Guillaume Canet in “The opportunities of love”. The interview

SortAnd Vincent Lindon seems to be done on purpose to embody heroes who fight for a better world (and it is with him, in fact, that Stephan Brizé shot his “work trilogy”), the convocation this time was triggered for Guillaume Canet “and his infinite melancholy”. The director of The law of the market And Another worldwith The opportunities of love (released a few weeks ago at the cinema) he leaves factories, offices and union disputes, to do The chronicle of a love, a “amour de jeunesse”which grants a second chance.

Guillaume Canet who, according to a French newspaper, with this fact in fact, would have agreed to shoot A documentary on itselfin the film he is a cinema star, married to a celebrity (and so far we are, Canet is Marion Cotillard’s husband, the couple has two children, Louise and Marcel, 7 and 13 years old). In burn out For Middle -age crises or doubts about one’s talentMathieu-Guillaume leaves the company with whom he is trying a piece and He takes refuge in a luxury spa in Brittany to pull a little bit up with Thalassotherapy.

A woman lives in that town, Alba Rohrwacher (and the monthly Positif He describes the couple of actors “The Stradivari of this chamber music on the fragility of the human condition”) With whom Mathieu lived a passion of love 15 years earlier. He left her, both have redone a lifetime, she married a doctor and gives plan lessons. They meet again.

Canet who is an actor and director, with the movie Ad vitam it would have been seen by 17 million spectators in 3 days (Netflix data, not verifiable) and recently he directed Asterix and Obelix, Films with great collections and fierce criticisms, this time has contributed to producing more indulgent newspapers, such as “Why do heated loves always excite the cinema?”. If half of the film the French star is in slippers and bathrobe, cradled by a lift music, urged to do breathing exercises by a “mystical coach”, e forced to undergo the selfie rite Between one treatment and another, in the other half he transports us to the melodrama, compared with the past that reappears, brought this time by the notes of Vincent Delerm. “I think I have already shown, even in my films, that I have nothing against the idea of ​​playing with my image” he explains, patient, a I woman.

The condemnation of celebrity

The film could also be seen as an ironic-depressive extension of Rock’n’roll, He directed and interpreted together with his wife Marion and his son, where he played an actor and director in the forties whose ego was deeply wounded by a young colleague that “he was not old, but not even more rock’n’roll”.
It is not very different from what happens to Mathieu, and in addition another 7 years have passed … 50 years is the age of the budgets, and it is also mine. Mathieu goes to do Thalassotherapy to relax, because he has lost himself in the characters and work. His ex, when they meet, sees in him the man he was and he remembers. Which is also the man he would like to return to being. But the problem is that, When you are famous, finding your true you is impossible because everything around you brings you back to your public personhow others see you. You can no longer let yourself go to your emotions and be honest with the people you are with. So he is completely stuck, lost.

Did you feel lost in her characters?
Yes, because sometimes we accept roles to live things that we have not lived in our lives and that we are interested in experimenting. It happened to me at the end of a film that I could not separate myself from the character because it was a spokesperson for me and allowed me to free emotions. And when this happens, sometimes you would like to continue.

Do you love selfies? Do you happen to stop it while she would just like to go unnoticed?
I told Brizé a few anecdote that he then used in the film. Often people who want to bring home the image of a celebrity are more concentrated on themselves than on the objective and happen that they forget to frame you, or that cut you in half. They do not realize it because they only look at themselves. But there is something about me in the character. My behavior with the people who ask me selfies or autographs at the wrong time: I react a bit like in the film. In a respectful way, it is not easy to say no to people.

Is there anything of her also in the sensitivity it shows in this love story that is renewed late?
I love an expression that a friend used with me at a time when I was not too well: “You have to decide if you want to be happy or be right, you cannot have both of them”. Mathieu is a man who has decided to be right, but when he stops reflecting for a moment he understands that he didn’t make much sense. And he doesn’t have it above all when you are in pairs. Sometimes it makes sense to say: you are right. Give up the blow.

