Other People’s Children: Which famous author did Rebecca Zlotowski originally want to adapt?
In theaters since Wednesday, “The Children of Others” is Rebecca Zlotowski’s fifth feature film, and also her most personal. But the French director had a different initial project, centered on a male character.
Other People’s Children by Rebecca Zlotowski
With Virginie Efira, Roschdy Zem, Chiara Mastroianni
What is it about ? Rachel is 40 years old, no children. She loves her life: her high school students, her friends, her exes, her guitar lessons. By falling in love with Ali, she becomes attached to Leila, her 4-year-old daughter. She tucks it in, nurses it, and loves it as her own. But loving other people’s children is a risk worth taking…
An abortive adaptation of a novel by Romain Gary
SGP / BESTIMAGE
Rebecca Zlotowski originally set about adapting a novel by Romain Gary, Beyond this limit your ticket is no longer valid, devoted to the impotence of a man on the eve of his sixties year. Roschdy Zem was to play the main role.
But the director and screenwriter found herself in difficulty, “Not that I couldn’t project myself into this man who could no longer get a hard-on or was afraid of no longer… But perhaps because I planned too much. And gradually my own impotence appeared to me, that of a 40-year-old woman without children who wants one and partly raises those of another, those of another. »
The mother-in-law: a character relegated to the background
The Velvet Movies – George Lechaptois
With Other people’s children, Rebecca Zlotowski wanted to focus on a little-told situation, but which she considered worthy of being: that of a mother-in-law. This bond which unites a woman to the children of another has no name (we do not speak of “step-motherhood”) and is not represented on the screen. On the one hand, there is the stepmother, inherited from fairy tales, and on the other, the overwhelmed mother-in-law of blended families from romantic comedies.
“Where was this woman who forged an intimate and precious bond with children, raised them every other week for a few years, without having any herself, accepting the risk of necessarily having to erase herself from the equation once once the romantic relationship with their father is over? asks the director.
Statement of intent
Julian Torres
With this movie, Rebecca Zlotowski wanted to write the film “about this secondary character in the story” that is usually the mother-in-law. It was a question of making triumph “a cinema of secondary character” and highlighting another grid of emotions, like the friendship between men and women, the tenderness between women, “the spite more than the betrayal, the melancholy of the missed encounters with existence, but also the excitement of successful encounters with desire, eroticism, consoling joy. Transitional loves, those that we experience between two great stories, and that Americans call “rebounds”. The rebound girl, the rebound boy. »
Serendipity
The Velvet Movies – George Lechaptois
Rebecca Zlotowski discovered during the preparation of the film that she was pregnant “although I no longer expected it”. She gave birth shortly after mixing was completed. “I had the feeling of filming this letter of love, of solidarity to childless women – nulliparous, as the doctors say – while no longer completely belonging to their community, without yet belonging to the other. »
