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| The Name of the Game (Les Règles du jeu) : 2006 |
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Portraits - |
First aired on Super Écran: January 2007 Transcript of the English subtitles on the broadcast For me it’s really important to have empathy for the character, so I have a tendency to retreat to places when building up a character; I hide, and my best hiding places are in my home: it’s in my bed, it’s in my bath. Because I feel that when you first meet a character it is THE meeting, like if you were to meet somebody and you needed to really have trust in him or for him to trust you, I don’t know … it’s like a … it helps me to take things further, and I want to go further and further. I don’t know if I am far enough yet. To be totally abandoned in the intimacy of the character, I don’t know. But I know it’s in those 2 places where I work the most. I realised after certain shows that while I was doing them I was living as a monk. No drinking, no parties, not too many visitors, no going to bed late. To the point where it was making me aggressive. I become too frustrated. And after long periods of working, I really need, first of all, to let go of myself, get loosened up and inspire myself in another way, to get back in touch with other creators. So, I absolutely need that. And sometimes, just going out dancing, or not going out but dancing or just having friends over, having a party. That kind of energy, I really need it, I need to express my fun, like everyone else I guess. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had this anxiety about losing my parents, losing people I love. It started with my parents because they were older than the other parents, me being the youngest of a big family. I would wake up at night and cry. My parents were just next door, but I was 6 or 7. There are children who have this, who have this kind of awareness of death or of loss when they are really young … for me, it remained. And maybe that’s what developed this sort of sensitivity. Well, I don’t know what came first, what made me get attached to what the other person was saying, especially toward the people I loved: what they were saying, how they were living, and I developed a way to fight the end of things, like I said. Those are the things that frighten me, and I believe in general that our fears are really the motor of creation. Let’s say we were talking about creation; if I create a show, I will surely take my fears, I will control them, put them in a block and it will become such a scene and such other scene. I create the puzzle and it makes me feel good and maybe it is shutting out those anxieties that I would have if I weren’t doing that job. I come from a big family, a family of 8. I am the youngest and I have many memories of happiness, often listening to the discussions around the table. That made me very much aware of what would happen around me. My mother is someone extremely curious. She would pick up autumn leaves and would stick them around everywhere in the house, she would also pick up bees and flies and would place them in plants to create drama, and I loved it! She is someone who is extremely open, very curious and who wants to taste everything out of life. I like to create different universes everywhere I am, where I live. So, at home too I like to create atmospheres. Her openness to new things and her, “let’s do something else with this” or “let’s take it differently” influenced me a lot. As I told you, I was like a sponge. Sometimes I think I still am. Well, being an actor, I think you need to be. I would take in those things, literally. I clearly see and I clearly hear my father singing and listening to classical music and being in that universe, that material that does not exist, you know … so … Then there is my brother Bernard, who is an electro-acoustic musician; who would bring home Pierre Henry’s records, who in, I was about 10 years old, so in the 1970’s, was a little strange, a completely abnormal music universe. This would come into our home and I would have vivid memories of really listening over and over to Pierre Henry’s Apocalypse de saint Jean. And that was before Messe pour un temps présent, because Messe pour un temps présent was a kind of pop but the Apocalypse that’s completely radical, theatrical, anyway for me it was … Around that same period of time, I was performing at the playground, and I kind of experienced, and this is not pretentious at all, but I have experienced a state of grace. It’s a state where you forget … you are just connected with what you are doing, with the character. It was really naïve and unconscious, I was playing a lawyer and at one point I started to improvise things and people in the audience were reacting. And your feet are no longer on the ground, you fly a little bit in between the character, your imagination, your interior … You do hear the audience, but you are in control, at the same time, completely, of what you’re doing but that’s a great liberty. It’s a strange state to be in, a state that you experience once in a while in this profession, but it is not constant. It’s like fate. I left the stage and said to myself, “That’s what I want to do with my life.” Then I forgot, because I did music, at home we did a lot of music and I was learning piano in the meantime, so I was going to become a music teacher. Not an instrumentalist but a music teacher. That’s what I wanted. And in music, in CÉGEP, in French drama, we did some short Ionesco scenes, and the teacher told me, “You have to audition at the Conservatory” and I was 17 and I remembered “Ah yeah, that’s what I wanted to do.” So I auditioned for the Conservatory and The National Theatre School and they didn’t want me, so I went to the Quebec Conservatory, and I was really happy because it happens that in Quebec, they really work on creation. Of course it taught me a lot. Since Forcier’s films, Forcier’s universes are very theatrical, I arrived in this and I knew his universe because it was not something completely surprising for me, those strange characters, jumping personalities. In a Forcier’s character … I mean, in Le vent du Wyoming, for instance, it was a character who in the beginning weighed 200 pounds then lost weight and fell in love with an author, was flirting heavily, and in the end became a nun and levitated. That’s a theatrical path, so to speak. Forcier is someone who also observes a lot, who is very attentive, because he is so in love with his characters and it’s so well written. You can love it or not, It is really a completely assumed style. It’s beautiful, it’s fun to play for him because her gets so happy that the picture is getting made