The Big Picture

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff sits down with first-time writer-director Durga Chew-Bose and the stars of her debut feature
Bonjour Tristesse
at TIFF 2024.

Bonjour Tristesse
is a French novel adaptation that stars Chloë Sevigny, Claes Bang, and Lily McInerny.
In this interview, the cast and director discuss challenges filming on location, bringing new life to their characters, Charli XCX, and more.

Summertime sadness makes its way to the screen with Durga Chew-Bose’s feature directorial debut, Bonjour Tristesse. This first-time director celebrated the world premiere of her film at the Toronto International Film Festival with the cast members she tells us were pivotal in bringing her own spin to this 1954 coming-of-age novel.

Based on the novel of the same name by Françoise Sagan, the dreamy film follows the story of 18-year-old Cécile (Lily McInerny), who spends the holidays getting sun-kissed by the French seaside. She’s not alone — joining her is her devilishly charming father, Raymond (Claes Bang), and his youthful Bohemian lover, Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune). But when her peaceful world is interrupted by the presence of her late mother’s friend (Chloë Sevigny), a remarkably stylish and sociable fashion designer, Cécile slowly receives several rude awakenings about the fabulous society she’s surrounded by.

Our own Perri Nemiroff had the opportunity to discuss Bonjour Tristesse when writer-director Chew-Bose and cast members McInerny, Bang, and Sevigny stopped by the Collider studio at the Cinema Center at MARBL. During their conversation, which you can watch in the video above or read below, they share how each member of the cast was pivotal for Chew-Bose’s vision for the adaptation, the challenges they overcame while filming on location, discovering their characters, and Sevigny’s brat summer in Charli XCX’s music video.

‘Bonjour Tristesse’ Is Based on the French Novel by Françoise Sagan
Image via TIFF

PERRI NEMIROFF: The movie is based on some very well-known source material, but given we’re at a film festival, I feel like a lot of people might not know about the movie yet. So I must give you the honors, Durga. Would you mind giving us a brief synopsis of the film?

DURGA CHEW-BOSE: It’s a film about a father and daughter spending their summer in the south of France at a leisurely pace. They are accompanied by their father, Raymond, and Raymond’s girlfriend, Elsa, and they’re just really having a good time. Then, Anne arrives. Anne is a friend from Raymond’s past, and her arrival stirs things up. The momentum kind of picks up in their summer for various reasons.

Spot on. I was waiting until you hit the “but” moment, and you hit it really strongly. So again, this is based on very well-known source material, and you want to respect the source material, but when you adapt something, you also want to make it your own to a degree. What was the key for in terms of you making this version of the story specific to you as a filmmaker?

CHEW-BOSE: I actually think one aspect of making it my own was casting these actors. I really admire their work, and I feel like they bring something really original and unexpected to the roles and break the characters out, but also deliver a lot of interior life.

I’m gonna follow up on that briefly.

Durga Chew-Bose’s Casting Makes Her Adaptation Unique
Image by Photagonist at TIFF

When you are casting the three of them in particular, what do you see in them when you first meet that signals to you that, “They are not only perfect fits for these characters but also good collaborators for me?”

CHEW-BOSE: Where do I begin? With Claes, he really likes to talk it through but not necessarily have answers, which I really appreciate. It means that you can remain open, but you’re not always just solution-driven with a character. Things like backstory and stuff, you can get entangled in it, but as long as we were on the same page, we’d have jazzier conversations about that kind of stuff. So I really appreciated that. And his passion, too. Chloë is really, really careful. She’s also a director, so she brings that quality to the role, but also to the set. She really cares deeply about her characters, and, beyond that, she cares deeply about the film. She sets a tone that I was really lucky to work with. Lily is like a bright star and she’s really funny. The character of Cécile, by virtue of it being a coming-of-age film, is full of contradictions and is figuring out how her feelings manifest. Lily is a really physical performer, and she brought that out in Cécile’s character really beautifully.

