Katell Quillévéré – The Time to Love: “Anaïs Demoustier, Vincent Lacoste and Me”
The director of the ambitious and seductive melodrama Le Temps d’aimer talks about her relationship and her work with her two main actors.
First broadcast tonight on television for Time to loveReleased this winter in cinemas, this successful melodrama is coming to Canal +. First recommends it to you, and suggests that you read this interview with its director, Katell Quillévéréto keep you waiting. It was originally released in November 2023.
Your Time to love is a melodrama that depicts, over more than 20 years – from the end of the Second World War to the 1960s – a love story between two people damaged by life and who are complete opposites: the single mother of a child born from her brief union with a Nazi soldier and the son of a bourgeois family forced to hide his homosexuality. At what point do you think of Anaïs Demoustier and Vincent Lacoste for these two roles?
Katell Quillévéré: Once the script co-written with Gilles Taurand was finished. At that point, we began to think about it with my casting director Sarah Teper. We looked for who could play these two characters in the generation of thirty-somethings. And I very quickly came up with the idea of Anaïs and Vincent.
TIME TO LOVE: A SHATTERING MELODY (REVIEW)
Why ?
First of all because they are very great actors, an essential condition for everything I wanted here in terms of emotion to be measured. I knew that they would be able to take on… all that burden. But also that it would be a challenge for both of them, because they had never had this type of character to play. Which was really an essential fact for me. I always try in my films to offer the actors the opportunity to renew themselves because that’s what will make the part exciting. Vincent, I found him really striking in From our wounded brothers by Hélier Cisterne with this very large and perfectly controlled step towards great maturity. And I extended this gesture by offering him here a real physical transformation. I made him lose ten kilos, put on glasses, straightened his hair. I changed his gait, his stature, his elocution, his gestures. He sort of emptied himself of Vincent Lacoste to compose this character and we had a great time doing that, this work that went a lot through the body.
And Anaïs Demoustier?
She is an actress I have admired for a long time and I really wanted to give her a role that was right for her. That is to say, a real leading role where she could show the extent of her subtlety, her intelligence, her finesse with this depth that is hers, essential to portray this young single mother of a child born from her brief relationship with a Nazi soldier, so ambivalent and complex. I also relied on her sunny side. Because as her character creates ambivalence in the viewer who has difficulty loving her at first, given the harshness of her relationship with her son, I knew that she would succeed in creating this empathy that is essential to the balance of the story.
What was the content of your discussions about their characters? Did they spontaneously have the same content as Gilles Taurand and you?
With Anaïs, we discussed a lot about the violence of her character. And she was able to express to me beforehand her fear of going too far. Because there is a guilt linked to this role also linked to the image that we all still have of motherhood. She asked me for example if she could kiss her son more often while being aware that the project of the film was precisely in the bias of the opposite. And that if we had softened this link too quickly, the final emotional charge would have been impacted. Like a devitalized thriller. Because for me, Time to Love is a sentimental thriller. Anaïs took on all of this in an incredible way and the complicity she shares in life with Vincent nourished the film. Because the characters they embody are certainly people who love each other but also friends, life partners
Your work with both of them begins with rehearsals?
Yes, but I will talk more about reading moments where we revisit the scenes, where we talk about the difficult places for each person, where we possibly rewrite to make everything more fluid. Because with actors as experienced as Vincent and Anaïs, I obviously don’t need to go and check in advance that they will be able to give this or that emotion. It’s a luxury and a huge time saver. Then, once on set, I follow a method that I created on the set of Suzanne. I ask the actors to do each scene in hyper different emotional directions, from very restrained to very explosive. In order to have all the possible colors on the editing table, at the moment when the film takes power over what we have written or staged and demands at certain moments, a lot of restraint and at others, conversely, that the emotion bursts out full screen. I need to have all this palette in the rushes.
Trailer :
Katell Quillévéré: “Cinema must function as a catharsis”
