Eva Green is a slender but voluptuous 23-year-old French actress suddenly caught in the eye of a hurricane. It has been created by the veteran Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, who has been like a weatherman throughout his 40-year career, anticipating climate change in films. He’s on familiar terrain with this one. It’s all about sex. For those who recall the controversy about Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, in 1973, be assured of one thing. This is much worse. Or better, depending on your point of view.
If it took only two to tango in Paris, Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, there is now a potent ménage à trois in The Dreamers. Green’s sexually confident Isabelle is at the axis, pursuing a relationship with her brother Theo (Louis Garrel) that veers tantalisingly near to incest, as well as one with a visiting American, Matthew (Michael Pitt), who seems completely out of his depth as she flaunts and teases.
The film’s controversial cocktail of full-frontal scenes, masturbation, three-in-a-bath and sex on a kitchen floor was warmly applauded by critics after the premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival. But long before cases of vino were uncorked at a party along the Lido, executives at Twentieth Century Fox in Los Angeles were recording a completely different verdict over their mineral water and canapés. Cuts, cuts and more cuts needed to be made before the film was even screened in Manhattan, let alone Mississippi. The film’s 63-year-old director was apoplectic. “The film must not be amputated and mutilated,” he declared. “Some people obviously think the American public is immature. Last Tango opened with just a two-second cut. So what is going on here?” As the film finally receives its American premiere later this week at the Sundance Film Festival, he may find out. Fox Searchlight, a subsidiary that releases art films on behalf of the studio, has nervously pencilled in a March release in America, with cuts intended of up to 60 seconds.
All this, of course, is a free feast of publicity to marketing people, however po-faced they like to pretend to be. The fact that The Dreamers is being released in Britain uncut and full-on only adds more welcome clatter to the chatter. But where does this leave Eva Green? “Nervous, excited and curious,” she reports, with the kind of confidence she displays on screen. “And with no apology for anything you see me doing.” If Green sounds dead cool, then that is exactly how she appears: calm, dark-eyed, willowy, with a classy European beauty from her mix of a Swedish father and a French actress mother, Marlène Jobert. Her English is impeccable, with a waspish delivery. She crept up on the inside lane to nab the part, on the strength of a couple of plays after three years at Eva St Paul drama school in Paris and a 10-week polishing course at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
It has already worked wonders. The director Ridley Scott, a difficult man to please at the best of times, watched a preview of The Dreamers and immediately snapped her up as the female lead for his next big production, the lavish and costly Kingdom of Heaven, a story set during the Crusades, alongside Orlando Bloom and Liam Neeson. This time, she got the part without the casting marathon she underwent for The Dreamers, which started with simple questions about her politics, attitude to cinema and sexuality, and finished with a successful screen test in London opposite Jake Gyllenhaal, who was set to play the American role.
“But Jake eventually had a problem with the frontal nudity and dropped out,” Green reveals. “His lawyers got involved.” Such indiscretions continue to be served like foie gras, rich and exclusive, during our meeting. A few samples follow. What sort of prosthetic was the French actor Louis Garrel using during the masturbation scene? “No — this is the real noise,” she says. “He really was masturbating. I was very nervous for him, but he was so relaxed. It was the first sex scene to be filmed, too. He did two or three takes. He’s a very strong male.”
How about the key scene in which her character loses her virginity to the American on the kitchen floor, while being encouraged by her brother? “Bernardo stood above us like the leader of an orchestra,” she says. “He would say: ‘Okay, now start ... okay, orgasm ... okay, slow down.’ It was all very reassuring. There was a camera on my face at all times. That was about three or four takes.” Did she feel any moment of self-consciousness while parading around naked for hour after hour? “I did not even look at the faces of the sound and camera guys,” she says. “It was the only way I could deal with it, because I had to be so free with my body. Sometimes, they would say: ‘Do you want some alcohol to make you more relaxed?’ I admit that for one scene, I did have some whisky.”
And when she did a cheeky scene, disrobing Michael Pitt’s character to discover that he keeps a photograph of her under the zip of his trousers, how did she keep a straight face? “Michael had great difficulty in that scene,” she says. “That was very funny, because of some of the lines. It put him off — a lot. It is not easy to get an erection to order, unless you are a porn star.”
All this is delivered without a blush or hesitation. Green, despite protestations to the contrary, oozes a confident sexuality. She is not conventionally beautiful, and even her sleek figure is offset by a carelessness in how she sits and smokes, but she still manages to turn half-a-dozen heads in the lobby of the stylish Italian hotel where we meet.
