How did the project for Julia come about?
I wanted to write about a woman. With Le Petit Voleur and La Vie Rêvée des Anges, I wrote about people who were 20 years old, and I wanted to move on to an age closer to my own. The character is in her mid-40s. I’d read a character in a book who caught my attention, a woman who was a bit alcoholic. That’s how the character came about, but I moved away from that. In the first version, it was an English couple who came to Siberia to kidnap the grandson of a Russian oligarch. My co-screenwriter and I thought to ourselves: they need to speak Russian, it would be complicated, we’d never been to Siberia and we couldn’t afford to go for a visit. We then moved the location to New York, the woman was a prostitute, but a story like that in New York boxed things in. I wanted to have colors, like in Marseilles with Le Petit Voleur. So I thought, why not Los Angeles? Then we dropped the male role, and it became this woman who was initially a prostitute and who drank, whose life was a mess. And little by little, we moved towards this “normal” woman, integrated into American society, whose life falls apart because of alcohol and who doesn’t have enough money, which in the United States can quickly lead to your downfall. With her life in disarray, she jumps at the opportunity to make some cash when she gets the offer. She needs to believe.

You first thought of Siberia and New York and ended up with California. Is it a story you couldn’t make in France?
No, I couldn’t. In my opinion, it’s very hard to do fiction in France because it always gets mixed up with social reality. Audiard manages to do it. With this character, I needed space for her to run away. If it had started out in Paris, she would have run off to Orléans – the imaginative appeal is much less effective. Also, there was Mexico, a border to cross and a very different country from the U.S., with a different culture of violence; poverty pushes people to extremes. Since she’s American, others see her as someone with money, someone who can be shaken down, and I needed this violence to trigger a boomerang effect – she herself is violent with the child. When she crosses the border, at the moment she gives the child a little breathing space, she’s hit hard by the violence of the Mexican mafia, and by her lie about the child as well, since she has to make people believe she’s the mother and put her head in the lion’s mouth to get the child back. In France, we couldn’t have done that. I liked the idea of the motel, like a cramped prison, coupled with the prison of the Californian desert, which we shot in Mexico. And where’s there a desert in France? Except Ermenonville perhaps…

What movies or filmmakers served as inspiration?
Cassevetes, of course. I’ve seen Gloria and of course I like it, but we couldn’t make ours too similar. Because of the story with the child and the story with the Mexicans, we had to steer clear of that direction. On the other hand, Opening Night and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie were used for inspiration, and Nan Goldin as well… I showed those films a lot to my director of photography, for the ways of filming space and movement. Every filmmaker has directors who inspire him and who are important to him. Those were mine. For La vie Rêvée des Anges, I watched a lot of Pialat. Cassavetes was also an inspiration for characters with energy, even if they’re negative – an energy for life. A negative character like this one poses a lot of problems for financing the film. Before making the movie with François Marquis, I met with a lot of producers, the film was nearly made several times, but each time it fell apart because we couldn’t get money for a character like that: a 45-year-old woman, an alcoholic who lies and kidnaps a child.

Was it less difficult to find the actress?
We asked Julianne Moore, who accepted, but it was ten weeks of shooting and she was pushing for only eight weeks. After a while, I got sick of it and called her to tell her I’d make the movie without her. And once again, the picture nearly wasn’t made because Julianne Moore was out. I’d thought of Tilda Swinton early on, so I contacted her and she said yes, but suddenly Canal+ reduced the amount of money they were giving us and we didn’t have enough to make the film. We made it with four million euros, and did what we could.

