By his own admission, Laurent Cantet was a sensible boy at school. He made friends easily and didn’t take part in the kind of high jinks that the teenage pupils in his much fêted new film, The Class (Entre les Murs), get up to.

“Perhaps I was a bit too sensible,” says the 47-year-old director, lowering his voice beneath the hum of a crowded Paris café. “I think making the film allowed me to experience this kind of [mischievous] behaviour in a vicarious way, to discover an aspect of myself which I never managed to explore.”