The always-stylish GENEVIEVE PARLEY is privy to the thoughts of French director ANNE FONTAIN as she discusses her new Audrey Tatou-starring film COCO AVANT CHANEL, which channels the life of the vastly influential 20th Century couturier.

Anne Fontaine’s new biopic Coco Avant Chanel tracks the life of the young Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel, arguably the last century’s most recognisable and lauded fashion designer. Portrayed by the mesmerising Audrey Tatou, the film examines Coco’s humble beginnings and also her glamorous adulthood, introducing along the way the relationships that fundamentally shaped her progress, one with rich eccentric Étienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde), and the other with ‘love of her life’ Arthur “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola).

Here actress, writer and director Anne Fontaine (also responsible for the Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Beart-starring Nathalie) talks revealingly about capturing the life and beating heart of one of fashion’s towering figures.

GENEVIEVE PARLEY: Why were you interested in the character of Gabrielle Chanel?

ANNE FONTAINE:  I was lucky to meet Lilou Marquand when I was very young; she had been the closest collaborator of Chanel throughout the last part of her life and later wrote a book on their relation entitled Chanel Told Me. So every day, for a while, I would hear something about this mythical personality. It was not so much the fashion as the characteristics of this exceptional woman that interested me. I had been particularly touched by the fact that she was a self-made person. This girl, coming from the heart of the French countryside, poor, uneducated, but endowed with an exceptional personality, was destined to be ahead of her time and of a society where women were the prisoners of alienating behaviours and clothing. I remember putting up photos of the young Chanel on the walls of my bedroom, but I never thought I would make a whole film on this subject.

During a conversation on Chanel with [producers] Carole Scotta and Caroline Benjo, they asked me whether I would be interested in developing a project recounting her path. I asked them to give me time to think about it, pointing out that I felt it would be a mistake to try to take in the entire life of Coco Chanel. The other imperative condition was to find an actress to embody such a character, and not someone who would ape or make a pale imitation of Chanel.

GP: Audrey Tautou was obviously the ideal actress to portray Coco Chanel.

AF:  Yes, and Audrey very naturally embodies the androgynous – something that did not exist at the time and is essential to understand how Coco Chanel invented her style. Chanel drew her inspiration from her own personality; she composed her style on her body, her difference, and her vitality. Today androgyny is in fashion, but at the time of Chanel, women were curvaceous and plump. Chanel also launched the fashion of short hair. The actress had to combine slender silhouette and strong temper, this iron hand in a velvet glove. Audrey has the slimmest waist in the world! She has also this “little black bull” side to her, as Paul Morand used to say of Chanel, a grace, finesse, and an irrefutable charisma. On my first encounter with Audrey, her will, her audacity, and the density of her gaze that goes through you struck me. Chanel looked at everything. Her culture was not one of knowledge, but a culture of observation.

GP: Writing the screenplay about a famous character, you must have had in mind that the audience knows the end of the story…

AF: Suspense is very real in the life of this heroine:  How will she make it? How will she overcome her ignorance? It’s interesting to see that Chanel, whose name today is emblematic of haute-couture, was not really interested in fashion at first. She wanted to be a dancer, a singer or an actress. After she dropped her artist’s dreams, her dazzling career was nearly built without her knowing it. What particularly interested me was to watch Coco build her destiny before our eyes, by inventing as she went along.

GP: In her designs, Chanel never projected the image of the ideal woman as designers do in general. She built her mythical style upon her particular characteristics and her difference.

AF:  She was different. Chanel turned this difference into a fundamental asset, though it must have been a terrible suffering for her. We worked on that transformation with Audrey. At first, she appears as a little peasant girl, unpolished with a beehive hairstyle; then, we see how her style clashes with the other women only to become, in the last part of the movie, the incarnation of French chic. I thought it was interesting to give shape to this evolution without over-explaining things. Little by little, everything in her was grace, and what people looked at was Chanel.

GP: What liberties did you take while working on the screenplay?

AF:  In order to interpret a famous person, I had to liberate myself from the diktat of the biography if I wanted to get the freshness back. With my co-screenwriters, we had to invent some things, go against the chronology, modify, or give more density to some characters. We know very little about the first years of her life, and Chanel lied all the time. She used to say something I find sublime: ‘I invented my life because my I didn’t like my life.’

GP: Your direction respects and celebrates the motto of Coco Chanel, which was: ‘You always have to remove, to strip, and never add.’  Like her, you don’t go for the superfluous, the frills…

AF:  It was very important to me that the film looked like her, no fuss or aesthetical lyricism. The style of CHANEL is recognizable among all by its rigour, the elegant simplicity of lines. In the scene at the hippodrome or the beach in Deauville, we noticed the total opposition of the style of CHANEL with the dresses of those women and their elaborate headdresses, all the frills and corsets that cut them in half! They had a decorative posture, whereas Chanel was concerned with the existence of the individual. You had to beat the heart of things, all the time, with the movie.

COCO AVANT CHANEL opens in cinemas Thursday Jun 25, rated [PG].

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