Mélanie Laurent is Marie Antoinette and Guillaume Canet her husband Louis XVI in Gianluca Jodice’s The Flood (The Flood), which opened the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival on Wednesday evening in the Swiss city’s Piazza Grande, which offers 8,000 seats during the festival.
On Thursday afternoon, the two stars and their director met with members of the press to talk about the film. The film is set in 1792, when the two main characters and their children were arrested and imprisoned in a Parisian castle, where they awaited trial.
THRThe Locarno review of the film called it a “fascinating palace drama about the last days of the French royal couple par excellence” and also highlighted that “the nuanced portrayals of Canet and Laurent help make the famous couple more than just caricatures.”
The stars talked on Thursday about how they got into the shoes of their characters and their way of thinking. Actress, screenwriter and director Laurent (Inglourious Basterds, Now you see me, 6 Subsurface) said that she had read Stefan Zweig’s famous biography Marie Antoinette: Portrait of an average woman“From her birth to her death, all the details and stories were in there,” she recalled. “I started the film when I understood her and liked her. When you read a script about Marie Antoinette, you know she’s going to be cold and just this and that – all these cliches we have. All films somehow stop when they get arrested. That’s where we started the film.”
Laurent added: “It was super exciting to start the film where she finally has time to be a mother and understand the men in her life, but then she loses her best friend and goes from being cold to depressed. So that’s probably the most interesting part of her, when she knows they’re going to die, because she’s much clearer about it, and she’s scared for the first time.”
Actor, screenwriter and director Canet (Ad Vitam, The beach, Out of season), Marion Cotillard’s partner, said he started with a great script by Jodice and co-writer Filippo Gravino. “So as an audience, I discovered a lot of things,” he explained. “There are a lot of things that I didn’t know as a Frenchman. So I learned a lot from the script and it made me want to read other things, like the book (by Jean-Baptiste) Cléry, in which (the king’s former valet) tells all these details about Louis XVI – how shy he is, the difficulties he had in society and with many people, his relationship with his wives and this kind of autistic side. The description of him was really like that of a child.”
Canet: “It was very interesting for me to understand that this could be one of the reasons why the revolution could happen. His father knew that he was not able to hold a country together with the same strength and perhaps madness as the other kings in France had done in the past.”
How did Laurent and Canet develop the relationship of their famous characters on screen?
“We read the script several times with Guillaume and then separately with Mélanie,” explained Jodice.
“We knew each other and didn’t spend much time (discussing) before filming,” the actor said. “You just play your role, and unless you’re paired with an actor or actress who is very selfish, it works out fine.”
The physical transformations into Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were hard at times. Wearing a corset, “no matter what you do, you feel upright and you stand upright, and then you have no way to be like that,” Laurent said, hunching over. That was key in the first part of the film, “when she really looks like a queen, and then, as time went on, I was just allowed to change my body and my (physical) posture. So I didn’t have to wear those four hours of makeup every day. Thank God! By the end of the film, I was literally wearing 10 minutes of makeup, which for me is the best.”
It was different for Canet. “I was in makeup for four hours every day. So it was long and tiring,” he said. “At the beginning I was quite scared, I was quite nervous because it was really scary to see myself in the mirror with all these prosthetics. You’re afraid of not being able to express things, emotions and stuff, because you’re all hidden behind this mask.” But he got positive feedback on his first pictures. “When we started, I understood pretty quickly and realized that it would help me more than it would be an inconvenience because it helped me to stand up straight and have this regal posture. And this guy has difficulty expressing emotions. So in a way it was quite interesting to have this kind of mask.”
Laurent said that with her acting background, she “knows exactly what an actor is thinking before he says anything.” So she enjoys better understanding the different parts and roles in the filmmaking process. Without that knowledge, “I think most of the time there is a language problem. That causes a lot of misunderstandings,” she argued. “On my last film, I took the camera and set the frame and discovered a whole new world. I realized that all these technicians are there to make you feel comfortable (as a director or actor). I opened a new door and just discovered something technical that I didn’t know. So I think it would be great if everyone swapped jobs for three days so we know what everyone is doing.”
Canet also appreciates having seen filmmaking from different perspectives. “There are a lot of great directors who are also actors, and I like that. And there are a lot of directors who are also really good actors,” he said. “When you have the chance to experience both, you learn a lot.” He then joked: “I know that I got on Gianluca’s nerves at times, and the only thing that calmed me down as an actor was knowing that as a director I would hate it if that happened to me.”
At the end of their talk with reporters, Laurent and Canet were asked about work-life balance and how important film work is to them. “For me, it’s an instinctive thing,” Canet said. “I can’t take breaks. I don’t know how to take a vacation. Sometimes my goal is to go for a week without writing or watching anything or thinking about anything or reading anything, but just enjoying the vacation and taking a few naps. I’d love to know how to do that, but I just can’t. It’s an obsession. I’m a workaholic.”
Still, he said he loves spending time with his family. And Canet added: “The most important thing to stay creative and support yourself is real life with real people.”
Laurent also loves immersing herself in film work, and “I hate vacations,” she told reporters. “I think I write stories and I tell stories because I think life sucks so much when you see the world and when you see what humanity is doing right now,” the star explained. “I like to write very strong female characters. I want them to have the last word. I like when love stories end well. I love when I have the power to tell a story that is more inspiring than life, and that’s why it became an obsession.”
The two French stars also spoke about the pressures that come with fame and social media. “Most of the time – and I had to experience this for myself and my partner Marion – people imagine things about us, our lives, our way of life, what we do in our lives, where we live – I mean, I sometimes hear crazy things about my habits,” Canet explained. “And the problem is that a lot of people believe that today, with social media and everything. … I think one of the problems with social media today is that popularity can sometimes change aspects of your work and the way people see you.”
Laurent chimed in and said: “I have a solution: no social media.” After some laughter, she explained: “I don’t read anything, whether it’s good or not. I stopped 12 years ago and I live in a bubble.”
