INTERVIEW: Director Sophie Fillières heads to forest in ‘If You Don’t, I Will’

There are times in one’s life when family, work and the pressures of 21st-century living can be too overwhelming, too complicated, too unfulfilling. The character of Pomme (Emmanuelle Devos) in Sophie Fillières’ new film, If You Don’t, I Will, decides to combat these pressures by retreating from her husband (Mathieu Amalric) and spending some time in the forest. Her Into the Wild experience is less about survival and more about reconnecting with her basic needs. Throughout this journey, she needs to figure out several important, sustaining items, including food, shelter and her thoughts on the future of her marriage.

The idea for the film, which Fillières both wrote and directed, didn’t start with the married couple of Pomme and Pierre. Instead, it started with this adventure in nature.

“[The idea for the film] came through a hike in the forest, and I thought what would happen if I, you know, decided to stay,” Fillières said recently during a phone interview. “I thought what would make somebody stay, and I thought, well, a couple where everything is not very OK and where she would absolutely want some liberty and some opening. … And also I’ve done before lots of portraits, feminine portraits, and I wanted to deal with the couple in general. So that’s how I started writing it.”

The director sees Pomme’s journey as progress toward a “primary feeling” with “primary expectations” and “primary needs.” The need to sleep, eat and be warm are sometimes forgotten about in the hectic society Pomme finds herself in. This central character has a college-aged son, a work-in-progress marriage with Pierre and the recent news that a tumor in her body is benign. When the audience first meets her, she’s preparing a return to her office job and dealing with the intricacies of life. Then a hike in the woods, with the promises of a picnic at some point, sparks her plan.

“She wants to go back to some kind of origin of who she is and what she needs, some basics, like basic needs, and also to I guess find herself again as she’s a bit lost inside this couple, well, not lost, but fed up and not well in this couple.”

Fillières likened the journey as a new lease on life for Pomme. In some ways, this revolutionary act of simplicity is a direct result of the character’s discovery that the tumor is benign. Although there are few details about her medical background, there’s a sense in If You Don’t, I Will that Pomme has a new life expectancy following the positive news.

“She reconsiders how she’s gotten there and what she still has to go, what’s in store for her at her mid-life crisis, which is not a word that I like very much, but still,” the director said. “I needed that she had some physical problems so that maybe that could account for … [how] she floats a bit and the way she’s a bit whimsy. I didn’t want her to be neurosed, you know, or crazy or have anything crazy. I didn’t want the stay in the forest to be like a huge whim. I needed it to be like a real decision, and the fact she underwent something physical means that it’s not just her character. It’s not her personality; she’s not a neurotic woman. She just went through something that makes her reconsider everything.”

Although it seems like the part of Pomme and Pierre were written for Devos, an accomplished French actress known for Coco Before Chanel and Read My Lips, and Amalric, an equally accomplished French actor who has gained notoriety in Munich and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the director said the script came before the actors.

“About halfway through [the writing process], sometimes in the dialogue and everything, I would say to myself, ‘Well, this is a bit hard to say. It’s a bit twisted and everything.’ And then I would reassure myself, thinking, oh, but somebody like Emannuelle Devos would do it fine, but I didn’t really write it for her. And then it just became obvious as I got along that she should do it, and also I had worked with her before. And I wanted to work with her again, and I thought at first that she wouldn’t want to do a third movie with me because she had a small part in a previous film, too, and a large part in another one. And I thought she would turn me down because maybe she would think she knew my style too much.”

Well, Devos said yes, and the two discovered that working for the third time on a film can have unique challenges. The expectations are higher, Fillières said.

“It raises all the stakes higher up because you have to find something fresh and something that you haven’t gone through already, that you haven’t worked,” she said. “It all has to be new.”

When Amalric was brought on board, there were some slight script revisions, even though Fillières said she’s not in the habit of rewriting.

“I didn’t know who to ask to play Pierre. I had thought about Mathieu Amalric, but I thought no. He’s such an international actor, and I hardly know him. I thought maybe he would consider it too much a small French film, but when he agreed to do it, I rewrote a little bit because … the fact that it was Mathieu, enabled me. He had such charm, even if the character is very somber and harsh with his partner, with Pomme. But the fact that he has such charm and seductiveness … gave me some latitude to go even further down in the somber side and to be able to rely on his charm and seductiveness so that he wouldn’t be a totally sinister character. I needed him to be lightly and in some way charming and present.”

Pomme’s journey into the wild can be a stand-in for a struggle many people are facing in today’s society. There are couples who get along until they are 90 years old, but many partners need to work out serious issues throughout the life of their marriage and relationship. Fillières documents this “warped” feeling that happens around 45 or 50, when divorce and separation seem so easy, and true growth as a person is sometimes lost in the fray.

“I think it’s an age, like the middle of life, where everything stands out more and what you dealed with for a long time just doesn’t go through anymore,” she said. “I think it may touch many life partners.”

The film, which is currently playing New York City’s Film Forum, is the culmination of a dedicated career that began when the director was still a teenager. Fillières first decided to work in films at the age 16 after watching Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie), released in the United States as Every Man for Himself.

“It made me discover what directing meant,” she said. “I went to the movies, but it was very fuzzy. I didn’t realize what was the actor’s part in a movie, what was a director’s part in a movie. And I saw this, and I thought, wow, you can do this. I mean you can decide things like that. It’s the power of decision through Jean-Luc Godard’s eyes in directing his movie that really opened me up and made me feel that I have to do this. But I wanted to do this, the absolute decisional power, yes, to decide on everything, I mean the editing, the place where the camera is, and what you decided to show and not show. I think directing is something like I always say it’s like showing what you hide and hiding that you’re showing. It’s both. That really sort of excited me, and that’s what made me pursue this.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Click here for more information If You Don’t, I Will at Film Forum in New York City.