Mia Hansen-Løve in conversation with Gabe Klinger
The Metrograph Interview
MIA HANSEN-LØVE IN CONVERSATION WITH GABE KLINGER
Mia Hansen-Løve, 2023
The Metrograph Interview
BY
GABE KLINGER
An intimate conversation with the ever-inventive French auteur on finding inspiration, her process, and the need for nuanced characters.
All Is Forgiven streams exclusively on Metrograph At Home.
Before I met Mia Hansen-Løve 19 years ago, I knew her as an actress in Olivier Assayas’s Late August, Early September (1998) and a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. This was already an enviable resumé for a 23-year-old; little did I know that she had also already written a script for a first feature, which she would go on to direct two years later, in 2006, at the age of 25.
The film, All Is Forgiven, follows a certain autobiographical tendency in first features; the edict “write what you know” informs Hansen-Løve’s process, but unlike many of its genre, the film is not a coming-of-age drama with the standard tropes of realization told from a single youthful perspective. The story switches POVs, boldly jumps in time, and withholds offering a redemptive arc for an adult character who by today’s standards would be considered by many, well, a touch problematic, if not completely unredeemable (we discuss this aspect of the film below)—choices that a first-time filmmaker aligned with the wrong group of producers might feel pressured to re-conceive in order to find a broader audience.
Luckily, Hansen-Løve has always found supportive partnerships, and her eight features to date are all personal projects, from her own original screenplays, and have all been made independently (i.e. without backing from huge media conglomerates). In today’s increasingly art-fearing movie production climate, her resolutely curious and inventive output amounts to an unequivocal feat to be celebrated. As a filmmaker struggling to get feature projects off the ground, I try to conceal any twinge of jealousy or resentment in our wide-ranging, career-encompassing conversation below. Is Hansen-Løve luckier than the rest of us? Is it just that she’s French, and more determined?
Hansen-Løve joined me on Zoom from her home in the suburbs of Paris where she’s been busy writing her next, UK-set, English-language feature.—Gabe Klinger
GABE KLINGER: When you were making Bergman Island (2021), we talked about your aversion to handheld—you said when directors do handheld you “feel the style.” Re-watching your first film, All Is Forgiven (2009), I was struck by how much handheld camera there is in it.
MIA HANSEN-LØVE: From the beginning, I’ve always wanted to avoid doing handheld. Not because I am against it in general—tons of films that I love are filmed handheld. But most of the time, whenever I was tempted to use it for my own films, I would later change my mind. I think it has to do with a certain desire for quietness, regarding the camera, resulting from a constant desire for clarity, for precision.
But when I did my first film, my language, my grammar was very, very limited. So there were few options: I was going to film with fixed shots, or there would be one traveling shot at a specific moment, or it would be handheld if I wanted it to be more alive, you know? Since then, I’ve learnt other ways to bring a feeling of liveliness or spontaneity.
Even though I’m sure my style has changed a lot since All Is Forgiven, I still feel as close to that film as before. Sometimes you look back and you’re like, “Oh, no, it can’t be me doing that.” There are one or two early short films I made, which I didn’t finish: if I think of them now, it’s like they were made by another person. But All Is Forgiven still defines who I think I am as a filmmaker. It’s something that goes beyond the style and has to do with the interiority of the film, the emotions it conveys.
All Is Forgiven (2007)
GK: How much of that script-writing process do you remember?
MHL: I’ve written nine scripts and All Is Forgiven is still the most mysterious process that I can remember. Maybe everyone would say that because it’s a first feature: you’re new to this, it’s like a birth—it must always be a strong experience.
But what was really weird in my case was my absurd self-confidence. I honestly don’t know where it came from. I didn’t read any books about script writing. I didn’t go to any film school. I hadn’t really written anything before, except some bad poems. My education in film history was limited, too, really. But still, I had this self-confidence. “This is how I want to tell the story, this is how I’m going to do it; nobody can dissuade me, I’ll be fine.” I guess it comes from a necessity—when there is something you really have to say, and it gives you a strange determination.
