Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome all of you, I’m Jeremy Brock. On behalf of BAFTA welcome to this the tenth anniversary edition of the Screenwriters Lecture Series; this is our second lecture of this season. We work in conjunction with Lucy Gard and the JJ Charitable Trust to whom we are eternally grateful for the funding. This is also part of BAFTA’s Learning and Events programme which is an amazing part of BAFTA’s programme, and you’ll see people dotted around here, incredibly hard-working people, who come here on behalf of BAFTA to film these lectures and they’re then available online to anyone, anywhere in the world. We now have over fifty lectures by the world’s greatest screenwriters, we’re enormously proud of that work that they’ve done.
We’re also terribly grateful to the Curzon of course, who are housing us while BAFTA undergoes the flashiest facelift since Vladimir Putin’s one that he didn’t have. We’re thrilled also to be hosting tonight one of France’s foremost screenwriters and directors, Céline Sciamma. From her debut film Water Lilies, through Tomboy and Girlhood, Céline has written films that beautifully and subtly challenge received notions about sexuality and gender while simultaneously interrogating ideas around identity and love. Her glorious 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which I’ve been lucky enough to see, I don’t know how many of you have but those who haven’t are in for an extraordinary treat, rightly won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival; you can imagine that’s an incredibly important award to us!
Jeremy Brock: The zeitgeist would have us believe that the difference between film and television is almost invisible now stylistically and in terms of content; one of the wonderful things about Céline’s screenplays is that they beautifully deny that fact by their unapologetically cinematic manifestation, and it’s a gift to have a screenwriter of her talent and her natural cinematic flair to come and speak to us tonight. It’s an enormous honour for us. We’ll begin with a montage from all of our lecturers this year, Céline will then lecture, followed by a Q&A with the utterly wonderful Bryony Hanson, Director of Film at the British Council, and we will then—as we always do—open it up to questions from the floor. So if we could cue the montage please, thank you.
[Clip plays]
[Applause]
Céline Sciamma: Thank you. Can you hear me? It’s really weird not to have a—OK so this is a really good episode on my personal YouTube channel, I must say!
OK, I thought it would be cool if this lecture had a title, and I think it’s going to be ‘Ready for the Rising Tide.’ I hope this is English, you tell me. But I’m not sure of that title yet and we’ll see as we go along because yes I’m still in the process of writing this pitch and that’s because—and I’m being honest here, and it’s totally my fault, not at all your fault—I discovered about this lecture four days ago. I’d said yes to come here to meet you for weeks, but I just thought it was a classic Q&A, which it will also be. So it’s OK! If I’m really bad, it’s OK. The letter which actually mentioned the term lecture took weeks to arrive and arrived four days ago, so it’s not because I didn’t take things seriously that I’m in that position. I care a lot about this invitation from the BAFTAs in a tremendous 2019 and beyond line-up, and I care a lot about being invited by the British industry, written about by British critics, and meeting the British audience, because you people here get my job the most. Here I feel deeply understood, supported and I am personally fragilised by the fact that you would leave Europe, and I’m telling you French people are going to hate missing you.
So four days ago I read the letter describing this performance and there were links to previous lectures and I was immediately frightened because of this [gestures to lectern]. This is scary, imagine offering this as a gift to people for Christmas and wrapping it; they would be scared, like what do you want from me? Anybody super happy to get this would be labelled as suspect because it is scary. This puts you in a position of solitude and a position where you have to stand for something. It might be the only object that embodies that, and also that puts you in the presidential mood. So with this podium, the word that I learned yesterday as a lecturer, I understood that I had the opportunity to say something about screenwriting in front of you today. And now I needed to find what, because I think a lot of things about screenwriting, in fact I believe I am a screenwriter because I like asking myself questions about screenwriting; I do this job to have the opportunity to reflect and be a part of the invention, the defence, the politics of writing for cinema.
But I don’t have a big synthesis and formulated theory; maybe it’s time I tried, with you, here, and now. I guess explaining how I write so far has always been in contradiction with my belief that movies should be prototypes and invent their own language. Still this argument doesn’t stand because even within an experimental dynamic, you still have to find a way of doing it, a method or process for searching and finding the ideas.
The paradox is that you have to find your method because you don’t need one, or at least you feel you don’t need one. As a screenwriter when somebody pitches you something or when you think freely about a plot, ideas come in very fast; you find some narrative arcs, some obstacles, this scene—where?, this character—who?. I mean in hours, minutes, sometimes. I’m sure screenwriters in the room know that feeling very well. There is no blank page syndrome at the beginning of writing because it’s your job, it’s a craft with tools for building stories. And it’s a thrilling sensation. Screenwriters know how to write and sometimes this might be our biggest problem, because this knowledge comes from a culture of storytelling. I think writing is all about questioning that, that’s why you need a method.
