Interview met Stephane Freiss

What was your reaction on first reading 5 x 2?
Quite frankly, if it hadn't been a film by François Ozon, I would have turned it down. There were forty pages at most, he'd only written three episodes out of five. Indeed, it wasn't clear how many episodes there would be nor what direction we were going in. The important thing was who I was going with. There was François and there were his films, so I knew something about what I was accepting. Then there was Valeria. Two beings who were truly important to me. We started the film in the order in which the scenes appear on screen. And I would certainly not have shown such faith, such abandon for those scenes, which are not exactly timid, if I'd been working with different people.

The hotel scene is as you say pretty hard core…
In the screenplay, this scene is only a few lines long. It says we make love. It changed afterwards. But the dice was already thrown. François has a way of touching on things that are deeply serious with an apparent lightness of touch. This is not out of innate disregard. There is a basic innocence, a freshness, a naiveté about some things but especially I believe a true intelligence, an animal instinct. Usually, when I start a film, I know where my character is coming from and where he is bound. I re-read the story a thousand times and each scene helps me build. I've always worked like that. But on 5 x 2, I had to deliberately put that method aside every day, deliberately omit to ask myself where I was coming from and where I was bound. I had to be in the present, create the living experience of being together with someone without really knowing who the woman beside me was, nor how I'd met her. We had to look at each other, listen to each other, open all of our senses as wide as we could. Learn to build on the spot, with the other person, around the other person and never against her.

Is it basically improvisation?
Yes and no. We respected the story but we put flesh and blood into the words and the silences. I had never worked in that way. François is one of those directors who finds unlikely and profound things in his actors. He is lucid yet tender in his relationships. And behind all that there are a lot of more violent and troubled and unsettling things. The actor holds on to the tenderness to go inside himself looking for emotion. After the scene in the hotel, François said, "You took me by surprise. I wasn't expecting you to give so much.", which made us laugh at first. But I think he meant it. It is his strength. He puts the ingredients in the pot, then turns up the heat to boiling point. Like all magicians, he knows that some things are not under his control. Which is why everything he produces seems so lifelike.

Is it fair to say 5 x 2 is less about interpretation than immediate identification?
Both, I think. People's first reaction is to identify with each of the five stages. But I think people also start wondering about what has happened between the five stages. Valeria and I were always asking ourselves whether a section was strong enough to carry the audience into the next section. Was there nothing missing? Reading the screenplay, the significance of certain gestures is not apparent. They seem quite ordinary. But in the finished film, the meaning becomes clear. The consequences of a scene only emerge in terms of what is missing from the previous interval, in terms of the space between scenes, in which the audience is able to focus its own interpretation. Each scene is made up of what you see and the blank that precedes it.

There is also a matter of time passing in the interval between scenes? How can you show the passage of three years?
In theatre, it's a question which often arises. But with this film, I soon ceased asking myself about that. I stopped worrying. I told myself François knew what he was doing. He works very closely with the make-up artist and the hairdresser. We'd exchange thoughts and that was enough to reassure me.

5 x 2 was shot in two parts. How did you feel about this?
The first three parts of the film, which were shot in the first period, I felt as strong as I'd ever felt in my life. Working in a different way gave me energy, I wanted to show myself what I could do. I depended on two people I adored and that bond gave me wings. When we parted at the end of the first shoot, I found the separation painful. I didn't want to leave them, nor the rest of the crew. And I don't think they want to separate either. It was to be for two months and it ended up being five. Which seemed like a long time, especially since I'd seen no rushes. In the interval, I shot THE BIG PART by Steve Suissa, which is the exact opposite of FIVE TIMES TWO, a real melodrama and a beautiful one with a straightforward story about a precise and explicit set of circumstances. It brought me back to another way of working, another context, other people. The part was not an easy one. I was playing a man who lost his wife to cancer. When I went back to FIVE TIMES TWO, I was maybe less light-hearted. But the two final parts are about happiness, whereas the first parts are about separation and are much darker. It was about the joy of meeting someone and it felt less intense. Unlike Valeria who had worked on herself physically and who seemed radiant. Nevertheless, I remember it as a happy time. The harmony was still as strong as ever.

