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Interview: Mia Hansen-Løve on Things to Come

Hansen-Løve discusses her films’ autobiographical components, Jonas Mekas’s influence on her work, and more.

Interview: Mia Hansen-Løve on Things to Come
Photo: Sundance Selects

European art cinema, from The Blue Angel to Wild Strawberries to The Soft Skin, has a history of peering into the sexual and existential lives of male intellectuals, but contains few comparable films involving well-educated women whose lives are geared around reading, conversation, and career stakes. Things to Come, then, is a step in the right direction. It follows Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert), a philosophy professor, as she comes to terms with a number of unexpected events in her personal and professional life. That includes a rekindled friendship with Fabien (Roman Kolinka), a former student whose academic pursuits have dwindled over the intervening years.

Mia Hansen-Løve has proven herself an agile practitioner of character dramas, whether depicting sexual awakening in Goodbye, First Love or chronicling the highs and lows of a globe-trotting DJ in Eden. With Things to Come, she’s arguably made her most mature film yet, gracefully illuminating Nathalie and Fabien’s predicaments without pretending to have either of them fully figured out, if only because neither of them have all of the answers either.

I spoke with Hansen-Løve about her films’ autobiographical components, the influence of Jonas Mekas on her work, and how being a philosophy teacher means giving equal footing to each word, and all it entails, of that vocation.

Both Eden and Things to Come open with your main characters at a remove from their daily lives. In the case of Eden’s protagonist, he’s fleeing the dance club and it’s unclear what’s prompting his escape. With Nathalie, she’s on vacation with her family, but it seems she’s more distracted than relaxed. Do you have a strategy for finding the entry points to your films in this way?

It’s funny that you say that, because in my next film, the one I’m getting financed now, literally the first shot will be of the main character escaping. [laughs] But in that case, it’s in a literal way, from a hospital. But no, I wasn’t aware of that. I think the power of the filmmaker is to write directly with their unconscious—with their imagination but in the most unconscious way. A lot of the things I do aren’t on purpose. It’s just the way it is for me. I cannot decide what I write about and I cannot really decide how I write about it. Afterward, of course I can find meanings for the things and try to find connections and reasons. It’s not that things are accidental. What I mean is that I write them first and then try to figure out why. But, yeah, about the beginnings [of these two films]—another way to put it would be to say that in a lot of my films I begin with people walking or moving, like on a boat or a train. I guess it has to do also with the fact that I’m doing a portrait of characters. My films aren’t so much about story or the plot as about trying to catch a presence. I think these impressionist beginnings have to do with a quest for that presence.

You’ve explained in the past how Eden is based in part on your brother’s career as a DJ and Things to Come on your parents, who are both philosophers. Is that quest different when you’re drawing elements from people close to you in your actual life?

It’s true that they were inspired by my family, but for me, as soon as I take a pen and paper and start writing, it becomes fiction. These characters, just like the characters from my five films, have been partly inspired by people I’ve known, and always by people I love. I wouldn’t make a film that was inspired by people just because I thought it was an interesting story, or bad people, or people I read about in the papers. I have to have an intimate, deep connection to these characters. It’s not theoretical. It might sound paradoxical, but it’s all about fiction. As soon as I translate it into a story, I just try to give it a frame. You stay faithful to some things and betray others in order to make it possible to tell a story. There are things you forget, so you change or reinvent them. So it has nothing to do with a documentary. Ultimately, you pick an actor to play the character and this actor has their own presence and their own aura. That personality always influences the film, so I’m looking for it. All of this can seem somewhat contradictory, but the dialectic between reality and fiction, and the tension between the two, is at the center of my films. But when the film is over, I speak of the fact that it was inspired by these people because it’s hard not to speak about it. In the end, it’s not pure but rather an impure fiction.

You mention how your films have nothing to do with documentary, but your explanation regarding reality and fiction reminds me of someone like Jonas Mekas and his film Lost, Lost, Lost, where he takes home videos of his family but transforms them through edits and voiceover into something that nearly becomes fictional or, as you said, impure fiction.

It’s interesting that you mention Jonas Mekas. He was the first person I ever interviewed when I wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, when I was very young. I was like 20 years old. So I watched all of his films and they impressed me a lot. Recently, I watched one of my short films again, Un Pur Esprit, my second one. It’s a black-and-white, three-minute film, shot on 16mm, handheld, no dialogue. It looks like a small Jonas Mekas film. I think I was very much influenced by him. But what I mean is that, for me, Lost, Lost, Lost and Jonas Mekas’s other films are less like documentaries and more like poems. I really do see them like poetry. That’s what I mean when I say it becomes fiction for me. It’s not about representing reality. It’s still about transforming it. He’s filming his family and the world, but at the end it’s totally something else other than reality. We can feel his beliefs and we can feel his own interiority. All these images end up being totally interior. And that’s what I’m trying to do in my own way, which is of course very different, but I’m working with reality in an intimate way. It has all to do with the invisible.

