"Goodbye First Love" and Mia Hansen-Løve: an interview

Lola Créton in Hansen-Løve’s film.

I was extremely taken with Mia Hansen-Løve’s fea­ture, Goodbye, First Love (ori­gin­al French title: Une amour de jeun­esse) when I saw it at the 2011 New York Film Festival. At that time I inter­viewed its dir­ect­or, ostens­ibly for this start-up for which I was edit­ing an online movie magazine. Then the online movie magazine fol­ded, Hansen-Løve’s film got a rel­at­ively unher­al­ded U.S. the­at­ric­al release, and now it’s on DVD. The inter­view kind of fell through the cracks, but as the film is part of my 2012 best-of list, I thought now might not be a ter­rible time to run the inter­view, in which I ask long-winded ques­tions and Hansen-Løve provides patient, intel­li­gent answers. It is prob­ably best con­sumed after you see the film, which I highly recommend. 

    Some Came Running:  I wanted to ask you about the
rela­tion­ship the film has to the lead char­ac­ter.  You nev­er, des­pite the fact that there’s a sui­cide attempt
and there’s all sorts of prob­lems, the film nev­er looks at her through the
per­spect­ive of patho­logy.  The film
seems very much with her, both in the shoot­ing style and just the way her
char­ac­ter is por­trayed.  And I was
won­der­ing the extent to which that was a really con­scious idea of treat­ing this
theme or some­thing that evolved, to the extent you even thought of
dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing the film in terms of its per­spect­ive from oth­er films about
young love, in oth­er words.

     Mia
Hansen-Løve: This film, like my oth­er ones, are actu­ally about things that
could be very melo­dra­mat­ic. For me in a way it could be a tragedy.  I mean this girl, she’s crazy about a
boy who always goes away and leaves her. 
She attempts—she tries to com­mit sui­cide and she over­comes it, but not
really.  And then he comes back and
then leaves her again.  It could be
really big melo­drama.  But I never
tried to do a melo­drama.  I always
tried just, as in my pre­vi­ous films, I want my chil­dren to look at it in a way
that so that the film does­n’t belong to a genre but is simply a film about
life.  To me the film can­not be
about real­ity, about real life, if it’s part of the genre.  It’s a kind of para­dox because as a
view­er, as a spec­tat­or, I don’t have any prob­lem with that and I can be crazy
about film, I can really love some films that are melo­drama.  But it’s not the same thing when you
are a spec­tat­or and then when you make your own films.  You don’t try to get the same
things.  And as a spec­tat­or, I’m
very open. But as a film maker I try to be as hon­est as I can about life and
about my exper­i­ence.  And I feel if
I tell a story I want it to be as—I want to try to trans­mit a feel­ing of truth,
and not—even if at the end people—I don’t try to make people cry as much as
pos­sible or to make them laugh. 
It’s not that I don’t care about that but to me it’s not as much.  I prefer that they, when they go out of
the film, maybe they’re not so sad as they could be if I put the music at this
point or if I make more dra­mat­ic scene. 
But I prefer that they have a feel­ing of truth and of real­ity.  That’s what I try to get.

     SCR:  It’s inter­est­ing that the divorce of
the par­ents when the fath­er is all of a sud­den no longer there, it’s not quite
treated as an after­thought but in a lot of oth­er stor­ies about adolescence,
par­ents break­ing up would be seen as a kind of cent­ral event.  And here it’s just some­thing that
hap­pens.  And in a way it helps
focus the cent­ral­ity on the love story. 
But in a way there’s some­thing about that that’s very true to an
adoles­cent’s own perception.

     HANSEN-LØVE:  Yes, because I think in many films the
rela­tion­ship to par­ents is very much dram­at­ized, like many films adolescents
like fight with their par­ents all the time, or if the par­ents get split, it’s
like a big tragedy.  And I don’t
say it’s not, maybe it is, but it’s not my exper­i­ence.  My par­ents were split when I was 20, and
I felt very sad about it, but it did­n’t look like—it did­n’t look dra­mat­ic.  And I think that there is something
true about that.  And to me it
would have been some kind of betray­al if I had—if by writ­ing my script I would
have made it, emphas­ized it, to make it look more like it looks in films.  And also it’s true that as you say, I
try to be in the—in Camille’s per­spect­ive and at that time her own love, her
own prob­lems with her lov­er, is everything.  In this way, the—actually it’s much—maybe much more
import­ant than what she thinks, but the rela­tion her par­ents have and the fact
that they are sep­ar­ated is almost—is in the back­ground, because the main
prob­lem is the boy that she thinks is the most import­ant thing in her life.

