de Voir.ca / par Manon Dumais

Bien qu’il soit revenu bredouille de Cannes, De rouille et d’os de Jacques Audiard est un grand film. Et même s’il est humainement impossible de voir tous les films programmés à Toronto, je puis affirmer qu’il s’agit sans doute de l’un des meilleurs films à voir au cours de ce prestigieux festival.

Écrit avec Thomas Bidegain, De rouille et d’os est l’adaptation libre de nouvelles de Craig Davidson, écrivain canadien vivant aux États-Unis; l’une d’elle raconte l’histoire d’un boxeur; l’autre, celle d’un dompteur d’orques. Souhaitant raconter une histoire d’amour après le drame carcéral Un prophète, Audiard et Bidegain ont revampé ces personnages afin de former un couple en devenir.

Ce matin, j’ai eu la chance de rencontrer, très brièvement, Marion Cotillard qui y campe avec un mélange parfait de fougue et de sobriété une jeune dresseuse d’orques victime d’un grave accident qui trouvera réconfort auprès d’un jeune homme (Matthias Shoenaerts) doué pour les sports de combats vivant aux crochets de sa sœur (Corinne Masierro) avec son fils (Armand Verdure).

Dans l’une des plus belles scènes du film, le personnage de Cotillard retourne sur les lieux de l’accident et engage un dialogue silencieux avec l’orque lui ayant arraché les jambes : « Il y a une connexion très forte à cette puissance et à ce silence presque méditatif auxquels elle n’était sûrement pas connectée avant l’accident en fait. C’est un mélange de ce qu’elle est quelque part, ce mélange de force et de douceur. L’amour qu’elle a pour ces animaux est intact parce que c’est fascinant et que c’est plein de surprises, bonnes ou mauvaises. »

L’actrice poursuit :« Il existe une association de survivants à des attaques de requins qui ont développé une espèce de fascination et qui se sont lancés dans la défense de cet animal splendide dont on a une perception totalement faussée par les films. En fait, je pense qu’on ne peut pas en vouloir à l’animal parce qu’il n’est pas responsable à partir du moment où l’on vient dans son milieu. Il n’y a pas de violence ni de méchanceté comme les hommes peuvent avoir envers d’autres hommes. En lui prenant ses jambes, cet orque lui a redonné la vie et elle vient l’en remercier. »

Reconnu pour sa dureté et sa violence, le cinéma d’Audiard semble pourtant l’écrin parfait pour le talent de la délicate actrice :« Je me toujours sentie plutôt à l’aise et à ma place dans un univers masculin. J’ai mis plus de temps à avoir de très bonnes amies filles que de garçons. Je pense que c’est l’expérience de vie qui nous change à un moment donné. J’ai été élevée avec deux frères; adolescente, je me sentais plus à l’aise avec les garçons parce que je ne sentais pas très à l’aise tout court, donc la relation masculine me mettait plus à l’aise. Du coup, je m’adapte très vite à l’univers masculin. »

Marion Cotillard is on the cover of the Fall issue of TIME Style & Design looking strikingly elegant. Order it here. There’s also a really interesting story behind the photo shoot:

To prepare for his cover sitting with Marion Cotillard for TIME Style&Design’s fall issue, photographer Peter Hapak hit the archives, collecting pictures of Paris and Parisian fashion during the 1930s, including the work of famed French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue. Studying images of women in restaurants, chatting with friends or simply roaming the streets of the city, Hapak easily understood why Paris has long been considered a fashion capital of the world. “All of the women looked like they had walked out of a fashion magazine,” he says. “Fashion is such a big part of the culture there, and you can even feel that history when walking through the city today.”

On set in Paris this August, Hapak tried to evoke this era, capturing Cotillard in designs by French fashion houses Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, along with other designers like Andrew Gn and Dries Van Noten. “She’s the representation of the French woman for me—elegant, but not too stylized,” says Hapak of Cotillard, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2007 for her portrayal of French singer Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. “With the cover look, it felt like she was pulling a dress out of her own closet. It went so well with her style, and she felt really confident in it, that you would have never known she was dressing up for a shoot.”

