Director Benedict Andrews talks 'Seberg' and mentions Kristen

Outtake Magazine

This is of course based on a true story. Did you have any knowledge of that history before they came to you with the screenplay?

Andrews: No, I didn’t.

Have you found it to be known at all?

It’s certainly not well-known. In my experience, people will know and adore Jean Seberg from Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and some people will know of her other films, but they tend not to know her history. That said, there are some people interested in American politics and that period who will know a lot about it. There is a lot of material, once you start to dig. But I think there is a reason why this wasn’t known, and it’s because those in power so effectively destroyed her and destroyed her truth. There’s been rumours in some of her biographies of there being attempts to tell this part of her story before, and of the FBI leaning in to stop these stories being told. I don’t think that’s the climate we live in; I think there’s now permission to talk about this era of Hoover’s FBI because enough time has passed.

The interesting thing is that, as that time has passed, the story becomes more about now. The writers wrote this script ten years ago and there were several attempts to get it made. When I came on board along with a new bunch of producers, then it happened fairly quickly. But I also think there’s a ‘film gods’ thing happening, in that now feels like exactly the right time to tell her story. And Kristen is the only actress I can think of to play her, which I think is something people are also really responding to: what Kristen stands for, where she’s at as an actress, the transformation she’s going through, and all of that. The similarities are spooky. What I’m saying is that I believe some movies get made when they need to be made.

Didn’t it first screen on the 40th anniversary of her death?

Yes it was, while we were in Venice.

Was that intentional?

It was a coincidence. I mean, we were shooting 50 years later, events from 1968-69, and so I was aware that the Los Angeles we were in was 50 years later and all of that… but it’s all the million coincidences that led that to happen… And it doesn’t look like it – it looks like a very lavish, very elegant film – but it’s made on an indie budget.

That might be surprising to some, because that limited budget doesn’t translate visually.

I don’t tend to say this, but it was a motherfucker to make. And to get that money, and to cross all those different worlds that the movie crosses with such authenticity… and we shot on film! And the costumes also look so authentic. So to get the kind of elegance and value that her life needed was difficult because we couldn’t go outside much. You know, Tarantino was shooting Once Upon A Time In Hollywood at the same time for 11 times the budget [$8 million versus $90 million], and he recreates the entirety of Sunset Boulevard! We can’t go out there but in a way – again with the film gods – the movie is about privacy and private space, so there’s a kind of special feeling that the movie gets by not being able to go outside. She leans out the window in New York and there’s the city, but we don’t have any establishing shots of New York.

It’s claustrophobic in that sense.

Yeah, and also true to her experience, right? Kristen said that to me the other day like, “I don’t even know which city I’m in.” The actress is moving from place to place, and often only seeing the inside of a hotel room because they can’t go outside so easily. So that had become true to her experience… I don’t know how we got on to that! But anyway, it was a fight to get the movie made and all those things then come to it being released at Venice Film Festival. I literally only knew it was on that exact anniversary because I was plugging back into the movie ahead of promoting it in Venice, and I was looking back through an old notebook and saw I’d drawn a cross with her birth and death day. Isn’t that crazy?

Eerie, that’s for sure. You’ve mentioned Kristen Stewart‘s many parallels with the subject. Were you picturing her when reading the script or did that come later?

No, it did come later. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the difficulty of casting an actress to play an actress… She came into the conversation relatively late, but from the moment we sat down with each other to talk about it and feel each other out, literally from the first word, we were already making the movie. And now I look back and think, there is no version of this movie without her. Even if you had a wonderful actress, technically brilliant, who could have been given the haircut and look like her, that movie is still just a movie. She [Kristen] taps into some other rhythm and frisson between her and Jean, where there’s a level of truth and understanding that only she could bring to it. It’s a chemical reaction. 

