from The Philadelphia Inquirer / by Steven Rea

Marion Cotillard won the best actress Academy Award in 2007 for her performance as the iconic chanteuse Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. It’s highly likely that Cotillard, who has managed to work both sides of the Atlantic – in her native France and in Hollywood – will be nominated again in January, for her work in an altogether different sort of French film, Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone.

As a Marineland whale trainer who experiences a catastrophic accident, leaving her a double amputee, Cotillard brings riveting emotional authenticity to the sort of role that is easy to overplay, to sentimentalize. There isn’t an ounce of sentiment in Cotillard’s portrait.

Rust and Bone, a gritty love story, also stars Matthias Schoenaerts as a drifter with a little boy and some fierce boxing skills. The film opens tomorrow at the Ritz Five and Rave Motion Pictures/NJ. It has shown up on scores of year-end Top 10 lists, and has garnered Cotillard Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe nominations.

“When I began preparing for the movie, I started to watch videos of amputated people, but then I realized very quickly that I shouldn’t do that,” Cotillard says via phone from New York. “For my character, Stéphanie, it has just happened in her life – it would have been different if she had been amputated for 10 years or something, my work would have been totally different. But because the accident has just happened, I thought I would experience what it’s like to move with no legs – that I would just experience it with her, if you know what I mean.”

During the shoot, in the scenes when Stéphanie is limbless, without the prosthetics her character eventually receives, the actress wore green socks so her lower legs and feet could be digitally erased. The result is haunting – and hauntingly realistic.

“The first time I saw the finished film, I was blown away by what they did; it was really amazing,” Cotillard says. “The people we worked with were really talented and they were very fast, very discreet on set, and the technical aspects never got in our way. . . . They made our jobs so easy.”

For Cotillard, Rust and Bone is a story about a woman and a man who have avoided the truth in their lives.

“Before the accident, she’s a very cold person, she’s struggling with herself, she’s struggling with her life, she’s not even searching for a reason to live – she’s just kind of an empty shell,” the actress explains. “And then after the accident, she really hits the bottom. And when you hit bottom, you have two options. The first is to give up, and the second one is to face yourself.”

It takes her a while, but Stéphanie chooses option No. 2. And Schoenaerts’ character, Ali, similarly learns to face himself – and the violence that has defined his life – through her.

“When you go through such a dramatic accident, you can realize that you’re alive in a different, more heightened way,” Cotillard ventures. “And all the violence she would provoke before her accident was an attempt to feel that she was alive.

“But then with what happens, she’s able to turn violence into something very powerful, that’s going to open doors for her, opening the door to life.

“And then, because of that, love happens.”

Cotillard lives with the French actor and filmmaker Guillaume Canet, of Take No One fame. The couple have a baby boy. This spring, they were based in New York, where he directed and she starred in – with Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, Zoe Saldana, Mila Kunis, and Cotillard’s Rust and Bone partner, Schoenaerts – Blood Ties, a crime thriller set in the 1970s. Cotillard also shot Nightingale, a James Gray film with Jeremy Renner and Joaquin Phoenix, in New York this year. It is set during the Roaring Twenties.

In La Vie en Rose, Piaf’s life story spans six decades, beginning in 1915.

“I’m trying to cover the whole 20th century,” Cotillard says with a laugh. “Bring on the ’80s!”

I added loads of additional stills of Marion Cotillard in ‘Rust & Bone‘ (De rouille et d’os). Some of those are spoilery which is probably why they were only released after the movie came out on DVD & Blu-ray in France. The movie is currently screening in the US in New York & Los Angeles and will get a wider release tomorrow. On January 10 it will open in Germany. I also added 6 more subtitled video clips to the archive. There are now 10 clips. Enjoy – but if you haven’t seen the movie yet, I fear watching them all will spoil things too much.

Gallery: 025 De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone) – 2012 > Stills
Video: 006 Movie & TV Clips > Rust & Bone

from The Canadian Press / by Victoria Ahearn

It took just one image for Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard to nail the physicality of her “Rust and Bone” character, an orca trainer who loses her legs in an accident at Marineland.

