Film & Fashion: Coco Before Chanel
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Q: What was the challenge in writing the screenplay? What was your research like?
AF: The challenge is to be fresh with a movie like this. It's a heavy thing to do a period drama: Everything has to be true, but you have to find room to breathe—to be modern. Chanel was very modern, and I tried to do everything through her eyes, her perception. There is one book that was very interesting, about the lies of Chanel. It lets you enter into her personality, because she said, "I invented my life, because I did not like my life." She made fiction of her life.
Q: The film reminds us of La Vie En Rose, the biopic of Edith Piaf, for which Marion Cotillard won the Oscar® for Best Actress.
AF: It's very different. They began the same way, since they were two orphans and they had no money, but one is a victim and the other never wants to be. And the other thing is that the movies are very, very different—one is a biopic of the whole life, with flashbacks, and mine is a point of view, an angle, [which speaks] about the construction of a myth and stops at the beginning of celebrity. But of course, they are both French icons.
AF: The challenge is to be fresh with a movie like this. It's a heavy thing to do a period drama: Everything has to be true, but you have to find room to breathe—to be modern. Chanel was very modern, and I tried to do everything through her eyes, her perception. There is one book that was very interesting, about the lies of Chanel. It lets you enter into her personality, because she said, "I invented my life, because I did not like my life." She made fiction of her life.
Q: The film reminds us of La Vie En Rose, the biopic of Edith Piaf, for which Marion Cotillard won the Oscar® for Best Actress.
AF: It's very different. They began the same way, since they were two orphans and they had no money, but one is a victim and the other never wants to be. And the other thing is that the movies are very, very different—one is a biopic of the whole life, with flashbacks, and mine is a point of view, an angle, [which speaks] about the construction of a myth and stops at the beginning of celebrity. But of course, they are both French icons.
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