On the other hand, I still felt very fragile. Technically, I didn’t know how I was going to make it, and I was very aware of my ignorance. I spent months and months preparing the filming; I wouldn’t make a proper storyboard but I’d make tons of drawings, take tons of notes on the scenes, the shots, etc. I don’t know if I should say that I was lost, but it felt like a huge effort to learn how to become a filmmaker within the space of a few months.
GK: In terms of the story, how did you decide what you wanted to show or not show? The time-jumping structure of the film is confident for a first-time filmmaker.
MHL: That’s one thing I was really sure about. We don’t know what Victor’s been doing for the last 11 years, we don’t see: I knew from the start I wanted to tell the story in that way. It probably has to do with how much I knew—and didn’t know—about my own family story. The film is inspired by my paternal uncle. He died in his forties, just after meeting again his 16-year-old daughter who he had not seen for over 10 years—but my film is a reinterpretation, a reinvention of that. There were lots of things I didn’t know about his story. My parents didn’t tell me much because I was only a young teenager when he died. His fate also relates to my grandfather’s, who committed suicide—another tragic story that has affected the destinies of his six children. They all grew up in Vienna; my father was the eldest, so he became a bit like the father for the other five, a responsibility that must have been very heavy.
Anyway, for some reason, a part of me identified with the story of my uncle. It was about self-destruction, time passing, heritage, unconditional love—all these themes that I identified with, even though the story wasn’t my own. The true story was very blurry, but there was something about the few parts I knew about that I was clinging to. I was catching them and making them mine as a way to work on my own identity.
GK: The beginning of the film, where Victor, Annette, and their daughter Pamela visit with the paternal extended family, recalls Fanny and Alexander (1982).
MHL: That makes sense. I was already a Bergman fan, I had seen that film and it was always so important to me. I had somehow identified with that cinema as much as with the world it was depicting. The atmosphere, especially the Christmas scenes, reminded me of the way my grandmother used to describe her life in Vienna with the many kids.
GK: Then for a moment we’re in a Fassbinder film, in that café with the kitschy Schlager music playing [Udo Jürgens’s “Griechiescher Wein”].
MHL: Fassbinder? No, you’re joking.
GK: No, just the one scene, in which we go from Bergman to Fassbinder.
MHL: It’s very kitsch but I love that popular, sentimental music. I was listening to it again the other day.
GK: I was also thinking about Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers (2005), which came out two years earlier.
MHL: I had seen it and I loved it too, yes. I don’t know if it influenced me, maybe; I’m sure you could find other films with dark, romantic scenes involving drugs. There were other directors probably influencing me: Bresson, and Truffaut, who I admired then as much as I do today. But I also think this whole romanticism with drugs in my first feature—
GK: I don’t think it’s romanticized. Definitely not like Garrel. Actually, I thought of Garrel because of the dance parties. The drug stuff felt more in the Alan Clarke zone.
MHL: Well, that’s nice to hear because I love Christine (1987). I’m a big fan of Alan Clarke’s films. But when I mean romantic, I don’t mean Garrel, I mean more touching on the Viennese melancholy of my father’s side of the family, who all had different problems with addiction, which then went from one generation to another. The Viennese invented melancholy in a way—or listening to my father telling me about Vienna always made me feel that. I was always haunted by this question: “Is it my family, or is it Vienna, or both?” I don’t have the answer, but I wanted to explore that.
Talking about influences: Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973) had impressed me a lot. Maybe I identified with these films also because I could connect them with my family stories.
And with some of my own experiences, too. When I was 13 years old, I went to Vienna (my parents used to send me there during the holidays) and fell in love with a guy who was a heroin addict. Nothing happened. He was older than me, double my age, 26, and he protected me from the drugs. But I really fell in love—like, I was crazy about him. My parents had to bring me to a psychiatrist to get over it. It was my first love, in a way—but a chaste one. We would go to the Stadtpark; the Stadtpark scene in All Is Forgiven is from my own memories.
When I went back to Vienna to present the film at the Viennale Film Festival, I saw him again. He came to the screening, and afterwards we went to the Stadtpark and got drinks. I don’t remember what he said about the film, all I remember is how he looked, and how it felt to meet him again. When you make very personal films that deal with your own story, it can help turn a page. The film is the moment where the story ends. That has happened to me a couple of times.