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I’m struck by your mentioning of the invisible as part of this quest, because at the beginning of Things to Come, Heinz is describing a piece of music to Nathalie and says that, “In order to understand it, you have to see it,” and emphasizes the visual qualities of musical performance. This also recalls Eden, of course, since it’s about a musician, but I wonder if music as a form of sight, or a way of seeing, has any significance for you?

Music has always been at the center of my films and characters, and it’s very central in my own life. I think music is what brings us the closest to the soul. At the same time, I don’t like the use of music in most films, which I find very conventional and manipulative. I just read a book about Ingmar Bergman’s films for something I’m working on right now. The writer of the book, Jacques Mandelbaum, talks about music in Bergman’s films and says that at the end of his career it became more obvious that music was everything for Bergman, because it was the thing that brought us the closest to the invisible. So, yeah, music is essential to my films and I try to use it in a parsimonious way. It’s important when it’s there, but I don’t use that many songs. Or if I do, it’s something the characters can hear. I don’t use a soundtrack. It’s important because there’s no gap between what the spectators and the characters hear. The only exception is when the music carries to the next scene even though the previous one is over, but in my mind, it’s as if the character in the film has the song in her mind. But the music always has to be connected with a character. It brings us to their interiority, whereas in many films the music has nothing to do with the character and the goal of it is to influence the emotions of the audience. And it works, even on me.

One thing Nathalie does see are the protests outside of her classroom that become a sort of nuisance for her. How did you arrive at deciding to include these ongoing protests by her students and other young people? They remain an adjacent, though still integral, part of the film throughout.

The idea of integrating the protestors was pretty much there from the start. As the daughter of philosophy teachers, I’ve always been aware of them. Right now, the climate in France is bad and we have a lot of protests, but at the same time, there were always lots of protests. France is a country of protestors. Especially in high schools. We love to demonstrate. I’ve done that myself. With my parents, I’ve seen tons and tons of strikes. So I couldn’t imagine making a film that would be about teaching and intellectual work in France without portraying that aspect. And I’ve enjoyed teachers who weren’t in solidarity with these young people, even though they actually share their ideas, or part of their ideas, and belong to the same leftist side.

I wanted to show the intellectual world in France as it is with its divisions. I think that world is deeply divided, almost irreconcilable. When we want to make political films in France, it has to be obvious and politically correct. There’s a bad side and a good side. It has to be very simple. But the intellectual world in France is very complex, very nuanced. I’m influenced by this idea of complexity that, I guess, I inherited from my parents, but I think it’s especially important today to defend this idea of complexity versus simplicity. In the papers and conversation, everything tends to be black and white. I thought there would be some necessity for me to show this complexity, even if it wouldn’t be politically correct somehow. Something that really annoys me in films is the fact that we rarely know what people really think about politics, which paper they read, which TV channels they watch, or which books they read, as if we were ashamed of these things and we want to make the film as universal as possible—that if we show the specificities of the world the characters live in it will speak to too small of an audience. I don’t believe that. I think we can reach universalities through specificity. We have to show precisely the world we live in, the world we know, and show it honestly.

And that specificity surely means recognizing when characters are self-contradictory or potentially wrong about something. I say that because Nathalie and Fabien are at points in their life when they’re questioning their choices and how they might change them. Is this inclination, of wanting to do something else with your life, something that resonates with you, as a filmmaker, or is this theme wholly contained to the characters themselves?

No, it’s not that I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, because I think I know very well why I’m doing what I’m doing. [laughs] There’s nothing else I want to do or know how to do. Since I was about 20, it became clear to me that my life was going to be about some kind of quest for meaning, and that the only way this quest could express itself was through fiction and, more precisely, films. So I don’t think I’ve ever lost contact with the reasons why I’m doing what I’m doing. But I also can’t say that I think Fabien and Nathalie lost themselves. The reason Fabien stopped working on his Ph.D. isn’t because he’s lost his vocation. It’s almost the reverse. It’s because he feels like he can’t really fulfill himself intellectually while he’s in the Ph.D. It’s not enough for him. In the academic path, there’s no accomplishment for him. As for Nathalie, yes, she does have something pragmatic, since philosophy isn’t just about ideas, but also a job. But I don’t think that means losing the purity of a vocation.

I think teaching is also about very concrete things. It’s not only about sharing radical ideas, but confronting them, the new generation, with everyday issues. That’s the way I see philosophy in the film. These characters aren’t just philosophes. They’re also teachers. They’re teaching philosophy, but their ideas are always connected with everyday life. I think that’s the beauty of it. If there’s one connection between Nathalie and me, and I think it’s a deep one, it’s the fact that, for me also, filmmaking was always been connected with the invisible, but ultimately it also connects me with the real world, more than anything. If I wanted to become a filmmaker, it wasn’t only because it was a way for me to tell stories and try to make beautiful things. It’s also because it was connecting me with reality. When I was in my 20s, I felt pretty melancholic and disconnected. What I find so extraordinary about making films is how you can move back and forth between very abstract questions and material ones. You always have this dialogue from one to the other. And you also have that in the teaching of philosophy. I guess that’s the real connection that I have to the profession of the characters in the film.

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

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