It's a tragicomic pop opera with live singing during sex, and a prodigious toddler that's played by a puppet. If anyone's game enough to commit to the brilliant and bizarre twists of Annette, it's the proudly, defiantly weird French director Leos Carax.
You open the film with yourself and your daughter, Nastya, and you devote the film to her. It's about a child of celebrities, artists. I have to ask, how much of yourself is in this, literally and/or figuratively?
It's hard to say. With my daughter, I did that in my previous film also, one called Holy Motors.
Yes.
I think it's that now that I'm a father, it's a way of reassuring myself maybe in starting to film almost like a home movie. But it is a film about a father/ daughter relationship. Of course, it's a bad father. That's probably one reason I hesitated to do the project when Sparks proposed it to me because it's their project originally, it's not mine. My daughter was nine at the time and I felt there could be confusion between life and fiction. But as I was listening to the first demos they sent me, [Nastya] started to listen to them too and liked them and asked why was I listening to these songs. I explained it was a project. And I felt she understood the difference between what makes a film project and life, let's say.
But anyway, in making a film I think you put your fears and questions into it so it doesn't reflect as much who you are, as what you wonder about, what you fear. Everybody fears that he's a bad father. Every father has that fear and it's just going into that, exploring that.
And on Sparks. I confess I'm late to their music. I only really discovered them through from earlier this year. I've come late but I love the way that their music is loaded with multilevelled irony; their songs are very funny but they're also great songs. It doesn’t seem to be a stretch to see that in the chosen professions of the lead characters? The comedian [Adam Driver's Henry] and the singer [Marion Cottillard's Ann], that marriage of humour and musicality?
Well, I've known their music since I was a kid. I should say actually I know two albums since I was a kid, two albums that came out when I was 13, 14 years old called Propaganda and Indiscreet. Then I didn't know much about what they did later because I got focused into cinema. But yeah, they always have, to me, this mixture in the music, this mixture of joy. And there is irony, as you say. I think irony in cinema is dangerous. You have to be careful with it because it can disarm everything so I had to work on that. But it's that joy and poignancy in their music and songs that I like a lot. That obviously became much darker as a project than they anticipated, I think, but I don't know how that happened. That's me, I guess.
Yes, the film ends up focusing on Henry as he, to use a cliché, ‘battles his demons’. And you confront the idea of whether having him explain his bad behaviour is a pathway to forgiving him. How conscious were you of giving him too much scope to ‘explain’ his behaviour? You know, in some films that's a pathway to forgiving the man.
Yes, well, it's all about crime and punishment. I've never made films ‘about’ anything. It's not a film about a toxic male guy. If it's anything I would say it's a study on morbidity. But when I try to imagine a film, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, I usually don't think about the reactions of the audience. For this film I did it more because obviously there was questions like, "Are people going to accept a puppet appearance in the film, half an hour into the film?" And it was obviously a puppet baby, but nobody in the film sees it as a puppet it seems, at first. Things like that, "Are people going to accept a film where people sing 90% of the time?" Et cetera, et cetera. And the film was supposed to be in LA that we shot in Europe.
There's so many reasons to be worried about this whole suspension of disbelief issue. So I thought more about that, about what would be the film or what it would seem like, but not in terms of Henry's character or psychology. I've been asked about all that #MeToo movement which hadn't started, actually, when we came to the film. But it was already in the air. It's been in the air since, I don't know, the Bible, probably.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so with the Henry character... you can imagine what you want, but once you have an actor and Adam, you create that character with him. I couldn't have done Henry without Adam. And I didn't know Adam at the time. We met a few times over the years because he was there from the beginning, like seven years ago, but we met very few times. And so we discovered each other on the set and I felt I could go much further with him than I had imagined.
Given the additional rigours of the shooting to the rhythm of the song, and shooting live singing, did you have to challenge some of your own assumptions about the way you make films? About your own directing style?
Well, of course. But I would say that filming actors singing live, making the whole film in songs and singing, is liberating. I felt freer than ever. I would never be able, let's say, to direct actors in theatre. I need a camera. I feel stupid. And I don't talk much to actors. I don't know how to direct actors, really. So with the singing and the music, everything becomes more organic. Everything you ask from the actors while they have to sing at the same time, if they have to run or they have to fuck or whatever they do, their singing is going to change because it's all about breathing, of course. And so that's very moving to watch, it's very moving to do and I felt more freedom that way. It's going to be hard, if I have to do a film again, to go back to spoken words.
So, to Annette. I understand that finding a baby who can sing like an angel would be a difficult task, and you’ve mentioned the risks around the suspension of disbelief. Was Annette always going to be a puppet or did you explore other ways to represent her?