And here’s the interview:
• Marion Cotillard: La Vie en Rose

Gallery:
001 Portraits > Sessions from 2012 > TIME Style & Design

from TIME Style & Design (US) / by Marcia DeSanctis

Sheathed in fall’s signature mauves, burgundies and dusty pinks, Marion Cotillard is radiant in this season’s commanding yet feminine silhouettes

As a child growing up in the bucolic Loire Valley, Marion Cotillard didn’t covet her mother’s high heels. “I wore a lot of my father’s clothes as a kid, even though most of the time it was a disaster,” she says. She once paired a men’s sky blue thermal bodysuit with an orange polka-dot cardigan, black skirt and flats. “As soon as I put my foot in the school building, I thought, My God, what did I do?”

It’s hard to imagine Cotillard, the face of Christian Dior and an Academy Award–winning actress, feeling the same doubts today. She has been a red-carpet darling since collecting her Oscar for the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose in a mermaid-like Jean-Paul Gaultier dress—scales and all—back in 2008. Since then, she has racked up credits with Woody Allen, Steven Soderbergh and Christopher Nolan, who cast her in linchpin supporting roles for both Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, while her lead performance in Rust and Bone, in theaters later this fall, generated awards buzz after its Cannes premiere. And even under constant surveillance by the world’s fashion mandarins, Cotillard hasn’t tamped down her playfulness or originality. (Case in point: the ballet-inspired Dior dress, spiky Louboutin Mad Max sandals and shock of tangerine shadowing her blue eyes at the New York City Dark Knight Rises premiere.)

Cotillard grew up shy and awkward, she says, but with a strong sense of adventure and a stronger safety net. “We lived in an amazing, creative, free and loving world,” she says of her family: father Jean-Claude, a mime and director; mother Niseema Theillaud, an actress and drama teacher; and twin younger brothers. She inherited a talent for the family business, and today, Cotillard never stops working. She arrived on the set of Rust and Bone just four months after giving birth to the now 16-month-old Marcel, her son with French actor and director Guillaume Canet. Since June, she has wrapped Canet’s 1970s Brooklyn crime yarn Blood Ties and James Gray’s as-yet-untitled Ellis Island drama, also starring Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner.

“By the time I got to the set, Joaquin and everyone had a running joke that Marion was a cyborg, that she never messed up, never faltered, she was always brilliant, every time, every take, every day,” Renner says with a laugh. “She makes everything look easy. Nothing gets under her skin.”

“It’s strange, because I had the feeling sometimes that I was directing Marion like I would direct a man,” says Rust and Bone director Jacques Audiard. “I don’t know how to describe it except to say that she’s very rational and direct and not fussy in a girly sort of way. This was incredibly surprising.” In Rust and Bone, Cotillard plays Stephanie, a marine-park trainer who suffers a critical injury and then—against a backdrop of sea and summer sky on the Côte D’Azur—claws her way back to humanity and love. “I was baffled by the character at first,” Cotillard says. “But the amazing thing about this job is the chance to search for and hopefully find this new person.”

In her fashion choices, however, Cotillard does not seek out reinvention. “If I don’t feel like myself in an outfit—if it makes me feel like a different person—I won’t wear it,” she says. Dries Van Noten appeals to her for combining simplicity and edginess, as do the bright sculptural prints of Tsumori Chisato. “I always find something that’s kind of crazy but at the same time is wearable and really looks like me,” she says about the Paris-based designer. Whenever she’s in Los Angeles, she likes to stock up on James Perse Tshirts and real cowboy boots—she has three pairs—at her favorite emporium on Sunset.

Cotillard also has something of a hat obsession, one that dates back to the making of La Vie en Rose, for which she had to shave her eyebrows and hairline. “I looked terrible, so my hat collection increased dramatically,” she says. She favors the masculine shapes of the trilby and fedora, in which she’s often photographed while strolling with Marcel on the streets of Manhattan and which reveal that Cotillard’s most enduring fashion influence may date back to her idyllic childhood. “I love men’s hats,” she says, “because my father wears them.”

After launching their online magazine earlier this year, Dior are now launching a print magazine – and Marion Cotillard is on the cover of its first issue. WWD reports it but since I can’t access it here a few quotes courtesy of Fashion Copious:

- Available September 10th.
- The 110 page debut issue was designed by Fabien Baron.
- Marion Cotillard is “wearing the house’s original Bar jacket and flaring skirt from 1947″

Dior chief executive officer Sidney Toledano said such communication efforts nourish the brand, feed its narrative and help articulate “the values of Dior, which are different from our competitors.…It’s important today to differentiate ourselves.”

