from The Independent (UK) / by Craig Mclean

Obsessed with dark thoughts as a child, communing with the spirit of Edith Piaf as an adult: the Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard has spent a lifetime studying the human soul – which should come in handy as she takes on the role of an anthropologist in her latest film

Towards the end of an hour in her company, during which she has skirted round the topic of what she is doing next (“I have a project for the summer. Different thing that I don’t wanna talk about…”), and in which she has sniffed, snorted and spluttered her way through her flu, I ask Marion Cotillard what I suggest is a stupid question. In her new film, the ensemble drama Little White Lies, made by her boyfriend, the actor-turned-director Guillaume Canet (Tell No One), she plays a Parisian ethnologist. But her previous few roles have all been English-speaking parts. Is it more difficult for the Frenchwoman to act in English than in her native language?

“Oh, it’s not a stupid question,” she replies eagerly. “Oh no, no, no, it’s far from being stupid. Yeah, it’s totally different. And it’s more work. But it’s something that I love to do. I love to work on the detail of the sound, how you stress a word, the meaning of the rhythm of what you k say. It’s very, very interesting. And I love the English language. But yeah, there’s a difficulty added to…”

She pauses. The Oscar-winning star of the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose (2007), last seen on screen in Christopher Nolan’s mind-melting and box-office-wowing Inception and, before that, as Johnny Depp’s girlfriend in Public Enemies, immerses herself in her roles. Completely. During her time as Piaf, she sang every day for seven months, beginning each morning of the three-month rehearsals and four-month shoot with a tilt at some of the Little Sparrow’s canon. While making any film, she adds, she doesn’t even read books. She can’t be distracted from the job at hand. “I’m not the kind of person who can do a lot of things at the same time.”

Thus, during the making of Public Enemies – Michael Mann’s film about the American gangster John Dillinger (Depp) – she kept her entire life English: off set, she thought in English, talked in English. “It was really, really weird,” the 35-year-old says in her rhythmic, repetitive, emphasis-heavy speaking style, “because I really wanted to have this perfect accent and I knew that it was not possible to have a 100 per cent perfect Chicago accent from the 1940s. It was really, really hard. So I stopped speaking in French for four months, and I started to speak in English with my friends [from home]. Which was very weird.”

Such devotion can come at a cost. All that singing she did for La Vie en Rose? Cotillard’s voice wasn’t even used in the film’s musical moments. She just did it to better get into character, “to learn the technique” of lip-syncing, “which is beyond difficult”. The director used Piaf’s original recordings. Or, for the scenes where the impoverished, unknown Piaf sings for her supper (or, for another bottle of hooch – she liked a drink), an impersonator.

“Ah, no,” the actress says to me with a shake of her head, doing the singing herself was never really an option. “No. No, no, no, no, no. Because I had only three months when we finally got the funding, to prepare for the role. So it was… freaking short! So I was frustrated, I have to say. Not that I really wanted to sing, but I wanted at least to have the time to try. And I didn’t.”

After completing work on the film, and given its resultant success, did it take a while to shake off Piaf? “Ooooh,” Cotillard breathes, “a while was long. A while was nine months. It was terrible. And I’m ashamed to say it, but that’s what happened.”

She was, she admits, haunted by the star, one of France’s greatest cultural icons. “I had this weird feeling. And I’m very sane! I don’t live with my role, I’m a really normal person. Well, I’m an actress, I’m not that normal! But I tend to be really normal.” She smiles. “But I couldn’t let her go because her biggest fear when she was alive – of course, we don’t have fear when we’re dead – was to be alone.

“And then when we finished the movie, I didn’t want Edith to be alone. That’s crazy! Then, suddenly, going back to my life and leaving her alone… It just took time for me to realise that she had been dead for a while.” Now Cotillard laughs. “So it was OK! She was not alone! She was gone.”

The ghost was exorcised, and Cotillard’s body hair returned – to play Piaf, she’d had her hairline heightened and her eyebrows removed. (“Shaving doesn’t make them thicker, it just makes it ugly when it grows back.”)

And physically, she was, finally, no longer bent out of shape. Trying to appear like the gawky, thin Piaf across the span of her adult life (she died in 1963, aged 47) meant Cotillard had tried to “shrink” her real height by nine inches to somehow resemble the 4ft 8in chanteuse, putting a great physical strain on the actress.

“But that’s something that I really like, and I think it’s easier for me to have a character that is really far from me. And, for example,” Cotillard adds in her chewy, American-accented English, “with Little White Lies, the difficulty was that the character was not that far from me.”

It is a bright but cold December Paris day and Cotillard is spending it conducting a couple of international interviews in a hotel. It is rather early for her to be doing press for a film not due to be released until the spring. A few days later, a possible explanation emerges: it is announced that Cotillard and Canet are expecting a baby. Perhaps the actress, chary of discussing her private life, didn’t want to be asked about the pregnancy by journalists. If that was the “different” kind of “project” for the summer that she had been referring to, fair enough.

