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Marion Cotillard

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Cotillard in 2016

Marion Cotillard (born 30 September 1975) is a French actress who has appeared in both European and Hollywood productions. She is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, two César Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. She became a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in France in 2010 and was promoted to Officer in 2016, the same year she was named a Knight of the Legion of Honour.

Quotes

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  • I was fascinated by this world of telling stories, of having a different day every day. And my parents were – still are – passionate people, and to be raised with passionate people who open the door of your imagination and your creativity, I think it’s why I am an actress now.
  • I was doing movies and I was not happy, I wanted more than what I had. I started to feel that I had some anger that it wouldn’t be fast enough, that I wouldn’t do [good roles], and I started getting jealous. It’s not very constructive for me to be jealous, so I told myself, OK, I’m going to take some time off. I don’t want to wait for the phone, I don’t want to do things just to earn money, because a passion shouldn’t be like that. Tim Burton offered me the role in Big Fish, and this was exactly what I wanted. It was not “exactly”, it was much more than I had dreamt of. And then I told myself, you wanted to leave, and here comes something so fulfilling, so maybe you should think twice! Maybe it’s actually your right place to be an actress.
  • I’ve never gone so deeply in someone’s emotions, so it affected, but in a good way, my emotions. I went deep somewhere that it has awakened things that I had hidden because it was too hard to face. And after the movie I started to face those things I was afraid of. I had to get rid of a lot of my fears. I am not very good at expressing myself in a simple way so it can create mis-understandings and I hate that. And I fight and… there are a lot of situations where if I could have handled it at the time it would have gone, and I didn’t because I’m afraid of confrontation, I’m always afraid to express myself in the wrong way and to be misunderstood and to give something of an image of myself that I’m not. So most of the time I don’t say anything because of being fearful of being wrong. And with Piaf, suddenly I wanted to face my fear, because I know that when you face your fears it disappears for real.
  • Daniel Day-Lewis gave me one advice. Take care of my life. Don’t work too much. He’s right. And that’s why you have to come back to your life, because it is in your life where you can find the desire to tell someone a story, and if you don’t live your life then you are not interesting any more, because what will you tell? If I’m always in different stories which are not mine I’ll be lost and I’ll be poor. Poor of my own life. And I don’t want that.
  • Someone who will try to make me angry or create a situation that is not related to my character in order to put me in the state of the character. It’s 100 percent counter productive. Either I will get mad and I won’t be good or – and most of the time this is what happens – I will laugh. I cannot take it seriously.
  • I don’t know if we have many lives or if I will be reincarnated into a next life, but I really do think that when you die, it doesn’t stop.
  • Talking about myself to someone I don’t know, and knowing that most of the time they will interpret in a bad way what I’m saying, has turned me into a wild beast when it comes to press. I’ve noticed that it’s creating something kind of out of focus about myself.
  • I've never believed in the so-called method, that is, in the idea of ​​identifying with the character to the point of living in his skin even off the set. But this time, for the first time in my career, I decided that to play Alice, outside of filming, I would never speak to my partner, Melvil Poupaud. He was disappointed at first, but then after the film I tried to explain to him that I had to find a foothold to hate him with all my might.
  • It was also that first thrill of acting that guided me. The visceral, almost inexplicable feeling that grabs hold of you and that you want to relive. My parents are actors, I grew up immersed in that world, and, at 11 or 12, I played an old concierge in a summer camp show. I truly believed I was that woman, and I was struck by the effect the scene had on my fellow campers. It was perhaps the first time I felt like an actress. At the same time, what does it mean to "feel like an actress"? To embrace it? To dare to say, "I belong here"? It's difficult to put into words without sounding presumptuous: we're already asking the audience to listen to us and watch us play with our emotions.
  • I started in the 1990s, a time when actresses, especially younger ones, were often mistreated. Today, problematic behavior is finally considered unacceptable. It makes me feel so much better to think that young women won't have to go through what I went through, that they are better equipped than I was. When I started out, many people accepted the idea that a director could feel and express his desire for his actresses. It was also considered normal to meet a newcomer in a hotel room, to ask her to undress during an audition, to threaten her budding career if she refused to audition with a problematic man… It's so shameful. In fact, we were ashamed. I am extremely relieved by the new measures that have been put in place, the presence of intimacy coordinators on film sets, for example. I always request them, even when I have complete trust in the director. When I was young, I was assaulted by a partner after a kissing scene: as soon as we got back to the dressing room, he jumped on me. In the presence of an authorized third party, this kind of unacceptable behavior can be reported immediately.

About Marion Cotillard

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  • She is an artist who has a tremendously healthy ambition to do really great work. With Marion, she’s totally authentic. You can give a great performance but you can’t give the heart of an actress without real authenticity. She’s committed and unselfconscious – she has complete artistic authenticity. You see that in different moments with other actors. Johnny [Depp] has it. And with Marion, it’s every look.
  • She’s a great and real person who doesn’t fall into the movie stardom cliché. She is an artist first and foremost, and I’ve never seen anyone work so hard in my life. When you went into the rehearsal room, there she would be, working and working. She was just living the role. Daniel Day-Lewis was absolutely blown away by her, as I was, as anybody was.
  • She came to my house like 3 months ago and we just spent like five hours together, but like two friends. So, we just wanted to talk about life. And I’m really super-proud of her, but I’m making my own career and there is no jealousy and maybe it’s why we’re still friends. There’s two different ways to work and maybe I’m not ready to do all this. Maybe I’m not strong enough, in a way. And I’m recording a CD with Damien Rice and I'm gonna direct my own movie in five months. So, I think I’m really proud of what she’s doing, but I think she’s proud of me, in another way.
  • The best performance I think I’ve seen in the last ten years, strangely, is Marion Cotillard in La Vie En Rose. It’s very hard to do what she did, which was to play an old person – people are always kinda like [cackles like a withered old crone] when they do old people. Actors, when they play old people, try to look old, and old people try to look young. And she looked every bit like she was 70-years-old, but she looked like she was trying to be young.
  • I met Marion Cotillard by chance, while having lunch with Guillaume Canet, without knowing that she was his partner, while I was working on the script for Guillaume's fourth film, Blood Ties. I thought she looked like Pola Negri, the Polish silent actress. So I wrote the film for her, without ever having seen her on screen, knowing that her face was exactly the one I was looking for. An astonishing phenomenon happened during filming. She kept offering to remove text, assuring me that she could express everything with her face. I was skeptical each time, it seemed impossible to me. And yet, every time, she proved me wrong. She managed to convey incredible things just with her face.
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