Anatomy Of A Fall Director Justine Triet On Love Of Cannes Competition – Deadline

French director Justine Triet anatomy of a fall opened in Competition at Cannes over the weekend to a lively reception with its star Sandra Hüller frontrunning for the festival’s coveted best actress award.

Hüller stars as a German writer living with her husband and visually impaired son in a remote mountain chalet in the French Alps, who is accused of murder when her husband falls to his death from an upper window of their house.

Her complex nature is exposed in a trial that hinges on her son’s testimony and a sound recording of a heated argument with her husband.

Triet is one of the few women to have competed at Cannes more than once in her career.

He previously competed for the Palme d’Or with Sibyl in 2019. Before that, his fourth feature film in bed with victorystarring Virginie Efira as a workaholic lawyer with a disastrous love life, it opened Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2016.

The director spoke to Deadline about the new movie

DEADLINE: What was the genesis of the film?

JUSTINA TRIETE: I wanted to make a test film, based on my experiences with in bed with victory, as well as a film that delved into the dynamics of couples. My original idea was to do a miniseries, but my producers convinced me to drop that and make a movie.

My goal was to immerse myself in the life of a couple, and questions about man-woman relationships, as well as what is meant by family. When I started conceiving the film, the idea was to look at both the physical and psychological downfall of the couple. That’s the Bergman-esque side.

Everything is built around the mother and child. My daughter was about 10 years old and I said to myself: “You don’t know much about who I am, about my life, about my history.” I envisioned a story in which a boy’s absolute trust in his mother is slowly eroded and damaged, putting doubt at the heart of their relationship.

DEADLINE. How did you come up with the idea of ​​sound recording at the heart of the trial?

TRIETTE: What interests me most about the film is the relationship between truth and evidence… I liked this idea of ​​the life of a person captured on their phone and what would happen if the contents of that phone were suddenly made public. That is the heart of the film and, in particular, the recording of the fight between the couple. We originally planned to weave a lot more footage into the film, but in the end, we kept it simple.

When Sandra’s character says that the recording is not reality. It is very contemporary. It is what we live today. A trial is a place where things are transformed and given extra weight, creating new fictions. I liked the idea of ​​creating a film in which two fictions ride side by side, the defense and the defense of the dead, and neither version is necessarily the truth.

DEADLINE: The movie is extremely layered. Putting it together must be a bit like completing a puzzle…

TRIETTE: It took me much longer to write than usual. An essay film, if it is not a comedy, requires a lot of time. You have to pay attention to even the smallest detail. There were two of us writing the script, which was good because we had two brains to share the work. The film is built layer upon layer. You use the word ‘puzzle’ and that’s what it was, the idea of ​​how we’re going to build and reveal this character without a big denouement or twist at the end. That’s something I really wanted to avoid.

DEADLINE: You have worked with Sandra Hüller in the past on Sibyl, in which he had a supporting role. What led you to cast her in the lead role here?

TRIETTE: I actually wrote this movie for Sandra Hüller. I wrote with her in my head. I said to myself: “I really don’t know who Sandra is. I could spend years trying to understand her. I am fascinated with her. It’s so full of contradictions and complexities, and I wanted to talk about a woman like that.

DEADLINE: The age of the boy in the film and the fact that the character is inspired by your own relationship with your daughter is interesting…

TRIETTE: Absolutely, it’s that key stage where a child transitions from infancy to adolescence. I never really talk much about my life. I keep it very compartmentalized. I have a complex family. My father had many different women and I have a very, very mixed family. There are many family histories and family mythologies that I haven’t talked about but that have informed this work.

DEADLINE: You wrote the script with writer-director-actor Arthur Harari (Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle) who is also your life partner. How was that?

TRIETTE: We have worked together in the past, but not like this, with this level of intensity, side by side. It’s interesting to work with someone you love, but I think it will be the last time. He doesn’t want to work with me again. He said, “Justine, I love you but it’s too much, you ‘vampire’ me.” We said that the film is important but we must not let it devour us. When you work with someone and you’re in a relationship, and especially on a subject like this, you need to be organized. Sometimes it was horrible, sometimes it was perfect.

DEADLINE: Why did you choose to make the film multilingual and have Hüller speak English instead of French?

TRIETTE: It was very important to have that sensitivity, that feeling that the husband and wife do not speak the same language, so they communicate through a third language, English. There was also this idea of ​​what it means to be a foreigner tried in France. Being judged in a country that is not yours can be hard because they judge you for how you express yourself, but since you don’t speak your mother tongue and there are many filters between you and your reality.

The fact that she is a German who speaks English and tries to speak French creates a lot of masks and clouds the issue, creating more confusion about who she is. Sandra speaks English very well. When I hired her I told her that the language would be an important issue in the film… She wanted to speak French and I told her no.

DEADLINE: You are one of seven directors in Competition this year, up from four in 2019, when you last competed with Sibyl. Do you think that progress is being made in terms of gender parity in cinema?

TRIETTE: It’s better than when I started. I’m 44 now, but there aren’t enough women making movies. We need to work with quotas, which will encourage and help this evolution. When I look at my 12-year-old daughter and listen to her conversations with her friends, I can see that things have changed in the last four years, maybe since MeToo. They have a different vision, but it will take time. There is a revolution but as a spectator I still think that there are not enough women’s films.

DEADLINE: When you say quotas. What do you mean? So that?

TRIETTE: There should be quotas for everything, everything. We need women in positions of power everywhere, not just in movies, but in all of society. Women have been involved in film forever but in small, shadowy positions. We need to put them in bigger positions. After all, we represent more than half of humanity.

DEADLINE: What does it mean to you personally to be in Competition at Cannes?

TRIETTE: It’s fantastic. You work for three years on an auteur film that is neither a blockbuster nor a Netflix series, and this is the strongest place to show it and connect with international viewers. Cannes is not only French, it is international.

It can be violent. You never know how people are going to react to the movie. Sometimes it’s hard because you feel misunderstood, but I’ve been very lucky at Cannes. You can be attacked but I like that violence, which is not physical but voyeuristic. Many people look at you, analyze you and romanticize you. It’s a bit like being in court.