Louis Garrel & Léa Seydoux : getting together again
Le deuxième acte is the fifth movie you have filmed together. Do you have a feeling of deep familiarity when you find yourselves together on a set ?
Louis Garrel : We talk about this almost every time we see each other : “So, when are we going back to it together?”
Léa : What is funny in this story about Louis and I together when it comes to cinema is that it is truly a forbidden story. There’s always something that cannot be done, or that doesn’t work between us two… (laughter) We either act in a love story that cannot come to life, as in La belle personne, or we never see each other as in Saint Laurent, or barely, as in L’histoire de ma femme. Sometimes he directs the movie but doesn’t act in it as in Petit tailleur… We’ve actually not had that many occasions of acting together even if we’ve shot five films.
Had you ever met before La belle personne?
Léa Seydoux: Oh, of course. Louis is the one who made me want to act!
Really?
Léa: Yes, really. I was very young, 18 years old. I was coming out of a very troubled teenagehood, and I didn’t really know what I was going to do with my life. I met Louis and it was like I saw myself in him. He suddenly embodied something that I could envision myself in. Yet we’re very different, Louis and I, but strangely he kindled in me a desire for cinema to which I had never had access before. And I had never seen him in a movie, he was a student at the Conservatoire, and I had this vague desire to become an actress so I was doing casting calls for projects I wasn’t actually interested in… I stalked him a little, I wanted to talk to him but he was quite distant… I was annoying him, I think… He was a bit arrogant at the time (laughter)
Louis: Haha… I remember a shy young girls, whose shyness was really very visible. She would flush when talking to you. A few years later, when I saw her work, I thought of that very relevant theory a friend of mine had explained : some actors or actresses do this job in order to display themselves, others to disappear. Léa was one of the ones that do it to hide.
Léa : Wasn’t that friend Rebecca (Zlotowski), by any chance? (Laughter)
Louis: I’m not going to reveal my sources ! … Alright, it is Rebecca (laughter)
Is La belle personne an intense memory?
Léa: Very intense, for me. It was a kind of revenge compared to my first meeting Louis, since I had gotten the first role and in this film he was falling in love with me. It’s really quite powerful to reverse reality and fiction (laughter). It was my first main role, with a filmmaker I adored. I felt really chosen by him, and I felt like he was offering me a spot.
Louis: For me it’s different. It wasn’t the beginning of anything. This film was part of a series of films that Christophe and I were doing in a row. Before that there was Ma mère (2004), Dans Paris (2006), Les chansons d’amour (2007). It was the continuation of a very strong collaboration.
Is it on the set of La belle personne that you chose Léa to act in your short film, Petit tailleur (2010)?
Louis: Oh, absolutely not. I was looking for a theater-trained actress, because the male character in the film meets Léa’s character in a theater. Since Léa had never done theater, I hadn’t thought of her. Maybe I was indeed arrogant (laughter). But it’s true that when I was young, I was convinced that acting was enmeshed with theater.
When did you change your mind about this idea of acting?
Louis: I don’t think I have. Deep down, I think I still feel that way…
Yet you haven’t acted in theater for a long while, have you?
Louis: That’s true. I kind of despise myself for giving it up. The last times I did, it had become very difficult. I had to face a stage fright that was becoming more and more invasive. It was hurting me. Stage fright can be stimulating, it can make you question everything. But on Luc Bondy’s last show, Les fausses confidences (2015), with Isabelle Huppert, I had to face anxiety while on stage, and I couldn’t understand the meaning of what I was saying. A sort of vertigo, that muddles everything, that makes you think of these six hundred people in the dark, watching you.
Léa, do you struggle with this type of emotion?
Léa: yes, all the time. It’s an endless battle. It’s exhausting (laughter). I struggle a lot with stage fright. But I struggle with a lot of anxiety in general. I live with it, I try to turn it into something. For a long time I used to think that it would settle down with age, that I would be able to tame it. But I feel like I’me becoming more fragile, on the contrary. I ended up thinking that the moment when we were acting was like a meeting with myself. Some sort of confrontation with everything we are, even what we sometimes try to avoid. It is this meeting with yourself that induces such stage fright. It isn’t linked to the gaze of the others, or to their judgment. It’s only about the self. It is a sort of vertiginous meeting with yourself. I once heard Olivier Py say that acting was like a meeting with death. It can seem a bit heavy but I completely understand what he meant. There is something of that sort. It is at the same time unenjoyable, anxiety-inducing, and completely addictive. There’s a desire to feel that. It creates a chemical reaction in your body.
Louis : I don’t really fee that way. I wouldn’t say I feel like I am facing myself when I act. What I like most about acting are those moments when I feel like I am freeing something other than myself. I always hope I will be able to make something in which I won’t be able to recognize myself in the end, something that will live on the screen and that won’t be me anymore.
