Am I the only one who is suuuperexcited about the Vogue Paris issue? I can't wait to find out what's inside. I hope the "en vogue" pages are focused on her style (they were with the Coppola, Moss and Galliano issues) and I hope there'll be something with pictures of her family.
Charlotte Gainsbourg plays a version of Bob Dylan's first wife in I'm Not There, a re-enactment of the singer's life with multiple actors playing him (in theaters Wednesday). "I panicked — a lot," says Gainsbourg, 36. Here's what the Paris-based star tells USA TODAY about Dylan, Cate Blanchett and the legendary Hermès Birkin bag, named for her mom. Q:How did you come to play Claire in the Todd Haynes film?
A: He contacted me at the end of 2004. I was just so surprised that he knew about me, and he was offering this part. I read the script, read it twice, before calling him again. I didn't know enough about Dylan himself to be able to understand the part. I did a bit of research before I called him back, and in the end we talked over the phone. That's how we communicated until the day before we shot. I never met him. It was so weird. Q:At least your sex scene was with Heath Ledger. What an amazing cast — Cate Blanchett plays Dylan, too.
A: I saw Cate Blanchett do some scenes, and I was really intimidated. (But) I just abandoned myself to the film. His music, the possibilities of who he could be, who he pretended to be — that's what I find so interesting. Q:When did you become a fan of his music?
A: Very early, when I was 13 or 14. (But) I never even saw him on stage. I asked my father (singer Serge Gainsbourg, who died in 1991) if I had to buy one song, what I should buy, and he said Lay, Lady, Lay. It never left me. It was my father's pick. Q:You're quite a pop star yourself, with your 2006 hit album5:55.Any plans to release more music?
A: I'd love to. It took me 20 years to release another album (after 1986's Charlotte for Ever, featuring the scandalous duet Lemon Incest with her father), but it took me 10 to feel that I was able to do it. I didn't feel comfortable. I didn't feel that I was a singer. I didn't know who I was going to work with. It was when I met (French duo) Air that I was sure we wanted to work together. Q:You recorded an album and starred in movies in your teens. Would you let your son Ben, 10,and daughter Alice, 5(with director/actor partner Yvan Attal)do the same thing?
A: My son already shot a film with us. He was playing our son. We asked ourselves a lot of questions. I'm happy I started that young. It was a choice, even though I was 12. I knew what I wanted. It was a lot of fun for me. I'm so happy my parents let me do that. But it was another time, and you feel that the movie industry was less difficult. My parents didn't push me. I would be worried for a young boy or young girl to start and be on their own. It's a weird question. My son, hopefully he'll find something else to do. Q:How do you feel after having brain surgery in September (after a water-skiing accident)?
A: Oh good, good. It was very scary. It's over. Two years ago, I broke a vertebrae doing snowboarding. So my entourage is saying, 'Please stop sliding sports.' I was going to go surfing, but I'm not sure now. I don't think I'm really made for that. Because I had this accident, I had to take it slowly. It's quite nice. Q:Hermès named the Birkin bag after your mother, actress Jane Birkin, and the bag is almost impossible to get. How many of them do you own?
A: None. I couldn't have a bag that's my mother's. I couldn't go out with it.
It's a great fashion thing in America, because they're so tough to find. For me, it's her bag and nobody else's. I'm very proud it has such success.
Quote:
Daughter dearest
Charlotte Gainsbourg has stepped out of the shadow of her famous father, Serge, to become more fashionable than ever. She speaks with Andrew Pulver.
Charlotte Gainsbourg's speaking voice is one of the strangest around: reedy and fluting. Her sentences are measured and precise, as if she's always thinking about punctuation.
Even though she grew up in Paris, and still lives there, she doesn't seem to have a trace of a French accent. But Gainsbourg isn't having it. "Always when I'm speaking English, it's like I'm pretending to be fluent. I don't feel fluent at all." This comes out in textbook-perfect English, of course.
It's a pertinent point because in her latest film, Gainsbourg is, once again, playing an Englishwoman. In past years she's played Jane Eyre - a perfectly appropriate use of her spectrally weird voice and otherworldly screen presence - and in Nuovomondo (aka The Golden Door), she's back doing the Jane Eyre thing, playing a turn-of-the-century Englishwoman with a secret sorrow.
