Interview With "Last Summer" Director/Writer Catherine Breillat

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[00:01:24] You are listening to the Next Best Picture Podcast, and this is Emma Sassick's interview with the director and co-writer for Last Summer, Catherine Breillat. Catherine, it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for your time today. It's my pleasure.

[00:02:24] Well, first I just want to say welcome back. It's been a long 10 years since we've had you back in the director's chair. How do you feel with this film coming out?

[00:02:40] It's like my producer, Saeed bin Saeed, gave me a second birth. He gave me the beginning of a new first life, like he resuscitated me from the dead. Because I didn't make films for 10 years

[00:02:51] because the French hated me and thought I was has-been. It wasn't that I didn't have projects, I had projects, but it was impossible to get them produced. And Saeed bin Saeed himself was surprised how hard it was to find the money for this film. This

[00:03:09] film is really made with nothing. Unfortunately, it's a story. Which goes to show that cinema is not about the money that goes into it, but about the gestures, about the purity of a line. Money has nothing to do with it. The line is either elegant or it isn't.

[00:03:35] We've seen so many times, time and time again, so many people struggling to be able to make films again, regardless of a storied career that they have behind them. So I can just only imagine how important this one was for Catherine to get back into that director's chair.

[00:04:04] It was very important. I was scared, you know, after 10 years and Saeed took away all of my technical team, all of the people that I'd been used to working with, everybody and everything

[00:04:18] was new. Which in the end was really for the best because that's really what gave me a new start, where I was able to draw on myself and myself only without the crutch of any familiarities

[00:04:28] and to recover and find again the fact that I'm a beast of cinema. I'm reborn and on the eve, the evening of, I'm always very frightened and my teeth are clacking. But once I get to the set,

[00:04:43] everything is simple and graceful and that's just what I'm made to do. And because I'm completely self-taught, because the great schools in Paris or in France, the great schools, even though I had all the important exams that one needs to get into them,

[00:05:13] I couldn't study to be a director. Because I was a girl, I could study to be an editor or I could study to be a continuity supervisor, but not to be a director. So I decided that I would write a book

[00:05:25] and then other people would ask me to make that book into a film, which of course is what happened. And so to create that first film, to be able to get to that medium without the schooling I drew

[00:05:36] and learned from painting mostly, and in particular sort of American hyper-realistic painting in terms of what it teaches, what it taught me about the frame, about setting a frame within which in cinema, once you have your frame, you pour out, you pour in the emotion.

[00:05:55] I have to commend Catherine for calling herself the beast of cinema. I love that, and especially when it comes to this film. It really is that way, because really making a film like this is really, if you're asking an

[00:06:25] athlete to run in the Olympics and have to make it to the podium, even though they haven't exercised in 10 years, so of course there was a lot of panic, especially because I have no technical

[00:06:33] culture of cinema. I don't know how it works. And yet on the day that I find myself on a set, evidently I know everything. A professional. And I say I don't know how to do anything, and then I realize that, you know, me and I chose

[00:06:46] the day that I see Léa and that I choose that she's going to be my actress, it's because I can see that first scene with her. I can't see many more scenes with her. That's all I can see, but

[00:06:55] I know she's going to be my actress. To have that one scene is already something, because cinema is really learning that tomorrow is another day and that you will solve every problem as it

[00:07:08] comes to you in front of the camera. And that's beautiful, that it's a carnivorous art. It eats the flesh of the actor and that's how it metabolizes its solutions. Oui, c'est ça la beauté du cinéma. C'est que les mots deviennent du cinéma.

[00:07:21] And that's the beauty of cinema is that words become flesh and that silence is a lot more important than speech. I love hearing all of these different ways you describe film,

[00:07:31] and it shows me how important this medium is to you. And again, it goes back to, you know, me saying I can just imagine how grand this film was to get back into that director's chair.

