Louis Garrel: ‘I have a good friend from Ireland. When he speaks I don’t understand a word’

It would not be overstating matters to argue that Louis Garrel comes from French thespian royalty. His grandfather was the busy actor Maurice Garrel. His dad has been directing for more than 50 years and, just this year, at the age of 74, won best director at the Berlin Film Festival. Brigitte Sy, his mother, is a tireless actor, director and educator.

Garrel was surely destined — doomed? — to a life on the screen.

“No, to be honest. In the beginning I was only interested in playing on stage,” he says in lively, fluid English. “My dream, when I was 17, was always to appear at the Comédie-Française. That was my dream. Not making movies. I couldn’t see that dream. I could see the dream of watching movies. But not playing in movies. I could see there was a life for an actor on stage. But I started to have panic attacks on stage.”

Really? Stage-fright?

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“Oh, yeah. I am very anxious. Anyway, to answer your question, when I was 12 I saw my grandfather on stage…”

And he has a story about the great man changing identity before the audience.

Just past his 40th birthday (not that you’d guess that), Garrel throbs with accommodating charm. He is keen to wrestle every question into submission. He enjoys a bit of creative self-deprecation. Then again, he has a great deal to be charming about. Over the past two decades Garrel has developed into one of his nation’s most sought-after actors.

He first made a mark outside his home country in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, from 2003. He made fine films with Christophe Honoré and with his own father. He played Jean-Luc Godard in Michel Hazanavicius’s undervalued Le Redoutable. He played Alfred Dreyfus in Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy.

Meanwhile, he developed an increasingly successful sideline as a director. His fourth feature, The Innocent, premiered at Cannes, became a hit in its home country and won him a César award for best original screenplay. That is no small thing. A “French Oscar”.

“For writing! I was super proud of that,” he says. “But more that so many people came to see the film. I could taste the joy of a successful movie … The ambition was to make a film for le grand public. Also because the film is autobiographical. And I remember films where the director has lost himself in memories. He thinks his life can be interesting to others, and it’s not.”

Let’s talk about that. In The Innocent, Garrel stars as a young man who gets drawn into an agreeably absurd heist after his mother, who teaches acting in a prison, marries one of her soon-to-be-released students. Garrel’s own mum ran theatre workshops in jails for many years and attended one such wedding.

“My mother worked in jail for 15 years,” he says. “One day she announced she was having a wedding in jail. That was the beginning of the plot. I wanted to mix autographic attributes with film noir to have unique noir. I thought if you mix those in it will become more original. You started the conversation saying the film was also emotional. I was talking about the life of my mother.”

All four of the characters he has played in his own films have been called Abel. It looks as if he is developing an easily replicable cinematic persona. The character alters. But enough traits remain to weave the oeuvre together. You see some of this in Woody Allen’s films. Garrel finds a more useful comparison with a great Italian film-maker.

“It’s a good avatar,” he says. “I also hide myself but not totally. It’s always difficult for me to explain why I named my character Abel. In the beginning it was maybe more easy to call him the same name. I don’t have to remember the name of the character. Ha ha! Also maybe I wanted to imitate Nanni Moretti.”

[ Eva Green: ‘It’s great to go bonkers. You are not able to do that in real life’ ]

It seems Garrell made his film debut, at just six years old, in his father’s film Les Baisers de Secours. Growing up intervened, and, come the new century, after studying at the Conservatoire de Paris, he secured a few roles in French films before landing Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. It was an auspicious launch. Co-starring the similarly fast-rising Michael Pitt and Eva Green, the sexually explicit drama went among students as Paris sunk into the quasi-rebellion that was “les événements” of May 1968.

How did he find Bertolucci? The Italian director had previously investigated the sexual life of the French capital with Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris. An intimidating predecessor.

“When I met him I was 19 years old and I was super afraid,” Garrel says. “You heard about his reputation. He had worked with Marlon Brando. And you know about the sexual reputation of his movies. But he was so seductive and so intelligent. At the first meeting, he was talking about Marlon Brando. He said to me, ‘You know, Marlon Brando didn’t want to talk to me after the shoot.’ I asked why. He said, ‘Because I asked him to pull off the Stanislavski mask. And he was pissed off with me.’ I had such a great relationship with Eva and Michael it was like a dream. At the end Bernardo said, ‘The dream is over,’ and I wanted to cry.”

[ Bertolucci’s legacy marred by ugly stories about ‘Last Tango’ ]

Garrel, an immediate force in French cultural life, seems to have needed no coaching on how the levers of the nation’s cinema function. Roles came quickly. He had the right sort of face for magazine covers. He was the husband of the film director Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (yes, sister of the former French first lady Carla Bruni) from 2007 until 2012, and married the actor Laetitia Casta in 2017. He doesn’t seem to have any huge ambitions — why would he? — to appear in American films, but he was charming in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, from 2019.

“No I didn’t really have that ambition,” he says. “The last movie I did in English was Little Women with Greta. That was a fantastic experience. But I never had this dream about making movies in the US. Mostly because, when I was 20 years old, I read an interview of Jean Renoir and the journalist asked, ‘What could be your advice to a young director?’ He said, ‘Speak about what you know.’”

Over the past few years, he has turned up in films by two controversial film-makers. He made An Officer and a Spy with Roman Polanski in 2019 and Rifkin’s Festival with Woody Allen in 2020. We hardly need to work through the arguments gathering around both directors. Garrel and I speak as mutterings greet the arrival of their succeeding films — Allen’s Coup de Chance and Polanski’s The Palace — at the imminent Venice Film Festival. Garrel is diplomatic.

“People are not angry about celebrating the movie,” he says. “I think maybe they are more angry about celebrating the person. I think that’s okay. If it’s that then it’s okay. I can understand that.”

Maybe the film is too serious, right? Maybe the director should have made the movie even more crazy

—  Louis Garrel

Mention of Polanski reminds us that Garrel has already played two of the most resonant figures in modern French life. His portrayal of the director Jean-Luc Godard did not delight everyone — Godard was a quasi-deity in some circles — but, to those on board with the cheeky Le Redoutable, his performance was a comic masterclass. Satirical but still respectful. There was, to me, something of Mel Brooks about the exercise.

“Yes. Maybe. Maybe the film is too serious, right? Maybe the director should have made the movie even more crazy.”

When I mention Alfred Dreyfus, the army officer whose conviction for treason remains central to French discussions of anti-Semitism, he reminds me there was another iconic French man to get the Garrel treatment.

“That was a great responsibility,” he says. “I was afraid of their reaction. So nobody knew Alfred Dreyfus. But also, when I played Robespierre during the French Revolution, I felt that … character was so symbolic in French history.”

Golly. Who next? De Gaulle? Vercingetorix? He actually is playing King Louis XIII in an upcoming Three Musketeers flick. No wonder he can’t find time for overseas roles. And his English is so good. He puts me to shame with my awful French.

“Don’t be ashamed. I have a good friend who is from Ireland. When he speaks I don’t understand a word. So I have to pretend I understand what he tells me. Most of the time we speak with the hands. Ha ha!”

Nice guy.

The Innocent is in cinemas from Friday, August 25th