Beautiful answer. Now it’s time to hurl compliments Durga’s way, especially considering this is her feature directorial debut here. I have a feeling there’s going to be many more in her future. What is something about her as an actor’s director that you all appreciated and are excited for more actors to experience down the line?

LILY MCINERNY: I’d love to start. One of my favorite parts of working with Durga was her innate sensitivity and emotionality and her willingness to discuss the more abstract elements of my character in a way that was really open and vulnerable. The way we were able to share our personal experiences and how they tied into these characters, how they compared, how they contrasted, that was really special. Creating a space for that kind of dialogue was really rare and delightful. That’s one of my favorite parts, but the list goes on.

I love that. How about the two of you? Anything come into mind?

CHLOË SEVIGNY: I felt very protective of Durga as a first-time filmmaker. It’s scary to walk on and have this power and responsibility. She was, of course, very close to the script as a writer-director, which always tends to be a specific thing. She’s emotionally attached to the material in a different way than directors who are directing another person’s piece of writing. I really wanted to respect that and respect her vision. She was just so clear in what she wanted. She was so good at making choices, and I feel like, as a director, it’s a lot about making choices. She seemed very confident in all of her decisions but also open to trying new things. Being able to have confidence in the person that you’re giving yourself over to is really important, and I felt that from Durga innately, so that was nice.

Are you blushing yet? Well-deserved. You want to take us home on this one?

CLAES BANG: I really like this thing of working with someone who has written and is directing it because you get really close to the core of the whole thing. But I sometimes also feel that you cannot get in there, but that is not the case with Durga. You have an amazing openness. You’re inviting it that we sort of contribute something, and in this way we sort of shape it together. That just felt very fulfilling. And that started even when we talked on the phone, a year before we started shooting. We started to have these conversations of this whole thing, and I really felt that we were building it together, and you were very perceptive to ideas and the whole feel of it. So that was just a pleasure and a joy.

SEVIGNY: Also, I feel a bit jaded sometimes in the industry, especially working a lot in television, and it’s just kind of this machine. There’s something pure about Durga’s approach that was really refreshing for me after doing a lot of episodic television, to have this person who had this really deep, profound respect for the history of cinema and wanting to do a return to a certain kind of movie that we don’t see anymore that she was trying to capture. That was fun and refreshing for me to be able to do something like that, something more internal and different than playing this kind of high-stakes TV stuff that I sometimes get stuck in. [Laughs]

I get that. I don’t know if you’ve done any new episodic stuff since, but is there anything about your experience working on this that maybe gave you something new to refresh that experience when you get back into that machine?

SEVIGNY: Every machine is different, and every set is different. But the consideration that Durga had, the way she looked at things, was from a different angle than most people do. She had a very profound kind of joy, attachment, and attention to just very obscure, esoteric [details]. I don’t even know what the word is. It was very unusual.

I like hearing that. I feel like unusual is what keeps me on my toes and keeps me excited and interested, so whenever someone has that kind of eye, I’m probably going to like the movie.

It’s All in the Details in ‘Bonjour Tristesse’
Image by Photagonist at TIFF

To dig into all three of your characters now, someone brought this up to me recently. I don’t know if you had this experience, but I get a little obsessed with the idea that one of the most exciting things when you start a new film is having that moment, either in prep or on set, when you do something or think of something and know you have just found who your character is. Did the three of you have that with your characters, and if so, when?

BANG: I don’t think there’s like that kind of “prize money” moment. I don’t think I’ve ever had that, actually. But I felt that for me, the thing that was really interesting in this was this relationship between the father and the daughter, which is what drew me to the project in the first place. We went there a bit before we started shooting, and Lily and I got to spend time together. Over those weeks, I felt what you were talking about, that kind of feeling, because I think that was very important to us that we got that connection right, that you had a feeling they had this shorthand. And I think we started to move into that over those weeks.

SEVIGNY: What was so interesting to me about playing Anne is that her character is revealed through the film. She’s very guarded. She shows up, at first, to this party — she’s an intruder, she’s a disruptor. I’m also serving something in the story, a certain aspect of the story that her character has to react against. I had to work within those confines. I like, as an actor, having certain confines in that way, in serving and propelling the story, and having something for her to bump up against. But I got to reveal Anne, as the movie goes on, to these characters in the movie.