Léa: I’ve noticed this in your way of acting, and it might be even more true today than before. You really enjoy composing, inventing. You like taking detours. Whereas I am the opposite. I act by using my own nature, kind of like a “modèle” with Bresson. We’re both very different actors…
With you, Louis, we feel a desire of showing the pleasure there is in acting, almost like there is with some Italian actors…
Louis: That’s possible. Orson Welles used to say that the Italians are a people of actors. These days, I’m starting to feel like the most difficult part of it is acting in naturalist films, where the feeling of acting needs to fade, while still trying to produce something powerful. I’ve recently watched L’eclipse (1962) by Antonioni again. I fell to the ground. The film communicates a feeing of metaphysical anxiety that is truly overwhelming. What Alain Delon and Monica Vitti manage to do is beyond everything. It couldn’t be further from performance and at the same time they embody with true power the incredibly deep and complex representation of life that is communicated by the film. I was completely fascinated.
Léa, do you get inspiration from the films you watch for your own work?
Léa: I take inspiration from everything. Not just films. Everything inspires me (laughter). I really love this sentence from Simone Veil’s philosophy, that expresses the idea that miracles happen anytime for anyone that is capable of observing and seeing. It ’s very enlightening, for me, on the nature of our work. You just need to be receptive and in touch with the world that surrounds you. I learned a word I didn’t know about some time ago : introjection. It is the opposite of projection. Projection is projecting something of yourself to the outside world. Fantasy, for example, truly works with projecting mechanisms. Introjection consists, on the contrary, to let something from the world reach you, and leave an impression on you. Acting is both projection and introjection. For me introjection matters a lot. There’s something that is soothing for the soul in the act of letting yourself be penetrated by things.
Would you be able to say what your favorite memory of Cannes is?
Louis: For me moments with crowds make me a bit nervous, almost paranoid, but still, I have beautiful memories of my first times here, in parallel sections. The year of Dans Paris (2006), in the Quinzaine des cinéastes, is a very notable memory, a memory of friendship, of teamship; I remember walking, at dawn, with Romain (Duris), after not getting a wink of sleep for the whole night… And there was of course the presentation of L’Innocent that was happening for the 75th anniversary. My film was being shown to an incredible audience with great filmmakers that had come from all over the world for the anniversary. It was very stressful, it started like a nightmare. And then a spirit of lightness spread over the room as the showing was going on, people were laughing, applauding certain scenes… It got a fantastic reception.
Léa : I was in the room that night. It was great. For me, it was of course La vie d’Adèle. I really thought that the presentation of the film would be the end of everything…
Louis: Yes, I can really attest to that. You told me that over and over agin at the time. And then when I saw the reception the film got, I stopped trusting your gut feelings (laughter).
Léa: Kechiche didn’t want me to watch the movie before Cannes. But I managed to do it. I discovered that four quarters of the scenes had been cut. The most violent and crazy scenes we had shot at the time weren’t in the film. I really thought ‘All that for nothing’. I had an actual anxiety attack. As soon as the press showing happened – at the time it was the day before the official showing – all hell broke loose on social media. The film immediately created an intense craze. I felt like I was being saved. I realized the power of the film, the way in which it showed, in very simple, direct manner, a love story. And still today, it is the film that people talk to me about the most. Recently, in Cambodia, someone came up to me to talk about the film and the way it had moved them. So La vie d’Adèle is my most intense memory of Cannes. And the film got the Palme d’or, but at the same time it was given both to the director and to the two actresses, Adèle (Exarchopoulos) and myself. It was crazy.
We almost haven’t talked about Saint Laurent by Bertrand Bonello. What kind of memories do you have about this film?
Louis: For me, Saint Laurent is Gaspard (Ulliel). Léa and I immediately called each other when we found out Gaspard had been in an accident. It was a shock. In Saint Laurent, he created something incredible. Until then he was mostly associated with his beauty, his charisma. But then he found the key to something else, something truly dazzling. When Bertrand (Bonello) asked me to be Jacques de Bascher, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. But I rehearsed a scene wit Gaspard, that I had known for a very longtime. And I saw an incredible creation take shape, something that was beyond mere resemblance with the original. We were all very admirative of him during shooting and Bertrand was completely inspired by him. He had fire within him.
Léa : I too, as Louis, met Gaspard a long time ago. We’re all from the same generation. We started, then grew, more of less together. His death is very disturbing. He is an actor whose acting evolved a lot, who raised his intensity, in Saint Laurent, in Juste la fin du monde, by Xavier Dolan. I loved his love for cinema, his intelligence. It was incredible to listen to him talk about cinema.
Louis: I recall a kissing scene between Bascher and Saint Laurent. Bertrand had asked us to make it last five or six minutes, and it was supposed to be a sequence-shot. It was both amusing and troubling to do, because Gaspard and I had known each other for a long time. We had a close but not intimate relationship. We only had to do one take. It was very moving. When I found out about his passing, it was the first memory that came to mind. It kind of circles back to what we were saying, especially about stage fright. When you act, you engage your body in it. Even if you compose, if you hide or disguise, if you create something that isn’t you, it is still your own, real body that is being engaged.
Traduction Emma Frigo