But the film is not only about headline-grabbing explicit sex. It is based on a 1988 novel by Gilbert Adair, set against the backdrop of the Paris riots of 1968. The young American student is befriended by a French brother and sister when they discover he shares their love of cinema. They take him back to a lavish apartment owned by their parents, who are away on holiday. Their obsession with films is used to create their own world of role-playing and sex games, cut off from the rowdy Parisian streets and the growing anger of the crowds. Adair writes of the film, with a flourish: “It is about the spring: the springtime of Paris, the springtime of its political awakening and the springtime of their bodies. What happens inside the apartment seems to reflect, in a certain way, what is happening outside.”
Bertolucci, who was in Paris during that frenetic spring, is even more carried away by the memory of it. “There was something quite magic in the 1960s,” he says. “We were dreaming. We were fusing cinema, politics, jazz, rock’n’roll, sex, philosophy and dope. I was devouring it all.” It may not be the recollection of many who lived through it, but he insists: “There was hope in young people that you had never seen before, and never will again. The attempt to dive into the future, and freedom, was fantastic. It is the last time something happened that was so idealistic and so utopian.”
Even the film’s British producer, Jeremy Thomas, who delivered Bertolucci’s 1987 Oscar-winner, The Last Emperor, and has collaborated with the director three times since — on The Sheltering Sky (1990), Little Buddha (1993) and Stealing Beauty (1995) — fondly remembers the summer of 1968 as a key moment. “Paris was a central hotbed for lots of idealism — politics, lifestyle, a changing of moralities,” he says. “It was a very strong period in London when I was 19, but not nearly as strong as it was in Paris.”
Green, born around the time that most of the young rebel army of the 1960s had become eager recruits to the materialism of the 1980s, is typically more circumspect. “I cannot see it as much of a rebellion,” she shrugs. “What — or who — did it actually change? It cannot be compared with the real revolutions in Russia or in France. It strikes me now that everyone was pretty comfortable. Nobody was starving. They all had homes to go to afterwards.” She is also reflective about her character as a woman of mystery rather than adventure, which she is convinced mirrors the period. “She is inspired by the great actresses of the time — Greta Garbo, Lauren Bacall, Bette Davis — and she’s very ambiguous,” she says. “I think she is typical of her time in hiding a great sensitivity, and scared of being alone. Perhaps the 1960s were not quite so confident as people make out.”
She is far more acerbic when it comes to American censors. “They are going to cut the frontal nudity, the sex and the masturbation,” she says. “It is quite paradoxical, because in America there is so much violence, both on the streets and on the screen. They think nothing of it. Yet I think they are frightened by sex. I’ve had interviews with American journalists who have not actually seen the film, and they ask if I am going to make a career of sex movies. The answer is no.” The Dreamers, she insists, will be her first and last. “If you knew me, you would never think I was capable of such things,” she says. “I am very self-conscious of my body. I do not like looking at myself. I sleep in pyjamas. Even with my boyfriend, I can’t sleep naked.”
Her boyfriend of four years, a young actor called Yann Claasen, must have had a real shock, then, when he viewed what his girlfriend had done on screen. “He has not seen it yet,” she says. “I have not seen all of it myself, either. I was looking down for much of it. I have a lot of insecurity about my sexuality, and am very reserved. This is not me at all.”
Green, who has since made a demure French period movie called Arsène Lupin, set in the 1890s, with Kristin Scott Thomas, seems genuinely surprised at what she gets up to on screen. “Even after I had agreed to do it — and I knew exactly what I was getting involved in — I was having difficulty imagining actually doing it,” she recalls. “Michael was also shy, and remained so. But Louis helped us a lot. He was like a big kid.” Apparently, the actor came to Green’s trailer and made her an “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” offer. “It was like children. We got that over with, and it certainly broke the ice.”
There seems little chance that her long-term career will freeze over, as it did with Maria Schneider, all those years ago, once the initial furore over scenes with Brando had been forgotten. While Schneider’s plunge into desperation and unemployment is well recorded in France, Green prefers to concentrate on other Bertolucci discoveries who have prospered. Liv Tyler became established worldwide after Stealing Beauty, while Rachel Weisz’s debut in the same film — topless, by a swimming pool — has led to her becoming one of Britain’s richest screen actresses.
“A lot of actresses wanted this part,” says Green, who remains in bullish mood. “I never thought I was perfect for it, but I was given the chance. And I am not going to make excuses or say I have regrets, because I have none. If the censors want to ruin it, then that is their choice and their problem.”
The Dreamers opens on February 6
See the trailer for The Dreamers on January’s The Month CD-Rom
