Céline Sci­amma: ​‘I would love for some­one to make this film into an animé’

Fol­low­ing her inter­na­tion­al hit film Por­trait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sci­amma returns to her roots with her fifth fea­ture, Petite Maman. Star­ring twin sis­ters Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz as daugh­ter and moth­er Nel­ly and Mar­i­on, the film presents the time-loop premise with nat­u­ral­ism and authen­tic­i­ty. It’s also a return to some of Sciamma’s reg­u­lar themes: com­ing-of-age, grief and good­byes, but also cru­cial­ly the pow­er of empa­thy across gen­er­a­tions of women.

LWLies: Petite Maman opens with Nelly’s per­spec­tive and we fol­low her close­ly. What was it like for you to return to a child’s focus? Why does that world­view appeal to you?

Sci­amma: I used to answer this ques­tion about films with kids very dif­fer­ent­ly because I was younger. I was doing com­ing-of-age sto­ries because I was com­ing of age. When I start­ed writ­ing Petite Maman I realised that kids are great char­ac­ters, and it’s their per­spec­tive that I find attrac­tive – the way they see the world. I want­ed to give them full cred­it as indi­vid­u­als and to treat them exact­ly the same as adults. I think they work so well for cin­e­ma because they care a lot. Ques­tions from a child can always be so much more trou­bling and there’s such a strong pres­sure because it’s the great­est desire to know, under­stand, and feel. Look­ing at some­thing is so impor­tant and the desire to under­stand some­one is so important.

There’s some­thing refresh­ing about how Nel­ly and Mar­i­on respond to the sur­re­al sit­u­a­tion. Is their open-mind­ed­ness some­thing you hope to inspire in the audience?

Yes, I want the film to be about the audience’s emo­tions and not the char­ac­ters’ emo­tions. I want peo­ple to leave the room lov­ing the film, obvi­ous­ly, but also lov­ing cin­e­ma. To give that feel­ing it has to be a dia­logue that’s com­fort­ing and also trou­bling. That’s when you love cin­e­ma, with every­thing in it from the cos­tumes to the music is a small rev­o­lu­tion. That makes you fall in love again with the medi­um. We have this cul­tur­al back­ground that insists on rit­u­als, espe­cial­ly with cin­e­ma, so when you give young audi­ences more atten­tion you leave more in and you’re giv­en poet­ry, the poet­ry of kids. That’s why I keep refer­ring to Hayao Miyaza­ki with this film because he’s mak­ing inter­na­tion­al films, no one is ques­tion­ing the dif­fer­ent lay­ers. There’s a lot of inven­tion and I think that’s because he is think­ing about kids also.

Petite Maman reminds me most of My Neigh­bour Totoro and you’ve writ­ten for ani­ma­tion with My Life as a Cour­gette. Is that a form of cin­e­ma you want to revisit?

I thought about ani­ma­tion for Petite Maman while I was pro­mot­ing My Life as a Cour­gette and feel­ing a lot of grat­i­tude towards that film for how it made me grow as a screen­writer. I thought Petite Maman would be a per­fect ani­mat­ed film because peo­ple would take their kids. But then there’s the time scale of mak­ing an ani­mat­ed film which isn’t what I’m used to, and it’s not even a craft I can pre­tend to have. I would love for some­one to make this film into an ani­mé. I’m not real­ly doing screen­writ­ing for oth­er peo­ple any­more but it’s some­thing I would love to do again if it was animation.

What were Josephine and Gabriele Sanz like to work with? Did they bring a lot of impro­vi­sa­tion, because their per­for­mances feel very authentic?

No, there was no improv at all. Except for the pan­cake scene, but even then there’s a recipe! For me the thing I ask is, ​‘Do they get the idea or do they not?’ If they don’t get the idea then it means that it’s out. They’re defend­ing ideas and their char­ac­ters and we need to respect that in work­ing with them. We didn’t rehearse at all. Most of our dis­cus­sions before shoot­ing was around the cos­tumes because I do the cos­tume myself on my films, except for Por­trait of a Lady on Fire, of course. I do it because it’s the first part in the artis­tic direc­tion of the whole film when we’re talk­ing about colours and lights. But it’s also to build rela­tion­ships around the char­ac­ters. With the girls they learned the job on the set which is basi­cal­ly learn­ing how to walk again. There’s a lot of live inter­ac­tion which cre­ates authen­tic­i­ty so it’s based on an idea that we share.

The cos­tumes feel time­less and it’s inter­est­ing that you used an orig­i­nal piece for the ​‘music of the future’ at the end. Did you not want to tie the film to any spe­cif­ic time?

