INTERVIEW WITH Director PHILIPPE LE GUAY

How did “The Women on the 6th Floor” come about?

It all began with a childhood memory of my family’s Spanish housemaid, Lourdes.  I spent the first few years of my life with her around.  I ended up spending more time with her than with my own mother, to the extent that when I started speaking I got French and Spanish mixed up. When I started nursery school I spoke a kind of incomprehensible mumbo jumbo. I even said my prayers in Spanish. Though I have no specific recollection of these early years, my mother has told me about them and something from that time has remained with me. Then, when travelling in Spain, something clicked when I met a woman who told me all about her life in Paris in the 60s. The idea for a film about this community of Spanish housemaids took hold of me.  I wrote an initial version of the screenplay with Jérôme Tonnerre: it was the story of a teenage boy whose parents neglected him and who found refuge and protection with the maids in his block of flats. Then I decided to change the point-of-view and imagined the father being introduced to the world up on the sixth floor.  A different, less nostalgic film came together.  Jérôme Tonnerre worked with me on it. He had a Spanish housemaid who’d been in France for forty years, and we asked her loads of questions.  Our film takes place in 1962, at the end of the Algerian War, in the France of Charles de Gaulle. It’s not such a long time ago, but it’s another era, a different world…

The cinema has a long tradition of servants and their employers.

Yes, and so does the theatre! You need only think of Molière or Marivaux…Later Renoir, Guitry and Lubitsch drew from this tradition. What’s exciting about having servants in a story is you’re dealing with codes: politeness, what can be said and what cannot. This constantly creates performance issues and therefore directing issues.

Your film is not just a love story; first and foremost it’s about entering the world of these women.

The trap we had to avoid at all costs was the boss falling in love with the housemaid. That’s why I insisted there had to be not just one, but several women. Jean-Louis Joubert (Luchini) discovers a community, and their culture suddenly becomes part of his life. He is disturbed and upset, and ultimately seduced by them.  The film introduces you to a world that is unknown despite being so close. I like the idea that something foreign can be found on your doorstep. The slightest occurrence can take you out of your world and reveal new ones to you; worlds that brush past each other without ever getting tangled up.  In the film Jean-Louis sums it all up with the following sentence: “These women are living right over our heads, and we don’t know the least thing about them.”

How did you go about fleshing out your screenplay?

Jérôme Tonnerre and I met up with former housemaids living in the 16th arrondissement in Paris (and elsewhere) along with some of their employers.  We also went to the Spanish Church in rue de la Pompe – where we shot a few scenes. There is a key figure there, el Padre Chuecan: a priest who’s been there since 1957 who is a walking reference book about that wave of immigration. He’s a bald, 80-year-old giant of a man who took thousands of Spanish immigrants under his wing when they came looking for work. The Church was a cultural and social meeting place. It was the first place these women went to when they arrived in Paris, and that’s where the job interviews happened.  We got extraordinary real-life details out of meeting these people. Every one of the anecdotes in the film was based on real events, like the story of Josephina, who believed she had gotten pregnant because she had taken a bath in her employer’s bathtub…

Where did the material for the Joubert family come from?

I come from a middle-class family but the film is in no way autobiographical. My parents lived in Paris’ 17th arrondissement, my father was a stockbroker, and I was sent to a boarding school just like the Joubert boys. But we have nothing else in common.  As luck should have it, we did actually film on sets in an abandoned building, thirty yards from the school I attended as a child. We outfitted it as the Joubert flat, with the service entrance and the small bedrooms. The walls up there were knocked down and replaced with décor sheets so the filming would be logistically possible, because you could hardly get a camera in there! But the bedroom space is totally authentic.

At what point did you think Fabrice Luchini should play the main character?

Fabrice is known for his energy, the way he galvanizes a stage, film or TV set. He has extraordinary textual and verbal power, but he also has an amazing ability to step back. He loves writers motivated by resentment, and will quote despondent texts by people like Cioran or Thomas Bernhard, but deep inside he is not at all jaded. His facial expressions are enough to convince you how strong his link to childhood is. That’s the inspiration for the film: the way he looks at these women in such amazement.  As the filming progressed I realized more and more that Jean-Louis is a man who has never been loved. He says it casually when speaking about his mother: “My mother never loved anybody.”  And now these women on the sixth floor are gathering him in their arms, kissing him and looking after him. He is a child who has found protective women: surrogate mothers. For me, the film isn’t so much about criticizing the middle classes as discovering emotions. In this milieu and period people are frozen; there’s something obscene about saying what you are feeling. There is an incredible distance between a man and his wife and their children. Nobody kisses each other!  From day one, Fabrice drew my attention to the fact that Jean-Louis Joubert was a hollowed-out character who takes, but never gives. Which is something he’s not used to doing in his roles, we’re more used to see him giving of himself…

This is the third film you’ve made with Luchini…

We do not resemble each other at all, but strangely he’s almost become my alter ego. Fabrice loves the disillusioned; writers given to despair, while I like those with zeal and tenacity. But he is so joyful when he reads out depressing texts that his own energy transfigures them.  He is entirely without ego when he works. He is totally into his work, approachable and responsive, a true partner. There was something strange that happened with Fabrice. I gave him the screenplay in May 2009, and he called me a few days later to tell me we needed to talk. We met up a few times, had lunch, took taxis together, and each time we spoke about totally unconnected things like Molière or Flaubert…and never about the project. It turned into a kind of joke, and right up to the end I wasn’t sure whether he actually read the screenplay. Directing actors must begin in those seemingly non-productive phases, I suppose.  I knew the decisive moment would be when he met the Spanish women. I think he basically hadn’t been expecting it. He came into the office to find the six women sitting and looking at him. He sized the film up in an instant; he saw how exceptional these women were, some of them didn’t speak a word of French. He was electrified and went right along with the whole thing. In spite of all his experience, he is an instinctive actor who doesn’t have things all mapped out before he starts. On set he allows the emotions and the atmosphere to take a hold of him.

