Introducing her friend Daniele Thompson’s new film Cezanne et moi at a special screening at the Whitby Hotel last week, Diane von Furstenberg noted the painterly look, the sheer beauty of this movie. The audience of artists in all media could not have been more fitting: Marina Abramovic, Eric Fishl, Ahn Duong, Bennett Miller, Ellen Burstyn, Fran Leibowitz, Brigitte Lacombe, Art Spiegelman, among many others. Cezanne et moi, limns the intense and passionate friendship between two towering figures of world culture, painter Paul Cezanne and writer Emile Zola, imagining them as schoolmates, and rivals in art and love.
Just before the movie’s premiere, I had breakfast with Daniele Thompson, the esteemed director of Avenue Montaigne, co-writer of Cousin, Cousine, and the actor Guillaume Gallienne, who stars as Cezanne. Both Thompson and Gallienne identified with these artists’ struggles, while recognizing Cezanne as something of a mad genius. Thompson originally wanted Gallienne to play Zola. As it turned out, Guillaume Canet, the film’s Zola, and straight man in the bromance, could not make the celebration as his real-life partner Marion Cotillard was just giving birth to their child.
How much is known about this artistic relationship between Zola and Cezanne in France?
They are known as individuals, part of our culture and education. There’s hardly anything about them together. I dug into their relationship to see if there was a film in this story, helped by a new publication of their letters together.
You show them in an artistic milieu, among such figures as Pisarro and Manet.
DT: They are historic, the father of abstraction and the father of natualism. What’s interesting is to see them at 20, at 25. They were the rock stars. I mean like rock stars of the 1960’s.
In the US, Cezanne is well known. Even Gertrude Stein did a portrait of him. Zola, not so much.
DT: I knew more about Zola. As a writer, I know more about writers. I read his books. I knew nothing about Cezanne’s life, how he was ignored during his life. Difficult, obsessed, he retreated to his home in the south, Aix en Provence. Later in his life, people began to ask, what’s going on in Aix? I didn’t even know he was the son of bourgeoisie.
How did you find the film’s structure?
DT: This is not a biopic. It became natural to me not to go in a simple straight line, but go back in time to the great moments they had together: They were opposites. One rich, and lives like a tramp, the other poor and becomes bourgeois. Both were good scholars, in Latin and French, with great educations. Zola did his best work between the ages of 25 and 45. Cezanne did his best work is the last years of his life. They broke up in 1888. These moments defined the script. I gave the script to Guillaume and wanted him for Zola.
GG: I love the script but I wanted to be Cezanne. I had the feeling the Zola part was more like what I did in the Yves Saint Laurent biopic as Pierre Berge, straight guy. I want to be the manic-depressive. I also loved that the script was not a classical biopic. I loved the construction, of going deeper and deeper. You are always discovering. What’s going on between these two? Daniele agreed to have a reading. So I went to her place for a script reading and two minutes in she said, oh by the way, he has an accent so I created a southern accent.
DT: This was an issue with French audiences, because Cezanne was uncomfortable about his accent.
What other difficulties were there in the creation of this character?
GG: Cezanne was depressive, but also a maniac. Loud and strong. My father was a bit like that so I knew how to play him, what the volume was, the energy. The idea of never being recognized and less so by your best friend who doesn’t understand you, and doesn’t like what you do. I thought that was very interesting, and touching. I had to figure out, how can you be a touching pain in the ass? The breakthrough was love, and shaving my head. It helps to dedicate and focus. To be Cezanne, I had no beard and no hair –to make the wigs work. For months I had to apply cream and hats, to protect my head from the sun.
How much of the story you tell is fiction?
DT: Well, their last weekend together never happened. And I took liberties in their relationships with women. Cezanne introduced Gabrielle (her name at the time) to Zola his best friend; maybe she was his mistress as well as his model. From being a simple girl, she became the writer’s wife and took this role very seriously. She did not like Cezanne later on, did not like his paintings, stashing them in the attic. I emphasized their competition around Gabrielle who took the name Alexandrine. That’s my interpretation. We know very little about Hortense, Cezanne’s lover. He did paintings of her, none naked. I had him do naked ones. I made her a tactless person. He was not proud of her. He loved only his mother, and his son, and was obsessed by his work. Cezanne married Hortense when their son was 6, not admitting the relationship to his parents. He could not love himself. He started loving his work after a while.
Do actors and writers face the same artistic challenges?
GG: Cezanne knew that he was a genius but he could not do what he wanted to do; he knew what he wanted to do but it took him many years to achieve it. Pisarro was the only one who liked him. He said, come and paint with me. Calm down. The evolution of his work is fascinating. I have that as an actor. Erase, erase. Less is more, and sometimes you can’t do it.
DT: Any writer goes through what Guillaume is talking about. I used a lot of Zola’s book, The Masterpiece. For the violent scene when Zola observes Cezanne fighting with Hortense, when Cezanne saw how Zola wrote about it, he was enraged by the poetic rendering. “You write like God. You changed my life,” Cezanne was enraged by the way Zola used his life to make art. Yet Zola writes about the pain of finding the right words, not the banal words of everyday life. When I write, it is the same for me. And when I make a film, I am obsessed. I was with these two men all the time. Filming Cezanne et moi, I lived more in the 19th century, far away from these difficult times.
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