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MillimeterFade to Black: Olivier Dahan, Director
May 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
“I don't do any storyboard—never,” Olivier Dahan says, rather defiantly. “I don't work with the script on the shoot or in my hotel room. I don't plan everything. I don't rehearse, either. I just wake up in the morning and I go to the set. When I arrive on the set, I have no idea what I am going to do.”
So says the director of La Vie En Rose, the biopic on Edith Piaf, who began his career as a fine artist. In fact, his filmmaking process is like that of a painter, and it is a misrepresentation to call his film a biopic. “I have no method for it. I just follow my intuition for most of the time,” Dahan says. “When I was writing the script, I tried to make something like the portrait — an impressionist portrait rather than to make a biographic classical biopic. I didn't want to be on the facts — more on the emotional level.”
Regarding his dislike of technical planning, Dahan has this to say: “Actually, it is very comfortable because you can't be disappointed. You can be disappointed if you have a storyboard, something very precise to do. But for me, to put the camera on the right or to put the camera on the left is the same in the end. The emotions are not a question of the position of lenses. I could be disappointed, for example, if the actors are bad or if I don't have the power to direct them. That would be a disappointment for me.”
A sumptuous film with a career-making performance by Marion Cotillard, who ages as Piaf from 19 to an old 47, La Vie En Rose was made on a very strict budget without even time for Dahan to do preproduction tests with Japanese DP Tetsuo Nagata. The two had never worked together before, and their only reference was the photographs done by Brassaï. They set out to create something at once classic and modern with three different color palettes, but, in the end, they threw out even that conceit.
“The movie was scripted in three parts,” Dahan says. “With my cinematographer, we had planned to make something different for each of the three parts. For example, the first one was childhood, and we were talking about making something very brown and cold. In the second part, something more golden — like the rising star moment for her, and everything had to be golden. … Anyway, at the end, we just made it like one single block.”
Nagata shot Fujifilm Eterna250 and Eterna500 to cover the dark interiors of Paris and New York, as well as the bright vistas of the California desert and beach. The film was printed on Kodak Vision Premier 2393.
Interestingly, Americans are not the only ones to forsake their homelands and shoot their national stories in a foreign country. Prague served as a Parisian backdrop — for the most famous of Parisian singers. The most frustrating shoot, Dahan says, was one of the few in Paris, on the streets of Montmartre, where the young Piaf is running around busking and then is discovered. Cars and advertisements had to be digitally removed to take us back to 1935 Paris.
According to Dahan, the most challenging shoot, however, was the centerpiece of the film: the moment when Piaf learns that the love of her life, middleweight boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, was killed in a plane crash on the way to see her.
“From the very beginning, I wanted to make this shot as you see it,” Dahan says. “I wanted to reveal the whole movie in just one single shot.” It opens with Piaf in bed imagining his arrival. As she moves to the kitchen to prepare him breakfast, she passes weeping servants and friends. She finally hears the news, realizes her delusion, breaks down hysterically, then walks on stage and sings — all in one shot. The stage was specially designed for the reveal of the audience, and Dahan spent a lot of time rehearsing and blocking. The scene is masterful.
“In the morning, she is happy, then there is something dramatic, and then, at the end, she is on stage. And I really wanted to reveal her life in just one single shot. Yeah.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.