Director Olivier Dahan's new film La Vie en Rose had its Philadelphia premiere last Thursday night at the Philadelphia Film Festival and it received a standing ovation. After the screening, Dahan himself briefly appeared to answer audience questions, but he sat down with Street for an interview the following day.
Although relatively unknown to American audiences, Dahan has become a highly successful director in France, and La Vie en Rose is his sixth feature film. It tells the extremely sad story of French singer Edith Piaf. Although she was enormously popular in the '40s, '50s and '60s, most Americans today seem unaware of her. Dahan himself said that he wasn't very familiar with Piaf until he began to work on the script for the film. With the American theatrical release of the film in June, however, more people may explore her music.
La Vie en Rose continually jumps between scenes of Piaf's childhood, the height of her career, and the end of her life, all of which were equally miserable. Dahan said that one simply cannot portray someone's entire life in two hours, and therefore, he created what he calls a "portrait" of Piaf, not a "biopic." Coming from an art school background, where he focused on painting - even during the interview he was sketching a portrait of someone on a notepad - it is easy to understand how he could describe the film as such.
Dahan grew up in a small town in southern France, La Ciotat, where cinema was relatively unimportant. Despite being the subject of an early Lumiere Brothers film, there was only one movie theater in town. When asked about the impact of French filmmakers on his work, he replied that the town theater only showed American films. Consequently, he feels that Francis Ford Coppola and David Lynch are his two biggest influences. It was only while attending art school in Marseille that he discovered major French filmmakers such as Godard and Renoir, who he says have little impact on his work.
Perhaps the most astounding fact about La Vie en Rose is that Dahan shot the film from his first draft script, saying he didn't revise it "because I'm lazy." Given the complexity of the film, simply writing the shooting script in one draft is an amazing feat. Equally surprising is the way that Dahan works while filming. He says he never looks at the script while filming and never uses a storyboard. He claims he can do this because he is "quite well surrounded by a lot of great people," referring specifically to his actors and the director of photography.
Overall, what sets Dahan apart from most directors is his unique attitude towards filmmaking and art. He never likes to watch his films after they are made, and along the same lines, he refuses to hang his own artwork in his house. While he still views his films as art, at times he takes a more practical approach. When asked about a creative choice in a specific scene, instead of detailing its complex symbolic value, he said it was identical to two previous scenes and he just wanted to differentiate it. Such honesty seems to be a rarity among artists.