I want­ed the film to be time­less. It’s time trav­el­ling with­out a machine so it’s very nat­ur­al. The most dif­fi­cult idea was the fact that there are two hous­es and one should be old­er, but we kept it exact­ly the same. We didn’t age the wall­pa­per or any­thing like that. It’s a time trav­el­ling film where the time you trav­el to is the time you can be togeth­er so it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty to share the time.

I want­ed the film to be some­thing that every­body could con­nect to in terms of geneal­o­gy, and so I tried to make it reli­able so that some­body born in the ​’50s could total­ly get it. Marion’s sneak­ers are ones that were around in 1955, which is when my moth­er was born. So some­one who was a child in the ​’60s and some­one in 2021 can con­nect to the sto­ry. It means that there are 40-year-old women, grown-ups, going to the film, then going with their moth­er, being the kid and then going with their own daugh­ter. That’s the utopia of the film, I guess.

The use of objects in the film is part of that change of time, lit­er­al­is­ing mem­o­ry as tac­tile sou­venirs. Are there objects which evoke pow­er­ful mem­o­ries for you?

Well, a lot of them are in the film. The grandmother’s cane is actu­al­ly my real grandmother’s, and some of her out­fits are actu­al­ly worn by the char­ac­ter in the film. It was the first time that I was work­ing around a ghost; bring­ing back some­one is one of the attrac­tions of cin­e­ma. I had nev­er tried that before and it’s incred­i­bly pow­er­ful. The first shot I did of the grand­moth­er, that was the real cor­ri­dor at my grandmother’s place. Sud­den­ly you say ​‘action’ and you hear this noise in this cor­ri­dor and she appears and it’s incred­i­ble. It changes the love that is inside an image, and this can be felt.

When I was writ­ing the film, I was obsessed with the idea that we would feel our body dif­fer­ent­ly and log­ic doesn’t exist any­more. I kept think­ing about a moth­er and a kid going to see the film and then they go out­side and when they run to get the bus, they will run dif­fer­ent­ly togeth­er. That’s why I did the film and why I want­ed the film to be short because I felt that it was a kind of spell. You could take the ride sev­er­al times and you could go back to it. It’s not how long the film lasts, it’s how long the impact of the film lasts. For me, watch­ing the film includes the night after. It’s a project of impact and how it affects your dreams.

It’s inter­est­ing that you used Vivaldi’s ​‘Sum­mer’ so evoca­tive­ly in Por­trait of a Lady on Fire, and Petite Maman has such lus­cious autum­nal imagery. What do those sea­sons evoke for you?

When I think about child­hood, I think about autumn. Autumn feels like home. Por­trait of a Lady on Fire was intend­ed to be about autumn but it became kind of a sum­mer film, because all the exte­ri­ors were so sun­ny and we had to stick to the nat­ur­al light­ing. So I still want­ed my autumn film and this time it was a for­est. But still, we had to bring thou­sands and thou­sands of autumn leaves from else­where. There’s also a mor­bid side to this colour because something’s fad­ing already. It’s a very unsta­ble, beau­ti­ful moment to watch in nature.

Good­byes are the emo­tion­al crux of this film and Por­trait of a Lady on Fire. Is that per­son­al or some­thing you feel lends itself to the tran­sient nature of cin­e­ma? Of not want­i­ng things to end?

I keep going back to it, I guess I have to look this in the eye! For me it’s real­ly about the moment, it’s not about the end­ing. It’s lit­tle things because good­byes are due. Nobody ever dies in my films, there’s a ​‘life goes on’ spir­it. My films are about try­ing to con­sole peo­ple. I’m always look­ing at moments which are very much con­tained in time, there’s always a form of com­ing togeth­er and then we look at very small moments.

I loved the imagery of the black pan­ther at the end of the bed; this sym­bol of grief. Where did that image come from and what does it mean to you?

We shot this pan­ther on the last day, it was the last shot of the film. It was the hard­est thing to do because dur­ing the shoot the prop lady would bring me dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als for the shad­ows. It was very prim­i­tive cin­e­ma. There’s no CGI; it was done in the moment. So there was this small kid’s room filled with fake leaves held up with fish­ing line and they would all dance so that the shad­ows would be intrigu­ing. It was a 12-per­son moment. It takes a lot of peo­ple to cre­ate a mon­ster for real.

It’s a per­son­al image, but I think the fact that it’s per­son­al also makes it com­mon. It’s about not telling kids that mon­sters are only in your head, that mon­sters some­times are real. And they’re human. I tried to keep it as open as pos­si­ble so that every­one can con­nect. No one else has asked me about this, I’m avoid­ing the real ques­tion… Some­times the ques­tions that nobody asks you are the most trou­bling. When you don’t want to talk about a scene that’s nor­mal­ly because there’s a secret behind it that you want to keep. It’s a secret of cinema.