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Sarah's Key

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Based on Tatiana de Rosnay's best-selling novel, Sarah's Key tells the story of an American Journalist on the brink of making big life decisions regarding her marriage and her unborn child. What starts off as a reseach article about the Vel'd'Hiv Roundup in 1942 in France ends up as a journey toward self-discovery as she stumbles upon a terrible secret and discovers the heartbreaking story of a Jewish family forced out of their home, a home that is now their own.

Opened July 22, 2011 (Limited 7/22)

Runtime:1 hr. 51 min.

 

Interview with Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner

 

(Q) : Tatiana's(Author from "Sarah's Key) also writing a screenplay for this. How did you initially get started? How did you get interested in this project?
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : It's quite simple. The book was just released in France and I read about it in a magazine and thought it was a very interesting subject so I just bought it and read it and was like I have to do a movie with this book. So I was lucky enough to have a friend, a French writer who knew Tatiana, so I called him and said "Look, I'm really interested in Tatiana's book. Can you call her?" And then we met and it clicked, she trusted me, and I was lucky because it was before it became such a worldwide phenomenon, a worldwide bestseller.
 
(Q) : Even the film Kristin Scott Thomas was talking about it there's not much documentary footage or pictures for this. Besides the book did you get into researching more material?
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner): Yeah, sure. The book is very well documented because Tatiana used to be a journalist before being a writer.
 
(Q) : Yeah, she used to write for "Elle" or something.
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : Yeah and for "Vanity Fair." For a lot of magazines. So she made like one or two years of research and then once I finished the screenplay I said "Okay Tatiana, what do you suggest? What should I read?" So I read a few books, I watched a lot of documentaries. I watched them again because I had seen them before.
 
(Q) : Documentaries as in they have documentaries or were you talking about the Holocaust documentaries?
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : Yes, there are documentaries, there are a couple of them, and one that's very good. And that's actually on the French dvd. So yeah there are very few documentaries but they exist. But the thing is we don't images from the Roundup of course, as we mention in the movie, but we have images of the Vel' d'Hiv because it was like an indoor stadium as you could imagine today. And so I did research but the most interesting part is I met some survivors. I met two women that were little girls during the Roundup and that had been in the Vel' d'Hiv and survived, and there are very few of them.

So I met with them and they told me about their experience and what they remembered, and that was very interesting because that's what brought this feeling of realism when you watch this. It's because they told me about the noise, they told me about the heat, they told me about the smell. So I really tried to put that on screen in an almost impressionist way.
 
(Q) : So how did you collaborate with Tatiana? Was there any making some changes for making the film or it's pretty much all in the novel?
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : The film is very faithful to the book because it was a very well plotted book, good characters, very good structure. I didn't have to make things complicated; it was all there on the page. So then of course you have to synthesize because the book is too long for a movie of course. So you make choices, you have to get rid of things, sometimes you make little changes because a book is a book, a movie's a movie.

But the movie's very faithful and Tatiana was in the process. She didn't write or anything but we became friends so it was very transparent, like once we had a first draft we were happy with we sent it to her and she was happy too, so there was never any problem. We screened her the first cut and all this and it was a very pleasant and simple process.
 
(Q) : What about the process of casting Kristin Scott Thomas? Some of the performances were very difficult to play. So talk about the process of casting her?
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : The thing is in a French perspective we really needed someone who would be credible as this character, totally bilingual, credible as a woman living in France for 25 years, and this is Kristin's life. She's British, she's not American, but she's been living in Paris for 25 years. She was married to a French man; she has two French children, so she understood Julia deeply. And also Kristin is a big star in France of course, so it was just perfect, it was a perfect fit.
 
(Q) : She's also bilingual so that really helps.
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : And she's bilingual, yeah, and she speaks French almost as good as English. And she's a very, very good actress. Obviously, she's one of the finest actresses in the world. And the thing also that's interesting about her is because I didn't want the movie to be sentimental and she has this elegance. She's a very elegant actress and she knows how to avoid a trap. This experience, her knowledge as an actress and a human being was a great, great asset for the movie.
 
(Q) : Let's talk about the casting of young Sarah, Mélusine Mayance. She was phenomenal; she was perfect for that choice. How were you able to discover such a young, talented actress like that?
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : She's like an adult actress in a child's body. We were so lucky we found her. We didn't find her ourselves. François Ozon, the French director discovered her when she was seven. She did her first movie, "Ricky" with him. And François has an interesting sentence because when "Ricky" came out he was asked a lot of questions about Mélusine and he said "Mélusine is not a child; she's an actress."
She's like a professional actress and you can't imagine concern about are we going to find a child that can play such a complex character? And we did; it just happened. We were so lucky. Mélusine is like the French Dakota Fanning.
 
