And class is one element of the power play between the girls. When Tamsin asks Mona whether she's read Nietzsche, you don't know whether it's a serious question or a way to gain power over her.

Absolutely. It's a way of gaining power, of seducing Mona into a world of all sorts of unfamiliar things. Also it's a way of filling up silence. They don't quite know what to talk about, so we get these monologues. Basically they are not ready to communicate, so they are filling every moment with bullshit. I wanted Tamsin to know a bit more about Nietzsche, but I couldn't make my actress read him. Emily tried. She could have been slightly more demonic and Nietzsche-like in that moment, I think, but it wouldn't have rang true with Emily.

This movie involves a sexual relationship between two teenage girls, and that's probably going to push some people's buttons. Were you at all worried that critics or audiences would think you were a dirty old man getting his rocks off?

Not really. Maybe it fleetingly passed my mind that there's an awkwardness in doing this. When you build everything on the character, on authentic relationships, then you're on pretty safe ground. There's only one erotic scene where the girls are in bed, and we shot that at the very end. I prefer to proceed by understatement, but when we looked at what we had assembled, it seemed very coy and stupid that we didn't have this. Were we saying, "There is this thing between them, but we're not showing it"?

I had other problems, you know? The problem of how I'd be perceived was overshadowed by the much bigger problems of how to make it all work psychologically, how to get the actresses onboard so they knew what they were doing, how to make the story come together.

Unless I'm misreading your intentions totally, it's not a film about sexual identity. That idea doesn't seem to occur to either of them.

No, not at all. What happens between them mainly happens in the imagination, in psychology. Each of them lacks something, and sees it in the other. It's not about sexuality, or even about sex. It's much more play-acting. Tamsin is actually sexually inexperienced, and is just enacting all sorts of fantasies. I don't think they're aware of what they're doing.

How important is your Polish upbringing in terms of what you bring to making films in Britain?

It's easy to say that I have a different take on England because I'm foreign. I just decided to have a different take on England. I just like cinema or art that is not on the nose. I try to build things, make films, that are kind of slippery and ambiguous, that avoid the obvious. The problem with British cinema is that it's all about the obvious.

You've talked about the filmmakers you admire -- Scorsese, Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, Andrzej Wajda. What ties them together? What kinds of films attract you as a moviegoer?

I like films with some complicated characters, which are well cast, with good actors who inhabit the characters without trickery or fake technique. Films where the director manages to create a whole world, a photographic and cinematographic world. You know, like "Taxi Driver," where New York becomes a kind of mystic space. These are the films where you see the movie and you are kind of changed, where you don't want to leave the cinema. That's what moviemaking is about -- creating space, images, absorbing characters who you love or hate but who are mysterious, ambiguous. Characters who leave things unsaid, who are not completely obvious.

Mona and Tamsin are certainly not obvious. How did you approach their story? What was the mood or tone you had in mind?

There isn't one mood, but I do like to create a world where the landscape is an extension or a projection of the characters, a world stripped of irrelevant noise and information, so you can concentrate on a few elements that have significance. Where you have a balance between information and experience; you're not overburdened. Where a few objects can go a long way, a kind of distilled world where the simpler it gets, the more meaning resonates. I try to focus on the right images, the right objects, and distill themes that are simple but that resonate.

I've heard that you looked at hundreds of girls before finding Emily and Natalie.

Well, we didn't have much money, so it was a long process. It wasn't like there was an army of people looking. It was me and my casting director. We looked at a lot of Monas and quite a few Tamsins. But the same process was involved in looking for the landscape. We spent a lot of time driving around, hiking around with a camera, finding the elements of our world. Because the whole idea of a film like this is that it's handmade. You are building it from the bottom up, making all the choices -- that's it. You control every part of what you do.

"My Summer of Love" opens June 17 in New York, Los Angeles and other major markets, with more cities to follow.

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