“We were preparing the movie … trying costumes and … the first time I sat on a chair on my legs and I had those pants hanging, the image was so strong that we knew that the process of creating her was really on,” said the 37-year-old Paris native.

“And then this image never left, so the special effects never got in our way,” Cotillard said in an interview at September’s Toronto International Film Festival, where “Rust and Bone” screened.

“It’s weird because it was kind of organic. I think that when I saw this image of me without legs, that was it. I didn’t have to research or to think to forget that I had no legs.”

Besides, if Cotillard shows any awkwardness in the role, it’s fitting since her character is also adjusting to life as an amputee.

“It would have been different if Stephanie was a character who had been in that state for like 10 years. I would have worked totally different,” she said.

“But it just happened. Basically I discovered what it was with her.”

Cotillard’s method seems to have worked: she’s earning raves from critics and recently picked up a Golden Globe nomination for best actress for the role.

The French-language drama, which opens Friday in Vancouver and Toronto, is also up for a Golden Globe for best foreign-language film.

Jacques Audiard co-wrote and directs the French-Belgian film that’s adapted from Canadian author Craig Davidson’s short story collection of the same name.

Flemish actor Matthias Schoenaerts co-stars as Ali, an unemployed single father who turns to street fighting as he falls in love with Cotillard’s character.

“I was really, really moved by her. Everything she does,” Cotillard said of her character.

“The first time the relationship goes into something very physical with him, I always wanted to take her in my arms.”

Cotillard, who won an Oscar for playing French singer Edith Piaf in 2007′s “La Vie en Rose,” also liked the challenge of taking on an enigmatic character who’s sunk into a deep depression.

“When I work and when I take a character, I need to understand every part of the character. I need to go as deep as I can and to visit the whole house, every corner. I want to know every web, every spider, everything,” she said.

“And with her, suddenly I realized that I didn’t need to know everything. The fact that she was mysterious was very exciting.”

Cotillard was shooting “The Dark Knight Rises” during rehearsals for “Rust and Bone,” and Schoenaerts was at first worried they wouldn’t have time to develop chemistry.

“In the beginning I was like, ‘Oh my God, how is this going to happen onset?’” said the star of the Oscar-nominated 2011 crime drama “Bullhead.”

“But from Day 1, Take 1, we had a very genuine pleasure in what we were doing and she was ready as hell, and hungry and dedicated.”

And he didn’t have a problem trying to picture Cotillard without legs, even in their intimate scenes.

“Somehow, once I’m in the scene, I just feel it the way Ali feels it, I guess,” said Schoenaerts.

“I don’t want to mystify it or whatever, but it didn’t affect me, the fact that she still had legs and that I had to pretend she didn’t. For me, she didn’t have them.”

Schoenaerts did boxing and kick-boxing when he was younger but had to train a lot to prepare for his role.

Though he didn’t sustain any injuries during his graphic fight scenes, he was intimidated by the professional fighters he filmed the scenes with.

“These guys in front of me were huge and they scared the hell out of me,” he said with a laugh.

Marion Cotillard just got nominated for the Best Actress award by the London Critics’ Circle. She previously won that award in 2008 for ‘La Vie en Rose‘.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM OF THE YEAR
Amour
Holy Motors
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Rust and Bone
Tabu

ACTRESS OF THE YEAR
Jessica Chastain – Zero Dark Thirty
Marion Cotillard – Rust and Bone
Helen Hunt – The Sessions
Jennifer Lawrence – Silver Linings Playbook
Emmanuelle Riva – Amour

The Sky 3D Award: TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Anna Karenina – Jacqueline Durran, costumes
Argo – William Goldenberg, film editing
Beasts of the Southern Wild – Ben Richardson, cinematography
Berberian Sound Studio – Joakim Sundstrom & Stevie Haywood, sound design
Holy Motors – Bernard Floch, makeup
Life of Pi – Claudio Miranda, cinematography
Life of Pi – Bill Westenhofer, visual effects
The Master – Jack Fisk & David Crank, production design
My Brother the Devil – David Raedeker, cinematography
Rust and Bone – Alexandre Desplat, music

The 33rd annual London Critics’ Circle Film Awards will be held Sunday January 20 at the May Fair Hotel in central London.

from Red Eye Chicago / by Matt Pais

Good news, Katy Perry fans: Though Marion Cotillard’s whale trainer character in “Rust and Bone” loses her legs in an accident as Perry’s “Firework” plays, the actress says she’s not too traumatized by the empowerment tune.