[00:07:44] And I did want to start speaking a little bit more about the film itself. Since I know that this film was very much inspired by Queen of Hearts, I'd love to know when you first watched

[00:07:58] that film, what really pulled you into that story that made you want to make your own film of this nature? C'est très simple. Saïd Ben Saïd avait acheté les droits de remake du scénario. Il m'a demandé si

[00:08:14] je ne voulais pas le faire. Il pensait que je pouvais le refaire en mieux, disait-il, du moins autrement. Et bon, j'ai vu le film. Il commençait très, très crûment et ça, ça m'a plutôt…

[00:08:28] J'avais pas envie parce que moi j'ai fait déjà des scènes très, très crues quand c'est le sujet. Quand c'est pas le sujet, je veux pas voir de sexe en érection, même faux.

[00:08:39] So it's very simple because Saïd Ben Saïd had bought the remake rights to the Danish film and he asked me to… He thought I could make it better or at least different. And so I watched this film

[00:08:50] and it starts with very explicit scenes which wasn't something that I was interested in because for me, unless it's the subject, in which case, you know, that's what we're talking about. If it's

[00:09:00] not the subject, I'm not looking to see an erect penis just for the purpose of imaging sex. So all of this was something that I wanted to put to the side. However, what I was really drawn in by is

[00:09:11] the scenes of lying and just the ideas of the sensual lies and the denial, the way in which one can lie to oneself. This was the device or almost like a registerial generic scene that I

[00:09:24] wanted to confront and rework. And then in the film, in the original film, you know, there's these adolescents and these children, you know, it really obviously is my passion to film

[00:09:38] young people. So this was something that I wanted to do. But the two things I told the producer was one, that in the Danish film, the adolescent is too old to be much younger than that. And then

[00:09:48] the second, in the Danish film, the woman is a predator. And that was really not something that I could see myself, that I wanted to do. So I said that it would be the other way around,

[00:09:58] that we needed to see his desire and his courtship of her so that she would only succumb to it. And that changes everything. And what's so fascinating about directing actors is that you can take a scene

[00:10:10] that exists in both, the scene where Theo goes into her office to ask her, to demand that his father know the truth. In the Danish film, this scene is at face value. That's really what he wants.

[00:10:21] In my film, it's a scene of love that even though maybe, you know, he might also want his father to know in a larger sense, what's really at stake here is still his desire for her. So this

[00:10:32] is really a perfect example of the difference between the original and my remake. And I always say to my actors when they're playing a scene that exactly as it is written, and especially if the scene feels a little boring, that they should think about whether in this scene

[00:10:58] they are telling the truth, whether they're lying to their scene partner or whether they are lying to themselves. And from then on, something starts to bloom. And human desire is always something that's so fascinating to me in films because you see

[00:11:14] characters do something and then you stop and think, would I do this if I'm in this scene? Why are they doing that? Sometimes there's really no explanation to it. And that's something that I very much enjoyed with this film, because I'm sure Catherine has heard many people question

[00:11:33] the motives of both people. And why are they doing this? Why aren't they stopping this? But sometimes human desire is a very tricky and complicated thing. I'm trying to lose the compass of good and evil in this way to not have to teach morality,

[00:11:51] but to let each spectator know how whether they would have succumbed, how they feel, what their relationship is, and it's for that purpose. And that the end is as open-ended as it is in a very carefully designed way to leave that freedom.

[00:12:07] And especially when you have Anne's profession as this one in one pocket, and then you have her own personal life kind of going head to head with each other. I guess I would love to hear working with Lea Drucker on that. And I guess having her also

[00:12:25] come to terms with the duality of her character in a sense. As if the viewer were living the scene intimately. And so there is no space between the screen and the spectator. It's the opposite of

[00:13:09] the rose for a war product. The actors don't have to come down from the screen, the spectator has to come into the screen, feel the emotions, live the love scenes as if it were...

[00:13:23] I would say the desire is intimate and work is public and that one is not the same person in both of those things. But more than the intimate, I'm interested in the ultra-intimate.

