interview de Arisnee Khanjian pour le film A ma soeur-616

I first met Catherine Breillat in Toronto, when we had a long chat. I had seen a number of her films and I liked the way in which she tackled the prickly subject of sexuality without taboos or anxiety. When she called me a few months later, I had just seen ” Romance ” which had finally been released in Canada, amid all kinds of rumours. All the same, the film went way beyond the sensationalism that people tried to confine it to and it contained an approach to sex that was done with intelligence and original, well-thought-out ideas. When she asked me to be in ” A ma sœur ! “, I wasn’t at all scared because I had no ethical problems with her style of cinema.

Catherine didn’t give me any indications about my character outside the frame of the film. It was only during the scenes and after shooting, that I realised who my character was. She’s a woman who submits to the pressures of a self-centred husband, and she is very vulnerable, probably too vulnerable to have any authority over her daughters. During the long drive back, on the motorway, we realise that she is totally helpless, that she’s incapable of acting in a responsible manner. This refusal to understand her daughter could even mean that she was subjected to similar pressures in her youth.

On the set, Catherine concentrates on the essentials and doesn’t attempt to go into detail. She truly works with her actors; she doesn’t retreat behind the camera but remains physically very close to us. She is very attentive because she is looking for something precise without really knowing what it is yet. She asked us to do some difficult things, such as the slap scene that we had to redo many times. Or perform in swimsuits at very low temperatures! But we were all ready to do it for the film. Catherine demands a great deal of truth from her actors. She makes no compromises because she knows that compromises are always visible on the screen.