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9 months ago
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Palme d’Ors don’t grow on trees, so it’s small wonder that the world has fallen for Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, and the outstanding lead performance of Sandra Hüller, since it won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize. Hüller’s turn dominates the ‘sort of’ courtroom drama of the film, in which her German novelist — also called Sandra — is accused of pushing her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), also a writer, from the top floor of their alpine home. Sandra maintains he fell, or jumped, and the film spends much of its runtime chewing over the truth, though never revealing it.
Triet and Hüller first met over a decade ago, when Hüller presented the director with a prize for her short film Vilaine fille, mauvais garçon (2012). Several years later they met again, this time in Cannes, where Triet’s film Victoria was premiering alongside Hüller’s prize-winning Toni Erdmann.
Triet knew instinctively that she one day wished to work with Hüller, and the feeling was mutual. So, she wrote her a part in Sybil, released in 2019, and the pair’s bond developed as Hüller played a “crazy” director. Triet then wanted to fashion a film around Hüller due to the “strong connection” she felt towards her. Anatomy of a Fall was born. The film has earned five Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress for Hüller and Best Picture.
DEADLINE: Justine, before you had worked together, what was it that drew you to Sandra Hüller?
JUSTINE TRIET: She gave me my first prize for Vilaine fille, mauvais garçon in 2012, and immediately I had a huge feeling about this woman. When I watched Toni Erdmann a few years later, it was a shock. I have to admit that in France it was something very huge. Everyone was like, “OK, did you see this actress, this director?” It suddenly felt like a new way of playing, of being. It felt like she was living this part on set and I was very impressed by her way of living it.
After that, I said to myself, “I don’t know when, but I want to meet this person and possibly work with her.”
I saw her as this character in Sybil, where she’s almost like a double of me, a crazy director. It felt very funny to me. And when I met her just before we started shooting, on the set of Sybil, she was very, very… Not shy, because she’s not shy, but I could not imagine the fire inside this woman before we worked together. The part was not so huge, but she was so involved and it moved me a lot. So after, I was like, “OK, I want to find a good story to continue the work between us.” And I wrote a few projects and the first two weren’t very good. The third was Anatomy of a Fall.
DEADLINE: Sandra, from your perspective, do you remember meeting Justine and presenting her with that award?
SANDRA HÜLLER: Yes, I remember. There are also pictures of that moment that are really funny and some of them made it to the social media circus, to compare then and now, which is really funny. I remember that. And we both just had our children, so there was a connection.
I admired her so much for making Victoria (2016), because also I had never seen anything like this before. It was very raw and at the same time, very on point, what she did.
It felt like it came very easy, and at the same time it was absolutely existential, and I really love that. There was some punk to it. Everything she did felt really political from the beginning, which impressed me very much. And also, her genuine energy, which is like that to this day.
DEADLINE: The last time we spoke, Justine, you said you wanted to write Anatomy of a Fall as an apology for making Sandra play a director in Sybil.
HÜLLER: [Laughs] Yeah, you should, you should apologize for that.
TRIET: I don’t remember this.
DEADLINE: It’s in the transcript!
TRIET: [Laughs] OK, OK. Sorry. Yeah, maybe, I don’t know. For me it was two different worlds. Shooting these films was so different. Sybil was totally different in a way. But I think what I adore in our collaboration on Anatomy is… I think the second time when you are working with actresses or actors is always much more interesting. All the time it’s like this for me, because I think the second time, we’re not embarrassing ourself with politeness. Sometimes when you admire people, all that admiration between you becomes bullsh*t at the end of the day. You have to break that ice very strongly.
What I find wonderful is to be able to find something that is really so rare, which is a way of living or experiencing something within my actors on set. So, that’s something of this relationship that is real and not a kind of nicety or politeness between an actor and a director. I think that was really the principle thing with Sandra, is how strong this connection that I feel to her has been since we met. And the way that this connection is then exploited without any manipulation, just sort of laid out bare on set, so that we can harvest it. I felt that with Swann [Artaud who plays the defence attorney] also.
When Samuel [Theis who plays the husband] arrived, I started feeling that there was a dynamic there that we were going to be able to use, and that was going to nourish the project very, very much.
So, I think the bottom line is that I am kind of against the hygienist idea of the ways the dynamics and relations on set are supposed to be. I think that it’s not worth anything if something doesn’t happen that takes us further than the intended theme or subject of a work.
HÜLLER: I was so happy that Justine talked about this possibility of us working together again after Sybil, and she kept what it would be about a secret until I received the script for Anatomy. I read it all in one reading and I was immediately sure that I wanted to be a part of it. There was no question about it. The time that we had spent before on Sybil was very special to me and I definitely wanted to find out more.
