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Interview: Sophie Barthes (Cold Souls)
When you take this idea based on a dream and then work for three years of your life on a film and strive to do something that is original or different it may be based on the problem that, with some people, it is their culture that is restrained and if you do something surreal – you draw comparisons with Charlie Kaufman.
Since this interview back in January, moments after the world premiere of Cold Souls at Sundance, it’s been living out of suitcases for Sophie Barthes. Her impressive directorial debut has been spotted on the festival circuit with trips to cities on both coasts and visits in Europe and Asia before finally making its way into theaters, this coming Friday, via Samuel Goldwyn.
Eric Lavallee: I read your film as both a commentary, and a critique about society and our culture’s obsessiveness for altering our existence . Do you believe like Jung, that people do have souls?….
Sophie Barthes: Yes I believe people have souls, but they don’t take care of them. They let them shrink like an unused muscle. For me this is the metaphor with this film and though I’m not religious, you feel that some people are “soulful.” Maybe its a poetic, utopian way of thinking about it. There is something. Charm is part of the soul. Even you spend time in a house, you sometimes say “this house has soul.” There is something – I don’t know what it is.
EL: With your short film Happiness and now Cold Souls, you feature people who want to modify some aspect of their “cerebral” existence/appearance. Why do you think this has idea has manifested itself in your work?
SB: The idea for this movie came from my unconscious, it came to me by way of a dream. I think I’m attracted by this idea that you can materialize something that is abstract. So, in the short she was buying happiness and you obviously can’t buy happiness.
I love absurdism, Samuel Beckett, the theatre of the absurd. I grew up reading this stuff. So any situation that seems to play with this notion is of interest to me. My philosophy of life is that the human condition is extremely absurd. When you play with those concepts its gives you a little bit of hope. Humor and the arts can make life a bit more bearable.
EL: I was wondering when you hand over the script to Paul (Giamatti) in Nantucket, and he gets back to you the week later…I imagine his ego is flattered, but what component did Paul like best about your script after having had read it the first time?
SB: I don’t want to speak for him, but from what he told people in other interviews is that it wasn’t because it was written for him, he is a modest guy and so it wasn’t a vanity project. He loved the “dreamlike” feeling and was drawn to those parts, as well as the deadpan and dry humor. These are the reasons why it connected with him.
EL: Did he think his characterization of himself was accurate and more importantly, did Elizabeth Giamatti (one of the film’s producer) agree with your characterization of her husband?
SB: (Laughs). I think they were a bit shocked because I tapped into things that were real but by coincidence. I saw him in Sideways and American Splendor and this is when I decided to write for him. I started to fantasize about who this guy is? – he seems like a complete neurotic, funny goofy guy. So I wrote using my imagination but there were certain things that were real. At one point they were thinking maybe we should not call the character Paul Giamatti because it was becoming too personal, so let’s call him Paul Gianatti, but then Paul said “I want to do myself, it’s funnier.”
EL: Did you watch him outside the context of films? Did you watch him during interviews or red carpet premieres?
SB: Apart from the films, I didn’t watch anything but I read all of his interviews online. So I was reading how he answered questions and tried to capture the tone. But then after this, I forgot about it and created the character. This is a fantasy idea of him. In life he is not like this.
EL: Your screenplay is a fusion of sombre and comedic elements, I was wondering when you are writing if drama and comedy go hand in hand when you are writing? Or do you use different skills sets?
SB: This was the hardest thing to do and I was scared that I had failed. It’s hard to make a film where there is comedy, then drama, then more comedy and then more drama. I was reading an interview with Woody Allen who said he thought Manhattan and Annie Hall failed because he didn’t intertwine comedy and drama (obviously he did succeeded) but what he said is that you need to mix both tones and make sure you are always on that tight rope. I think Chekhov does this perfectly. I think the overall structure needs to be dark and melancholic and then you infuse humor. In the screening, people are laughing and then it gets melancholic and sad, and then you ask them to laugh again. So you are playing with the audience and asking a lot from them.
EL: Which did you find easier to write: “visual” gags or the dialogue? You are making people laugh with both.
SB: It’s very organic. As a screenwriter you don’t disassociate the lines of dialogue and the visual parts, it comes together in an intuitive way. For me it’s difficult because English is my second language so I think in French, so sometimes the dialogue is a bit more awkward and perhaps this is what brings more absurdity. I love writing dialogue, but sometimes I found that I needed to restrain myself – you need to hold the dialogue and think about the scene visually, otherwise I would just write dialogue forever and have too much fun with it.
EL: You mentioned at the Q&A at the world premiere that it was fellow (Sundance) lab Eric Lahey who made the pod thing. Did you have specific ideas as to the design of the pod beforehand? SB: He was with me at the lab, read and loved the script and started sketching stuff. He showed it to me and I thought it was so cool. He had all these ideas for it – he loves Terry Gilliam and he made this egg with a whole bunch of different machines. And then I picked one and asked for modifications because I wanted the entire body to be sucked in like a giant vagina. He drew it and I approved one drawing and then he went into his garage with his brother in Oregon and they built it. We had no money for this thing.
EL: What was it made out of?