“The song’s become something very special to me,” says the Paris-born Cotillard by phone from New York. “And we listen to it a lot with the team I work with. I love the song.”

In the film, opening Friday, Stephanie (Cotillard) copes with tragedy through help from Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), a nightclub bouncer who defends Stephanie in a fight before the accident. The 37-year-old Oscar winner (“La Vie En Rose,” “The Dark Knight Rises”) says her feelings about fighters vary.

“If you fight as a kind of sport, kind of a game, so it becomes something powerful and not something specifically violent [that's one thing] … but when you fight in the street, when you fight because you get in a fight with someone who says something bad, [it’s] not showing strength,” she says. “It can be weakness to be a fighter. Because you are just a violent person.”

Cotillard wasn’t happy when a friend tried to defend her in real life against “someone who was annoying me.” “I got so mad because I didn’t want him to get into a fight,” she says. “I used to go to see boxing and I used to love it, but seeing people fighting in the street because of an argument or something, this is something that I cannot stand.”

People may not expect someone as glamorous as Cotillard to enjoy boxing, but she doesn’t see herself that way. “It’s part of an actor’s life to sometimes show glamor,” she says. “In my real life I see myself as a human being who learns a lot of things, but I would not describe myself as glamorous. I would describe myself as just a simple human being.”

Cotillard’s Stephanie character has anything but a simple journey in “Rust and Bone” as she tries to reclaim her sense of self after the tragic accident with a whale she is training. Cotillard emphasizes the role of sexual identity in that process. “That’s a beautiful way to put the energy back into your body,” she says.

The whale accident comes as a jolt in “Rust and Bone,” but Cotillard has been familiar with surprises lately—particularly regarding her character in “The Dark Knight Rises.”

“I didn’t tell anyone what my character does in the movie,” Cotillard says of her friends, “and they were pretty shocked.” (Spoiler alert: She sleeps with Batman and tries to kill him. Cotillard notes her friends focus more on the killing aspect.)

These serious movies tend to be her forte career-wise, but Cotillard admits to loving “dumb” American comedies, including Adam Sandler films. She’s particularly fond of “Step Brothers” due to her love for John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell (she also says she loves Steve Carell and Vince Vaughn).

Yet when asked to name an actor she still wants to work with, Cotillard said Kate Winslet. When I suggest a comedy starring the two of them, Cotillard offers an idea for the title: “Step Sisters.”

Plus:
If she had unlimited time in Chicago: “I would want to go and visit my friend who lives there. And I would go to Gibson’s. And Green Mill. I loved it, too.”
On working with whales: “The thing is I didn’t have much time to prepare this movie because I was filming another movie, so I arrived five days before the shooting and we had worked before with [director] Jacques [Audiard], but with the whales I arrived five days before the shooting and that’s when I met with them and I started to learn how to [do] all the gestures to make them do what you want them to do. I love animals and I’ve always had a strong connection with them. My trainer, the woman who worked with me, she was really amazing and she made my job very easy … If you do the right gestures, you feed them well, they will actually do whatever you want them to do.”
On, as seen in “Rust and Bone,” topless swimming being more common in France than the U.S.: “There’s a freedom with our bodies in France maybe, I don’t know.”
If it’s more difficult to lose arms or legs: “Oh my God, I don’t know. It’s hard to compare. It’s really hard to lose a part of your body. No, I’d rather not lose anything. [Laughs]”

from The Star Tribune / by Colin Covert

Marion Cotillard takes a tough turn in the gritty love story “Rust and Bone.”

In her new film “Rust and Bone,” which already has set box office records in France, Marion Cotillard takes a dramatic step away from her chic, seductive earlier roles. Cotillard won a 2008 Oscar as Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose,” played captivating dream women in “Inception” and “Midnight in Paris,” and has been a brand ambassador of Dior since 2009.