Mia Hansen-Løve, courtesy of Hansen-Løve
GK: I wanted to talk about the scene where Victor is physically abusive with Annette.
MHL: We could summarize it by saying that I guess we could not call the film “All Is Forgiven” anymore. The very title would be problematic considering what it is about. Today, there’s this idea that if a character behaves badly, it has to be very explicitly condemned by the film somehow—if it doesn’t do that, that makes you an accomplice.
GK: You’re glorifying the behavior, somehow.
MHL: And I mean, I cannot live in that world. I’m happy that I haven’t been confronted with this issue yet. Because my films are always about complexity and contradictory characters—adorable at some point, brutal for a minute, and then adorable again.
Yet there are some truly awful people, of course, I’ve just never been inspired by them. I can film only people who I like—or love. But it doesn’t mean they have to go through their whole life like angels. The same goes for the characters they inspire.
So yes, it was clear to me that Victor was going to behave in a way he would regret, be violent at some point—like the scene you’re mentioning. Otherwise there was no film: there was no point, if nothing had to be forgiven. You can say he’s a “bad person,” or look at it in a different way. I leave that choice to the audience. It’s up to them to decide if they understand Pamela for forgiving her father.
What I’m saying is, we need to be allowed to tell stories with nuanced characters. And I need to have the right to love them as a director—I’m not going to force anybody to love them too. But that’s the minimum freedom that we must have in order to keep making films.
GK: Annette says, “I will never forgive you” and “I don’t ever want to see you again.” And that sets up Pamela’s POV in the latter part of the film. In my head, I’m like, “Uh-oh, Pamela’s going to ask her mother to forgive Victor, to have him in the family life again.” You might see that kind of thing in a Hollywood film, that would be the conflict. But that’s not what you’re going for here.
MHL: There was never an option where I would spend more time looking at some conflictual relationship between Annette and Pamela, or Annette and Victor in the third part. We feel that Annette never manages to forgive Victor, but she accepts that Pamela sees him, she lets it happen, even if it brings her back to the past and her wounds. The fact that she gives her daughter the freedom to decide on her own what kind of relationship she wants with him makes her a better person, in my opinion.
In the last scene, when they are sitting around the table and Pamela leaves for a walk, Annette closes her eyes in the sun; she seems to be calm, finally. I didn’t want the last image of her to be one of an angry person.
If it differs from more conventional storytelling, I think one of the reasons is because I wasn’t taught these conventions. I didn’t need to get rid of these rules: I never learnt them.
GK: In the scene 11 years later with Pamela’s aunt in the café, I worried you might fall into the trap of too much exposition, but the scene is very touching.
MHL: I love filming people talking. I always thought it was a relevant way of using cinema, capturing presences. When I write those scenes, it’s not so much about the information they give, it’s more about the faces, the interiority they express—their past and their present.
GK: It’s bad exposition when you have to tell the audience something that the characters already know, right? Watching Pamela’s face, it makes us get into her POV and really feel something for her.
MHL: The more she learns, the more it says about how much she is unaware of—in the end, all she knows is that her father was in trouble for many years, that he suffered a lot. I also like the contrast between the story the aunt tells, which is very dark, and her face, which is quite luminous. Victor is the dark brother; she’s the supportive, luminous sister, some reverse mirror of him.
GK: Victor is like a Bresson character.
MHL: Yeah, I know what you mean. I must have thought about it because Bresson was always on my mind. And Victor was the one character who conveyed for me that idea of cinema, a certain quest for truth through actors, who should be very direct, straightforward—and habited. It’s true, in my head, Victor was always a Bressonian character. Not that I was trying to make the film look Bressonian, though.
But when I was looking for the actor to play Victor, I was hoping to find someone who would be that way. And then I met Paul Blain, by chance, at a screening that he was introducing of his father Gerard’s films.
It was like a miracle to me. He was everything I was looking for. He had an interiority combined with a rawness that I loved. I still admire Paul in the film as much today as I did 15 years ago, even after working with Isabelle Huppert and other great actors. There’s something about Paul’s simplicity and authenticity that I find very special, rare. And it’s ironic when I think back to when the film was released in France and the reception was divided, partly because people were so critical of him.
GK: Really?