Did you mind not seeing the rushes?
In general, rushes are important because they make you realize what you are doing and they help refresh the memory, they project you into what you were doing. Here, in so far as there was no classic plot, all seeing the rushes would have done was reassure me that the couple worked, that I was not acting too badly, that I wasn't too ugly when I was naked. But François wasn't keen to show us rushes. Really not!

What was working with Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi like?
I'd made a TV drama with Valeria fifteen years ago. We'd spent a month together, but there had not been any kind of meeting of minds, neither in the positive sense nor in the negative. We were probably not ready to meet. But on 5 x 2, the chemistry was instantaneous. Thanks to François of course, because neither of us was quite sure where we were headed. The fact that the film was unstructured made things seem even more exciting. Unconsciously, we may have felt that if we didn't surrender our inhibitions and give into a genuine curiosity about each other, there wouldn't be any kind of chemistry. In my view, both of us opened up completely and I certainly feel I met one of the most touching women I have ever encountered in my life. Valeria is someone I admire, when powerful and when in distress. She is constantly in pain, and constantly driven towards vitality.

How do you see your character?
Before making the film and at the end of each episode, François interviewed us. He'd ask us who our characters were, where they were going and where they came from. In order to synthesize all the different things I'd thought of, I imagined that Gilles was sexually unsure, that his failure with Marion, like his previous failures, showed that he was always trying to meet women, when in fact it was a man he should have been seeking to meet. I was convinced that my brother had discovered his homosexuality before I did. The Ferrons' family sexuality was homosexuality, that much I knew!

Were you influenced in that by the fact that this was a François Ozon film?
I want to say no but I'm not sure. François is unknowable. Everything he brings to the story introduces a certain kind of mystery, in terms of a sensual relationship to others. When François told me Gilles raped Marion at the hotel, it confirmed my reading. "Gilles is coming face to face with his true sexuality and shows her that he is not the man she thought." I was freeing myself of my heterosexual life and displaying the first signs of my new life which would be homosexual. It was a notion I kept up for a long time. It wasn't till the last interview that I told François, "I think I took a wrong turn. That's what I think, but I can't be sure. I'll wait till I see the film."

And now you have seen it?
Today, I see what the character does as an act of utter distress, of the kind that sometimes makes one do things one despises. Gilles is fragile and Marion is forceful. They are not a classic, orthodox couple and yet they offer a universally valid idea of what being a couple is about. As far as I'm concerned, that is the key to the film's success. It is neither linear nor conventional in its design nor conventional in the solutions it offers. I love this film more than anything. I do not regret all my peculiar notions as to Gilles' sexuality. They provided me with the vitality to play the part. Gilles is a fragile man but he is no wimp. He sees his marriage going wrong and that there is nothing he can do about it. Like many men, he feels the pain of that.

The wedding night and the childbirth scene are crucial moments in Gilles and Marion's marriage which they experience apart.
Playing those childbirth scenes was very unsettling. I would never have done what Gilles did. But instinct and the unconscious always win out. We all do inexplicable things, which we don't understand the meaning of till later. There is nothing further to say about that. Gilles' cowardice in the hospital and Marion's unfaithfulness on her wedding night are an expression of all the other lapses that we have not had time to see in the film. François has a rather dark view of what living together is like? But living together doesn't solve everything. Are two people who decide to live together in any way superior to two people who don't? The question arises in the context of a society which is undergoing change, in which living together is no longer the only way, it's a choice.

Do you feel the film will change the way audiences see you, help people stop seeing you as a Romeo figure?
My Romeo image has altered a great deal in recent years, luckily. LES CHOUANS is fifteen years old and it's image of me is out of date. I have acted in a large number of plays since. François saw me in the theatre. Maybe he was able to see more complex, more ambiguous and contradictory qualities that lie buried, deep inside me and that others have not bothered to notice. Also, he took a bet on me. I'll be grateful for that as long as I live. He made me want to go back to making films.

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