Now the 37-year-old actress goes gritty and working-class as Stephanie, a killer-whale trainer at a French seaquarium. After she suffers a terrible accident, she enters a sexually charged courtship with Ali (up-and-coming Belgian star Matthias Schoenaerts), a tough boxer/bouncer with a criminal past, impulse-control issues and a spotty record as a single parent to his young son. Each is damaged inside and out, each makes an effort to heal — and tame — the other.

“Rust and Bone” is already gathering Oscar buzz for Cotillard. To prepare, she took swimming lessons while filming “The Dark Knight Rises” in Pittsburgh, and spent days learning how to interact with whales by observing orca trainers at Marineland in Antibes. (Spoilers follow.) But in a September interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, she said that playing a double amputee re-learning to walk did not require a lot of study.

“I didn’t need to watch a lot of videos” to create her character’s body language, Cotillard said. “They showed how amputees who were experienced with their artificial legs moved. My character, who was suddenly injured, was learning to walk from scratch, like a newborn, and she learns as she goes along.”

Cotillard’s father was a mime and theater director, her mother an actress, but they didn’t pressure her to perform, she said. Her early film diet was heavily Hollywood, and she considers herself “very lucky” to have collaborated with Woody Allen, Tim Burton, Michael Mann, Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott and Steven Soderbergh. She hopes one day to work with her longtime favorite, Steven Spielberg, as she crafts a career shuttling between English-language roles and working in France, which she considers her home base.

Cotillard is famous for her immersion in her characters. She shaved her eyebrows and hairline to play the haggard, aging Piaf. To get inside John Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette in “Public Enemies,” she interviewed elders at the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin where Frechette grew up.

But she had never faced a challenge like playing a legless woman. For scenes in which Stephanie uses a wheelchair, Cotillard sat on her folded legs. Scenes where she walks on steel prosthetics were created with digital technology. “Once I put myself in the character of someone legless, I almost forgot everything below the knees.”

The love affair between Stephanie, who retains a healthy sex drive, and the ever- ready Ali, who is brusquely matter-of-fact about her injury, is by turns dramatic, frankly sensual and surprisingly fun and funny. “The tragedy was already in the situation. We didn’t need to dwell on it as actors,” she said. “They both hurt but they are transforming, regaining their lives, embracing love. Why wouldn’t they laugh together sometimes?”

Cotillard appears in several scenes with performing whales at the amusement park, in effect directing their performances. It was one of the most difficult episodes of the production, she said, because she considers the whales intelligent, sensitive creatures that should not be removed from their habitat.

“It didn’t feel like I was in charge. It was as if we were working together as a team,” she said. “But it was not my favorite scene. I never go to the zoo because I hate to see animals caged or turned into circus amusements. Their captivity in a swimming pool upset me. The trainers love them, working with these huge creatures is their passion, but I would not go back there again.”

By contrast, she sees the scenes of Stephanie’s visceral excitement about Ali’s bare-knuckle boxing career as paradoxically life-affirming. The whale trainer becomes his lover, manager and chief cheerleader. It’s not that her character relishes brutality, she explained, but that the combat stirs visceral feelings in a woman who felt physically desensitized. “She’s not a saintly martyr,” Cotillard said. “A character who is pure isn’t interesting. It’s the complicated ones who are the best challenge.”

from The Hollywood Reporter / by Seth Abramovitch

Marion Cotillard is still visibly shaken when she recalls the moment she first heard about the Aurora shootings.

The date was July 20, 2012, and what was meant to be a career high for the Oscar-winner — starring in a new, Christopher Nolan-directed Batman epic — was instantly overshadowed by unthinkable tragedy, as news quickly spread that a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado left 12 moviegoers dead at the hands of a crazed shooter.

Those wounds have barely begun to heal as the country now copes with an even more unbelievable and senseless horror: the murder of 26 people, 20 of them young children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

The Hollywood Reporter asked Cotillard about her thoughts on the Colorado shooting in a conversation with the actress last month.

“I’ve never felt good about guns. Especially when it’s out of control,” the Rust and Bone star told THR.

“Sadly, I guess, it’s in America’s culture,” Cotillard continued. “And I believe it’s going to be hard to change that because some people can’t be secure without it. It’s creating at the same time this insecurity. It’s a vicious circle.”

