For Benedict Andrews, Kristen Stewart has some distinctive qualities as an actress: “As a performer, she works from somewhere quite raw. She will kind of throw herself at takes and she’ll often pull herself up if she feels she’s out of tune. She’ll break a take, swearing and cussing like a sailor. She has an incredible truth barometer.”
When he first met her in a Los Angeles restaurant to discuss the screenplay for his new movie, Seberg, she was all business: “There was no small talk. We jumped straight into unpacking the script, talking about (the character), and in that first session it was as if we had already rolled up our sleeves and started to work together, and we never looked back.”
Andrews, an Australian filmmaker based in Iceland who has a long history in theatre and opera, is increasingly turning his energies to film.
At first glance Seberg, his second feature, is a biopic, a portrait of the American actress forever remembered from her role in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 Breathless: cropped blonde hair, New York Herald Tribune T-shirt and an insouciant act of betrayal.
Andrews’s portrait of Jean Seberg, from a screenplay by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, explores some of the ups and downs of her career and private life in Hollywood and Europe, but focuses on the actress at a particular moment in time.
In the 1960s a politically aware Seberg began donating money to civil rights causes, including supporting the Black Panthers. She came to the attention of the FBI, which put her under surveillance and used media contacts to spread stories about her that were intended to destroy her reputation.
This tension, says Andrews, forms the centre of Seberg: “the tragedy of watching a luminous life be damaged and destroyed by FBI harassment, and the truth of her life turned into a lie”.
The film is in some senses a double portrait: it’s an exploration of the figure of fictional FBI agent Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell), a zealous young operative who initially throws himself into the task of covert observation with complete conviction.
To bring out the obsessive, voyeuristic nature of this process, Andrews made a film that saw him “interweaving the story of the watcher and the watched”.
He is quick to acknowledge that a film about filmmaking also heightens some of the movie’s themes: “Surveillance has been a big topic in my theatre work and I think an interest in voyeurism comes with the job. After all, in theatre and in filmmaking I spend my time watching people reveal the most private aspects of their lives and their beings and then invite other people, the audience, to come and do the same.”
It’s an activity that Jack, the FBI agent, is also involved in, “using the same machinery as cinema, cameras and microphones, to look into the minutiae of somebody’s life. I was very interested in those parallels between filmmaking and surveillance, and the idea of truth in both of them.
“Jean is trying to find truth as an actress,” he says, “to mine her most private memories, dreams and emotions, and all the things that are usually kept hidden. She has to reveal them for her work. And she’s also trying to find an authenticity in her politics and her romantic life.”
This part of her world included a relationship with Black Panther, Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie).
“Jack thinks he’s after truth,” Andrews says. “He believes at the beginning of the film in the American dream and he believes in his role as an agent, that he’s fighting the good fight. Then he realises he’s involved in the corruption of it and the weaponisation of truth to destroy political enemies.”
Yet the act of surveillance, Andrews adds, the collection of the minutiae of another person’s life, also allows Jack an insight into that life, and an emotional connection to it, particularly as he witnesses Seberg in free fall. At the same time, making a film about a cinematic subject has its risks.
“There’s a real danger when actors play actors,” Andrews says. “You can end up with a mask. Admittedly Jean isn’t as famous as a James Dean or a Marilyn Monroe, but even so, an actor can feel burdened or haunted” representing someone with a film legacy.
Seberg embraces the many faces of Jean, re-creating scenes from her films, showing her at fashion shoots, press conferences, interviews and film sets, as well as in her most private, solitary and fragile moments — and as a woman under observation.
Andrews never thought Stewart was in any danger of falling into that trap. “She really cared deeply about Jean and her story,” he says, “but she never became protective and she was never playing an idea, she was always trying to find the person from the inside out.
“This was important for me and it was something that I had a hunch she would be able to do because of this kind of volatility she has an actress.”
During the production of Seberg, Andrews says, the events of the film had some disturbing contemporary resonances. The often clumsy analog tools of surveillance of the 60s have been transformed into familiar, ubiquitous, everyday objects that accompany us everywhere and record us without our knowledge or consent.
“There’s this mass culture of surveillance and the movie is a warning about the dangers and abuses of that,” he says.
At the same time, Seberg has an elegance to it, even though it’s made with what Andrews describes as “a scrappy indie budget, way below a period movie that’s shot on film in LA should be”.
He puts much of this down to cinematographer Rachel Morrison and costume designer Michael Wilkinson, who worked alongside production designer Jahmin Assa.
The Australian-born Wilkinson, who was nominated for an Oscar for American Hustle, has an eclectic slate of superhero, fantasy and indie movies to his name and has worked with Stewart before on one of the Twilight movies.
For Seberg, Andrews says the designer’s challenge was to invoke the distinctive worlds of Hollywood, the FBI and the Black Panthers, “and I think his work is just astounding”.
And Morrison, he says, was particularly impressive in the way she approached the handheld camera work in the second half of the film, during scenes that convey Seberg’s vulnerability and despair.
“She’s smart,” he says, “very sensitive, and she had a great team working with her. We were both very happy to be shooting on film and we wanted to shoot a movie with a very contemporary sensibility in terms of the storytelling yet at the same time leaning into those paranoia thrillers of the 70s. We drew on those, we used similar lenses to the ones Gordon Willis used on (films such as The Parallax View and Klute), but we never wanted to make a nostalgic film.”
He is rather pleased, nevertheless, by one aspect of Seberg that could almost qualify as nostalgia.
In researching the Black Panther movement he found a 1968 documentary short by French filmmaker Agnes Varda to be an invaluable resource. He had thought some of the footage from Black Panthers might make it into Seberg but the rights proved too complicated to acquire.
Instead, he found other film shot on one of the days Varda was shooting a Panthers event. So, instead of footage by her, there’s a fleeting glimpse of Varda. “I’m extremely proud she’s in the movie,” he says.
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