MHL: Really critical. Yeah, yeah. But he was actually the first of a series of actors that I then had similar experiences with. I mean, the unknown actors I’ve worked with have often been criticized by people who thought their acting was inappropriate, or strange somehow—especially the men in my films. I often heard that. I never regretted my choices, I always thought they were right, but I progressively got convinced that my perception of “rightness” in acting is different from most people’s.
In the case of Paul, there were of course some who loved him. And now, with time, whenever my film is screened, I have the feeling people understand him better. But I remember when we were showing the film to the press, I was disconcerted because many thought his performance was problematic. I am still convinced it was because of how simple and true he is. Sometimes when actors don’t act in a way that you can see what they’re doing, people think they’re not there enough. They have to see the acting process, the intentions, the struggle—the work.
GK: Many characters in your films have double lives. As well as Victor, I’m also thinking of Gregoire in your second film, The Father of My Children (2009), the producer character who was inspired by Humbert Balsan. And also Chris [Vicky Krieps’s character] in Bergman Island.
Bergman Island (2021)
MHL: Yes. And also Camille in Goodbye First Love (2011), in the third part. In Bergman Island, there is Chris’s life on the island, and the one she imagines in her script—which may be her own double life, we don’t really know. But the fiction she tells connects with Camille’s double life in Goodbye First Love.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find it difficult to live only one life? I guess making films is an expression of this. I’m recreating another life parallel to my own. Contrary to what has been often said, my films are never really autobiographical. You can’t really tell your life in a film or it would be very, very boring. So these characters and their stories are reinterpretations of my life—and another life, in the end.
The more films I make, the more I feel like living in two parallel worlds, moving from one to the other. Even when they look similar from the outside, they have their own lives, so to speak.
Regarding the characters of my film having a double love life—well, in a time when people are so judgmental, I’m not so judgmental about this. It’s not like they are murderers or something—it’s just, people have difficulties with their feelings. Sometimes, they are divided. They love two people at the same time, and that’s part of what life is about. To me, it’s not a crime. But I realize, in the time we live in, I have to justify it.
In my last film [One Fine Morning, 2022], Léa Seydoux’s character falls in love with a guy who already has a partner. He’s having an affair. He’s lying—it’s bad, but that doesn’t make him evil, it just makes him a tormented guy. And in the end, he makes a choice.
Ethics, to me, has more to do with the “mise en scène” than with the weaknesses and failings of the characters.
And the way I relate to characters is not only determined by gender—I can identify as much with the men as with the women. Even though my last films are more focused on women, I really hope I’ll make more films with men as main characters.
GK: I wanted to ask about managing actors. You’ve worked with some big personalities at this point: Léa Seydoux, Isabelle Huppert, Tim Roth… I know in your experience there have been some anxieties that come with that.
MHL: I guess that’s what films are about. You have to accept when you make films that you’re dealing with human chaos. I mean, shooting a film is not like writing a script. It’s not you alone in your room. It’s difficult—and every day is difficult. The actors have their own issues. They have to feel well. They have to like you. But what if they don’t like you? What if, for some reason, they’re not at ease with you, or the scenes? What if they criticize the lines? If they don’t want to play the scene the way you want them to? You really discover them on the set.
At some point, you start wishing to just make animation films. It would be so much easier to not use actors. But I need and I want actors—they are an essential part of the soul of my films. So I must deal with who they are. Even the nicest ones have their problems. And it makes them fragile to be filmed, even the strongest ones, you know? It puts them in a state of vulnerability. Even very experienced actors for whom you’d think everything should be so easy.
One Fine Morning (2022)
GK: Tell me, just for fun, how long it takes you to write a script, how long it takes you to shoot the movie, and how long it takes you to edit—on average, obviously.
MHL: To write a script, I think six months. To shoot, two months and a half. And to edit, less than three months to get a quite clean version. But to get the final version, where I don’t change anything more, it takes maybe one more month—not because I edit all day, but because sometimes you need time outside of the editing room. To think about and hesitate between two shots or two cuts, and to make the final decisions, about music too.
GK: Have you noticed your process change—become faster, slower?
