nd edition of the Cannes Film Festival. “We have so many things inside us and the filmmaker knows how to canalize all these elements,” Bellucci said in a recent interview with Xinhua about her movie The Best Years of a Life, directed by Oscar winner French director Claude Lelouche, which was presented out of competition at the film festival.

The film is the epilogue of Lelouche’s 1966 love-story masterpiece A Man and a Woman. Bellucci said she likes Lelouche’s philosophy of life, and the film was a dream for her. When she heard Lelouche was preparing the film, she said she wanted “to be in this movie, even if I only get to bring coffee to the protagonists.”