He had already painted portraits of women, with Life in pink, a remarkable film about Edith Piaf in 2007, which earned Marion Cotillard an Oscar. Then Grace, biography of the former princess of Monaco, much less well put together in 2014. The Frenchman Olivier Dahan closes his female trilogy with an admirable figure. That of Simone Veil (born Jacob), with a tragic and glorious destiny.
It was at the suggestion of Elsa Zilberstein, who was going to play the character in her middle age and carried the project for a long time. “I didn’t want to do movies anymore. She came to see me… I didn’t know Simone Veil’s life very well. I especially remembered his speeches in the media, ”he explains from Paris.
A life, the autobiography of this great lady, since buried in the Pantheon, challenged him. “The book started in La Ciotat, my hometown, where she spent her vacations as a child. » Served by his intuition as to the rest, he created the mosaic Simone. The journey of the centurywhich just landed in our theaters, rewriting history through a personal angle.
An atypical journey
The filmmaker discovered how exemplary this atypical journey of a young Jewish woman who survived Auschwitz and other death camps, where she lost father, mother and brother. Because she would become Minister of Health under Giscard d’Estaing and have a law passed decriminalizing abortion, before being the first president of the European Parliament and promoting, without a spirit of revenge, France-Germany reconciliation.
Long omnipresent in politics, she was elected to the French Academy in 2008, before disappearing nine years later.
“She embodied resistance to everything, resilience. At the age of seven, eight, she was already rebellious, evokes the filmmaker. “My mother was not equipped to survive,” she would later say. Simon, yes. »
I like freedom, I mix things up. Everything was difficult in this film. Filming and editing above all, under stress and fatigue with a low budget, but an energy that compensated for everything.
Olivier Dahan specifies that he has no working method either upstream or on set.
He was in mourning for his father, an activist who once escaped the clutches of the Nazis. This cinematographic adventure reminded him of his family history.
“I like freedom, I mix things up,” he says. Everything was difficult in this film. Filming and editing above all, under stress and fatigue with a low budget, but an energy that compensated for everything. The biggest challenge was to paint a portrait between the lines of a life, without telling it Verbatim. I tried to stay as close as possible to the cinema. Everything is true and everything is false. But I try to stick to her words. We shot the concentration camp scenes in Hungary. »
Elsa Zilberstein in physical transformation gained eight kilograms for the role. Rebecca Marder plays the heroine in her youth while Olivier Gourmet enters the skin of husband Antoine Veil, a committed man and civil servant.
Dahan wanted to intertwine the periods, while keeping strong angles: happy childhood, the atrocious episode of the camps, his years as a magistrate in a macho world, his law which decriminalized abortion passed in the swell, the scenes with his husband.
Another source of anxiety. “Simone Veil’s family was tense, worried, terrified. But she loved the film in the end, ”rejoices the filmmaker.