[00:13:32] In the love scenes, I would tell my actors that I was not interested in being the spectator of this love or of the sex scenes, that I wanted to be in the middle of them,

[00:13:42] which in some way is the opposite of what happens in the Purple Rose of Cairo. It's this attempt for the spectator to enter the screen rather than to have the actors come out of

[00:13:53] it. So for the spectators to enter the screen and to come into contact with this ultra-intimacy in a way that allows them to be with an image that they have never seen of themselves,

[00:14:03] because one never sees oneself in such abandon. One has never seen oneself in this way. And that's very different from pornography, which of course is a caricature. I was interested not in the nudity of bodies, but in the nudity of faces and souls. And that's really the most

[00:14:18] intimate thing one can film. And what I also wanted to show, you see, as a film director, I have a look. I sign my look. The look is part of it, but in life it's the same. If you live with a man who doesn't like you anymore,

[00:14:34] you become the help of the shades, as he keeps telling you that you are. And I'm Audrey. And co-hosts of Sleepover Cinema, our show where we analyze the films that created the collective unconscious of the girls, gays and theys of the late 90s and early 2000s.

[00:14:57] Princess Diaries, The Cheetah Girls, Aquamarine, Cinderella, The One Starring Brandy. We haven't stopped thinking about these movies since we first saw them, and we want you to rewatch them and review them with us.

[00:15:10] Are these movies as bad as critics would have us believe? Do we even care if they are? We are always unpacking that very question on Sleepover Cinema. Check out Sleepover Cinema wherever you get your podcasts or at evergreenpodcasts.com. See you soon!

[00:15:31] What this has to do with my gaze as a filmmaker, because I, as a filmmaker, you know, I sign my gaze in this way and what I'm learning and transposing onto what the film

[00:15:41] is showing us is that the gaze is constitutive of that which is being looked at. And when a woman lives with a man who tells her what makes her feel like she is old, she is spent, she is done for, she becomes those things.

[00:15:52] And the second she is in the gaze of somebody who finds her young and beautiful, she becomes young and beautiful again. And she is illuminated from within. We see Lea's character go from a very serious, harsh, to almost finding or revising her adolescent soul.

[00:16:05] And that's a unique thing to film. In fact, my pace went a bit fast. But then the anecdote I always left men when they started, when I started to be ugly around them.

[00:16:16] I was actually going to say the, it's interesting because you do focus in on three characters and their pleasure during a few sex scenes. We first see it with Pierre's character as they're together in bed. It's just focused on his pleasure.

[00:16:35] And then in another scene, it's just focused on Samuel's pleasure until finally, or excuse me, Theo's pleasure. And then finally we get to Anne and she gets to let go. She gets to have the moment that she's been waiting for.

[00:16:51] And that kind of reminded me a little bit about that, her journey as well, kind of becoming softer and changing a bit through these different experiences. Is that how you wanted to highlight her journey through the film? Or was that a completely different decision? Yes, of course.

[00:17:25] That is the journey that I was following in that first scene. You know, when we see him orgasm of her with at her in this way and all she's done is succumb. And then, you know, she says, that's it, we're done.

[00:17:39] She somehow hasn't, her own pleasure hasn't come into play. And he says, well, there's no tragedy here. And he's kind of voicing this possibility that maybe people can just sleep together and it's no big deal. But something very insidious happens upon entering somebody else's body.

[00:17:57] You don't know exactly how, but in that suddenly something happens where you can get stuck in another person's body. Something of love suddenly appears in a way that takes time to recover or even arrive at.

[00:18:09] And so this is why we then see the second, in the second scene, suddenly when we think that there may be drifting apart, we realize that actually a relation now exists between them. And trying to figure out what this scene was going to be,

[00:18:21] which I always do with so much fear and so much terror. The idea is only really come at night. And suddenly I had this image of Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, the Caravaggio painting. And I knew that that's what I was going to take inspiration from to try

[00:18:34] an image, pleasure beyond pleasure, kind of something more than orgasm. A kind of fullness that is the transparent body that is a kind of metaphysical experience at this point, which is also always a solitary one. And we see this in terms of her softening.

[00:19:18] Léa is a character, Léa's character says no all the time. She says no to the tattoo and yet lets herself be tattooed with much pleasure. And in this last scene, when they're by the gate,

[00:19:34] where they're not even kissing, I guess he's drooling on her in despair and inebriation. He starts to seem like the young Werther to some degree. You feel like he could die of this first love. And she doesn't say no.