“It’s another way to communicate luxury,” said Toledano, flipping through the heavy, velvety pages and stressing, “This is not a catalogue. It’s fresh and modern. It’s how we see ourselves; our own maison. I think it translates perfectly the mood of the company right now.”

Vogue Germany reports that it will be published twice a year (September and March) in 9 different languages (among them English, French, Chinese and German).

Gallery:
001 Magazine Scans > Scans from 2012 > Dior Magazine (France) – No.1

We’re being hit with loads of news. The 56th BFI London Film Festival (October 10-21) unveiled their line-up earlier today – and guess what, ‘Rust & Bone‘ (De rouille et d’os) is on it. Not only that, it is also competing in the category Official Competition. There are 12 films in each of the 3 competitive categories. There are 2 screenings:

Saturday, October 13, 2012 at 8:30 PM
Sunday, October 14, 2012 12:30 PM

The festival’s comment to the plot synopsis of the “unpitchable” film is:

That such potentially lurid material is explored with subtlety and emotional complexity is tribute not only to Audiard, but to his extraordinary leads. Marion Cotillard is mesmerising in arguably her most challenging role yet, while up-and-comer Schoenaerts impresses mightily as an apparent lunk suddenly forced to look for his hidden resources. Rust and Bone is as punchy and abrasive as its title suggests – but intensely moving and surprisingly poetic too.

Additionally, Variety reports that Marion herself will be participating in a Screen Talk during the festival.

The first episode of the new Lady Dior Documentary is online! See Marion Cotillard overseeing the designing, cutting, fitting and sewing for dresses to be worn by her at Dior’s haute couture workshops. Enjoy!

Visit LadyDior.com to see 3 bonus videos showing work being done close-up & the view from the workshop.

Check back later today for screencaptures.

Gallery:
001 Dior > Lady Dior: A Web Documentary > Stills
070 Dior > Lady Dior: A Web Documentary > Episode 1: Fantasia

Video:
001 Documentaries > Lady Dior

Savoir Flair is a Middle East Online Fashion Magazine and they have a brand-new interview with Marion Cotillard about ‘Rust & Bone‘.

• Q&A With… Marion Cotillard

Gallery:
005 Scans from 2012 > Savoir Flair (Middle East) – September

After nearly 2 years (22 months) I was finally starting to get bored with the previous layout – however gorgeous it was. So Mel from Vintage Dreams designed the new look for the main site, the gallery & the video archive with pictures from the recent Grazia feature. Also a big thank you to Laura for her help with the video templates. I hope there aren’t any bugs – otherwise let me know.

I also started working on updating the information pages – while I’m by no means done yet, you can check out the progress over the coming weeks. In the meantime, how do you like the new look?

from SavoirFlair.com (Middle East) / by James Levy

There is major Oscar buzz surrounding Marion Cotillard’s raw performance in Rust and Bone as a killer whale trainer who loses her legs. Here, the French actress talks to us about the challenges of playing the role and juggling her career and motherhood.

How did your experience on the movie influence your attitude to life and to your own body?
I always keep something from an adventure, from a story, from an encounter with a character, with a director, with other actors. The first thing is a lotof joy and then it’s kind of hard to explain what stays with me. When I talk about joy it’s this energy of when you share something and you feel that it’s deep, then it really makes you feel part of something that has a right place, you know what I mean? Also, I think an actor is kind of an anthropologist of the human soul and so the more you explore the human soul the more you learn about us. And the more you learn about something, the more respect you have – and a lot of love too. I kind of love human beings. I have say. Voila, did I answer the question?

Physically, how did you work out for the part? It must have been difficult to think of yourself as legless?
It’s actually not difficult. The complexity will be the emotion and the different layers of a character, which is very interesting of course, for an actor. Difficulties, for me, are always technical. There were no major technial difficulties with the physicality in this movie because it was imagination – a lot of imagination. It’s hard to explain, or maybe it’s just as simple as I just imagine I have no legs – which is kind of hard to explain, but simple to say.

Can you talk about the special effects? They were incredible.
Yeah, they had to be because otherwise, there is no movie. They did an amazing job. And they did an amazing job because it didn’t affect the shooting at all. I didn’t know at all what it would be – I didn’t know if I would have to walk very slowly, I didn’t know anything. The fact is, there was nothing more to do than just being on set and doing the work that we usually do – and they just took my legs off.

