This is an off-camera scene. In 2020, during the filming of Deception, director Arnaud Desplechin takes a break to smoke a cigarette with Léa Seydoux, who plays the mistress of a famous writer. Suddenly, she says: “For you, who is interesting in French cinema at the moment? Which directors? » He evades with a smile: ” Full ! » But she insists, completely serious: ” Tell me ! Give me names. » Léa Seydoux is not joking.
At the time, she already had around fifteen years of career and, since her beginnings, the choice of director has been a determining element – a way of being part of life, the affirmation of a state of mind. , almost a philosophy. Yesterday, Léa Seydoux was chosen. Today, Léa Seydoux chooses. And the names that she snatches from Arnaud Desplechin, out of curiosity, out of appetite, out of necessity too, are so many little pebbles slipped into the bottom of a pocket that we take out at the whim of fate and with which we mark our path.
A strange destiny: it has taken it, since it began, on both sides of the Atlantic, in a large assumed gap between the quintessence of French auteur cinema and big Hollywood productions. In this 77e Cannes Film Festival, she is on display at Second Act, by Quentin Dupieux, opening, out of competition, which is released in theaters immediately on May 14.
French authors, American directors
In France, the list of authors with whom she has filmed is long: Arnaud Desplechin, Bertrand Bonello, Benoît Jacquot, Christophe Honoré, Mia Hansen-Løve, Abdellatif Kechiche, Rebecca Zlotowski, soon Arthur Harari and Leos Carax… American directors are not no less prestigious, from Ridley Scott to Denis Villeneuve via Quentin Tarantino, Sam Mendes, Wes Anderson or David Cronenberg, …
Funny path: it always leads further an actress who claims to have never dreamed of being one, who claims no culture as a film buff, who has always dismissed the word ” ambition ” to prefer that of ” desire “, and that none of his cinema elders inspired. Léa Seydoux threw herself into this profession at the age of 20 to try to put an end to, she says, the pain of living that had been crushing her from the inside since childhood.
Raised without being one, she tells it through interviews, by parents who were quickly divorced and very absent, from two dynasties of industrialists, the Schlumbergers by her mother and the Seydoux (at the head of Pathé and Gaumont) by her father, she bears the name but does not exude the carelessness, and her memories do not have the casual brilliance of the upper middle class. A teenage photo booth captured the melancholy of his face under a layered-peroxide cut popular at the end of the 90s. Extremely shy, almost mute, ” savage “, she sums up, showing the photo to a journalist from the YouTube channel Bling! in September 2022.
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