Yeah. Well, like everything, when you make a film it has to start with something that seems impossible. If not, it's not real or it's not exciting. With Annette, I was facing a few impossibilities there, obviously... But the way to go is you say, "I don't want her to be 3D imagery," because that meant that there was nothing on the shoot. It was all post-production and 3D imagery, for me, is not moving. So it can’t be that. I didn't want her to be a robot, an animatronic little robot, because that also, to me, is not moving. And I wanted her to be on the set. I wanted to be able to touch her, the actors could touch her and take her in their arms and feel for her. So we came pretty quickly that it had to be a puppet. But I knew nothing about puppets or puppetry so I explored that but it was a very long process since we had trouble finding money anyway for the film. We had a few years.
So, I started working with sculptors in LA when the film was an American project then it became a French project and co-production with Japan, I started to work with a Japanese woman puppeteer but I could never see Annette. And then finally I met this young puppeteer woman in France, Estelle [Charlier], and she saved the film because even the first, first time she tried Annette, the sculpture of Annette was already beautiful. Very rough, but beautiful. And I decided to keep this roughness, to keep her obviously a puppet, but not to hide anything and not to make it perfect. And that's how it happened.
[*Plot details – skip the next two questions if you haven’t yet seen Annette] And of course that end scene, not to give it all away, but casting someone to embody Annette, how did you find her? She's a revelation. She's beautiful.
Well, the idea came to me quite late to add this last scene I guess mostly because, as I said, I'm a father now. I couldn't imagine ending the film without a confrontation between Annette and her father. But once I imagined that I thought, "Shit, I'm in an impossible position. I'm never going to find a little girl who can sing and act and confront Adam," especially when I wanted someone really, really young. And this child, Devyn [McDowell] is her name, had just turned five years old. And we had casting all over the place but she was the youngest. She was the one with the shortest attention span.
When she was a few seconds at a time, she was wonderful and so we worked with her. And I'm very proud of that, seeing that work we did with Adam and her.
She really is a great foil to him. The way she matches his intensity, it's so good.
Thank you.
Okay, this might be a basic question, but I'm struck by your use of the colour green. I mean, it’s there all over Denis Lavant in Holy Motors and Adam Driver wears a lot of it in this one, too. Is there anything behind that, in your frequent use of that particular shade of green?
Ah, what happened was I made a film in Japan, a small film, not a feature film, like… I forgot, oh 12 years ago, where I created a character called Merde, Monsieur Merde, translated as Mr. Shit, and I realised I had never filmed the colour green, really. I was afraid of it and so I gave this character an all green costume and I fell in love with that green. Then I used it again in Holy Motors. Then I painted my apartment green. Then for Annette, it was obvious for me that Henry would be green and Anne would be yellow and red. I don't know how these things work but that's how it happened.
Ah, good to know. Thank you for clearing that up. You mentioned the film took a while to get made and I did notice there's a lot of logos there at the start, as is the case for many films these days. What was its path to screen, where did it hit the hurdles? Was it that people didn't buy into the concept?
From left: Denis Lavant in the green suit of 'Holy Motors', and Adam Driver sporting a similar shade in 'Annette'. Source: Various
Yeah, it's hard to know. The story is an American film so I was there in Los Angeles and we had a big company trying to do it. And I kept getting emails saying how excited they were or ‘hyperexcited’ but nothing was happening. So I went back to France for the project and, yeah, lots of people were saying, "This is an impossible film. Nobody is going to accept a film with a puppet," et cetera, et cetera. And then I went to one producer who was a crook. It took two years to get rid of him and then so all that took time. Of course, finding the money took time too.
No doubt. And now it's out. You acknowledge audiences – and audience behaviours – in the film. What is it like now that it's out in the world and people are responding to your movie with the little girl who happens to be a puppet?
The only time I had a release that went well for me was Holy Motors. Releases are hard and it's even harder today because of COVID, of course, and because of this new world of platforms. You can hardly say a film is coming out anymore. It's coming in, it's at home. So it feels a lot like COVID and platforms have the same agenda, to keep you at home, which is sad to me. But I'm proud of the film so that's the main point, I guess.
Yes, I miss cinemas. We're all locked down here in Sydney at the moment.
Yes, I heard.
And so what now? I know you're in the midst of releasing the film, but have you got some more projects or another project in the works? Not to go all Hollywood with you...
It's always hard to know when you finish a film because you don't want to go back... Just [thinking] about all the projects I didn't make in all these years I now can't go back to. Once I make a film, I have to abandon the other projects, I feel. I have to discover something new and I have to need to do something to do it. So it usually takes time. But I have to do a big exhibit here in Paris for next year, installations and videos and stuff, so that's going to be a lot of work. And Adam wants to shoot another film soon because he's a workaholic. So he's pushing me to do something with him. I don't know yet. Maybe I want to do a small film with unknown people? I have no idea yet.
Annette is in release in select Australian cinemas now.
