Sarah Bernhardt: THE DIVINE by Guillaume Nicloux

INTERVIEW WITH GUILLAUME NICLOUX

Sarah Bernhardt is astonishingly modern, but she is also a being with a thousand facets. How did she enter your life and your cinema?

GUILLAUME NICLOUX: It’s thanks to Nathalie Leuthreauwho wrote the screenplay, which I became passionate about for Sarah Bernhardt. I admit that I didn't know her well, Nathalie read everything about her and constructed an extremely precise and factual sum before we gradually identified two axes among the madness and the whirlwind that was her life: the day of her jubilee and the amputation of his leg. To tackle this “sacred monster”, we quickly eliminated the obligation of a realistic biopic and a totalizing story. Paradoxically, the two key moments that we chose are poorly documented. The film nestles in the absence of certainty, which is very stimulating for a filmmaker. What brings you closest to Sarah Bernhardt?

I still have a background of punk anarchism which leads me to be interested in rebellious and counter-current figures, nourished by “neither God nor master”. Sarah Bernhardt is one of those vampire people, capable of sucking you in with their presence, their demands and their contradictions, their generosity and their excess. She is a woman who is too much: too loving, too violent, too unjust, too in love with justice, too rebellious. All these facets do not go without each other, and feed each other. In this sense it is an assumed “romantic” film, a love story where the passion of a woman artist prevails over reason and morality. A unique destiny whose life was guided by imagination and surpassing oneself. Her modernity is striking… In particular her freedom from patriarchal control, which is expressed throughout her life, her multiple loves, her opposition to authority while she practices its excesses, her interpretation of masculine roles … there are her political commitments, her bisexuality, her way of taking on motherhood without a husband… it was very subversive for the time… directing a theater, taking care of the costumes, the sets, cutting plays, rewriting the text if it did not suit him. She is radical and stubborn, which commands respect. She manages her money herself, frees herself from good manners, contradicts herself and claims it… but Sarah Bernhardt is also avant-garde in her art because she invents a theatrical game. It is very disturbing to see how she applies the Stanislavski method in advance by calling on her emotional memory. According to her, to play pain on stage you have to be in pain, to make people cry, real tears have to flow, and even if she claims in the film that it is mainly necessary to make you want to cry, the interpretation does not exclude not suffering. However, his acting does not correspond to the interiority that Kazan and Strasberg would later develop at the Actors Studio. She succeeded before her time in the improbable marriage between interiority and eccentricity. When Nathalie and I heard Sarah Bernhardt's voice in the Jean Cocteau house, we were stunned by the way she declaimed. Playing like that today would seem completely surreal.

Sandrine Kiberlain is exceptional. Did you think about her from the start of the adventure?

GUILLAUME NICLOUX: Yes. The first reading of a version of the script for Sandrine dates back to five years ago. We sent it to her and the same day she called us at 11 p.m. telling us that she was excited about the project. It was very stimulating to know that we had touched a sensitive chord in an actress moved by the singular destiny of another actress. And Sandrine was extraordinary in her inventiveness and concentration throughout the shoot. To the point that she gave me the impression of discovering Sarah Bernhardt by looking at her. For example, all of a sudden, while she was playing Sarah, in her elderly period, a laugh arose, which I absolutely did not expect. Where did he come from? I don't know anything about it. All the scenes are strong, because they are chock full of excess, and it was not necessary to overdo it or be ridiculous. Sarah Bernhardt’s motto is “all the same”. “Still, I’m going to do it.” And Sandrine did it completely and wonderfully. There is almost no scene without her. Sandrine Kiberlain is Sarah Bernhardt without playing like her. Did the question of imitation arise? No. We knew it would be impossible and that didn't interest me. On the other hand, Sarah had to be reinvented in such a way that we understood why she was so fascinating, why the audience was upset, why women and men fainted in the room. To establish an internalized game, we began with a scene of agony, she adored them, where we can let ourselves be taken in by the lure, to definitively establish the commitment she put into her roles.

INTERVIEW WITH SANDRINE KIBERLAIN

How do you build a character like Sarah Bernhardt?SANDRINE KIBERLAIN:

Perhaps by avoiding any voluntary construction. Above all, we should not think about what it represents, about its aura of a “sacred monster” as Cocteau called it. It would be intimidating. I attached myself to more intangible data: his energy, his freedom, trying to free myself as quickly as possible from what could have been an obstacle.

What did you discover in this dive into the waters of Sarah Bernhardt?

SANDRINE KIBERLAIN: I discovered the woman. I read several biographies including his memoirs while I was learning the text. This is the only work I did beforehand: knowing the text as if it were my own language. It was the first time I worked with a repetiteur and for three months I learned the lines. We had to completely assimilate it, because Sarah Bernhardt is very quick in her way of expressing herself. It’s impossible to be hesitant and say one word for another. We started filming in January, I got started in October, the way you learn a play, through readings at the table, which had to register in my brain. And little by little, as Sarah learned, she arrived. I dared more and more to set the tone, the intentions. I got to know her.

The film is also a documentary about an actress playing another actress…

SANDRINE KIBERLAIN: Absolutely. It was only recently that I realized that the film is also a documentary about the game.

Nathalie Leuthreau

“A true myth who became the first “star” known throughout the world, Sarah Bernhardt is intriguing. She not only marked with an indelible mark of its time, but its name spanned the 20th century and still remains enduring today. Yet, It is clear that few people really know who she was.