Delicate Gravity – trailer from philippe andré on Vimeo.

S: When did the concept behind Delicate Gravity first bloom as an idea for you, Philippe? Were there any initial phases where the story was different? Were there any immediate inspirations or influences that helped you develop the concept?

P: This story happened to me. Almost. I found a message on my answering machine. A woman was talking to her lover. It was a message left by mistake. I used that as a starting point.

I built up the story from there: What if the man receiving the message is a kind of lonely guy. What if the message left by mistake is a lot more dramatic. In my film we hear Claire telling how much she loves the man she is waiting for but we understand this woman is so desperate, she might commit suicide. Then she only hangs up without letting any number but just the name of the hotel she is in.

I think it’s pretty catchy to start a story. So it has always been the hook to push the story forward. After that my intention was to see two persons who have nothing in common meet in a hotel the time of one night. To portrait a woman seen through a man’s eyes and make a kind of classic piece. Like ‘A Special Day’ by Ettore Scola or ‘Brief Encounters’ by David Lean but set up nowadays.

S: Considering the importance of phones, dialect and language in the film, did you intend for Delicate Gravity to be a film about communication? Or perhaps, a film about miscommunication?

P: Definitely yes. This is a very important topic for me. Communication seems to make people more distant from each other sometimes. Using more and more devices may be they tell less. We think we know people but actually don’t. These topics are very interesting for me. Sometimes communication has replaced language in a way. I wanted the movie to give that a bit and make of this love story a modern one using phone, messages. Paul and Claire need each other this night. He is lonely, she is lost. But Claire is ashamed Paul has heard her message and Paul is embarrassed to have heard it. It builds up a sort of ‘over-communication’, the kind of message you don’t want anybody to have heard, you would love to ‘unsend’. And at the same time a miscommunication moment because they don’t know how to talk about it. That way in the film they share something, as a secret they don’t want to talk about. So it’s full of contrasts, which is great to develop characters on screen.

S: Was the use of irony intentional in that regard? Paul is a translator, Claire’s desperate message failed to send, and ultimately Delicate Gravity is framed by what isn’t said, as opposed to what is. Do you agree with that statement?

P: Yes I do. Because life is ironic. It’s never black or white. Irony always makes a story more believable on screen I think, it makes everything more real, this feeling of ‘life is just like that’.

Reason why I’ve given to Paul a translator’s job. He understands nothing of his own life but he is the right man to ‘understand’ Claire. As if he was discovering a character in a novel he has to translate. Because a translator has to understand everything of a character to find the right words. It’s not only about translating a line. They need to know the whole story.

The story is based on obstacles but these failures push these two guys towards each other. It was a great mechanic to play with when writing. They hide more than they say, but what they hide is loud. It’s kind of ironic yes. I love that being a film maker but being an audience it’s what I prefer. Because I see more on screen than what is told. A silence can reveal more than many lines of dialogue.

S: The musical score in Delicate Gravity is beautifully crafted, but in many ways it’s enhanced by your sparing use of it, for only the most crucial of moments. Do you think your time directing music videos made this skill evident for you?

P: I think it did. The way to use music with moving pictures has always been my passion. I’ve even wrote a memoir about that and I’ve been graduated at film school with it. I think there is still so much to do there. I did not want the music to be just a parallel layer to enhance emotions. For me music is like another actor in a way, or a narrator. Like at the opera, you have the singers, they tell like the dialogue and when they stop, the music continues to develop the story by itself. Here actors talk and when they stop, the music continues. It’s like another voice. It’ s not something very common in movies as music is often there to enhance the emotion or the drama of a scene. As if the scene was not strong enough to work without.

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S: Yvan Attal and Anne Parillaud play their roles so finely, with so much chemistry between them. Were they the initial choices for your leads? Were they any individual qualities you wanted either actor for, in their portrayal of Paul and Claire?

P: My initial choice was Yvan Attal. He is such a great actor. My producer knew him and Yvan read the script and loved it. So it was easy. I’ve been very lucky. We worked together to find who would be Claire. Yvan preferred not to work with an actress he had worked with in the past; The film was an opportunity for him to work with someone different. It was a good call for me to have Yvan discovering an actress in the real life and on screen. My story was all about that.

I wanted an actress with this mix of beauty, fragility and strength at the same time. A kind of distance in a way. I needed a kind of sophistication for Claire.

Paul does not have that at all. He is raw, a bit more rough even if he is very educated. The more difference I could have between Paul and Claire the more interesting their meeting would be. They are pushed towards each other by circumstances but would have never met otherwise. Both of them are amazing and their performance is stunning.

S: How do you think you’d react in Paul’s situation if you received the voice message?

P: This exact same message as in my film? It’s hard to say. Let’s be romantic and say I would do exactly what Paul does, call the hotel, call the police, and as nobody really helps, I would go and meet Claire at the hotel she is in. What would come next is … real life. May be what is in a movie is more interesting. I think it is actually.

S: Thank you for your time Philippe, I found Delicate Gravity to be one of the most genuine films about human emotion and connection I’ve seen, and that deserves a lot of praise.

P: Thank you so much. It was great talking to you.

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