We know about the intensity of your acting, but the moment when you discover your legs are gone – how do you do that?
Well, it’s imagination. I don’t know.

It must be more. And how hard is it for you to play that?
That’s what I try to do. Being a character and trying to feel what a character would feel… If you fall in love, if you lose someone or lose something. I really think it’s just the imagination.

What is it like to come back to your country and your language? What difference does it make?
It’s totally different because you don’t have to think about the way you talk. You create a different way of speaking, which is why I like to create something that is different, or a lot different, or slightly different from my way of speaking, my way of moving. I like that a character will have its own way of living, but, for example, with the last movie I did I’m a Polish girl, so I had to learn Polish and some of my scenes are in Polish and also I had to have this Polish accent in English. It’s a lot of work. When I do a scene it’s like my brain has separate places for each complexity and technical difficulties. In French it’s just French – I don’t have to think about the way I have to say this word, or if it sounds French. It does! I know that it will! I know that it will sound French no matter what, no matter how I speak.

There’s this amazing shot where you’re standing in from the glass with the killer whales on the outside. How difficult was that shot?
Well, I was lucky to have a very strong connection right away with the whales and we had rehearsed this scene before, but it was not a rehearsal – the choreography was not like the show outside before the accident. The choreography was specific. Here I knew what I could do to have this conversation that was totally improvised in a way that I decided to wave and she would wave back. I decided to tickle her nose and she would make the bubbles. So it was pretty strong because you never know if she would react and she reacted to everything that I proposed her.

What was the whale’s name?
There were two whales and actually the first one was kind of mad at me and the whole crew. It was the only time I was really scared and I freaked out even though I knew the glass was totally secure. But I asked her something and because you’re in character and there’s the whole crew behind you and it’s not a usual show for her, she became mad at me and she screamed at me with her jaws open and I got really scared.

Have you gained power from injuries in your own life?
Well, I think a human being goes his way and you’re richer from your experiences. So, of course, yeah.

Let’s talk a bit about The Dark Knight Rises – what was it like working with Chris Nolan?
Oh, it was amazing. I love working with him. I loved working with him on Inception and then I was very lucky that I could work with him again. It’s actually the first time that I’ve worked with a director twice. I loved his set, even though it’s a big scale movie because it’s huge obviously, but it really stays at a human size. He’s a family guy and his set is like a family, which is kind of weird when you talk about Batman, but it’s actually true.

How do you do that logistically, working so much and being a young mum?
Well, he knew that I was a young Mom and he has four kids and they were amazing with me – they were really amazing. I cannot thank them enough to make me part of the adventure and still being entirely a Mommy.

Not many European actresses have made it in America. What do you put your success down to?
I just go where I think I belong. I’m so lucky that sometimes it’s in the US and I have the opportunity to explore a wider world. An actor is happy when you explore something that’s different each time and to get to explore Italy when I play an Italian woman, or Poland when I play a Polish woman, because then you learn about the history of the world and the history of a country. So I’m grateful to Olivier Dahan who gave me all this because of the role in La Vie en Rose. He’s the reason I’m so happy right now.

Where have you put your Oscar statue?
It’s in Paris. I’m never in Paris so it’s been a long time.

Where in Paris?
Well I’ve just moved from my apartment so it’ll be in a box somewhere.

How was it working with Jacques Audiard compared to other directors you’ve worked with?
Well it’s impossible to compare any of the directors that I’ve worked with. That’s why I had amazing experiences with all those people because they are so different, and that’s what I’m looking for. Something different each time, a different vision of life in a way. All the directors I worked with love the story they’re telling, obviously, and they love their characters but with Jacques it’s so strong the love that he has for his characters. It is so strong, that is, first of all, very inspiring and secondly, very beautiful to watch.

Finally, how was it to kiss Batman?
How was it to kiss Batman? Jeez (laughs).

Telluride Film Festival added a brief video from the tribute to Marion Cotillard last Saturday, hosted by The Hollywood Reporter’s film critic Todd McCarthy.

Gallery: 042 Award Shows & Premieres etc > Telluride Film Festival – Tribute – 2012
Video: 001 Award Ceremonies > Telluride Film Festival