I mean, you would have to come to set and shoot with us to understand it, I really cannot describe what is a very intimate process. It is very much based on mutual respect and the same sorts of fantasies that people have. Maybe speaking the same language, although we don’t. And liking the same sort of process, trying things to be on the wrong path sometimes, and not being worried about things going wrong. Enjoying the process, not so much the outcome of something.
Justine is a collector of material. I am too. I don’t like to work toward a certain goal that is to achieve. I find it unnatural, I must say. I think the collection of material, and the collective process of thinking about something and then trying out things that we haven’t known before, is more the natural thing to do for me. And that’s what we do. Aside from that, there is a lot of humor, and everybody on the set has a voice, and there is no ranking in the importance of people or something. I love that very much.
DEADLINE: Language is central to Anatomy of a Fall. Samuel is French, Sandra is German, and they communicate with one another in English. How central did language become to you, Justine?
TRIET: When I started to imagine something with Sandra, I started with a different project, but I was obsessed by one thing. If I was going to work with her, I had to really play with her foreign nature because it was not possible to just cancel it and pretend that she was, I don’t know, another person. So, the question of the language was really important from the beginning. I think if she had refused the part, I’d have had to find another person, I don’t know, English or American, or another European actress. But it was very important to put her in this situation. And I think we played a lot with this because she was surrounded by French people all the time. And sometimes she was lost. When she was in the courtroom, I could feel that she was totally lost sometimes. And she was very clever because I think she really uses this foreign language to personalize her character.
So, the question of language has been fundamental, as I’m experiencing right now myself in this interview [laughs]. The limit of the language that is not one’s own is something that has always recurred, and that is particularly important in the case of Sandra’s character as a writer, because of the implied, supposed, and perhaps effective mastery that she has over narrative. Being a craftswoman of narrative and going between different languages is something that all adds to what is expected of her as perhaps a duplicitous person. That the many languages that she carries within her play like a filter between her and reality, and separates her from us.
DEADLINE: What did you make of it, Sandra?
HÜLLER: Reading the script, first of all, I found it thrilling. It was a really thrilling experience to read it. Even though it’s not mine, I found the language so precise, and the questions that are in this script were visible from the beginning and were so inevitable that there would’ve been no way to pass it on. There were no clichés unless they were there to show the cliché. That really astonished me. I loved to read that, and to think about that person immediately and what she could feel like. I think there were not so many discussions, which is… Justine, you have to tell me if I’m wrong. I had a lot of conversations with my French teacher, because we were meeting twice a week in preparation, and while learning the lines, a lot of questions came up. And sometimes afterward I would call Justine to ask, “Do I see that in the right way?” But basically, everything was already there and on the table. There was not so much to question.
DEADLINE: There’s a scene that unfolds in court as we hear the recording of the fight between Sandra and Samuel. How was that choreographed for you, verbally and physically?
HÜLLER: We shot the courtroom way after, so the two scenes aren’t really connected in my memory. We started in the house in the mountains for two or three weeks, and then we went to the courtroom to film for another three weeks. So, to me, they were really separated, these two places.
This argument is so accurately written it’s almost like theater, with [playwright and poet Heinrich van] Kleist or something, that you could just take it and it would do something to you immediately. You can rely on the text very much. It’ll carry you through all of these things. And Justine has a way of marking sentences that she wants to have a bit more force. She writes them in capital letters with lots of exclamation marks, so you know where she wants you to go, which was easy at that point because I totally understood the feeling that Sandra would have at that moment.
As for how we choreographed it… We just had to find out how far away they are from each other in the beginning and how long this tension would hold until it explodes. So, we had to find the positions in the room, in the kitchen, but we didn’t have a lot of rehearsal at all. So, it was all in our imagination from the beginning. And as soon as we decided where everybody was, we immediately started recording it and then that was the shooting.
DEADLINE: Justine, how did you discuss that scene with your actors? Because that’s the line that Sandra says in court, “According to your logic, all of Samuel’s problems are my fault.” It’s almost the crux of what occurs in the film, that this man is so fragile and weak that he blames his wife for his problems.
TRIET: Yeah, exactly. This is the point. It’s because he died that she became the person who is responsible for everything. And of course, because she’s powerful, she’s much more attacked. And he seems to be the perfect victim, so of course we played with this code. Most of the time it’s the woman in this position. And I think, of course, at the end, she’s not responsible. We never know exactly all the story, but we can have a feeling in the argument scene that she’s not an angel, but she’s just deciding to take some space.
HÜLLER: The sentence that you pick up on, whether or not she’d be responsible for all of his problems, is really fundamental to the film. And I think it incarnates the baseline of this relationship between this man and this woman, and this woman who — and that was kind of the entire narrative device — has taken up space that she isn’t apologizing for taking up, in a way that women don’t tend to, or haven’t been portrayed as taking.