and that his characters are alive, in flesh and blood, in front of him. So that makes it … I was going to say easy, but it’s fun to surprise him, it can be easier to surprise him because he is … He trusts you completely. He wants you to surprise him, he wants you to live right there, in front of him, because he has been thinking about them for 3 or 4 years. While growing up at 2,3,4 years old, I needed my father and my mother to look at me. I needed to say, “That’s my drawing!” We still do that, actors do, and I think that in life in general we still do too. But the actor needs to say, “Look at my drawing. Do you think it’s pretty?” And it’s not superficial, I need others to look at me, really, who I am and what comes out of me and what I can give. Not imagining himself playing or imagining her playing or seeing someone else. I want him to see me, what comes out of me and what I can give. Is this important in this character? Come and get it with your camera. I need you to see this, if the character’s doing that. And if I feel it, I will feel free to do things that will just help the character. Freedom is when the other person tells me … that I understand his universe precisely. That he draws the precise contours of the drawing so I will be able to live inside that space. That’s it. The contours must be as precise as the importance that the scene has. Why is this scene important in that story, in that hour and a half of this character’s path? Why is it important? Because we see what? When she takes a shower, what do we want to see? Solitude, discouragement, sadness, at that moment? Why did you choose to have a shower scene where you see her wash herself? It’s not a soap advert. What do we see in this? I need to know. After that, I’ll do it for you. And we can also both establish that. It is not necessary that the director knows everything; what, where, when, all the time. But if I am being asked to be focused for the job, I want the person who I am working with to be as focused as me. Like the thing I have the most difficulty with is happiness. Playing characters that are happy is really tough for me. At the theatre I also go, “Oh no! Not happiness again!” In life I feel happiness a lot and it is not difficult at all. I am not looking for misery or trouble. I like characters that drive through walls. But they get back from it. They are shaken, but that’s what is fun. What is that state of mind? In cinema, we really go into the intimacy of characters. That’s what interests me, to see the flaw of a character or to se how she is in her intimacy, because that is where all of a sudden all her ethical barriers fall down. This is when you most understand the person, it’s when you bond the most. That’s what we want to do in the cinema, because otherwise it is dull! This is a bracelet that belonged to Annie in Délivrez-moi, and I kept it because I love it. Because, I don’t know, it has something provocative and strong about it, something rough. Also, she wore that because in prison she had tried to kill herself, so she had scars and since they were right there she was always cautious to hide them, so she wouldn’t open up to anybody. To people. She doesn’t want to open up. That’s her past and she wants to hide it. Right away we see her vulnerability, something she wants to hide, that she is ashamed of. And it’s a gesture that stayed with me. I kept the bracelet, but the gesture stayed with me and I do the same … Of course it was me who played Annie, but there is something more voluntary in that gesture that comes from her. It remained. Sometimes, the way she walks remains because it’s straighter than mine and I like it. It helps me to walk straighter too. Analysis and psychoanalysis interest me a lot, really enlighten me about the characters, and effectively, it is how I find reasons for a character to act in a certain way and totally the opposite afterwards, or just about. It also helps to draw different layers. I like … I see myself on the screen and … especially the last 2 pictures I worked on – Le secret de ma mère and Délivrez-moi; I look at my age and I am like, “Well, here I am at 40! And it is wonderful!” I am happy about it. I think it’s beautiful. As long as the others assume it and don’t go, “Hmm …” in the morning when they see me. “Hmm … I am going to have problems with the lighting!” No, that’s how it is! It’s not easy to play a character because you are always … In this field you are always trapped in the other person’s vision. That’s why it’s difficult to get older in this profession, because it’s the other person who is going to tell you, “The pouches under your eyes, it’s too tough to light them!” It means you’re not ‘it’ anymore! Or something like that! We’re all afraid to grow old and die, of getting fatter, getting uglier, of changing too much, of not recognising ourselves. Especially in the other person’s eye, because we, we don’t grow old, it’s the other person’s vision that changes a lot. And that’s difficult to accept. That’s why I’m happy for now because I see myself on screen and I go, “Yes, I’ve aged. Yes, I’m 40 and I have this face, this skin.” I can accept it. It’s never easy to look at yourself. We’re very bad judges of ourselves, very critical. But as for the reality of getting older, for now, it’s all right. I hope I will continue to have that acceptance of myself, in this transformation of my body. It seems we’re less interested in women who are 50 years old, or 40, 50 etc. I mean older, in the cinema. There are fewer parts. I’m talking about roles with meat on the bone. And it’s at that age, in fact, that you have way more layers accumulated, you don’t need to play, that are just there. I don’t know which actor, I think it was Noiret, who said that now … I don’t remember how he said it, but he said that now he could almost do nothing, because he already had plenty of layers there inside him, because his life was there and because he is a man of a certain age. It’s fun to observe that for women too, but it’s like we don’t let women have layers, real life layers! Well, a lot less. There are beautiful parts, but very few. That is going to change, though. It has started to. But I look at myself, and I see my wrinkles, some white hairs, and I don’t want to dye my hair yet. And I like it. I like the wrinkles, I like this change. However, it’s certain that my job gives me the possibility to exult that fear, allows me to take that fear. We all have that dread of getting older, just not to the same degree for everyone. But my profession gives me the impression that I can take that paste and at least do something with it, you know. References:
Pierre Henry's records |
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