Cotillard is currently shooting Blood Ties, directed by her partner and father of her one-year-old son, French movie star Guillaume Canet. The film is set in the world of organized crime in 1970s Brooklyn.

from Canada.com / by Jay Stone

When Marion Cotillard first heard about the movie Rust and Bone — a romance between a street fighter named Ali and a woman named Stéphanie, who trains whales at a marine park and loses her legs in a tragic orca accident — she thought it was role she would never take on.

It was months before director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) asked to meet with her, and she didn’t think she was even in line for the film. But an agent was telling her about it, and Cotillard says, “My first reaction was ‘Oh my God, I love this director and I really want to work with him one day if I can, but as much as I love him I could never ever do such a character, because of the marine land.’”

It’s a subject that’s close to her heart. The 38-year-old Oscar winner (for La Vie En Rose) is a prominent environmentalist and has been a spokeswoman for Greenpeace. The idea of a movie where whales are kept captive in tanks for the amusement of the public was against everything she stood for.

Cotillard says she forgot all about the conversation until she was cast in Rust and Bone — a job she accepted because of Audiard, and because Stéphanie was an intriguing mystery — and she had a scene with the orcas kept at Marineland Antibes, in the south of France. Then it came back to her.

“It’s me now in this sea land that I hate so much,” she recalls. “But then I met the trainers and I met the animals and I finally considered them as animals and not as freaks, I mean as poor animals turned into freaks by human beings. So, yeah, I had to do the job, but I will never go back to a marine land. I respect the trainers, but I don’t understand how you put such an animal in a swimming pool. It’s beyond understanding.”

Yet it’s a beautiful scene: Cotillard’s character stands in front of a glass tank as a whale swims up to her and moves from side to side at her direction. There’s no big secret to it — “you give them fish and they do anything you want them to do” — but Cotillard says it was an amazing encounter nonetheless. She felt she had a special relationship with the orca during rehearsal, although that changed when the scene was actually filmed.

“There were so many people behind me that the orca got scared and suddenly she screamed at me and she opened her mouth and even with the security glass I was totally shocked. And I cried that day.”

It was an emotional reaction from an actor who is known for throwing herself wholeheartedly into roles. “She brings a level of emotion that’s very high,” says Audiard. “It’s like a hand grenade.”

Stéphanie spends much of the film in a wheelchair or crawling on the floor or, memorably, having sex with Ali — played by rising Belgian star Matthias Schoenaerts — with her half-limbs thrust into the air. Cotillard says it wasn’t a difficult effect to manage.

“It came very quickly,” she says. “We were doing the fittings and I had those pants and I just sat on a chair with my pants hanging. And suddenly we had the image … and this image never left my mind.

“I didn’t have to try to feel that I had no legs. I had seen it.”

The film, which is based on a book of short stories by Canadian writer Craig Davidson, goes beyond romance and becomes an examination of the collapsing economy as well. Audiard says he was inspired by 1930s Hollywood movies and directors like Tod Browning (Freaks) who cast their dramas against the unspoken background of the Depression. Cotillard said they never talked about it, but Browning is one of her favourite directors. “I saw Freaks I don’t know how many times.”

And then there was the attraction of the mysterious Stéphanie. Cotillard says she’s always looking for things that she hasn’t done before.

“I kind of like that she stayed mysterious to me in a way. I’m not sure exactly what she’s looking for, but I believe that you attract what you need in life if you want to listen,” she says. “If you want to see. If you want to watch. If you really want to be here and now, you can be here and now. And even though she was totally lost, her failure is so deep she’s empty. She doesn’t know who she is.”

She adds, “It must be the first time that a character is so mysterious to me. It was really exciting because usually I get who the person is. There’s always a way, a road to take to the character, but this one was a really long road. I couldn’t see her on the road when I started walking on this road.”

It’s a departure in other ways as well. Cotillard’s other 2012 film was the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises, directed by Christopher Nolan. However, the two movies are not as different as they appear. “Yes Batman is like a huge blockbuster, but it’s also directed by someone whose totally involved in the whole process,” she says. “It’s kind of rare when a director in America writes his own scripts, so Chris Nolan is very, very special. It’s a big movie but almost like directed by a guy who has the spirit of an auteur.”