     SCR:  I’m inter­ested in how you—I guess
arrived is maybe not the right question—but there’s some­thing about the way the
film is shot.  It seems very almost
nat­ur­al­ist­ic, an it seems—you’re not—the cam­er­a’s rela­tion to the char­ac­ters is
always—seems very sym­path­et­ic without being obtrus­ively so.  You’re not fol­low­ing from over their
shoulders, you’re always—mostly the female lead.  But even when you sep­ar­ate from her and you’re with certain
of the oth­er char­ac­ters, the cam­era is always with them in a way that strikes
me as very—I don’t want to get too—they’re always with the char­ac­ters, in both
just the view but also the affinity. 
And it reminds me a little bit of Renoir. 

     HANSEN-LØVE:  It’s funny that you talk about that
because I tried to talk a lot about that before and because it’s so great, that
mat­ters a lot to me actu­ally. It’s
dif­fi­cult to say it in English but I’m going to try.  Because style is everything to me.  I mean style is very import­ant to me.  I think you can­not dis­con­nect what you
want to say to how you want to say it. 
But I’m obsessed with the idea of being trans­par­ent in style, of trying
to reach a style that you don’t see. I am obsessed with hav­ing it sort of erase
itself, the style.  I try to be
very dis­creet, just I fol­low the move­ment, I am just with the char­ac­ters, I try
to find the right dis­tance.  But I
also try to make this sobri­ety itself not too obvi­ous, you know?  Not be too rigid because it can go to
the oth­er extreme. It’s all a mat­ter of nuance and being in the right distance,
being not too far and not too close. 
It’s merely a mat­ter of nuance. 
And I like the idea of sort of not being ideo­lo­gic­al about style. For
instance, when I made my first film I had been writ­ing on films before for
Cahiers, and I had noticed that many of young film makers when they make their
first film they want to impose upon them­selves a very strong prin­ciple about
how they film so that it looks radical. 
And to me that is some kind of…evasion. It’s a way of not tak­ing a risk,for me. I think
it’s a very easy way to appro­pri­ate a style.  But to me style is some­thing that you have to reach little
by little, it’s some­thing that you learn and it’s not some­thing that is given
to you. For me, style is a long work and you need a lot of humil­ity for that
and that’s what I’m try­ing to do when I film.  That’s why some­times I could be temp­ted to film only in like
in a camera—hand-held cam­era or to film only in like fixed shots or…it’s hard
to explain but I always felt like it would­n’t be really hon­est to make the film
like that.  Because it would be to
prove this as the most import­ant thing, and this is not really the most
import­ant thing.  I love Rohmer,
and it’s not to say of course I don’t mean that my film looks like Rohmer’s
film, really not, but there is a sen­tence that someone told me after see­ing my
film and it keesp—it’s crazy how it stays in my mind since that.  The sen­tence is that I—maybe it’s
fam­ous but I do not know—he said, to under­stand life is to let your­self be
car­ried by it like a cork in a river.

     SCR:  Or a hat.

     HANSEN-LØVE:  Yeah, it made me crazy, this sentence,
because I did not know this sen­tence and that’s so much what I like—what I try
to say in the end of my film when she is at the river.

     SCR:  Two ques­tions about the span of time in
the film.  You go from 1999 to
about 2006, 2007.  It’s a span of 8
years.  And at what point during
the pro­duc­tion or pro­duc­tion design or actu­al shoot­ing is there a point
where—how much atten­tion do you pay to the peri­od detail when you’re try­ing to
shoot some­thing that, say, takes place in 1999, and when do you sort of let go
of try­ing to fix it too much?

     HANSEN-LØVE:
I was pretty com­puls­ive.  I was
very com­puls­ive about things in terms of what you saw, in terms of like for
instance cars, that dated peri­od, and the urb­an­ism of the city, because Paris
in 10 years has changed enorm­ously and it alters the atmo­sphere.  It’s very, very sig­ni­fic­ant and so I
was very con­cerned that in terms of bill­board signs, etc., that they be
accur­ate in terms of the peri­od. For instance, 10 years ago you did­n’t have the
bike lanes that we have every­where now in Paris for the bike and the bike is
pretty much import­ant in the film. So those kind of things.  I try when I filmed him 10 years ago I
tried to film—I film in places where you don’t have these signs every­where. So
my accent in terms of that was really on the exter­i­or details, and it was not
for instance on the phys­ic­al changes that the char­ac­ters might have endured
over the course of time, which I did­n’t emphasize.