And do you think that’s because there are so many ways in which she is a modern equivalent of Jean? They are both vocal activists, they’re both young actresses who started off assigned to a certain persona which they then wanted to move away from…

It’s all of that. They’re also wildly different: Jean was a Protestant girl from the Midwest and Kristen grew up in the valley. But you have this ridiculous amount of parallels that you’ve touched on, plus being thrust into the public eye at a very tender age, being unfairly treated by domestic press, both of them unfairly savaged. And Kristen is the only American actress to have won the Cesar award while Jean Seberg became known as a French actress, so they had parallels in European cinema, while keeping star status in the States. Kristen certainly understands this idea of living in a glass house, and as a director it’s a gift for her to have an innate knowledge of that.

And another thing is for her to play such a style icon; there’s maybe a couple of people in the world who are on Kristen’s level, who are avant-garde or experimental while also working with Chanel and major fashion houses. And Jean… we don’t portray Jean wearing denim jackets, looking like Jane Fonda or looking like a hippie. She’s still dressed in Chanel, that Left Bank culture and forward-thinking couture. All of that was groundwork and in the end, she’s just a fucking good actress, and a hungry actress, and a singular actress. And she has a similar thing to Jean in that she didn’t go to drama school in London – no disrespect to those who did – but neither of them had that protection of technique. Kristen of course has incredible technique that she learned being directed by David Fincher at age 11 and coming up on all those film sets but, like Jean, it’s a raw and instinctive kind of technique.

She certainly gave something spectacular. You’ve spoken of media treatment and living in a glass house – and in many ways, the period you focus on marks the beginning of the surveillance state as we know it. What commentary is the film making in today’s socio-political climate?

We get very close to both sides of a surveillance operation during this great shift in American history. It’s like you were watching the Big Bang of it, the beginning of the modern state and modern culture. Now, we all carry those surveillance mechanisms around and we are completely complicit in our loss of privacy… The film is a warning or reminder of what happens when this machinery is turned against a dissident or activist, by a very reactionary, conservative and racist government machinery. Today, that’s not a fairytale or something out of a quaint past; it’s the daily reality of governments that use racism to split and gain voters as part of their warfare against truth. And we watch Jean caught in the crossfire of that war waged by White America on Black America. That manufacture of fake news, not the journalists’ version of fake news, but by the state who are manipulating truth and weaponizing lies. That’s still what’s going on. And with Jean in that conference standing up to the lies, and Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell)’s gesture of coming to her and becoming a whistleblower, those both present as non-didactic, non-dogmatic instances of people valuing truth. That’s really urgent for the culture we live in now. It’s incredible the parallels between a burning 1968 and a tumultuous 2019.

Electric Ghost Magazine UK

Electric Ghost Magazine: We’re speaking at the BFI London Film Festival, where Seberg just had its UK premiere. What is your relationship to the city and the festival?

Benedict Andrews: London is a second home to me. Film4 funded my first feature Una and at that time I was living in Smithfield Market. I’ve also done work at the Young Vic [Andrews worked on productions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire for the Waterloo theatre]. We showed Una at the BFI festival in 2016 and I came to find that there’s a real density to the festival, similar to Melbourne in my home country. It’s a really smart cross-section of movies that you have to plot your way around. It’s a kind of injection into the complex cultural life of the city and its strong, critical filmmaking culture, opening a door to what is out there. It recognises the diversity in today’s cinema and feeds that.

Una was your first feature film after years of directing theatre. Can you talk me through the jump from one medium to the other? 

With Una, I was adapting the play Blackbird by David Harrower, so I still had a foot in the theatre. It is a complex study of sexual abuse, and also of a nihilistic relationship. It’s about two people trapped with each other, moving through a series of spaces and cutting out the rest of the world in their little bubble. Our grammar for shooting was very rigid, the camera never came off the tracks. This allowed us to concentrate on the performances and the dialogue in a way that is very similar to the theatre.

You mentioned there about your directorial grammar. On Seberg, you certainly seem to have added to your vocabulary — it’s got a much more explicitly cinematic feel to it. What changed from one film to the next?

I worked with Rachel Morrison [cinematographer: Mudbound, Black Panther] for Seberg and she is a wonderful handheld shooter with this sensitive, intuitive way of working. There are still plenty of steadicam shots, but we had these moments where I wanted to let the camera fall off the track, so to speak, and move more through the world. It’s a story about worlds overlapping and we wanted to use the camera to put across this feeling of crossing to either side of the wall. I am now starting to want to move more and more into that way of entering worlds, so I think this is the direction I will keep developing in on my next film.