The lead members of your crew were French and the rest were Americans?
We only shot for eight days in the U.S.; the rest was shot in Mexico because it was cheaper. We reconstructed the interiors of the motel and of Julia’s apartment in a studio in Mexico. We shot the desert, the river and the bars there; we only shot exteriors in Los Angeles, in front of Julia’s home and the train station. In Mexico, our crew was much too big; there were sometimes four people per a position on the crew. We could never do a tracking shot with our Mexican key grip, and the gaffer wasn’t much good either. They were very nice. But there were fifty of us, fourteen trucks… a veritable circus. With the Americans, we worked for eight days and they were real assholes, because we were only working eight days and the people were bad. Except for the first assistant camera and the key grip, none of the others gave a damn. As soon as you went over by a minute and a half, you had to beg for mercy. The American crew was expensive, and not nice. We shot the last sequence in Mexico, with thirty cars on camera; we never would’ve had the right to do that in the U.S. In fact, I was afraid several times that Tilda would get run over. The movie still got made, but it was touch and go. At one point, I asked the Mexican production company to confirm that a helicopter was available – “Yes, yes, no problem” – and the day before we filmed, “Sorry, we don’t have a helicopter. Do you want to shoot a model?” So François Marquis had a copter sent over from San Diego, in the U.S., it couldn’t fly at night, and so we had to shoot the sequence in two hours… We got to the desert, people were waiting, I told the production manager to clear a path for the crew nothing would get trampled on, and the morning when we were about to shoot, everything was trampled on, there were truck tracks even though there were only supposed to be two people in the desert… We wasted time, got into arguments, nobody wanted to do anything and we had to erase everything with branches. They brought you a car and it wasn’t the one you’d chosen – even though every day they ask, “This is the one you want, isn’t it?”, and when the time comes, it’s not the car you’ve chosen… and it doesn’t work!

You never indulge in visual tourism: the camera stays on Julia for a long time and the first rather wide shot, a location shot, comes from a camera inside a car. Is this something you thought about: not lingering over the American scenery?
I was much too into the idea of a thriller to do that. And we also would’ve needed more time. Don’t forget that I shot a four-and-a-half-hour movie in forty days – we cut it down to two hours and twenty minutes, but the screenplay was very long. Afterwards, it was a bit like Cassavetes’ notion of expanding the writing and then tightening it up. There are some superb sequences that were left on the editing-room floor. Four and half hours was a working version for editing, and much too long. On the other hand, cutting it down two hours and fifty minutes was really very hard.

It’s a French film without a tourist’s view of the U.S.
That’s what I’ve been told: “It feels like a film directed by an American.” It’s sort of what I was looking for. I didn’t want the point of the view of a French filmmaker who came to shoot in the United States, which Wenders did very well when he made Paris Texas, or Dumont when he made Twentynine Palms, lingering over the landscape, where you feel the point of view of the European director who’s contemplating his place in the American landscape. I wanted to make a thriller. I was much more interested in making a film that focuses on a negative character, getting the audience to accept and follow this character.

Yorick Le Saux’s cinematography is carefully thought out. Did you give him any points of reference?
Yes, Nan Goldin’s camera work, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie: a lot of brightness and vivid colors. And a camera that tries to capture the characters. Often, we’d film the main character, and suddenly we’d go and shoot the profile of the other character. I used Cassavetes’ approach and asked the actors to act even when they weren’t in frame, which they were happy to do. And then there were jerky camera movements, and things poorly framed that were brought back into the center of the frame. Cassavetes does that a lot as well. And also the importance of lighting and color. That’s also why we chose Los Angeles: for the lighting and the colors. And in Mexico, there are pinks, blues and yellows. It’s very colorful.

And with a lot of handheld camera work, up close to the characters.
We worked in cinemascope – I wasn’t used to that. For a story with only one character, it seemed hard at the beginning, and yet it worked. It also gives the movie a sense of adventure and sprawling landscapes. And Yorick Le Saux did a marvelous job, the gaffers shot very quickly and with little equipment. We also realized that labs in the States boost the colors and the lighting a little more than French labs do.

Is the film going to be released in the U.S.?
It hasn’t actually been bought by a distributor. It’s what I told people while we were shooting: Mexican assistants are used to American gangster movies being shot there, and that’s why they aren’t very good: they’re used to being completely taken care of, being supervised by the Americans. They’d tell me, “But Erick, that’s not what gangsters are like!”, their frame of reference comes from studio movies. I told them it didn’t matter, that Americans would never see the movie, that it wasn’t for them. I was right – for the time being, we don’t have a distributor over there. The movie’s long by American standards; I don’t know who could release a two-hour-and-twenty-minute French film.

If American producers asked you, would you go and shoot for them?
That depends on what it is. Miramax offered me an adaptation of Vertigo. Terrence Malick offered me the story of a boat person who goes looking for his father in the United States, and I said no to that one as well. I figured, if I dropped Julia, which we were having trouble putting together, I’d spend two years making a film and would never do Julia. I really wanted to shoot this film and didn’t really want to start working on anything else, especially an American project. I really wanted my second feature movie to be my own brand of fiction, and really didn’t want to shoot something made to order. But if someone calls me now, why not?

Paris, 2008 March 6, by Olivier Gonord.