SB: The structure is wood and then there is this foam that was sandblasted onto it and it took him six fourteen hour days to make it. And all the glass work is made by Andy Paiko, a glass artist (visit the website). He makes jars and all sorts of stuff and he hand blew all the tubes that you see and the lights. We would love to make an exhibition with it.
EL: St.Petersburg benefits both the narrative and has the obvious perks of the landscape, I was wondering what kind of barriers and difficulties does it present to film in Russia?
SB: We were surprised. We heard all these clichés that if we went to Russian we would be ripped off by the corruption and bribes. We had no problems. We were working with Globes Films as a partner and they made the film Mongol with Sergei Bodrov. They were super professional and very “old school.” They are there for the love of cinema – we shot for ten days and prepped for one month and had no logistical problems and they had those theater actors. This is where we got Dina (Korzun) who works in Russia and she would love to work here (she did Forty Shades of Blue) but it’s difficult for her because of the accent. While Katheryn (Winnick) roots are Ukrainian but she is Canadian, but her physicality was so great. It was difficult to cast her role. The casting director called her from L.A., she was so funny – and perfect for the role.
EL: Technically speaking, what was the most difficult sequence during production?
SB: The soul “dives” (where Paul goes in and sees his soul) were difficult because we didn’t have much resources in terms of sets. We took decisions and didn’t know until after if the choices to use the slow-motion, different film stock and the strange locations would work for something that has never been depicted before: the fantasy of how it is to look inside someone’s soul.
EL: The Sundance lab process allowed you to sharpen your script and prep for how you would direct certain sequences. I was wondering if this “luxury” of preparation is something you’ll mimic for your next project even though it may be costly in time, and money?
SB: I would love to do that for my next. Sundance is amazingly generous – they put you in these director’s labs and you are directing scenes of your movie before shooting your movie with a camera, crew and actors . You could do something at home with a video camera, but what this did was allow me to see the vision growing. As a first time filmmaker I was really scared with the big actors – the first two days on set I’m thinking “wow, I’m directing Paul Giamatti, this is ridiculous”. So with the lab you feel more confident.
EL: Andrij who blew me away with his work in Half Nelson, does another sublime job here. I’d like to know how that creative process works? Do you throw scene ideas at him and he visuals it and comes up with lensing, camera movement and color palette strategies?
SB: We live together, so he has seen the script since day one. I woke up and I told him that dream, so for three years we can’t separate our lives from this movie, it’s our child. We collected a lot of pictures, and I made this book of pictures and we frequently go to MoMA and the Met and I point at palettes of colors I like. For camera movements he loves to operate the camera himself, it is the soul of the camera. He loves fluidity and in Half Nelson it was more gritty and handheld, this one was a bit more formal for the comedy elements. It’s difficult to do comedy and have a camera that is shaking so we did static shots – when Paul is soulless he is in a centred frame and it makes the deadpan funnier and for Andrij it’s difficult because he does not like to shoot comedy – he likes mood. He came to the lab and we experimented a lot, we shot the chickpea scene in the lab in four different ways, one that was super handheld, one that was very static and then we saw the results. You can’t move the camera around and try to be funny at the same time.
EL: There will be obvious comparisons to Charlie Kaufman’s work, but your influences range from dead writers, your dreams, Woody Allen movies, paintings and the photographs you mention beforehand. I imagine you must be flattered and both fed up of the comparison. What is your take on this?
SB: (Laughs) It’s exactly how you put it. I admire Charlie Kaufman – I think he is fantastic. When you take this idea based on a dream and then work for three years of your life on a film and strive to do something that is original or different it may be based on the problem that, with some people, it is their culture that is restrained and if you do something surreal – you draw comparisons with Charlie Kaufman. I grew up with surrealism, Buñuel, Boris Vian, Dadaism, Gogol (the surrealist Russian writer who wrote Dead Souls) and these are the movements that influenced me. I don’t think that my style is similar to Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry or Charlie Kaufman. We have completely different styles.
EL: What provided you and the crew the most laughs: Paul as Russian Poet or Paul with and a 5 percent soul?
SB: I couldn’t even direct this scene, it was when Paul was doing Chekhov without the soul – the crew and I were crying of laughter. I couldn’t say “action” or “cut”. And Paul was saying “common put yourself together”. We had to re-shoot many times. And there was that scene in the bedroom with Watson where he admits to renting the soul of a Russian poet – it was the first week of shooting and we couldn’t even record sound, we could here people laughing. The mood was really light and Paul was enjoying himself a lot.
EL: I think that my only complaint is I felt that Emily Watson was underused….is there a scene that didn’t make it to the final cut?
SB: Our first cut was three hours. When I wrote the role of the wife, I wrote it as a minor role. I didn’t know I would be able to get her, and then I became stubborn and I really wanted Emily Watson, so she accepted to take the role, if I had known I would had gotten her, I would have fleshed out the role a little more. There are so many subplots with Russia, so we had to concentrate Dina and Paul. In retrospect I would have wrote more, I love her, she is an amazing actress and she deserves much more. When it’s your first film, there are so many things to cover at the same time – you are just lucky to be making it.
Samuel Goldwyn Films releases Cold Souls on the 7th of August.