And in some ways, of course, this is the trial of a woman who may or may not have committed murder, but in many other ways, as you know, that’s also what’s being tried here; the fact that she seems to have no qualms about the space that she takes up, whether it be artistically or otherwise.
I think it’s a very interesting thing to observe that when you portray such a thing, it becomes kind of a litmus test for the people watching in terms of how they react to what they’re seeing. Whether they find that indeed maybe she is taking a bit too much space or not. And the ways in which the different spectators will react to her position says a lot.
In some ways it’s asking a question that I was talking about just yesterday, of wondering what it costs to be free, what it costs to be courageous, what it costs to have ambition.
DEADLINE: Sandra, what’s your take on women having to apologize for being successful or for having time to themselves? What is your sense of this question of women being allowed to be suns and moons in their own right?
HÜLLER: You know, in my life, I’m sometimes confronted with people — men — that say, “These things don’t exist anymore, and it’s all in your head,” which is partly true because these narratives are so deep in our bodies that even we ourselves believe it sometimes that it’s not right to take time for ourselves.
Take, for example, the situation now when Justine and I are promoting the film, or I’m promoting two films [Hüller also stars in Zone of Interest]. It is not easy to say, “I need a weekend away from my family because I just need to sleep.” Although I’m working all the time, at the same time, I’m away from them. So, that is something I think that maybe male friends in my environment don’t ask themselves. They just say, “I’ll stay in bed today.” Or don’t even say it. They just do it.
So, of course, these things are very deep inside of our systems, and it takes a lot of awareness even to find them and to ask yourself, “Is this really my decision or is this a decision of my great-grandmother, or even before?”
I think that this film is masterful to show someone who just doesn’t apologize for being there with all she is; with her talent, with her way of loving, with her way of respecting others and leaving space for the feelings of others. Which is often also criticized. Some people think she’s a bad mother; which I would love to discuss more, because I don’t think so.
DEADLINE: Please don’t shy away from it.
HÜLLER: No, but it’s not the answer to your question. The way that she loves her son is a way of respecting her son, leaving space for her son, leaving space for his own grief, not mixing it up with her own grief, not instrumentalizing him and his feelings for her own healing or grieving or whatever. Not to interfere with his own development. That is something really hard for a mother, I have to say. And it takes a lot of awareness to do it that way, to do so.
I think maybe that’s also something that people connect so much with in this film. Because although it’s searching for the truth all over the place, and maybe it’s not found in this particular murder case, but it is absolutely found in these questions.
And it’s something that we are not used to seeing; a woman to act that way.
DEADLINE: Justine, you’ve spoken about this as being a genre movie, but not a genre movie. What do you mean by that?
TRIET: Speaking about a genre of film, one has to ask, “What does that mean and what kind of register is that?” And for me, it’s about code. It’s just saying that a certain set of codes are available to either be copied or to be overturned. And this film, I believe, very much, surfs with the codes that it borrows, but it is also trying hopefully to emancipate itself from it.
I wasn’t interested in just making an American thriller film, for example, but I thought that I could use the tropes of a courtroom drama to create the portrait of a woman who is being completely depicted from the outside by other people’s words, within which she is trying to redefine her narrative. And the genre would be put at the service of this negotiation. Which is also the case for a lot of the films that I love and find interest in. They tend to be kind of on the emancipatory ends of whatever a thriller might be, whatever a courthouse drama might be, or any of these genres.
DEADLINE: You’ve cited The Boston Strangler and Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, and I’ve seen Presumed Innocent mentioned somewhere. What other films were on your mind when you and Arthur [Harari] were writing Anatomy of a Fall?
TRIET: I was obsessed by White Dog from Samuel Fuller. I would have loved to make a remake of this film. I was obsessed by the shot behind the dog. And it was really funny, because we have the dog in Anatomy. I was really obsessed with how we would film the dog.
And of course, The Changeling from Peter Medak was important for me. Yeah, there is a lot. Because as a spectator, I watch… 80% of my movie, it’s a genre movie all the time. I also love Jordan Peele’s Get Out. As a spectator, these movies are my food all the time.
And of course, I’m obsessed by genre movies of the ’70s and ’80s … Like all the Richard Fleischer movies, like See No Evil. I love 10 Rillington Place so much.
But you know, it’s really interesting because you’re watching masters at work, and you are just like, “OK, maybe I can just find a way to not copy this thing, because it’s not interesting to just copy, but have some few influences with all the technical things.” Sometimes these guys really invent some technical way of filming. And when I watched Get Out the first time, I was really impressed. He invents some new things.
DEADLINE: Sandra, do you share Justine’s love of these kinds of films?
HÜLLER: I have to admit, I’m not so much of a cineaste. I didn’t see so many films in my life. All the things that Justine is talking about are absolutely not familiar to me. I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I really want to spend some time with her so she can show me all these things.