     SCR:  Which leads to my second ques­tion which
is about Lola Créton’s per­form­ance, which is unbe­liev­ably ter­rif­ic.  And how in the 1999 scene she seems
very much 15, very—what’s the word?—gamine-esque, maybe.  And then she grows up.  She becomes a young woman just the way
she car­ries her­self, just the very way that she changes the way she walks.  From the begin­ning to the end it’s a
com­plete trans­form­a­tion. She
actu­ally grows up before your eyes. 
And yet she had not aged at all and in fact now she’s 17.  What do you think it is about her?  It’s an amazing—between your direction
and her cap­ab­il­ity, it’s a remark­able thing that she has done.  And how was the pro­cess of work­ing that
through with her?

     HANSEN-LØVE:  Thank you.  I think—I feel the same, I mean I think not every­body can see
that because the changes are not so exter­i­or obvi­ous.  Some people may think she does­n’t change that much, but I
feel just like you.  I feel it’s
quite extraordin­ary the way she changes from the—it looks like it comes from
the inside. She changes, not like in things that you can really define very
eas­ily, but she changes in a way—in what goes out of—from her eyes and her
look­ing away to look into people, in her way to talk­ing, in her way to walk in
the places of the silences in her—when she talks and when she stop and
listen.  I mean the rhythm of her
way of being is so dif­fer­ent. And
I still find it—myself I find it extraordin­ary.  And I think in a way the thing that moves me the most when I
look at the film, it’s not because it’s—it’s not the film itself because it’s
so close—I’m not moved by what I’m telling because it’s so close to me.  But more I’m moved by her and what she
did in the film.  And I can’t
really know how she found that because Lola is very young and she’s 17 now, she
was 16 when she was in the film, and I think she did­n’t get everything of the—I
mean she under­stood it in a very instinct­ive way.  But if you talk to her, she can­not explain or she can—she
does­n’t have an intel­lec­tu­al point of view at all on the char­ac­ter.  But I think there is—in this way I can
say—I really believe in some kind of a magic of cinema, because I think
something—sometimes things really hap­pen between the char­ac­ter and an actor
that’s all about an intu­ition of things. It’s very mov­ing when you watch your
act­ors. I think it’s very—it’s extremely mov­ing for a film maker when you
see—when sud­denly when you see your images in the rushes, the images that you
shot on the—in the edit­ing room. 
It’s not some—you don’t see your­self hav­ing asked them to do something,
you just see them being the character. 
It’s some­thing that really like makes you cry almost.  There is this shot at the end of the
film, it’s almost noth­ing, but to me it’s some­thing that could really make me
cry, it’s like at the very end when we are in the coun­tryside again and she’s
look­ing for Lorenz, she can­’t find him in the house, and we go out of the house
and there is this shot where she just walks on the—she’s on the moun­tain, she
just walks out­side, there is the wind, and she just looks for him.  And after she finds him, she is sitting
on a rock and they talk together. 
But there is this shot where she just walks along and the way—there is
such a mature and deep and simple way of just walk­ing and look­ing.  Something that she would nev­er have
done in the first part where her char­ac­ter was 15.  And I just can­’t fig­ure out how she could have such a strong
intu­ition of how you are, the kind of look that you have, the thing that—I can
really see what she has been—in her face I can see where she’s been through, I
can see the past, the wounds, I can see everything in her eyes.  And it’s not like some­thing I asked
her, like please do that, put that in your eyes.  It’s some­thing that she did her­self.  And I think it’s a mix­ture of what she
is and the script, some­thing that the script gives to her too and made it
possible.

     SCR:  The pub­li­cist just gave me “the
look.”  So I guess maybe we can do
one more ques­tion.  Shall I do the
crisis in French cinema ques­tion or the oth­er ques­tion?  I’ll do the oth­er one.  If I read cor­rectly, you’re a mom now
for the first time.

     HANSEN-LØVE:  Yes.

     SCR:  And did this have any effect on your
con­cep­tion of the—I know the idea of the film was well part of that, but I
won­der if it had any effect on your con­cep­tion of exe­cu­tion of the film or that
you would care to speak about.  If
not, then we can talk about the crisis in French cinema.

     HANSEN-LØVE:  No, I would just say that I think when
you have a child you’re writ­ing a very dif­fer­ent way.  Not mean­ing what you are or—it does­n’t change my perception
of right at all, at all.  It’s just
part of me and it’s just—but just you have much less time.  So before I used to write when I was
writ­ing a script I used to write like I would give myself 10 hours, I would
say, OK, today I will write from 8 o’c­lock until 8 in the night, and then—so I
would write extremely slowly.  And
the big change in your life is that you have less time, so you have to be much
more concentrated—it changes the way you write.  And the oth­er thing is that I think I would not have written
this film if I had not become pregnant. 
I think that’s the reas­on I wrote the film when I was preg­nant and I
think the fact of hav­ing a child made it pos­sible for me to write this film.