MHL: I am faster. I can shoot a scene in less takes. When I did my third film, Goodbye First Love, sometimes I would do 15 takes, 17 takes. It went a bit crazy. The dailies were good, but I just wanted to do it again and again and again. They could not stop me. Now, after five or six takes, if it’s good I can stop.
But then there’s this problem I have never solved: I write scripts with too many different locations. They’re not necessarily expensive films in the sense that the locations are not luxurious locations—they can be small apartments, or street corners, or whatever—but I always write many short scenes in many different locations. Bergman Island is really the only film that has this one location, the island. On the island, there are other locations, but it is all the island, which made the experience so great and easy for me; I loved exploring this one place. It felt like a miracle that I had this idea for a film that allowed me to work that way. But that has happened only once. All the other scripts implied tons of different locations—that’s how my inspiration works, I don’t know why.
GK: Hollywood people, industry people, they love working on stages because you don’t really have to move. Americans love films that have a limited amount of locations and characters.
MHL: Do you think they save money by working on stages?
GK: Maybe it’s a control thing? Netflix and the networks, they can all be there with their monitors and in their little meeting rooms, controlling everything. When you’re moving different locations all the time, it can be hard for people to follow you around.
MHL: Yeah. That reminds me of a conversation I had with Damien Chazelle in Venice [where Hansen-Løve was on the 2023 Competition jury]. He was telling me about this horrifying expression, the “village video”…
GK: You never heard of “video village”?
MHL: No. It was the first time. It sounds exotic. Damien Chazelle was explaining to me that it’s actually great because you can send everyone there, far from the set… and then relax. But this idea of the “video village” where the producers and team gather in front of screens; it’s really the opposite of how I work.
Also, the kind of locations I’m looking for need to have their own past, their own soul. I don’t think you can create that on a stage. I like the feeling of being among real people in streets which have a history. I’ve never had to film on a stage; as long as I can avoid it, I will.
GK: Do you shoot all of the scripts that you write? I ask because every American writer-director I talk to has, like, six scripts, in a drawer, things they couldn’t get financed. It seems in Europe when you write a script you are going to shoot that script—you’re going to bring it to the finish line regardless of what the industry tells you.
MHL: I’m the European type. Where I write a script, I’m going to do it, whatever happens. I’ll find a way. I have to.
It would be very dramatic for me not to shoot a finished script, because when I write a film, it becomes another me. Like right now: I’m writing a film and I live with it, I think about it all the time. I’m inhabited by that story, by the characters. If someone were to tell me in two months, “Oh listen, you’re not going to do it, just put it in a drawer and maybe in a couple of years…” that would be a tragedy. I don’t know how I would handle it. I have been lucky so far, it hasn’t happened.
GK: So you’ve shot everything. Every script you’ve finished, you’ve shot?
Mia Hansen-Løve on the set of Eden (2014)
MHL: Yes. Eden was the one that probably came the closest to not being made. It was supposed to be a four-hour film, divided in two films. It’s the one film that changed the most between the original version and what it became. It ended up being only one film, two and a half hours long.
There were so many times when I thought it was hopeless. The film was too expensive and not commercial enough—we didn’t get the money—and there were no famous actors involved. But something in me couldn’t let go. I really wanted that film to happen.
GK: I think that’s so amazing. It’s not the way American producers think about how you make films. If it doesn’t work, you put it in “development hell,” they call it.
MHL: Oh, my God. And what about British films? I’m curious because I’m writing this British film. Am I going to be treated the same way as you are in America ?
GK: I don’t think so. It’s different in the UK. So you’re doing another English-language film?
MHL: Yeah. It’s quite different from what I have done before—it’s a period film. I’m close to the end now, so hopefully we’ll be shooting by the end of next summer, if the whole process goes the way we want it to.
GK: It seems to be a constant in your life as a filmmaker—you get things done the way you want them. You’re determined.
MHL: Is that so unusual?
GK: I think that’s very unusual today, yeah.
MHL: Because I’m lucky? Or I’m more determined than other directors? Or because I’m French? Or all of this at the same time?
GK: All of that at the same time.
Gabe Klinger is a filmmaker and occasional contributor to film periodicals who splits his time between São Paulo and Chicago. His films Porto (2016) and Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater (2013) are available in the US from Kino Lorber.
All Is Forgiven (2007)