In the conversations with his wife in the film there is the impression that there is a real strategy behind the decisions made (“Do that thriller, the thriller works at the César”). Is it necessary to be strategists to resist your world?
No, indeed it is precisely the opposite of what we need to do. If you choose a movie for strategic reasons, because you think it will lead you to César or Oscars, you are certainly not choosing it for good reasons. I think that the beauty and strength of an actor and a director is to live between one film and the other, to feed on what happens when you are not on a set and keep those emotions, keep your feet on the ground, live a life simple. We receive scripts, there are good moments or less good for doing certain things. Stephane came to propose this film at the right time. I had passed through moments of my life when I questioned myself, I had doubted me, so I was ready to interpret a man in crisis. I have never worked strategically. This profession must not be done with the head, but with the heart.

There is a phrase that Alba says at the end of the film, simple, but revealed: “In life there are people like you and people like me”. He alludes to the desire to succeed, to get out of the boundaries of a simple and perhaps considered mediocre life. How was it for you to become the person you are now?
I really believe in the soul. And to the fact that when one is born and then grows it has a mission in life and that I have been needing to express things since I am, writing or directing, or also as an actor. It is a visceral need, I could not live if I did not do it, it is vital, necessary. And then I can’t do anything else. Hoping that it lasts …

For Brizé the actor is the most important profession in the world, because unlike the musician who works with an instrument, the actor has only himself and this requires a lot of courage.
Our instrument evolves, can degrade, perfect or annihilate completely: life the things we cross can destroy us or improve ourselves. It moves me to see actors and actresses who cross experiences in their lives and then see them on the screen and use what they lived to tell a story.

For example?
It is interesting to see how you agree to get old. Especially the actresses. I have seen actresses who have a problem with their image, see the search for ways to always be young and then finally you see them in a film in which they agreed to see each other for what they are, with their age exposed without filters. It is touching because it is a sort of liberation, stop hiding behind make -up or surgery. I remember a great actress of the 1960s who had no longer made films, theater only for a long time. A director offers her to make a film, she accepts on condition that the direction of photography is entrusted to a great one: Henri Alekan (he worked from the 1930s to the 90s with some great directors, from Jean Cocteau to William Wyler, from Wim Wenders A Abel Gance, editor’s note). They make the film and on the evening of the first she is in the room, she passes on the screen her first floor, and she is seen for the first time as she is, aged. He turns to Alekan and asks him: “But then, Henri, what happened?” And he replies: “I aged, Madame.”

Guillaume Canet and the relationship with the theater

What effect does it make them see you again in newspapers or in the movies?
I don’t see myself again, I hate to see me again. At home everyone knows that newspapers should not circulate, my friends know that if they see something that concerns me in a newspaper, beautiful or ugly, if they have to keep it for them. I don’t want to know anything about it. I struggle to see me, and also to listen to me, I seem to have a voice as a duck.

The relationship with the theater for cinema actors is complex. She also works on stage, her protagonist does not accept the challenge and escapes. The film plays a little on the sense of inferiority of the theater compared to the cinema.
I have never felt a feeling of inferiority, I loved to do theater and I miss a lot. My spiritual father, Jean Rochefort, said to me: “Wait to make theater to be old and oily, make cinema as long as you have a beautiful skin”. I followed his advice. But it is true that the theater terrorizes, and that there is a completely different adrenaline in play. Don’t go to sleep until 3 or 4 in the morning because you are loaded with the energy that passed the audience, then sleep until the afternoon, the rhythms are busted. It is a separate life, you can no longer deal with people who normally live, perhaps with children. When I will be older and the boys have grown up I think I will make theater, but I will take a quiet studio apartment to be able to sleep for a long time.

After a huge movie like Asterix and Obelix Do you want to do different things?
Ah yes, it’s okay to do one of those dimensions. But not more. Now I go back to the thriller, a genre that excites me a lot, and only as a director (the film, Karmahe will start shooting at the end of February, protagonist Marion Cotillard, editor’s note). The tradition of the French “Polar” on paper is exportable. But of Don’t tell anyone (2006) Ben Affleck had taken the rights for the American remake, but it was not over well.

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