I do have my way of doing it, I guess at this stage I could drop a central notion here: Desire. To me, writing is about having desire for ideas, therefore it is always about trying to build an architecture of multiple desires. The word desire is traditionally linked to cinema; it has long been called the industry of desire. This idea is polemical on a lot of levels in 2019 if you want my opinion, but it is our culture, the one we grew up in at least. Yet desire is not a word we associate with screenwriters, or words. It is associated with the idea of images and making images. As a writer, you are only asked about desire as an initial spark that puts you at work: The desire to write that story, or in the more introspective psychoanalytic question: The desire under your story, your secret desire. It is pretty rare that you get to refer to your present desire, or desire building up. Also because the process of writing is so long, it’s like it doesn’t have a present because it is constituted of layers and layers, and it’s all about rewriting. But to me that’s actually the point. The fact that screenwriting is the opportunity to work on your desires rather than acting immediately on them.
Here I must say that putting desire at the centre isn’t about making it organic or personal; that would be feminine and despised; it is to make it sharp and uncompromising. It is about the construction and being radical with yourself, not self-indulgent at all. It’s about resisting easy pleasures and resisting the temptation of belonging. At that point I’m sure that feels quite abstract, mostly because desire doesn’t feel reliable as a method. Desire doesn’t even have the reputation of being accurate; can we trust someone’s desires? It seems like a very vast and mysterious feeling or sensation, but make no mistake, it’s not because it’s white, it’s because it is hitting hard somewhere and having a strong echo. Like I rising tide I might say, and that leads to the title.
I think desire is super accurate, but you have to locate it. My job as a screenwriter is to work on locating that place where desire is precisely hitting. For myself if I write for myself or for my colleague director if I’m writing for somebody, it’s about finding the point of impact and getting accurate about what you want, rather than thinking of desire as a romantic mystery about yourself.
So there’s three step: The first step is identifying and locating your global desires for a film, understanding them and being honest about them. This takes time because there are several impacts on different zones; political desire, aesthetic desire, production desire—you have to locate them and trust them enough to deconstruct them.
For Portrait of a Lady on Fire I had several big desires, for instance, that once located were designing the map of the film. I wanted to write the present of a love story, how it is born and how it grows patiently, but I also wanted to tell about the memory of a love story, what is left of a love story. Both these levels were equally desired and not compromising means crafting the storytelling that would allow both dynamics. I wanted to show an artist at work and write an artist, model collaboration that would depart from the fetishized muse tradition; I wanted it to be a period piece but tight budgeted because I didn’t want it to be dusty and meticulous and mundane; I wanted it to be a contemporary form even though it’s set in the past. Those desires are mostly political as you can see, and it can seem a little bit cold but political desire for the film is at the heart of the decision to actually write it because it will be about finding a hard solution to these theoretical desires.
And there starts the second step. The second step is about working on the local level, which means the scenes. The scenes are the centre of my writing process; each scene as a unit of desire. Technically this is how it works: It is about having two files opened on my laptop, two lists. The first list is very free, it’s a list of ideas for scenes, sometimes images, a line of dialogue; they have no connections with one another and are often not connected yet with the plot of the film. For Portrait of a Lady on Fire my first list was: Having Adèle Haenel running fast towards the edge of a cliff, actually setting fire to the character, an abortion being painted, a group of women singing an unknown tune in the night, a sentence: ‘Don’t regret remember,’ and the last scene of the film, a long take on a character listening to Vivaldi’s Summer in a concert hall. Those are the desired scenes, the ones you don’t have to look for; they are your compass, the ones you make the film for. Those belong to the list of scenes you desire, they have the point of impact. Sometimes you don’t even know why, you just know they will be in the film. And you should respect that a lot.
The other file is a list of scenes you need, the steps that are inevitably building the story, the ones that are logically unfolding your pitch or plot. That list goes like this: The scene where the painter is commissioned by the mother, the scene where the painter arrives at the castle, the scene where the painter sees the sitter for the first time, the scene where the painter starts to paint, the scene where the sitter discovers a portrait, the scene where the maid gets an abortion. I’m going through all the film like that. Those scenes seem much simpler to write because they belong; they are needed. But actually my work is all about making them belong to the other list, they must become desired, every single one of them. My rule is that not a single scene must stay on the ‘needed’ list, because it’s cinema and then I’m going to direct it.
