Céline Sciamma talks about her debut feature, Water Lilies.
In Water Lilies you managed to capture the essence of female teenage anxieties. You achieved this partially through portraying their world as exclusive to them – there are almost no adults in the film…What motivated you to make this film?
Yes, exactly, there are almost no adults! At that time this was a first opportunity for me to write my first script. When you are at film school, they always tell you what you have to write about and this time I wanted to write about something that interests me. So I started wondering about what I really wanted to talk about. The thing is that I really wanted to talk about girls and that was my starting point. I wanted to show the girls’ locker room, the other side of girls, not just the fantasy side, but what is really the job of being a girl…Then, of course, I know what is like being a girl, so I started with that memory of synchronised swimming that struck me when I was a teenage girl and that got me all confused. I always kept that in mind and I felt it was very emblematic of the way you feel when you are a teenager. I missed my life, I missed being a synchronised swimmer and I always remember being so impressed by the femininity of those girls. That confusion, which I felt for a few days moved me but always made me laugh and it was a great point for me to start a fiction, but not the fiction when you tell things about yourself…I started thinking about this and tried to imagine actresses…
I very much liked the length of your film: 85 minutes seem to be just right…
I like this format, a popcorn movie, an hour and a half. Now they are getting longer and longer and I prefer the shorter format. I always wanted my movie to be an action movie. An action movie is not a movie with guns and helicopters. It is a movie in which people are given a chance to act. And this is the cinema! In France we have this tradition of intimate dramas in which we like to talk a lot. And we talk and talk and there were some great films made like that, Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore…In this film they keep talking, but it is so great! In my film I did not want to talk too much. You are not going to say to the person that you love them, you are going to eat food from their garbage, but it is the same!
I liked the fact the dialogue was scarce in Water Lilies…How did you find the actresses? They were all fabulous!
I found them in three different places: Adele [Haenel], who played Floriane, had already been in a feature film when she was a child and my casting director found her. She was perfect and I did not want to see any other girl for her part. Louise [Blachère], who played Anne, was really hard to find. It was not easy to find a chubby girl, who is not a typical onscreen stereotype of a chubby girl. I put an advert in a magazine and it was a month before shooting and we still did not have the actress for her part and then she came. At that moment I was desperate…She had done nothing, but she is a great theatre lover.
Yes, at some parts she was rather theatrical, but it worked really well…
Yes, I thought so too. She had that experience on stage and we had to calm her down. But we used her theatrical ability. And then Pauline [Acquart], Marie…The casting director found her in a public garden, she was just hanging around with her friends. We were always on the street, in high schools, stores, looking for girls. And then we finally found them.
Water Lilies reminded me of a film I saw a couple of years ago… I completely forgot the title…It is Spanish perhaps? A story of a teenage girl, who falls in love with an older man...there is also this memorable scene at the swimming pool…
Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl [Argentina]…I am very happy that you connected my film to hers, as I have always liked her work…
What are you working on currently?
I am going back to screenwriting, which doesn’t mean that I won’t be making movies. I want to write a script for a friend of mine, who composed the score for Water Lilies. We went to film school together. And then I am going to think of something for myself. I think it is good to take some time thinking about stuff. I don’t just want to make any films, because I have made one already and I am legitimate. I want to know what I want to talk about.
How much improvisation did you allow your girls to perform?
Almost none. I wanted everything to go according to the script. I did not change a line in the script.
For you as a filmmaker, what is the importance of public film festivals, such as LFF?
It is very important! My film has already been released in France but it is still crucial for me to travel around with it. I am relieved that it happened but I still like to sit with different audiences in different countries and see what their reaction is. Everybody reacts differently to each film. Last night, when I got into the cinema, I was very moved. I still feel that something is happening for the first time.
Even so the story is universal, it is still received differently in various countries…
Totally, and especially with the homosexuality part, that changes everything…
And also the fact that Water Lilies represents that female to female contact that I believe many young girls experience in their youth…
It is very true and girls often tell me this and I am so happy about that, because this is what I wanted to show in my film…And at that time of your life everything is a matter of friendship, it is all important.
Are there any filmmakers who influenced your work?
I am a child of the 80s and I have always liked movies about children. Back to the Future has always been my favourite movie. Now I like Bergman. I love all the 80s traditions of popcorn movies, they were really clever. And then the 90s, the new French rising auteurs, like Pascale Ferran, Arnaud Desplechin etc. That was the time when I liked French cinema a lot. It felt like we could do it. When you see Jean Renoir you think like, yeah, that’s a big thing, nobody is going to do that any more…Water Lilies is very French but at the same time it is not French. My favourite director is David Lynch. When I think about, not the story, with Lynch you cannot think of the story, but the lighting, the camera, the material, the lights, the shades, the colours…
The direct translation of your film's title reads 'The Birth of Octopuses'?
In English this title did not really work, ‘Birth of the Octopus’ does not really mean anything. Somebody also pointed out that it has to be plural, ‘octopuses’ and then you get into this phonetic sound, similar to ‘pussies’ etc. and I did not want to get into that…I think it is dangerous…
Kamila Kuc
BFI LFF Web Editor
PhD Candidate, Birkbeck College