Every day, a personality invites itself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Monday September 18: the director, Josée Dayan. At 9:10 p.m. on France 2, she takes a leap into the 50s and 60s with the film “Adieu Vinyle” starring Isabelle Adjani, Mathieu Amalric and Barbara Pravi.
Josée Dayan is a director and a lover of images, but also of actresses and actors. She has always been different, unclassifiable, relevant, sometimes impertinent, open if the arguments are good. This is also what makes up his personality, determined by his convictions and the need to make his films showcases to highlight stories, actors and actresses.
>> Barbara Pravi responds to ISabelle Adjani in the fiction “Adieu Vinyle”: “She supported me and gave me advice”
Monday September 18 at 9:10 p.m. his latest film will be broadcast on France 2 Goodbye Vinyl with Isabelle Adjani, Mathieu Amalric, Jérôme Deschamps, Barbara Pravi, Jacques Bonnaffé and Matthieu Dessertine.
franceinfo: Isabelle Adjani is undoubtedly an actress that you like and that you like to highlight.
Josée Dayan: Yes, I like actresses and Isabelle is a great actress. For a director, it’s a gift to be able to film an actress like her because she has a way of approaching her characters that is so unusual, so unexpected. You read a script and you say to yourself: “ Okay, that’s the story.” and then she has a different way of telling it because there is her sensitivity that comes into play and that’s why she is this actress and that she has had this career since she started at 16-17 years old, in French.
“Isabelle Adjani has, precisely, a way of approaching her characters that is unique to her.”
Josée Dayanat franceinfo
She really trusts you. She doesn’t say yes to everyone!
A film is a relationship between an actor and a director, it is a transceiver. I like filming Isabelle. I think she likes being filmed by me because we have a real connection.
In this film, we are in the 50s and early 60s. A star and two men. She’s really at the height of her glory, but at the same time, we feel that it can be very fragile. And then on one side, there is her husband who is madly in love, but who has understood that she no longer looks at him and on the other, there is her lover, who is also very much in love with her.
Yes, I think it’s more complex than that because in truth the couple formed by Isabelle Adjani and her husband Mathieu Amalric is a couple that is torn apart, one could say like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but it is a inseparable couple. That is to say, there is a real passion between them, a destructive passion, but a passion.
We realize that the passion does not weaken in you?
No ! My film company is called “Passion Films”. When I created it, I spoke to Jeanne Moreau about it and I told her that I had just created a production company and that I didn’t know what to call it. She said to me: But call it ‘Passion Films’, because you are passionate.
The actors trust you for that. When they come to see you, they know you are consistently engaged.
They know in any case that I will do everything not to betray them. That’s for sure.
Isn’t it heavy to carry this commitment on your shoulders?
No, because I would not like to have a perverse look on them and betray them. I myself would be extremely unhappy. When I want to shoot with an actor or actress, I want to enhance them and I want to film them as best as possible to try to recreate what they give off, what their look gives off, the emotions which pass through us. And I know that there are certain directors who are much more cynical than me. I’m not cynical.
In your films, there is always this notion of memory. What is your relationship with memories?
Memories live in you, shape you. You are who you are because you are full of memories too.
“Memories are important. It’s not about being backward-looking, but you can’t slam a door and turn a page for good either. No.”
Josée Dayanat franceinfo
It feels like this wonder will never leave you.
Well no. When I was 22 or 23, I made a musical film which was produced by Bernard Gavoty and I went to film Arthur Rubinstein in his mansion in Paris, down Avenue Foch. I think he was 83, 84 years old. For me, obviously, he was both a monument, but he was an old man. I felt like I was at Tutankhamun’s house. I asked him: how do you manage to still have this sense of wonder at your age? And he burst out laughing and replied: You know, you’re right, I’m 85 years old and for 70 years, I’ve been going to Gstaad every winter, to the same hotel. I say to myself why is he telling me that? And in the morning, when I wake up, I open my window, I look out and I’m amazed because I see snow. The day we are no longer amazed, we must stop living.
Does that mean that cinema definitely fulfills you?
But yes, it’s complicated, but I like it.