Rust and Bone is a much smaller project, but her performance was nominated for a Golden Globe Award, and it is also generating Oscar talk. Cotillard doesn’t want to talk about it, beyond saying, “You know, I’m very happy that people like the movie.

“I just want to do my best. I just want to find the authenticity of each character. That’s what matters to me. It would be horrible to have an audience saying, ‘Oh it’s her.’ It would be horrible. I want to experience something new each time.”

from Hollywood.com / by Aly Semigran

“It’s one of the most powerful movies that I’ve ever seen, but I know I won’t be able to watch it again because it’s such a strong, emotional journey.” Marion Cotillard could have very well said the same exact thing about her film Rust and Bone, the harrowing French drama which has earned her a Golden Globe nomination in the Best Actress in a Drama category (and will likely earn her another Oscar nod) about a woman whose life takes a sharp turn when a horrific accident leaves her a double amputee. Instead, Cotillard is talking about another kind of gut-wrenching tearjerker: David Lynch’s 1980 classic The Elephant Man. “I remember seeing it and I cried so much I didn’t want to go to school the next day because my eyes were so big from crying so much,” the actress recalls.

It’s obvious within moments of meeting her that Cotillard is an actress who wears her heart on her sleeve both on the big screen and off. In fact, it’s that very same sensitivity that provided to be her biggest challenge in the film. In Rust and Bone Cotillard’s Stéphanie is an Orca whale trainer at Marineland. The actress says that while she felt a connection with the majestic creatures, their being attractions at a theme park proved to be too much for her. Cotillard — who once “had the opportunity once to swim with whales in the ocean and it’s fascinating, it’s totally amazing” — admits, “I’m very uncomfortable in a captivity [environment]. It’s something that I don’t really understand, how we can take these magnificent animals out of their environment and put them in swimming pools. That was my biggest challenge, was actually to be cool during those days.”

The stunningly beautiful 37-year-old star may have not been able to connect with Stéphanie’s ability to work with whales in captivity, what she didn’t have a hard time with was finding ways to connect to the spirit of her character and her many struggles. In addition to her injury, Stéphanie falls for a handsome, but troubled single father Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) and their tumultuous relationship both burdens her and sets her free. Cotillard says that her Rust and Bone character is “much more violent than,” than she is in real life, but she understands that through violence people can release themselves from pain. “I had a period of my life when I questioned existence. I had so many questions and there was no answer and I was kind of lost. I didn’t know what to do with myself, I didn’t know why I was alive.”

But those very questions of existence and the “Whys?”, like the ones Stéphanie continually asks herself and others, can lead to something quite unexpected. “There’s a process of self-destruction when you don’t get those answers because you don’t know if you’ll ever get them,” Cotillard says. “Before you find something that allows you not to worry anymore about those answers, that thing is most of the time, love,” she says of her character’s journey, both with herself and in her unique relationship with Ali. “When you hit the bottom and there’s nothing left but yourself to face, you abandon a lot of bulls**t. You get straight to the point, you’re up front, you have no time to lose with not saying things or saying things in a very complicated way. She tells what she feels because that’s who she is now.”

But it’s those very complications that draws the Oscar-winner — whose film credits in 2012 ranged from the small, intimate Rust and Bone to the blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises — to her projects. “I love complexity, that’s really what I’m attracted to. With [Stéphanie] …she was such a mystery when I read the script for the first time. I thought, ‘Well she could be a lot of people.’ There’s very little information about her, about where she comes from, about her family, about her past, there’s almost nothing. So we really had to create almost everything about her and to find the authenticity, to find who she is and that was an amazing journey because when you do this with such a brilliant director [Jacques Audiard], it’s very inspiring.”

Cotillard gives a lot of the credit to Audiard (whose brutal and brilliant A Prophet earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 2010) for making the heaviness of the film work. “Jacques is this mix of a very grounded person and at the same time, a great poet seeking authenticity in everything he does and I loved working with him.” Cotillard has spoken before about the importance of a great director to a project, like she did during The Hollywood Reporter’s recent actress’ roundtable. (“I realized that if I don’t trust the director, if I don’t like him, I’m going to be bad.”)