Everything you write will have twenty people working on it, so that means hundreds of questions you’re going to have to answer and some of them will seem pointless but you can’t leave one single question unanswered. Your absence of choice will have an impact, so for instance I can tell you things from a simple scene that is a very simple breathing moment in the film: The three women, the painter, the sitter and the servant, are in the kitchen. They are silent, Eloise is making dinner, Sophie is doing embroidery and Marianne is serving some red wine. Writing the scene is five lines, making the scene is answering to what time of the day is it? What the weather is, what’s the menu? What shade and shape of plates do you want? Where should the glass be stored? Looking at plans of the table, giving the actress lessons in embroidery, designing the embroidery weeks before with an artist. If the scene is not important to you, it will get the same amount of questions, so you have to want every scene very deeply. It is about caring. You have to care about every detail. So no scene should stay in the list of the scenes that you need. Every scene has to have its own desire within it and the biggest job is thinking strongly about each scene in that list and finding something that hits you accurately, which means deeply.
This takes most of my time in the writing process, because I don’t actually start writing the continuity of the script until those two files become one. The painter will arrive by boat and jump into the water to save a canvas; the model will surprisingly be critical when she sees her portrait for the first time, rather than intimidated. The abortion scene will take place with the baby sharing the frame with the character terminating her pregnancy. Sometimes you don’t find an idea that you have a strong desire for because sometimes a scene is about getting from a place to another place—what do you do then? I used to think useful scenes should at least be shot for editing hypotheses, but now I don’t anymore. I am being radical with this belief. At the stage of my fourth film, I decided to get rid of the scenes which had been sticking for too long in the ‘Needed’ list; I just erased them. It puts you in a position where you have two scenes you want without the bridge of the scene you need, but it actually produces editing in the script and confronts you to new narratives, a new rhythm, makes you be more experimental, new power dynamics between the characters. It actually helps you be brave and depart from the comfort of a solution that has been tested, that works and that’s reassuring. It makes you depart from convention.
The hard part of that process is that when you go along with the convention and the rules of storytelling, you feel you are writing, it looks like you’re writing, because it’s efficient and understood. It takes a strong will to go deep; you have to accept the fact that you are choosing unsatisfaction for a while. You are not writing, you are thinking about writing. When the list is done on this one file, I start to write continuity in the dialogues, and I must say I don’t work at all thinking about character design, it’s not part of my process. I never think about characters as fictional persons; I don’t think of them out of the timeline and the context of the scenes, like ‘what would she do?,’ ‘how would she think?’—characters are never hypotheses. I don’t think about back-stories for them, I don’t even give them surnames. When I’m asked about the future of my characters, I honestly answer that they don’t exist, I don’t think about their resume I just know how they act and what they go through in the present of the narrative, which means that here again I focus on their desires. The characters are desire driven.
I think this method can be applied to every type of film and character, but I’m pretty sure it’s linked to the fact that I’m writing female-driven stories. Women have been objectified by fiction and by the patriarchal lore throughout history, so giving them back their subject status, their subjectivity, is giving them back their desires. Heroines don’t have the same opportunity as heroes to have project freedom. Fiction is not a safe space for female characters. They don’t get rid of oppression there, you can’t artificially free women in fiction so if you want to tell their stories it’s not about where they live—because they rarely have the opportunity to live freely, especially in a period piece—it’s about what they experience. Portrait of a Lady on Fire only looks and tells about its characters desires because they don’t have the freedom to project themselves, so it’s about how their desire will be fulfilled for a moment. Desire is female’s opportunity for fiction, and at that stage maybe I could change the title of the lecture to ‘Female Gaze at the Stage of Screenwriting,’ don’t you think?
So technically, even though Portrait can be pitched as an impossible love story, it is not written that way. It only tells about the possible love, their experience of it. It’s not about their relationship facing the world and the rules; it’s about the two of them facing each other. Of course, the story is impossible but their love isn’t… Or is. Isn’t. Isn’t. Their love is possible. So I decided not to tell about the obstacles, the enemies, the traps, men. Leave the impossibility outside the room, because it will be waiting for them anyway when they get out. If you take a moment to think about it, this big rule we totally follow, telling the obstacles between the character’s desire and its fulfilment would be more interesting and valuable than telling about the desire itself. It’s weird, but this is how we learn screenwriting, as the art of conflict.
