Confessions

Marion Cotillard: “If we want the world to be better, we must start by looking at ourselves with love.”

BY Richard Gianorio

According to Edgar Morin, emblematic French philosopher and sociologist, stars are endowed with an ‘over-personality’—hybrid creatures built from a thousand facets. Goddesses of radiant perfection, shaped by the star-system itself, nourished by economic and cultural considerations.

Morin dates the disappearance of the stars to the passing of Marilyn Monroe, which would sound the death knell of a Golden Age. But despite a new era, the invention of new media, and more screens, the stars have not disappeared. Quite to the contrary, social media has created new, less fascinating monsters who trigger the same collective fervour as in the 20th century.

Where does Marion Cotillard come in this? As long as I’ve known her, the French actress is a link between the ‘old-fashioned’ stars—distant, with glamour—and those versatile versions of today, the global militants of environmental causes and muses of large luxury groups (for Cotillard, it’s Greenpeace, Dior then Chanel).

It’s a textbook case: a quintessentially Frenchwoman, perfectly integrated into a Hollywood heritage that was, a priori, not intended for her. Fate decided it. With Marion, myth goes hand-in-hand with reality—with Hollywood it was so far, but so close. French actresses (Cotillard is one of those who, like Binoche, resonate better with her native blue, white, and red) have an unequalled mark on international filmography.

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Confessions

Every Frame A Photo: Sir Roger Deakins Talks Byways

BY Chris Cotonou

Sir Roger Deakins has been waiting a long time to share his still photography. It was a matter of circumstance—and free time in his demanding schedule—that led to the publishing of Byways, a monograph that compiles his black and white images from as early as 1971. But how does the Oscar-winning cinematographer, whose work with Sam Mendes and the Coen Brothers has put him as arguably the greatest of his era, see the difference in his still photography work? Speaking to Chris Cotonou, Sir Roger Deakins shares his thoughts on the correlation of film and still photography, and selects a few of his favourite images from Byways…

I’ve always thought colour was a bit of a distraction. I grew up in the late 60s when most photography was black and white. But I’m very much more into the simplicity of black and white. It’s more about what you see in the frame and through the composition. I didn’t have a camera until I was at art college. That’s when I started thinking about photography. They put me on a graphic design course, but I really wanted to be a painter. And I was unhappy until I started taking photographs as a way to help illustrate a book cover or something like that. I then met Roger Maine, who was teaching there part-time, and I bought a camera, and I think it must have been a really cheap camera—a Praktica. The lens was plastic. But it did what I needed it to do, and helped me discover what I wanted to concentrate on—which would then become cinematography. I spend a lot of my time trying to take street photographs, and with that you need to spend a lot of time just wandering around until something catches your eye. Some photos in the book are purely there because they stand in for a part of my life shooting documentaries, like the round-the-world yacht race. I mean, I hardly took photographs because really, I was making cinema. Whatever I put in the book stands for a longer period of my life than for what they represent.

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