SIMON GRAY: Both yourself and the character Ismaël come from the town of Roubaix . I'd never heard of this town, so I looked it up on a map. It's almost in Belgium!
ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: Yes, it's just on the border. It's a shitty town.
So why does Ismaël come from Roubaix ?
It always seems to me to be a challenge when you are making a European movie to create a fictional place - somewhere magical, somewhere mythical. In Japan or America there are places that have this. Maybe in Britain , especially in British novels, you find this. It's not the geographical reality that's interesting: I'm looking for a landscape of fictions. The landscape in France is not that fascinating to me.
I worked very hard with my co-writer, Roger Bohbot, to try and create towns that could be fictional, towns that are completely unknown to the audience. Roubaix ? Nobody knows where Roubaix is. It's of no interest to anyone. It's used to comic effect. Like when Philip Roth writes about Newark as the very centre of the world. It's a joke! But he creates the fiction by saying 'the action is set in Newark '.
So in the film, there is Grenoble . I mean, what is Grenoble ? I'd never been there until the shooting but I knew that it is surrounded by mountains. Nora goes to see her father in Grenoble and she feels free because it is in the forest. But the mountains enclose the town, like walls - each time she looks out of the window she sees a wall of mountain. Suddenly, the town becomes quite frightening. In a sense, she is not free. She is imprisoned here, although I wouldn't say 'in Grenoble ' - the geographical aspect doesn't interest me that much. She might be in the Sweden of a Bergman film, full of awful people saying awful things.
Ismaël on the other hand eventually goes to Roubaix . What is Roubaix ? It's a small, really cheap, poor town. A town of hard workers in the old days, but now just unemployment. But what if Roubaix was a sort of enchanted place, like the Italy of a magical Shakespeare play? I mean, Shakespeare never went to Italy , but he created this magical place where anything can happen. I thought it would be funny that Nora is going South but it feels like Sweden ; and Ismaël goes to Roubaix but it feels, as in a magical Shakespeare play, like Italy - this lovely place where anything can happen, where amazing events can occur.
I thought it would be funny to switch the geography. We play with reality, with the landscape, with the people, with the bizarre architecture of Grenoble , and try to create fictions. That was the idea. Reality is a concept I don't believe in at all.
Does Ismaël come from Roubaix because you come from Roubaix ? I mean, are there aspects of the character Ismaël that are aspects of yourself? Do you draw on yourself when you create your characters?
When I'm making a movie, I'm asking the actors to give something true, something from themselves. I don't care where it comes from. A lot of time even the actors can't say where it's coming from. But they are giving something that is quite intimate. This is something you can't learn at any school. This is what acting is about.
I need an actor to reach a point inside of him or herself where the character he is playing allows the actor to speak about himself, about the hidden aspects of himself, of his shame, of his childhood, whatever. So, when I'm writing, just as a moral principle, I'm trying to be honest with the characters, to be able to identify myself in the characters. If not I don't think the part would be 'actable'. It would only be a character on paper. You must reach that point where you can give something of yourself to each character, where you can reach what you have in common with the character even if they are experiencing something that you've never experienced before.
Writing Ismaël was quite hard, to make it interesting, to transform it, as I was saying, into fiction, into something sparkling. But the harder job was to get into the mind of Nora, to fight for her, to love her. Both Emmanuelle and I tried to love her, to accept her and to identify with her. What she has to go through is beyond the limits. So, in a way, I feel close to Nora. I was proud to make a film, at last, as a woman, to speak as a female character. Nora needed to be loved, for us to foolishly identify with her. It is a sort of contract between us.
It's true, for example, that there are no Hitchcock movies that are more autobiographical than those he made with Ingrid Bergman. When he worked with Ingrid Bergman, he painted himself - as a girl. You can exactly understand how painful it was for him when you see, for example, Notorious . I don't think he identifies himself with Cary Grant. I think he loves Cary Grant, but he identifies himself with Ingrid Bergman.
It's interesting that you mention Hitchcock, who is perhaps infamous for portraying women as stereotypical, plastic, merely functional. Not fully-fledged characters. Yet you have claimed that one of the inspirations for the part of Nora was the role of Marnie. Why Marnie? Marnie is not what I'd consider a great part.
Well, I must have seen Marnie when I was 11, when it was on TV. My parents didn't have a TV so it must have been at my grandparents' apartment. It's a souvenir of my childhood. It was so shocking. There is all this guilt, these sexual connotations. Marnie feels guilty because she killed the lover of her prostitute mother. The story is so scabrous, so shocking. She goes mad, she doesn't know how to live, her life is a wreck, but she is trying to find peace at last, to discover herself.
How did you work with Emmanuelle Devos on the character of Nora?
On this film, the relationship between Emmanuelle and myself was so strong. Emmanuelle had been really tough with me before the shoot. She said, "I want you to tell me all the reasons why you love this woman, and why you think this woman is moral" and so on. And I had to answer all these questions.
I felt during the shooting of Nora's scenes that we were both directors, that Emmanuelle was directing half and I was directing half. Maybe just in a few words. She would say, "Why are you putting the camera here?" I would explain my idea. She would say, "Could you play Nora once? I just need to see the scene". And she would go to look in the camera and I would play Nora's lines. She might say, "OK, I think you don't get it." And then I understood what she had in mind. It was really bizarre, as if this part of the movie belongs half to Emmanuelle and half to me.
We both love female characters. One example - we both have a love of Thomas Hardy's novels. Particularly the female characters. Tess is the most obvious one, but also Sue in Jude The Obscure . The female characters are wonderful. We learnt a lot about what acting is, about what film acting is, by reading the novels of Thomas Hardy. Having this passion in common helped us to find the complicity to create a character.
Nora has many difficult experiences in the film. But the hardest perhaps comes near the end when she discovers her dead father's letter. We had no idea that there was such bitterness in their relationship. Everything is turned on its head. Why did you put Nora through this final onslaught?
The father's letter was one of the very first scenes I wrote. I didn't know the character of the father then. When I wrote these lines, I was blushing because I was so ashamed. I thought it was forbidden to write such a thing. Why did he write this? I can't answer that. But the fact is that these are just good lines. I knew that an actor would love to play them. They work. I don't know why. My job was to find the relationship between these forbidden words and me. The only tools the father has, because he is a writer, are his words. But why is he trying to drown his daughter like that? Is it something like love? Or is it hate? I think there is no answer.
He's not the only character in the film that does this though. Several characters are very resentful of people who are close to them.
Yes. This is the terrible version, the melodramatic version (in the best sense of that word). I think the guy is so alone. He's speaking from the dead, like a curse. Like in Hawthorne , he tries to brand her, to make her belong to him. It's a nightmare. I think it's the worst thing that could happen to someone - which is what I go to the movies to see. The worst or the best!
The opposite side is the comical version, when Ismaël goes to see his cousin who steals his viola and says "Oh and by the way, I hate you." It's exactly the same scene. Both characters react in the very same way. I mean, what can you do when you read a letter like that? You can't answer because it's so brutal. And afterwards it's a mystery. You have to ask, "Why am I hated? Why am I hated?" It's so bizarre. But I think it's a question that belongs to every adult or to every adolescent or to every lover. Suddenly you have to face something that is so strange - pure hate. It's so bizarre. Is it a mark of love? Nora might have said to her father, "Why can't you love me in a softer way?" But the father is there no longer. There is no answer.
Interview conducted by Simon Gray
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