And that leads us to the third and final step of this process: Once you have all your scenes as a list of strong desires and local solutions, you then have your narrative and you can ensure you read your film and go back to this global scale. At that moment, you have the opportunity to fully see and understand the desire you have for the narrative. If you now see a pattern between the local desires you found in the scenes that tell you about your higher desire, your desire for storytelling, your reflection on cinema. For Portrait it appeared quite clearly, the desire was to break the narrative of conflict and once you make that diagnosis, you should go for it all the way. And going all the way with this script was writing a love story based on equality, breaking this narrative of conflict was made possible by the fact that it is two women meeting so there is no gender domination, and then I decided there will also be no intellectual domination even though it’s an artist and a model, and also never to play with social hierarchy. It was a decision I had to take because we are born and raised in cinema being taught that conflict is the natural dynamic of the storyteller and that a good scene is in a way a good bargain between characters.
So no conflict, boring? I got the Best Screenplay award in Cannes.
[Laughter]
So maybe, but also I guess not. Lack of conflict doesn’t mean lack of tension; lack of conflict doesn’t mean lack of eroticism; lack of conflict actually means new rhythm because of a dialogue not built on bargaining. Lack of conflict actually means new power dynamics that allows new surprises and suspense. That’s what is at stake in a story with equality actually. Equality brings unconventional power dynamics to the screen. So basically as a viewer you don’t know what is going to happen, which is the base of being both entertained and committed to a story.
I’m going to end this by trying to embody this whole reflection into one example. So there was a scene on the list of the ‘Needed’ scenes, the first kiss scene. I needed to fill that with an idea that I would feel strongly about and that you would feel strongly about. A desire that would actually talk about desire. So I began the list of first kiss situations and ideas, having in mind that a good first kiss scene is about the choreography that will lead you to it. That’s what you remember from a first kiss more than anything, and also having in mind that a good first kiss scene must feel new. It must feel like a first time, like if I try to think about who did it well in the last few years, Spiderman comes to mind – Spiderman in French – the backwards kiss. I have no clips! There was an idea that felt new because it engaged both characters in another dynamic of power. I’m obsessed with this. We’re not sure what it is but it does feel different, and it’s unforgettable, so it is a good first kiss scene. I also wanted to challenge politically the kissing scene, which traditionally either has the surprise kiss scene thanks to a rain shower for instance, or the obvious kiss scene thanks to mustard on the corner of the lips, for instance, and it is generally carefully scripted as ‘They kiss.’ Or ‘They passionately kiss.’ And then it’s on the actors’ shoulders. It seems to rely a lot on them because its their bodies and fluids and interaction, but it shouldn’t be. It’s fake. It’s not about finding the magic. Actors should always be part of the elaboration of an idea, especially with intimate scenes.
So I wanted to craft a scene that would embody the sexiness of consent. Here again working with narrative. People who are questioning the idea of asking for consent in France, they do exist. They are brave fighters for the culture of French gallantry who say that asking for consent would not be sexy, it will break the mood. Some of the French critics thought the film lacked flesh, precisely because to them eroticism is about conflict. I wish some day why in life being kissed by surprise feels weird and clumsy whereas hearing ‘Do you want me to kiss you?’ feels like being in a film. Anyway. At some point I came up with the idea of them having to unveil their mouths like they would undress themselves. So I put a scarf, justified by a strong wind, pressed on their lips and thinking you would see their heavy breathing through the moving cloth. Let’s watch it now.
[Clip plays]
[Applause]
That wasn’t a bad choice actually. Not because I haven’t seen it—I wanted to take the bonfire scene also because, well, it kind of embodies the things I’ve been telling you, you see the initial desires, women singing in the night to an unknown tune, the character actually set on fire, the fact that there are no bridges between these two scenes it’s just this hand thing and there’s another day and we don’t need it, we’re trying not to use this. Not bad!
[Laughter]
So when you put so much desire into a scene, you also have a strong anticipation of the moment of shooting it, especially intimate scenes. You want it to go smoothly, to share with your cast, care for your cast. That day came. First we did the very long travelling by the sea with their hands touching and then Héloïse disappears and you find her in the grotto. We had trouble finding the right way to do it, we lost an hour, so when we began shooting the kissing scene I only had fifteen minutes ahead of me because the water was rising and strong waves were already coming out of it. So the shooting of this intimate scene became five takes in a row with me basically shouting at the actors from a distance being totally frustrated with strong waves coming closer. Reality to harden the process of shooting a film; it’s about compromising and knowing your priorities. That’s why you must take writing so seriously, be radical in screenwriting, because if you are radical with your ideas in a scene nothing will take it away and you will always be ready for the rising tide. Thank you.
[Applause]