Does playing English bring out her English side, I ask. "I'm French," she says. "I'm much more comfortable speaking French. It's easier to express myself in French. I'm not looking for words; it's much more natural."
Gainsbourg is, of course, possibly the most famous half-French, half-English person in the world. Born in London, she is the only offspring of professional provocateur Serge Gainsbourg and socialite-cum-actress Jane Birkin. Still only 35, she has been a bona fide film star in France for more than 20 years, raised two children and been declared the world's most stylish woman in this year's style edition of Vanity Fair.
More significantly, perhaps, she was the subject of sustained, and very public, adulation from her father (who died in 1991) during early adolescence, culminating in their 1986 duet on a song called Lemon Incest.
It appeared on an album he wrote for her titled (with characteristic reticence) Charlotte for Ever. (The video, in which she and her father snuggle up on a king-size bed with black satin sheets, is an object lesson in edge-of-legality queasiness.) Gainsbourg pere also wrote and directed a film called Charlotte for Ever at the same time; 15-year-old Charlotte was required to do a nude scene.
These days, in spite of it all, Gainsbourg looks suprisingly normal. She's also very careful with her words - as much, perhaps, because of her nervousness with the language as her complicated upbringing. Largely due to her father's tireless idolatry, she made her mark as an actress quickly (she played the lead in L'Effrontee, her first significant film, aged 13) but found it more difficult to turn acting into a career. "I was always doing something," she says, "but it was much slower than I expected. Nothing was really happening. I was never a workaholic; I was doing one film a year, quite slow. Then with My Wife is an Actress, I stepped out of something. I don't know how to explain it. It happened with that film."
Indeed it did. My Wife is an Actress, written and directed by Yvan Attal (an actor, with whom she has had two children), was a career hinge. Up untilMy Wife, whether she knew it or not, the timid but apparently pliable Gainsbourg had the dubious honour of being the muse to one older man after another: her father, directors Claude Miller, David Bailey and Franco Zeffirelli.
All that passivity seemed to vanish overnight. "Back then," she says, "I was less . . . voluntaire. I was waiting around a lot, and moaning a lot. When Yvan, my boyfriend, wrote My Wife, he wrote a different character for me. He wanted to show me in a different way." Attal, whom she met on the set of Autobus in 1990, developed My Wife is an Actress as a riff on the pressures that the secretive Gainsbourg faced from the public.
In response to My Wife, Gainsbourg has become a lot more voluntaire. Instead of opting for surrogate father figures, she has yoked herself to some of international cinema's more exciting talent. There was a small role in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 21 Grams, then a somewhat bigger one in the freaky Lemming, directed by Dominik Moll. This was capped by a lead role in The Science of Sleep, the creation of the undisputed leader of France's newest wave, Michel Gondry. And it's the same impulse that has seen her join Emanuele Crialese for The Golden Door, and Todd Haynes, in his just-shot Bob Dylan biopic. Cinematically speaking, Gainsbourg hasn't been this fashionable for years.
Perhaps it also explains her increasing confidence in the recording studio. As with her films, it helps to have powerful backup - Air and Jarvis Cocker worked on last year's album, 5:55 - but you can tell immediately that music is something she likes talking about. She even starts talking about her father - a subject that had been deemed off-limits.
"It was a very important step for me, in itself," she says. "I did my first album with my father 20 years ago. I thought I would never do anything without him. There was no point, it would never happen. And then with time I gradually wanted to do something again. I didn't know how, or with who. I knew I couldn't do anything on my own. So when I met Air, it all became possible."
She wouldn't sing in French, she says. "I told them, it's too heavy for me, because of my father." By now, Gainsbourg is positively voluble. "The whole process lasted more than a year. I was there every day. Sometimes I didn't have anything to do, because the words weren't written yet. It was like a workshop."
There's no stopping her now. Despite a reputation for terminal shyness, she is thinking about singing live. "People have asked me to. I thought that I wouldn't like it, but then Air are doing their concerts all over the world at the moment, and I went with them for four shows. It was quite terrifying. I only did two songs. I got a glimpse of what it could be, and I don't think I was very good, but I wasn't disgusted by it."
- Guardian
Merci Diorette.Thank you very much for the pics,i'll definitely buy it Thursday !!!
This will probably be my fav number of Paris Vogue with the Sophia Coppola one.
14-11-2007
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