Little White Lies is about a band of thirty- and forty-something Parisian friends. Every summer they journey to the holiday home of Max, a restaurateur, on the Atlantic coast at Cap Ferret. The film opens with one of their number carousing in a nightclub. He exits in the early hours, high on cocaine and booze, jumps on to his scooter, zips off through the quiet Parisian streets, and then… Well, let’s not spoil it.

Canet filmed this extended scene – he also wrote the script – in one remarkable shot. It’s the only stylised bit of the film. The remainder recounts, in naturalistic, empathetic, keen-eared detail, the group’s discussions of whether they should still depart for their annual group vacation – then, once they are on the coast, the director’s non-intrusive cameras linger on their thoughts about their actions, the differing states of their relationships, their views on where they’re going with their lives.

It is, then, a Gallic take on The Big Chill, a reference Canet is happy to acknowledge – and a notion underlined by the fact that most of the actors were friends before filming began. Cotillard said that her boyfriend – they’ve been friends for 15 years, and acted together in the 2003 film Love Me If You Dare – gave her a choice of roles to play. She opted for the part of Marie, the scientist who spends much of her time abroad studying humans, has no-strings-attached sexual relations with men, but is remote from close relationships.

“I chose Marie, so I thought, well, there must be something that I have to explore there.”

Hiding from people in a crowd – is that something she could relate to? “Um… yeah,” she says crisply. “Yeah, because I think an actor is kind of an anthropologist.” Born in Paris to actor parents – her father had a company that staged plays for children – Cotillard thinks that actors “study human soul, human heart, human behaviour. We try to understand this in order to be able to be [true to life]. And when I was a teenager I was… kind of special. I was very scared of other people. So I would hide. But I was more, I was more, let’s say, dark.”

Melancholy?

“Yeah. I had a thousand per cent of my teenage angst!” She laughs, sniffs and sips at some water. For all the heaviness of her illness, she is remarkably perky. “I started to ask myself very early why I was here. And I think it makes your innocence go away faster, to have this obsession of getting an answer about what are you doing here.”

Cotillard’s innocence was also rudely interrupted by the international success in La Vie en Rose. Her Oscar win made her a red-carpet fixture (she became a model/muse for Dior) and, after a few years of success confined to France (kickstarted by 1998′s Taxi), an international star.

But she didn’t like “to be the one under the light”, so took smaller parts in bigger movies such as Inception and Public Enemies. And she spent time singing and playing bass/keyboards with a below-the-radar group, Yodelice, comprised of Parisian musician friends.

The worst example of her new-found “status”: shortly after her February 2008 Oscar win, she was pilloried for comments she had allegedly made on a late-night French chat show a year previously, in which she seemingly cast doubt on the veracity of the 9/11 attacks.

Cotillard sighs when I mention this. “You know, I know how the media work. And I have to be honest: it was really stupid for me to talk about something that serious in a TV show at one in the morning. But we were talking about something totally different and I gave an example of what I had seen. And it was not very smart. But still: what was written out of it was very different from what I said.”

It was reported that she’d said the Twin Tower attacks were a fake… “I didn’t say that,” she interjects. “The first reason is that I know people who have lost members of families or friends that were in those planes. So how could I believe in the conspiracy theory? It’s nonsense.”

After Little White Lies, Cotillard next appears on screen in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. The latter, which she shot in Hong Kong, also stars Matt Damon and Kate Winslet, “two of my favourite actors ever”. There are ongoing rumours that Christopher Nolan wants to work with her again in the next Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises (could that, in fact, be the “summer project?”). But her part in Cosmopolis, a planned project with David Cronenberg, has hit the buffers due to problems with Colin Farrell’s schedule.

So, with whom – and in what language – would she like to work next?

“I just wanna do movies,” says Marion Cotillard with a shrug. “I don’t have a plan. I’m so lucky to have the opportunity to work with some directors and some actors I wouldn’t have dared to think I would work with one day. And now I know that everything is possible. So, it’s very exciting. But I don’t have in my mind whether I do an American movie or a French movie. It’s just [that] the stories come and… if I recognised myself in the story, I wanna be part of it.”

Another smile, another sniff.

“That’s how it happens.”

‘Little White Lies’ (15) is released on 15 April

from Empire (UK) / by Damon Wise

“I’m happy,” says Marion Cotillard, “when I know that I’m where I should be.” It’s a cold December day in Paris, just before a white blanket descends upon Britain and parts of France, disrupting Eurostar service in the run-up to Christmas. Though Paris is her home city – she was born there, before moving to the countryside at the age of two – Cotillard nevertheless has the feeling of a woman in transit. By her own admission, she is something of a restless artiste, and in the flesh she has a beauty that’s hard to place, thanks to a series of roles that have conspired to keep her out of the present day.

