“Living in Your Imagination”: A Conversation About Filmmaking with Durga Chew-Bose

I had met Olivier Assayas when I had been writing about Personal Shopper. We had struck up a friendship and we’d email once in a while. And when I told him I was adapting Bonjour Tristesse, he was really excited and he was someone that through various processes of making the film, I would touch base with him or show him a cut. I was desperate to work with his longtime production designer François-Renaud Labarthe, so I was really excited to tell [Assayas] that we got him. He actually said something really wonderful to me that I’ll hold on to forever. When our film didn’t get into Cannes, I naively thought we had a chance and so I was really disappointed. In retrospect, that was really silly. So he wrote me this email after and he was explaining to me the spirit of the film and how he’s not worried about it finding its people. He said that he has learned that “movies make their own friends.” I held onto that because it was such a simple but beautiful way to express what it is to make art, to not seek being universal, and to know that if you’ve stayed true to your voice, the same way we meet our own friends, we will find our people and cultivate that world.

Janicza [Bravo] was someone I would text if I had casting ideas and she had worked with an actor or something or knew of them. I had a very long call with Lena Dunham about casting and actors, and she’s so generous with her own experience, but also she’s quite firm and funny at the same time. I was going into making my first film with a lot of nerves and her confidence in me was a relief. She was talking to me as a peer, but I hadn’t even made a film yet.

I remember we went to scout and I was messaging with Janicza and I was like, “We’re going on a scout; I guess it’s real.” She wrote me back immediately and was like, “Durga, a scout is real.” These little affirmations that I wasn’t living in the clouds. Making a movie can make you feel like you’re living in your imagination and nothing is real until there’s an audience.

I relate to that anecdote. I would say that was one of the hardest things for me. It was hard because it came from this incredible place of respect for what actors do and knowing that there’s so many ways you can ruin quickly their space if you talk too much, if you use too many words, if you overcomplicate a simple feeling, or if you contradict yourself. You’re asking them to come for a very short period of time and be extremely vulnerable. My writing style is a bit mannered, which is an obstacle in and of itself when you’re working with an actor. I think I learned very quickly though that once you cast, the character belongs to them.

I think that every day on set for Lily had moments of, “I cannot believe I have a scene with Chloë.” And that energized her and added a certain voltage to her performance because there was this whole meta relationship happening alongside the actual relationship between Cécile and Anne. I remember one day Chloë got a set bag for Lily: a colorful basket that wasn’t floppy; it was solid, so when she put her script in it and water bottle and hat and sunglasses, it was sturdy. And Lily was over the moon, not only because it’s a gift from Chloë, but also the practicality of not having a flimsy bag when you have your paper script. It was so emblematic of Chloë because she’s impossibly stylish and impossibly cool, but incredibly practical and believes in function and efficiency. I was like, Lily’s going to remember this moment forever.

Yeah, it’s true. Those scenes, they’re more popular in biopics because they require it. It was always really important to me to find Anne’s vulnerability in her artistry, not just in her relationship to a man or potential motherhood or being in a different stage in her life. In the book she’s a fashion designer, but in my mind she was always an artist and in some ways that traps her—because it’s a career. It’s a rise in the ranks that might make you deliberate on life and make choices that exclude a family. You have to protect yourself and your vision and it can create outwardly a personality that people might not consider to be super warm. So I also wanted that scene to kind of expose what she’s like when she’s with her sketchbook. Writing it, I remember thinking, I want moments where Cécile can say one thing and it will affect Anne because she’s still an artist at the core and artists are so sensitive.

The roses. I don’t even know what I meant by that line, but every time I see it I’m like, “Oh God, that’s so embarrassing.” Because Cécile’s probably thinking roses are corny or so obvious, and it's just instinctive for Anne. Those are moments in life when they happen to me or I see them happening to other people, I think there’s been an earthquake. I’m happy you liked that scene because I know it’s not for everyone.

That was written as two separate scenes. The dialogue of that scene was written to happen after Anne and Raymond get together, and she’s on a terrace outside and he’s doing his ballet exercises, and they’re together. They’re in love, but for whatever reason, she decides to bring up that she misses Elsa, because she misses this other woman around. This other woman provided a seductive quality, like some kind of tremor in the household. And then the bed-making scene also happens after they’re together. But that’s not where it is sequentially now in the film. Multiple things happened. For financial reasons, in preproduction we had to cut a lot of scenes. And one night I was with my AD and my line producer, and my AD said, “Why don’t you have that conversation play over the bed-making scene because it’s in the same time period of the plot?” You know how sometimes someone suggests something and your ego is upset because it’s a better idea than what you had? I was thrilled because I felt like, “Oh, he knows me now. This sounds like something I would do.”
Then, when we were in the edit, my friend Chris Wells was having a pacing issue. And he was like, what if you move the bed-making scene to before they’re together officially, because making a bed has its own innuendo? So I can’t take credit for anything you just asked me, but I will take credit for listening to them.

Yeah [laughs]. In a world where the characters read a lot, especially as a way to spend time with each other, I didn’t want to focus to be, “Is Cécile reading the new Sally Rooney book?” I really wanted to create a hermetically sealed-off world that felt familiar but was hard to pin. Making sure the books weren’t real was important. My friend Teddy Blanks, the designer who did all our titles, and Molly Young, his wife who is also a brilliant and funny writer and critic, did the covers. I sent him an email with the character bios, who they are and what kind of books they might read, and I had some titles, because I’m a bit of a control freak. To Molly and Teddy’s credit, they went to town: the backs of the books have blurbs and descriptions. There are Easter Eggs. The book that Cécile is reading is called Claudia Claudia by a writer Valentina something—those are both like Monica Vitti characters.

I was taking the piss out of me. I’m very confident in the writing I want to do and the worlds I want to build as a filmmaker, but I’m also very aware of how they piss people off and they invite a lot of criticism. I’m actually kind of fascinated by how angry my movie or my writing make people. And I find there’s a level of mischief in me that finds that interesting. So in some ways, I wrote Nathalie as my ultimate film character, because she represents my favorite character and so many of my favorite films that is in a film for five minutes, but completely changes the course of things. But also, she’s negging me.
I wrote that line as a way to make fun of myself and maybe as a defense mechanism to make clear that I see it all. I understand why this type of storytelling upsets people, and yet I adore Nathalie. I love my critics. I agree with them often. You can agree with your worst qualities and you’re still gonna never change, maybe. It is myself bullying myself. I’m not into self-deprecation; it’s [more] like sparring with myself. I don’t know. I think it’s good to be an artist and be stubborn.