[00:19:46] Then she says stop with this kind of dying voice. I'm very proud of this frame because it's a 17th century painting, also one of my own inventions. Once again, being the beast of cinema. It's a very hands-on process. I'm constantly speaking to them during the love scenes.

[00:20:12] I'm really talking in every moment of the way, because for the frame to remain significant, what it takes of the microscopic movements of the face, of the body, is something that I have to constantly talk them through.

[00:20:34] And I find it so awful, the kind of morality talk that people try to put on everything that reduces everything we are to something really terrorizing in its banality. Whereas what I'm trying to do is to show the poetry of it all.

[00:20:50] And because I refuse to think that when I am in the act of making love, I am merely going through the motion of a pornographic film. I want to think that there's something that happens in that presence that abolishes obscenity and that becomes transcendent

[00:21:09] and that it can be filmed. I wanted to end with one more question. I read previously that this film allowed you to rediscover your love of filmmaking. And I'm sure all the ups and downs that come with this career.

[00:21:24] I guess, can you tell me a little bit about that? Was there any moment where you just felt that spark ignite back in you or you felt those butterflies in the stomach as they say? Or was it really just the whole collective?

[00:21:43] That spark is all the time on set and it's collective. Everybody feels it, the entire crew, the actors. After a scene as difficult or as dangerous as this one, beyond just the fact that the actors themselves are delivered from the scene, everyone is radiant from that experience.

[00:22:20] And so it's not the storytelling of the so-called or self-appointed intimacy coordinators. I coordinate emotion and art. And I think it's very important to remember that actors are artists and that they carry the sacred fire and that's going to lead them to the production of something beautiful

[00:22:37] if they are trusted and made safe in the process. I just want to say, thank you very much Catherine and Asia for your time today. It was such a pleasure. What an honor to speak with the beast of cinema. I will forever remember you by that.

[00:22:52] She's going to call you the beast of cinema, Dorina. No, but it's true. And I know that I know how to do it. I've done a lot of love scenes or at least intimacy. And I know that at some point you have to bring the actors into art,

[00:23:11] into transcendence, into grace. And that's what storytelling is about. It's not about whether you see my panties, whether you see the protection because... Yeah, and she says it's true because for me it's really never... I've made so many intimacy scenes

[00:23:27] and way before it was commonplace to have the kinds of protections that are now made, she used to make herself, you know, to cut underwear and stick so that it looks like they're naked from one side and to use scotch tape on the other side.

[00:23:41] All of this because cinema is an illusion. All of this really is nothing to do with the storytelling. What really matters is to bring the actors to a place that they are delivered of their own fears because now it is the characters that are moving through them

[00:23:55] and the characters are the ones whose bodies are in play. And when you get to that, you really magnify the artistry of the actor's craft. I said that very well. Like I've said many times...

[00:24:08] At the end of the film, Samuel, who was very young, he was 17 years old, no one knew his father or mother. He was very mysterious. Where he was sexually, even if he had made love or never, we didn't know. For Samuel, who was very discreet,

[00:24:26] he's at an age where you don't know how much he's experienced, what his experiences have been, whether he had slept with anybody, whether he'd had any kind of amorous experiences with beyond the reach of both his parents and the crew.

[00:24:37] But then on the last day, he wrote me this letter on the last day of shooting, which also happened to be my birthday. He wrote me this letter that he gave to me on this square school-like paper

[00:24:47] in this blue ink and in this micro writing, all very childlike. The letter said that making my film for him had been like falling in love. It had been to experience new things every day and things that he had never experienced before.

[00:25:02] And somehow I think that everybody on set was making this film in the state of being in love with the film and in the state of grace. That's so beautiful. Thank you, everyone, again. Merci beaucoup. Au revoir.

[00:25:17] Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to Emma Sassick's interview with the director and co-writer for the film Last Summer. Catherine Bredant here on The Next Best Picture Podcast. Last Summer is now currently playing in theaters in limited release.

[00:25:31] You have been listening to The Next Best Picture Podcast. We're proud to be part of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and you can subscribe to us anywhere where you subscribe to podcasts. Be sure to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts

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[00:25:52] Thank you all so much for listening as always, and we will see you all next time.

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