Jean Seberg’s story is a complex one, and well-known by cinema buffs. What is it that drew you to the material?

I’ve been making theatre all over the world — in Australia, Berlin, London — and it’s such a privileged space to drill down into the human condition where I have worked with many very talented actors. I developed my muscles there and, with Seberg, I was interested in those questions of voyeurism and the opportunity to study actors’ vulnerability and bravery — how they show their scars to the world. This movie reflects that and depicts the trauma of seeing your private space destroyed in the spotlight. There’s an element of performance to all the characters, whether it’s Jack [O’Connell] as the secret agent playing at being a superhero, or the activism Jean becomes a part of. It plays into my core philosophy that all the world’s a stage.

So, you’re familiar with acting and the processes and traumas that come with it, but were you familiar with Jean’s story before taking on the project?

I wasn’t familiar with Jean really, I knew a lot more about the Black Panthers. The film is not entirely about them, but it does look at her relationship with Hakim Jamal [Black Panther activist, played by Anthony Mackie]. Off the back of making Una, I was introduced to the team at Automatik — this exciting indie production house making interesting films like Teen Spirit (2018) and Destroyer (2018) — and they sent me a stack of stuff. I wanted to be part of this powerhouse making brave creative choices and the script for Seberg was the first to truly grab me. It was so many things — not just a light shone on this period of history, but it also had the pulse of a thriller and dug deep on her life as an actress, which really spoke to me.

Let’s talk about Kristen Stewart. How did you come to cast her in this role? How did you find working with one of today’s most in-demand performers?

It took a while to land on Kristen, but once we did it was like “Holy fuck, how could it have been anyone else!?” After travelling the world to festivals with her to promote the movie I have increasingly come to see that there is no other version of this movie with another actress. It’s just one of those rare things; her symbiosis with the role and where she meets Jean in the middle can only come from the understanding she has for this kind of life. She’s a contemporary style icon who is incapable of faking it and I think she and Jean are the same in that regard. From the moment I met her in a restaurant in LA there was no small talk for four solid hours.

The version of Jean you portray onscreen is of course not a carbon-copy of the actress herself. It feels more like an interpretation on the part of Kristen. So how did you conceive of the character ‘Jean’ and her relationship to the real Seberg?

We decided quickly we were not interested in doing an impression of Jean, so we workshopped the script together quite a bit to shift things around and I would feed Kristen a lot of stuff to read, too, but she found plenty of things herself beyond the obvious material. Many of Jean’s lovers wrote these fictionalised works about her which gave this great, metaphysical impression of what others thought of her. There are only two moments in the film where we recreated things exactly based on archive footage, one of them being a clip we recreated from Saint Joan (1957), but otherwise it’s entirely interpretive. The performance had to be living, not robotic, to truly capture Jean. If you listen to old footage of her, she speaks with this affected mid-Atlantic accent that we didn’t use, but sometimes you’ve got to bend the truth to actually get to the truth.

At Electric Ghost Magazine, we talk about cinema as a guide to life. What should people take away from your film, and from the life of the real Jean Seberg?

I can’t remember the exact quote, but there’s an interview somewhere where she says something like, “Between a career and the adventure of life, I choose the adventure of life.” There was just something in how Jean was wired where she was incredibly open and stood up for what she believed in that I think is very valuable. In terms of our movie, we are depicting a woman who goes through fire and comes out radically transformed. Both she and Jack’s character are people who want to find the hard-won truth and change in the act of doing so. Our world is treading on the brink and so I think, now more than ever, the grace of truth is a very urgent thing.

 Hot Corn

“She’s been making movies with Kelly Reichardt, with Olivier Assayas, very interesting choices. But then she also does Charlie’s Angels, and I know she’s proud of doing this and Charlie’s Angels at the same time, she’s proud of that movie,” Andrews said of his lead star’s eclectic range of career choices – which he feels is similar to Seberg’s.

