Director takes sincerity to the point of daring
The Immigrant plays with grand emotions
CANNES, FRANCE — When James Gray came to cast Marion Cotillard as the star of his new film The Immigrant — a melodrama about a Polish newcomer to the United States in 1921, who is forced into prostitution to survive — he hadn’t seen any of her famous performances such as her Oscar-winning turn in La Vie En Rose. But he knew he had the right actress when they went to dinner and she threw a piece of bread in his face.
“Because I didn’t like some actor or something that she liked,” Gray recalled Friday, following the première of his movie at the Cannes Film Festival, where it is in competition. “And I thought she had an amazing face, like (Renee Jeanne) Falconetti (star of the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc) or like Lillian Gish or Louise Brooks: a great silent movie face where you don’t have to say anything and it conveys so much emotion.
“Plus, she’s throwing bread in my face, which means she has a kind of a will, a strength.”
He said that sometimes you don’t even have to watch an actor acting: you can get a sense of their intelligence from talking to them.
So Gray got the roll and Cotillard got the role: Ewa, who lands on Ellis Island as a refugee from the First World War and is taken in hand by Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), a charming but dangerous pimp who uses her until she is rescued by Orlando (Jeremy Renner), a stage magician who sometimes entertains at Ellis Island.
(In one scene, the famous tenor Enrico Caruso also sings for the newcomers, a concert based on a true event.)
Learning to speak Polish for The Immigrant, however, proved to be a challenge for Cotillard.
“It’s the frustration to know that you cannot know inside of yourself if what you do is perfect,” she told a news conference.
She had 20 pages of dialogue in Polish. “I had to work almost every day and night to get it right,” she said.
The Immigrant has the look and feel of an old-fashioned film about an imperilled woman being abused by crude men. Gray said there were elements of opera in his vision, something with grand emotions to it.
“One of the best quotes I ever heard about movies was something Stanley Kubrick said. He said he always wished movies would be more daring and more sincere. I wanted to make something that was so sincere that it would be maybe daring.”
Gray said he’s unabashedly pro-immigration.
“Sometimes to speak a truth that you believe in is best done with a little bit of distance. Hence the period. Maybe people can look at the history to understand a bit of the present,” he said.