At that same roundtable, Cotillard found herself surrounded by the very women who are earning accolades for their work in film this year. The very same women she’ll face off with this awards season, including other Globes nominees Naomi Watts, Anne Hathaway, Sally Field, Amy Adams, Rachel Weisz, and Helen Hunt. But, that’s not the way Cotillard sees it. “I’m the biggest actresses lover! I love actresses, I’ve always felt a connection [to them]. We share something in that we play our emotions and we tell women’s stories.”

Rust and Bone is currently playing in limited release.

from Montreal Gazette (Canada) / by T’Cha Dunlevy

Fate works in funny ways, onscreen and off.

In Jacques Audiard’s raw romance Rust and Bone (De rouille et d’os), Marion Cotillard plays an orca trainer who suffers a terrible accident and must learn to piece her life back together, under dramatically different circumstances.

It’s a standout performance from an actress who is racking them up. But it almost never happened.

“I was not supposed to do this movie,” she said, during a sit-down interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Cotillard has been on fire since winning the Academy Award for best actress for her star turn as Edith Piaf in La vie en rose in 2007 — the first time an Oscar has gone to a French-language role. Since then, she has kept busy in high-profile films including Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris and Christopher Nolan behemoths Inception and The Dark Knight Rises.

Acting for Nolan was like entering Hollywood through the side door, Cotillard explained.

“I had a chance to work on very big movies, but with a very special director who has the spirit of an independent director,” she said. “Chris Nolan movies are blockbusters, but they’re still director’s movies, not studio movies, which I couldn’t do. I was offered, several times, roles in very successful movies. And I will never regret not being in those movies.

“I saw those movies and I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s obvious I couldn’t fit in there, because there is no director. The first person I work for is a director. If I have no director on set, I will be so bad.”

Which may explain what drew Cotillard from California to the Côte d’Azur: the chance to work with Audiard, director and co-writer of such powerful films as The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté, 2005) and A Prophet (2009).

“My schedule was really tight,” she said. “But I thought, ‘I have to do it. I cannot let it go.’ I totally fell in love with the story, and the character. I was so moved. It got right into my blood. What I’m looking for when I read a script is to be surprised — to have the perspective of something I’ve never done before.”

Worlds collide in Rust and Bone when Cotillard’s character Stéphanie meets Ali (the excellent Matthias Schoenaerts), a rugged bouncer — and, unbeknownst to her, single father. His uncouth directness proves to be just what the doctor ordered in getting past Stéphanie’s defences and helping her start over.

“He looks at her like a human being, someone who is alive when she is an empty shell,” Cotillard said. “He doesn’t look at her right away as a woman — she’ll have to teach him that; but she feels alive because he thinks she is. Maybe a (more sensitive guy) would be worried for her. Ali is not worried at all.”

They are an odd match. Early scenes have Ali and his young son hitchhiking through France and engaging in petty crime before settling in with his sister. He eventually finds his calling in a brutal form of streetfighting, broadcast on the Internet, with payment in cash.

But while Ali is a man of action, Stéphanie is — at least initially — a woman of deeply internalized emotion.

“She was the most mysterious character I had ever read,” Cotillard said. “Usually when I read a part and I want to do it, immediately there’s a connection and I know who this person is. With her, at the end of the script, I had no idea who she was. I told that to Jacques; I had to tell him, even though I was scared he would freak out that the actress he was working with didn’t know who (her character) is. But he told me, ‘Neither do I. We’ll have to go on the road and find her.’ ”

Cotillard’s tight schedule, combined with logistical problems in coordinating the sequences at Marineland in Antibes, in the south of France, meant there was little rehearsal time. Cotillard and Audiard unearthed her character on the fly. The moment finally came during one of Schoenaerts’s bracing fight scenes, where Stéphanie is sitting off to the side, within the safety of a vehicle.

“For the first week (of the shoot), we were sometimes not sure if we were going in the right direction,” Cotillard said. “But then there was this scene. She gets out of the car and he’s on the ground, beaten; and (Audiard) told me, ‘Yeah, that’s it. She’s a cowboy.’ And that was it. We had found her.”

Rust and Bone is in theatres Friday.