Image by Photagonist at TIFF

I love how you say “bump up against.” That’s very true, but there’s also a warmth and a reluctant maternal instinct, too. It makes it such a complex character which is true to the source material, as well.

MCINERNY: What comes to mind for me is there was one detail Durga included in the screenplay that described Cécile’s footfall as heavy, and that kept coming up. There was something about that specific descriptor that really painted the way my character moves through the world, this lack of self-consciousness, this innate impulsivity and energy and carelessness that she starts the film inhibiting. That was a great jumping-off point. Maybe it didn’t “unlock her,” but it was certainly a great foundation.

I love details like that. Someone once brought up to me, “I like to think of seemingly silly things about my character. For example, are they the type of person who runs late?” You might never see them run late in the movie, but it completely colors who they are and how they carry themselves.

MCINERNY: Absolutley.

Whenever you’re making a movie, you can plan, plan, plan. It never always goes according to plan. Something comes up, but sometimes that’s when you can find this unexpected magic that you never would have gotten if everything had gone according to schedule. So, can you name a moment on set when you had to pivot, but you found that special something in the process?

MCINERNY: Shooting in such a beautiful location right by the sea did pose some challenges. A problem we encountered, which we didn’t exactly expect, was the sound pollution from all the boats driving by. Oftentimes, that would adjust the pace of our days or create some conflicts between scheduling certain things. But once we learned to lean into and accept that, it unlocked other potentials, as frustrating as it was. [Laughs]

Image by Photagonist at TIFF

It put you in the zone! Anyone else think of something?

CHEW-BOSE: We had one day on a boat, and I got really, really seasick and had to leave. I was really nervous because I was like, “I’m leaving my crew and I’m leaving my actors.” And who was directing? [Laughs] But one of my producers, Katie Nolan, said something really important to me while I was being taken back to land. She was like, “You trust your team that’s there, and they trust you. It’s okay that you can’t be here in this moment.” And we got the shots.

It’s a beautiful thing. That works out when you assemble the right group of people to make a movie that you all believe in and love.

Chloë Sevigny Dishes on Working with Charli XCX in “360”
“This person must be cool or popular or something.”

I’m gonna wrap with one unrelated question. Whenever we do these interviews, I always talk to the Collider team. I’m like, “Does anybody have another project you really want to hear about?” Chloë, this question is for you. I can’t believe I’m saying this because it doesn’t feel like I’m cool enough to say this, but you had a brat summer, right?

SEVIGNY: [Laughs] Didn’t we all?

I feel like I could have delivered that with a lot more authority than I did! [Laughs] I’ll ask you something serious about working on that particular music video. How did that come about for you?

SEVIGNY: Charli [xcx] and I have a lot of mutual friends, and someone from her production team reached out, and they’re like, “We want you to be in the video.” I just happened to be in LA, and I happened to have a day off. I was really lucky. Honestly, I didn’t know a lot about Charli. I knew she had done this Boiler Room show, and it was all over my Instagram feed. I was like, “This person must be cool or popular or something.” I reached out to some young friends of mine, and I was like, “Should I do this video?” They’re all like, “Yes, Chloë. Of course, you should do this video!”

MCINERNY: Little did you know…

SEVIGNY: Little did I know.

You said you went into that not really knowing all that much about her. What is something super cool you learned about her in the process that you wish more people knew about?

SEVIGNY: She’s as nice and as down to Earth as she seems in all of her interviews. She’s so confident and empowered, and I love her attitude towards the press. I just think the world of her.

MCINERNY: We love Charli.

Special thanks to this year’s partners of the Cinema Center x Collider Studio at TIFF 2024 including presenting Sponsor Range Rover Sport as well as supporting sponsors Peoples Group financial services, poppi soda, Don Julio Tequila, Legend Water and our venue host partner Marbl Toronto. And also Roxstar Entertainment, our event producing partner and Photagonist Canada for the photo and video services.