“Jean did similar things, big marquee films at the same time she did smaller films. She also straddled both those worlds, and I feel very blessed to have had Kristen play Jean at this moment where she’s really transforming, bearing the fruit of these choices she’s been making over the last decade, and you can really see that in Seberg, it’s a brave, confident performance.”

He’s not wrong. It’s a wonderful performance by Stewart, and didn’t require a huge amount of physical transformation, like we saw with Renée Zellweger in another biopic of a star from a similar era, in Judy. Andrews admitted this was a purposeful decision.

What’s better than one Kristen Stewart? Two Kristen Stewarts!

“We’re not trying for a Judy Garland-esque transformation, she’s becoming Jean, so she has to change her voice and change her body to do that, and lose some Kristen mannerisms, but at the same time I always wanted you to see Kristen in the role, to see Kristen in Jean, to have their life forces meet,” he explained.

She’s not the only star signed up to this project, as supporting roles couldn’t have landed in more capable hands. Jack O’Connell, Vince Vaughn, Anthony Mackie and Zazie Beetz – the latter two illuminating the screen during the scenes featuring Seberg’s involvement with the Black Panthers, and how she sought to use her influence in the public eye to help support their cause. This whole side of the actresses’s life is one that was entirely new to Andrews, despite the fact he was such a big fan of her work.

“It was entirely new to me,” he said. “I knew her from Breathless and I carried her around in my imagination. This is the lapse Catholic in me maybe, but they become Saints in our imagination, and she was always flickering there. That’s what an incredible and original performance does. There’s something about what she did in that film which helped to invent what modern acting is, which is so luminous and so raw. But I didn’t know of her involvement with the Civil Rights Movement.”

The other side of this narrative is the how the aforementioned support led to the FBI feeling anxious about her potential impact, Seberg became a threat – she was powerful, and she had a platform. For Andrews the FBI’s investigation into her personal life has a certain resonance with modern society.

“There’s a lot of things that make the movie feel very urgent now. We live in a culture of mass surveillance, and in this we see the DNA formed of that. In a quite complex way, it’s a movie about truth, and we’re watching somebody’s truth destroyed, and the machinery of surveillance used to destroy someone’s truth and to spread misinformation and lies about them, to weaponise lies. There’s this ballistics of misinformation flying everywhere, and in Jean we see the human cost of that,” he said.

On the subject of pertinence, and bringing this story into a contemporary climate, we touch upon issues that wouldn’t seem out of place in the current #MeToo movement, and while this contributing themes could make up an entire film of its own right, in this it merely adds an interesting layer to an already complex tale – as we hear of how Seberg was treated by filmmaker Otto Preminger, when they collaborated on Saint Joan – the debut for the young actress.

Many people are unaware of Seberg’s involvement with the Civil Rights Movement.

“Jean was absolutely mistreated by Preminger,” Andrews said. “He picked someone with raw talent, but no experience so he could mould them and that was a brutal relationship and he had her under contract. At the same time, she did do good and interesting work with him after Saint Joan, but she wasn’t protected. Nobody stood up for her when this happened, and she could’ve been a very big star, there either there was no place for her activism in her work or in Hollywood, and/or, she was not the type to have exploited that the way others did. I’m not saying Jane Fonda did that, but she had a very strong media personality which she used to protest the Vietnam War, whereas Jean did not do that.”

Seberg represents another accomplished turn from Andrews, who is known primarily for his work on stage. Where Una was criticised for being a little too play-like in its small cast, and mostly single setting, this second film marks a more ambitious endeavour, and displays his talents for storytelling, far removed from a stage production. But, like he said to us at the end of our enjoyable conversation, he wouldn’t exactly be the first to make the move from stage to screen.

“I’ve always wanted to make movies,” he smiled. “Ingmar Bergman directed both, he directed at the National Theatre in Stockholm while making great movies, doing both at the same time. Visconti did Opera, Pasolini wrote plays, Fassbinder came from theatre as well. They’re my role models, to be able to straddle both of those roles.”