Marion Cotillard on Fear, Trauma and the Male Director Who Manipulated Her: ‘I Felt Like an Object’ and ‘Really Hated It’

variety.com:

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor In one scene in Mona Achache’s “Little Girl Blue,” which world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Special Screenings section, the director is seen insisting that lead actor Marion Cotillard stays in character even on her tea break, to the extent that she must drink tea noisily as her character, Carole – based on the French filmmaker’s own mother – used to do.

Does this suggest a manipulative relationship between director and actor? Cotillard disagrees. “I don’t see a director and an actor as being in relationships of manipulation.

It’s more a collaboration,” she tells Variety. “It happened to me only once where I felt that I was being manipulated by a director, and I really didn’t like that.” Although the male director, whom she does not name, had led her to believe that it would be “a process of working together with a collaborative connection,” she says, she soon realized he was attempting to manipulate her. “I thought: ‘Is he manipulating me because he thinks that I’m going to be unable to give him what he needs, what he wants, if he doesn’t act this way?

And I felt like an object, and I really hated it,” Cotillard said. “And the thing is, I saw right away all the manipulation, and I had the judgement that it was kind of dumb that you can’t ask me to do things without trying to use ways of manipulation that really don’t work with me, with my personality as a woman, I mean, as a human being, and as an actress,” she added. “I need to work hand in hand [with the director].” She draws a distinction between what could be described as “manipulation” and an “experience of surrender,” in her words, that an actor has to go through in order to embody a character. “I