(Q) : There's a moment that is kind of interesting towards the end that Kristin Scott Thomas' character was talking about it to some of the young journalists in the office. Some of the young journalists were talking about it. For French people to do this is really disgusting, but Kristin Scott Thomas' character was saying "But what would you have done if you were in that situation?" That was a really key element to talk about it because we'll never be there.
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : It's a crucial point in the movie. I hate people who judge other people when they're sitting on their couch watching TV. How can we know what we would have done in times of war when you're afraid for your life and the lives of your children? Some people had amazingly bad behavior, some people were incredible heroes, but like 90% of the people were in the middle in this grey area where they just tried to save their life basically.

So I think it's too easy for us that live in this rich Western world that has been sort of in peace for a long time, we're like spoiled kids judging our ancestors that were in a very difficult time. So that's the key element, I think that's interesting that everyone can ask themselves, what would I have done? And I think nobody can respond to that.
 
(Q) : I think that's sort of starts a discussion. I know you were showed this film at the Toronto Film Festival; how was the reception?
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : We had a great reception. We screened the movie in a lot of festivals. You know we were at the Tokyo Film Festival. We won the audience award and the best director award. The audience award in Tokyo, and I guess your fellow compatriots, right? It was surprising. I didn't know how the Japanese would react because I didn't know if it would be interesting to them or anything. It's not their culture and it's not their history. And they were fascinated by the movie; it was great.
We had a great reaction in Tokyo.

But I will say we had a great reaction everywhere. The movie's quite successful all around the world. I couldn't say why honestly, but maybe what I can say is because yes, it's about the Jewish family in this time of history but it's not about the Jewish family, it's about the family. The message is universal and everybody can connect to it, everybody can feel emotionally involved with these characters. There is no politics, there is no religion; it's just about a family.
 
(Q) : What was the reaction when the novel came out in France initially?
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : The reaction was very good because it's very far for us now and most of the people of the movie were not born then. I don't think there is the sense of guilt that you would expect because you're not guilty for something you didn't do yourself. And I think people should not feel guilty. What's very important is to know about it, is to understand what happened. That's important.

But I hate when guilt is an engine for something. It brings only bad things. Of course some people were puzzled, especially the young ones, because they didn't know about it. They were so shocked because they could not imagine that in their country, France, police arrested people and sent them to the camps. They just didn't know it and it was a big shock for them. Can you imagine teenagers, like 13, 14 year old kids. And so yeah that's was interesting. But the reaction was good. There was no controversy.
 
(Q) : Could you talk about the aesthetic approach? You made us go back into the 1940s. Could you talk about the aesthetic approach of working with the DP, Pascal Ridao, who you also worked with in another movie back in 2001 or something.
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : Exactly. We wanted the two periods of times to be a bit different but in subtle ways. I wanted 1942 to be very real, very immersive, so we chose to have a hand held camera. We shot that with short lenses because with sort lenses you can have both the character and what's around them with a depth of field. So we chose that so it felt very, very real with a warmer image for 1942 because it was a very warm summer.

And then for nowadays we chose to have a very classical approach. Fewer shots, slow motions, very quiet cameras, and also a bit colder for the image because I wanted to underline the subtle difference of a world that's in peace and a world that's in a time of war. And I think it also helped the audience never to be lost.
 
(Q) : How about the choice of music, working with Max Richter, who has done some American films and also working on "Waltz with Bashir" and some Israeli films.
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : Working with Max was a blast. He's so talented. I knew him through this piece that's called "In the Nature of Daylight." It's what you hear in "Shutter Island" but he kind of remixed it. If you like Max's music just go on YouTube now and listen to "The Nature of Daylight." Trust me; you will thank me after that. This song is like the most beautiful song I know. It's a song with no lyrics; it's a piece.

Then I tried to find him, we sent it to his agent and he loved the script and he said "Okay, that's a deal." But then working with him was great. He's based in Berlin and that was very interesting because my family, I'm from a Jewish background, I lost part of my family during the Holocaust, and there were German Jews actually from Berlin. And I'd never been to Berlin before, so going back to my roots sort of. It was very interesting.
 
(Q) : In the movie they are talking about how some of the Jews were still afraid after the Second World War, because of the fear that they had going through the process of the war. Do you think that happened just after 10 years?
 
(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : You have to understand that the people who have been through that were traumatized to a point you cannot even imagine or understand. They were scared it would happen again. My grandmother, she was not even Jewish, but she lost her husband, my grandfather was deported and died. She said baptized my mother and my aunt because she said "I don't want this to happen again." And she was not even Jewish. And then there was another thing.

I don't know if you heard about the expression survivor's guilt. I think there were two ways to react to surviving the Holocaust. You had these people that were so full of life, they survived, they were so full of life, but you also had the people who couldn't stand the fact that why did I survive and not my father, not my sister, and not my brother? Why me? It was a very, very big burden for them, and Sarah unfortunately was in that category.
 
(Q) : I see. What are you working on next?

(Gilles Paquest-Brenner) : I'm working on a movie, it's called "Dark Places," and it's based on the book by Gillian Flynn. She's a writer, she's based in Chicago, she's a genius. So we hope to shoot in February, and the cool thing is that since I'm Chicago right now I'm going to have lunch with her in 20 minutes, so that's really cool.

 

End.