Recently, Cotillard completed her first contemporary role in quite some time – not including Christopher Nolan’s Inception, because she insists, that was “timeless” – taking a small role in an ensemble drama, Little White Lies, directed by her partner, Guillaume Canet. The film is a very French and very personal affair, dealing with the lives of a group of Parisian friends who go on holiday together to a seaside resort after one of their number has been seriously injured in a crash.

“It was a great time, really,” she smiles. “We really had to work hard on the movie, because most of us are friends in real life and the locaion is the place where we go for our summer vacation. So it was very strange to suddenly be in the same places, with some of the same people, wearing kind of the same clothes and having kind of the same interactions – but with different names and different pasts. For the film we had to create entirely new relationships for ourselves.”

Coming from Canet, it’s certainly a surprise; his last film, Tell No One, was a gripping murder mystery. Little White Lies also reveals an unfamiliar side of Cotillard, who plays a freewheeling spirit with a bohemian dimension much closer to her own (although, to the best of Empire’s knowledge, the actress is not bisexual and does not smoke marijuana). Such freedom, she says, was what drew her to the project. “This film was different for me because it had been a long time since I had played a contemporary role,” she explains. “I’ve travelled back in time to the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and when you work on a movie that takes place in those times, the way you speak, the way you behave, the way you think, even, is different. So it was great for me to get back to 2010.”

At 35, Cotillard is now one of the biggest names in French cinema. Her parents were both actors, and though they didn’t push their daughter into the trade, they encouraged her to be creative. “We didn’t have TV before I was eight,” she recalls, “and I will always be grateful to my parents for that, because we developed our imaginations by creating our own stories.” As a youngster she watched a lot of movies, especially American ones, but it wasn’t the screen divas that caught her eye – it was the Tinseltown clowns. “I admired Greta Garbo but I didn’t want to be her,” she laughs. “I wanted to be Charlie Chaplin. And I wanted to be Peter Sellers.”

But for a while, she didn’t want to be an actress at all. “When I was around 20,” she muses, “I was like, ‘Do I really wanna do this?’ I wasn’t very happy with what I had. Which was, at that time, not really a lot. I wanted more. That was a fact, and I couldn’t fight it. So I went to see my agent and told him that I wanted to…” She pauses. “Not quit forever… But I didn’t want to be frustrated in my later life, and I was thinking of doing something else. And before I could say this, he told me, ‘Marion, you’re gonna meet Tim Burton…’ Now, Tim Burton was my idol. And so I told myself, ‘Wow… This is exactly what I want. This is even more than what I want! So if I get this, it means that I really have a place in this business. If not, I’ll do something else.”

Fortunately for world cinema, Burton cast Cotillard in his 2003 father-son fantasy Big Fish, re-igniting her enthusiasm for the craft. More small but significant roles followed, in Jean-Pierre Jenuet’s A Very Long Engagement and Ridley Scott’s A Good Year, but the watershed was 2007, when Olivier Dahan cast her as chanteuse Edith Piaf in the biopic La Vie En Rose, the role that brought her a milestone Academy award – the first ever awarded to a non-English performance.

“One day my agent called,” she rememberes, “and he said, ‘Olivier is writing a script for you based on the life of Edith Piaf,’ so I sad, ‘Well, okay…’” She shrugs. “But the script wasn’t written at that time, so I didn’t think much of it. To be honest, I didn’t know many things about Piaf, except that she had this amazing voice. So I listened to some of her songs, and then, about a year later, the script was written and Olivier gave it to me.”

Because it covered the whole of Piaf’s life, Cotillard was confused at first as to which part she would be playing. “And my agent said, ‘From when she’s 19 to the end’” She laughs. “I was like, ‘Excuse me? I’m 30! How’s he gonna make that work?!’”

Though Piaf is a major figure in French cultural history, Cotillard claims not to have felt any pressure. “I didn’t think about it,” she says casually, “because it would have taken me away from being inside this woman. I just wanted to understand the human being she was.” This she did through a process of research that she says changes with every project. “Sometimes it can be music that helps me find a character, sometimes it will be a picture, something that I write, or write as the character. It can have many, many forms.”

Empire wonders what form Cotillard’s research took for Inception (a movie which, of course, samples Piaf), in which she plays the dreamworld incarnation of the hero’s late wife, Mal? “Oh, that was totally different,” she enthuses. “Let’s say you’ve been to India, England, Russia and Argentina – but then suddenly you’re on the moon. It’s always different when you go to a place for the first time, but you always know what to expect there. But when you go to the moon, it’s a completely different planet.”

