Laurent in director’s seat for ‘Breathe’
International film star. Writer. Director. Environmental activist. Singersongwriter. And model. And she’s only 32.
Take that, George Clooney.
Mélanie Laurent is best known to American audiences as Shosanna Dreyfus in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” but of course was already a multiple awardwinning star in her native France when that film was made. She has since released an album of songs she wrote or cowrote (“En t’Attendant”) and is about to see the U.S. release of the second film she wrote and directed, “Breathe” (“Respire”).
‘Meant to be ...’
“When I directed my first feature, I was on set and I asked my best friend to help to direct me because I was acting in my movie,” she says by phone. “After two hours, he came to me and said, ‘Oh my God, it’s so you, being a director. You were meant to be a director.’ Yeah. I feel ‘me.’ ”
Although she admits, “I would be super-sad if I couldn’t work as an actress anymore.”
While that doesn’t seem an imminent danger for the in-demand performer with American credits such as “Now You See Me” and “Beginners,” directing is a long-held ambition of hers. As far back as interviews for “Basterds,” she would talk about coming to set on days she wasn’t called to observe Tarantino’s methods.
After a relatively quiet directing debut with 2011’s “Les Adoptés,” “Breathe” is garnering the young-auteur raves. Laurent is aware of the improvement — in her own work.
“When you direct the first one, you put everything in the first one,” she says with knowing laugh. “It’s full of charm sometimes, and it’s full of mistakes. The biggest mistake is you like so many things, the first version of the movie is like, four hours.
“When I was starting to write ‘Breathe,’ I would write a sequence and then think, ‘OK, I’m never going to film that.’ It took me four years to write my first one and it took two months to write ‘Breathe.’ ”
“Breathe” is a loose adaptation of a popular young-adult novel about an intense teenage friendship that goes toxically wrong. Laurent gets remarkably natural and grounded performances from her young leads, Joséphine Japy as impressionable Charlie and Lou de Laâge as wild Sarah. The film screened at Cannes and Toronto and has been honored with nominations from the Lumières and the Césars. It currently holds a 90 percent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has been described in major publications as “an impressive second film that features intelligent writing and knockout performances.” All this, despite Laurent intentionally working from fuzzy memories of Anne-Sophie Brasme’s novel.
“When I read the book, I was 17. I wrote the script, then I read the book again,” says Laurent, who co-wrote the screenplay with Julien Lambroschini. Laurent kept that distance in order to be free to cinematically express the essence of the novel as she felt it to be, sometimes making major changes — including fixing a narrative bug, allowing the story to unfold in an unburdened way.
Among the other changes she made were setting (moving it out of Paris to a small town in order to limit the characters’ options), telescoping the time, and drastically overhauling the protagonist, Charlie. Charlie is a wallflower in the novel, but lovely, with good friends and other issues, in the film.
Strong performances
The strength of the performances is not exactly surprising, with a veteran actress at the helm. But Laurent’s directorial grasp reaches beyond the acting.
“The part I love the most in that job is when you find the sense in every shot you make,” she says. “We didn’t know how to film it, and suddenly it appears. I love when I know exactly the sense of it. ‘That shot has to be a wide shot. Why? Because she has to float in front of the immensity of the new relationship she’s going to have.’ I don’t know, I’m happy when I’m doing that with my DP (director of photography). It’s intellectual, but it’s what I love the most.
“Then you can have improvisation, sequences not in the script.”
That’s not to characterize her technique as haphazard; the film’s signature sequence may be the meticulously planned tracking shot that reveals the truth about one of the story’s key figures. Laurent says she “wrote the scene exactly” as it was shot. And she played with the film’s aural landscape to subtly manipulate perception.
“I’m crazy about sound,” she says. “We did stereo sound until an hour (in), then it switches to mono sound, so everything switches closer to her.”
So it would seem her master classes in direction, working with the likes of Tarantino and Mike Mills (“Beginners”), paid off — even if one of the key lessons was not to try to be like them.
“The difficult thing when you make movies as an actress with a genius,” she says, with that wise chuckle, “you’re never going to beat him. The worst thing that could happen to me would be, ‘I shot with Tarantino; I’m going to make this with Tarantino in mind.’ So I learned something from him, but it wasn’t directing — it was that he put music all the time on the set.
“And when I shot ‘Beginners’ with Mike Mills, I wanted to be him all the time, with my crew, with my actors. He let us be so free, he was like my big inspiration.”
A case of nerves
Even with all her successes, though, Laurent wasn’t immune to the usual new-artist jitters.
“When I saw the final editing, I went to my producer and my editor, and I started to cry, and I said, ‘Please don’t release it. It’s too bad,’ ” she says with a full-throated laugh.
“They said, ‘OK, you’re simply not objective, goodbye.’ And my editor was really sad because we’d worked so hard. Then the movie went to Cannes and I was like, ‘What?’
“But I think if I’m so happy (with my work), I’m going to die as an artist.”