There are many references to the theatre throughout Resnais's filmmaking ("Marienbad", "Muriel", "Stavisky", "Mon oncle d'Amérique"), but he first undertook the challenge of taking a complete stage work and giving it new cinematic life in "Mélo" (1986), an adaptation of Henri Bernstein's 1929 play of the same name. Resnais remained entirely faithful to the play (apart from shortening it) and he emphasised its theatricality by filming in long takes on large sets of evidently artificial design, as well as by marking off the acts of the play with the fall of a curtain. After an excursion into the world of comic books and cartoons in "I Want to Go Home" (1989), an ambitious theatrical adaptation followed with the diptych of "Smoking/No Smoking" (1993). Resnais, having admired the plays of Alan Ayckbourn for many years, chose to adapt what appeared the most intractable of them, "Intimate Exchanges", a series of eight interlinked plays which follow the consequences of a casual choice to sixteen possible endings. Resnais slightly reduced the number of permuted endings and compressed the plays into two films, each having a common starting point, and to be seen in any order. Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi played all the parts, and the theatricality of the undertaking was again emphasised by the studio set designs for a fictional English village. Resnais returned to Ayckbourn in the following decade for his adaptation of "Private Fears in Public Places" to which he gave the film title of "Cœurs" (2006). Among the stage/film effects which contribute to its mood of "cheerful desolation" is the artificial snow which is continually seen through set windows until eventually it falls on the studio interior as well.