Cotillard refers to Nolan, half-jokingly, as “The Captain” of this intoxicating trip-slash-space mission. “And it was amazing, because The Captain is brilliant,” she marvels. “The Captain’s imagination is a mix of mysteries and answers.”

Cotillard says that the character of Mal was a collaboration, not between herself and Nolan but with her co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio. This kind of exploration, she says, is what keeps the job fresh. “It’s a fascination,” she decides. “When Michael Mann cast me in Public Enemies, I didn’t know anything about American history. I mean, not anything!”

So is she happy now? “Yeah.” Cotillard smiles. “I live as a girl who had big dreams and who is lucky enough to live those dreams while continuing to dream – while at the same time living a real life.”

A real life? What does that mean? “It means I don’t want to be someone else,” she says, emphatically, “and I’m not going to let my job take me away from myself.”

She smiles. “I’m not going to be haunted or disturbed.”

from Dazed & Confused / by Carmen Gray

The Oscar-winner on the French Riviera drama directed by her partner

The sudden global fame of winning an Academy Award for her raw portrayal of French singer Edith Piaf in 2007’s La Vie En Rose, the first Oscar ever awarded for a French-language role, was bound to cause upheaval for Marion Cotillard. The subsequent self-examination and house-cleaning of her life that role prompted is echoed in her new film Little White Lies, an intimate project written and directed by her partner Guillaume Canet, and made with a bunch of their friends. In it, the relationships of a group of friends are sorely tested when they go ahead with their annual beach holiday despite a traumatic event, and are forced to face up to some uncomfortable truths.

DAZED & CONFUSED: Little White Lies is an ensemble film, with eight characters sharing the focus – did it feel very different to working on La Vie En Rose?
MARION COTILLARD: Each role, small or big, has its own life and its own mystery to discover. Piaf was unique – I played her whole life. But when you’re part of an ensemble, and the dynamic of the group is the centre of the movie, you have to find your place in the group. What was very, very different from La Vie En Rose was that the era of the film is the era I live in. I didn’t have to study that world because I watch it, I live it every day.

Did that make it easier to identify with this character?
When I prepare to play a character that exists in another era I create a structure related to the way I speak. In a world that’s your world it’s relaxing, in a way, not having to think you cannot talk like you normally talk because it will not fit with the era. At the same time, something of you escapes more easily, and it’s kind of scary. The first time I saw the movie it was horrible to watch, and even though it’s a character – it’s not me – there are things of myself that I can see, and I hated it.

Your partner Guillaume Canet was directing – how was it to work together?
We are close to most of the actors in the movie, and what was weird is that this place in the south of France is a place where almost all of us go for vacation, because we’re friends. We know these places with those people, and suddenly, you have a different name, you have a different past, you have different behaviour, but then again this behaviour contains parts of yourself. It was kind of weird sometimes, but it created a dynamic which is so interesting.

The film is about the lies people tell each other. Did it cause you to re-examine your own life?
I had had this experience with myself before this movie. When I played Piaf I got myself in a very, very deep place and when I came back there were little lies that I couldn’t live with anymore. There was a big cleaning. What was driving me was much stronger than even the fear of being abandoned by some friends or that some relationships could be destroyed. Eventually, you find out that it doesn’t destroy anything: it’s the opposite. There’s no bullshit any more. It’s a genuine love. Sometimes you have to take the risk.

The characters are accused in the film of being very selfabsorbed – is this a problem specific to our generation?
I don’t really know if it’s being selfinterested because you sometimes need to face your own problems and understand what’s going on inside of you. I think sometimes you think you have time. You think that you’ll do this later because you’re afraid of doing it now. You put it aside with a tissue over it but it creates parasites. It won’t disappear and if you leave it too long what you really have to deal with and face can dramatically change, and sometimes it’s harder.

LITLE WHITE LIES is out on April 15

from GQ (UK) / by Stuart McGurk

Here’s Marion Cotillard – Oscar-winning actress, Dior model and activist – on, well… you decide: “We live on earth, have jobs and interact in society,” she said recently. “But we exist because there is a moon rotating around us and a sun we rotate around. We connect when we accept that the mystery takes place on the ground.” Yes, Marion Cotillard is very French.

Described by Nicole Kidman as “otherworldly”, the 35-year-old Cotillard looks set to continue in 2011 where she left off last year – nicking the roles the rest of Hollywood wanted. After starring in Inception, this year sees her complete a hat-trick. First up, French drama, Little White Lies, directed by husband Guillaume Canet. Then, Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Contagion. And finally, Midnight In Paris – a Woody Allen romcom (of course). In fact, only her pregnancy has restricted you seeing more of Cotillard, ruling her out of the race to play Catwoman in upcoming Batman (a role nabbed by Anne Hathaway). Cotillard’s joy, it seems, is the rest of Hollywood’s gain.

Little White Lies is out on 15 April. Contagion is out on 21 October.