Mélanie Thier­ry: ​‘The only thing I need­ed to find was her voice’

Mak­ing movies about real peo­ple has become a rapid growth area in the mod­ern cin­e­ma indus­try – these films tend to be looked upon favourably by awards bod­ies, and they also con­nect with audi­ence who like­ly have a rela­tion­ship with the sub­ject through anoth­er medi­um, be that music, art, lit­er­a­ture, sci­ence, or any oth­er pub­lic space.

Mélanie Thierry’s for­mi­da­ble per­for­mance at the cen­tre of Emmanuel Finkiel’s Mem­oir of War – based on Mar­guerite Duras’ 1985 piece of ​“auto-fic­tion”, La Douleur – sees the actress ingest­ing the spir­it of the great French rad­i­cal writer rather than offer­ing a stud­ied copy of her mannerisms.

The sto­ry is set dur­ing the Nazi occu­pa­tion of Paris and sees Duras try­ing des­per­ate­ly to recon­nect with her hus­band who is a resis­tance fight­er who may or may not have been cap­tured. She finds a cer­tain tricksy solace in a col­lab­o­ra­tionist police offi­cer, who offers obscure hints as to the where­abouts of her lost love.

LWLies: What was your knowl­edge of Mar­guerite Duras before play­ing her?

Thier­ry: I knew her because, for women in France, she rep­re­sents some­thing very impor­tant. When you’re a teenag­er, the way she talks about women speaks to you. Then, when Emmanuel Finkiel gave me the part, I need­ed to focus away from what she rep­re­sents in France now, because it would’ve been over­whelm­ing – it would’ve been too much to tap into her human­i­ty and the human being she know she became after the war. For­tu­nate­ly, the sto­ry takes place before her suc­cess. She was nobody at this moment. She found it very tough to find an edi­tor. She wasn’t respect­ed by any­one. She was in the process of find­ing her path, but it was com­pli­cat­ed. She wasn’t the Duras we know from the 1980s. She was just like every oth­er woman dur­ing the French occu­pa­tion – sur­vival was pri­mar­i­ly on her mind. And also to believe that her hus­band would return.

Were you at all try­ing to hint at the woman Duras became in your performance?

We just kept her lan­guage. Every­thing I say is in the nov­el. The only thing I need­ed to find was her voice. You mustn’t just paste these things on. You have to feel. Just to have a sen­sa­tion, the evo­ca­tion of Duras, the way she spoke, the way she used words, her con­cerns. That’s important.

Do you remem­ber your first encounter with her work?

When I was 17 I read her book The Sea Wall, and after that The Lover. The fun­ny thing, in a way, is that we have a beau­ti­ful actress in France called Dominique Blanc, who main­ly works in the­atre. She did La Douleur on stage. In the book it’s split into three parts: the part when the hus­band is com­ing back; the part we used for the film, which is the long wait; and then you have a third part focus­ing on the men from the gestapo were killed. Blanc focused on the idea of a writer who for­gets these notes she writes dur­ing the war.

She finds these notes but has no mem­o­ry of them. She plays that writer. It’s about dis­cov­ery, and div­ing into pain and mem­o­ry. And it was beau­ti­ful. In France, La Douleur is about pain and suf­fer­ing in the body, but it’s also psy­cho­log­i­cal. There isn’t an equiv­a­lent in Eng­lish. I knew her movies, I knew her work, I knew the woman! She was on the radio and I would lis­ten to her doing inter­views. Some­times she was a pain in the neck, but she was a genius! For my part and for my work, I need­ed to get rid of every­thing. Just need to give some­thing with the human being and the universality.

Would you learn about Duras in schools in France?

Teach­ers are free to intro­duce kids to her work because she was a woman writer at a time when there weren’t that many woman writ­ers. She’s not in the curriculum.

There is an aspect of the film where it expects you to know cer­tain things about France at that time.

There are many films about the occu­pa­tion of France, the lib­er­a­tion, the war – so many films are bril­liant and won­der­ful. But what we try to do here is to give some­thing dif­fer­ent. In this film we rely on the gaze of this woman who is wait­ing. There aren’t that many films about women wait­ing. There are many about men suf­fer­ing and fighting.

How did you deal with the fic­tion­al aspects of the text?

Of course. This book is her pre­tend­ing that it’s her inti­mate notes. Even if it’s not, because she was also a liar. Even if some of the notes were total­ly from this age and from this moment with her guts, in the 1980s you can feel that she reworked her notes. It’s a book writ­ten in her late style. It’s auto-fic­tion, but she’s not the first and she’s not the last. She’s some­one who is dif­fi­cult to define. Even in the text, her move­ments and moti­va­tions aren’t entire­ly clear. She’s much more ambigu­ous – about her feel­ings, her adven­tur­ous spir­it, how to have a rela­tion­ship with a col­lab­o­ra­tor. And it’s spe­cial to be able to chan­nel your pain and tor­ment in this way. And it makes you feel a bit guilty. You feel a bit dirty tak­ing plea­sure from pain open­ing it up to the pub­lic in book form.

Is it tougher job as an actor to chan­nel pain and suf­fer­ing as opposed to intense happiness?

My only mate­r­i­al to do some­thing in me. All I’m ask­ing myself is what I have inside and how can I use it to cre­ate a sense of sin­cer­i­ty and authen­tic. There’s so much dual­i­ty and com­plex­i­ty. She was nice, but she was not nice. She could be unbear­able, yet I have so much affec­tion for her. So I’m using these two sides. For a role like this, I want to be total­ly con­nect­ed to Duras, but also total­ly con­nect­ed to myself. I want to find that con­nec­tion, but also I want to give some­thing new. This film isn’t a biopic so I do have a cer­tain poet­ic licence. It’s not about repli­ca­tion a per­son. It’s about how you see them.

Mem­oir of War is released 24 May. Read the LWLies review.