I’m not so much of a thriller fan. I think I’m too easily shocked. I get disturbed by the lightest sense of whatever. I cannot watch horror movies, sometimes not even thrillers, or anything with too much violence. I just can’t take it. But the smart ones, where you have to find out what’s really going on, of course I love them.
There was a really big wave of those films, I don’t know, in the ’90s or something. Courtroom dramas where we had to find out the truth. But I think that’s long ago and these things are not made so much anymore. Or maybe it has moved towards TV, because there are so many TV shows that try to entertain people with crime.
TRIET: This is what I love in working with Sandra, because she’s not reproducing any of these things. For me, she invents new chords in this movie, and she doesn’t try to surf on the same wave. It’s the best. I love the freedom that comes from that inside our way of working.
Sometimes I think people who are obsessed by genre movies are a little sick in a way. And I’m sick in a way. For me it’s like a drug. Like I need my blood all the night, like a vampire. I need some blood before I can go to sleep. It’s not so healthy. Maybe I’m a little ashamed of this, and I share it with Arthur, my partner.
HÜLLER: Ah, that’s interesting. Maybe I’ll find fun in it, and maybe you can show me one day. I will stay over, and we’ll watch some horror.
TRIET: I promise.
DEADLINE: Can you remember the first movie you saw that scared you?
HÜLLER: I remember when I was a child, The Shining came on TV. Of course, not an original version. It was dubbed in German, blah, blah, stupid. But my parents watched it. I wanted to stay, I said, “Please, please let me.” So, my parents said, “It’s really not for you. You can try, but it’s really not for you.” And I remember spending the whole evening in front of the door looking through the little slit of the door, seeing if it was over.
TRIET: No [gasps].
HÜLLER: Yes. I just couldn’t stand it. I have been dreaming of it ever since. Whenever I go into a hotel and it looks just slightly like The Shining hotel, I don’t know, it’s traumatic.
DEADLINE: Are you two going to work again a third time?
HÜLLER: Yeah. I’d love to, but we don’t know when. Maybe not right now, because maybe we really have to digest the things that have happened, what we’re doing, and find out who we really are.
TRIET: I would love to! I’m in. I would love that.
HÜLLER: Yes, me too.
DEADLINE: Maybe a romantic comedy or something next?
HÜLLER: Of course. But with a little twist.
DEADLINE: Justine, what do you have in mind that you would like to do next with Sandra?
TRIET: I have two work projects. One very expensive, the other very cheap. So, it’s just… It’s very good in life when you have both possibilities because sometimes you have no money, and it’s really important to think about it. But honestly, I didn’t have any time… enough time to really dive in a project that I want really. But I have a desire with Sandra. I would love to make… I don’t know what film exactly, but the maybe the movie could be, like a melodrama.
DEADLINE: Melodrama, I like it.
TRIET: Yes, melodrama, but I don’t know when exactly. It’s just a desire. Because I think Sandra… there is a thing very simple, very easy when you direct an actress or an actor for me. It’s just, could you spend 2, 3, 4, 5 hours with somebody without feeling bored by her.
I think that really the main question, the selection process, whether you can watch an actor for hours, work out some very, very subtle element without getting bored. And for me, that’s the case with Sandra very much. I find her so interesting and so changing that I’d love to have the opportunity to play with her, to make her play again. Perhaps hopefully in a way where there’ll be even more time to explore, and let these things unfold. Maybe bringing back a little bit of humor also. Those are all things that I look forward to.
DEADLINE: And will there be blood? Because you like blood?
TRIET: Yeah, I would love. But I would love to make a real genre movie. But I don’t know. You know what? As a spectator, I consume a lot of these films, but most of the time, 80% of these movies are perfect, but the end is the sh*t. It’s the most difficult thing to end genre movies because you know, you tease, you tease, you tease, you tease, and at the end, of course, you disappoint your spectator. If you’re not very… No? If it’s a huge twist, very well done, OK. And [M. Night] Shyamalan could do it, and he’s a master. But sometimes it’s not good, and you are like, “OK. I’m so… All of that for just ending like this?” And I will not give you some examples, but you know. They’re not perfect. I’m not sure. You are consuming a lot of genre movie or not, Baz?
DEADLINE: Yeah, I watch everything.
TRIER: OK. OK.
DEADLINE: Which is why it’s so nice when I see a film like an Anatomy of a Fall because it makes up for the nonsense I have to watch.
TRIET: OK, OK. But yes, I would love to do it again. And yes, because I think as a director, I love so much, and I would love to make a movie without any words, just the mise en scène, and just… You are thrilling, but you have not all the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I’m not able to do this now, all the time I’m saying this. And each movie after movie, I’m doing very talkative films.