Opposite Luchini there is Suzanne, the wife, played by Sandrine Kiberlain.

Fabrice and Sandrine have acted together twice, most notably in RIEN SUR ROBERT, directed by Pascal Bonitzer, and there is a great intimacy between them. Sandrine has the whole breezy and superficial side typical of certain middle class women, but she also brings a kind of fragility and anxiety to the film. Suzanne comes from the provinces; she doesn’t quite understand the rules of this world, unlike her two girlfriends, who have got them completely mastered. She feels a bit stranded, and things often destabilize her, which makes her touching. Sandrine brings all this together with total precision and considerable humanity. Working with Sandrine also means constantly fleshing out the screenplay, or even taking things in a totally different direction. Take for instance the scene where the children come home from boarding school and Jean-Louis has gone to live on the sixth floor. In the first version, Suzanne had a sort of wounded pride. Then the idea came up that she should welcome her sons home with a bottle of white wine, and right away Sandrine pushed the indifference to the limit…

How did you put your Spanish community together?

I wasn’t interested in having a chorus; I wanted a gallery of very individualized portraits. First I imagined a republican character who’d come to France after fleeing Franco’s regime. At the other end of the scale I was looking for a super-devout zealot who goes to church every day and keeps arguing with the republican. Rising above the scrum and no doubt a mixture of the first two characters, is the one played by Carmen Maura, who calms things down and tempers the conflict. There is Teresa, who wants to find a French husband and María, of course, Concepción’s niece, who comes to France looking for work, and who is at the center of everything that happens.

How did you select the actresses?

First of all, Carmen Maura is the great figurehead of Spanish cinema: I couldn’t imagine the film without her in it. She is the first actress I saw. Even thought the role isn’t a big one compared to what she can get, she did want to play a Spanish woman in Paris, like so many women she had met in her youth. In addition she actually has a flat in Paris made up of several former housemaids’ rooms. She was similar to her character in the way she connected with the other actresses; she was someone to look up to, a friendly authority figure.   While we were filming they all had their own dressing rooms, but they didn’t spend any time in them, they got together and talked away at high speed in Spanish.  It was really lively and Fabrice was often involved. Carmen liked the idea of acting in Spanish and in French at the same time, sometimes in the same scene. I wanted to capture the musicality the Spanish language has.

What about the character of Marie, played by Natalia Verbeke?

We needed a young woman who was pretty, but not too pretty so she could be endearing. Natalia Verbeke had all these qualities and she spoke a little French too. That was important for the connection with Fabrice. She knew her lines so well that she was able to communicate with everyone on set.  Rosa Estevex took care of the Spanish side of the casting so I went to Spain often. I took more actresses from the theatre in order to avoid the cliché of using “Almodóvarian” actresses. That’s how I settled on Lola Dueñas, Nuria Solé, Berta Ojea, and Concha Galán. The last two didn’t speak a word of French and learned their lines phonetically. They have this amazing temperament, embodying all the intensity, violence and volubility of Spanish women.

What are your memories during filming?

There’s the scene with the party on the sixth floor; where Jean-Louis lets himself get drawn into the dance. You have to realize Fabrice is an excellent dancer, but I wanted him to be embarrassed and awkward. It was tough for Fabrice to hold back and not dance well, but the maids encouraged him little by little and he lets himself go without realizing what he is doing.
Something beyond words occurred: a tremor, an emotion in his eyes; the miracle of an actor opening up.

What did you learn from working on the project?

I’ve always liked actors, but I discovered the pleasure of working with a mixture of French and foreign actors. You have to change your habits and your viewpoint; it’s really refreshing.
There’s a European feeling to the story that affected me. Before the EU (European Union) became a political reality, Europe built itself in the sixties. The Spanish were there alongside us, on the street corners and in the parks…It’s part of our two countries’ common history.  Just as the character of Jean-Louis discovers other people in the film, I feel the cinema was invented to show the learning process. We film people in order to capture something in them, to make ourselves richer through contact with the other.

ABOUT FABRICE LUCHINI (JEAN-LOUIS)
One of France’s most beloved actors both on screen and on stage, Fabrice Luchini grew up in the Paris working class neighborhood of La Goutte d’Or. The son of Italian immigrants, he sells fruits and vegetables from a young age at his parent’s small shop. Preferring street life to school, he is nonetheless an autodidact, avidly reading French literature with a passion for Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust, among many others. At 13, his mother finds him a job as a hairdresser apprentice in an upscale salon of the 8th Arrondissement, but his love for soul music turns him into a regular of nightclubs where he gets noticed by director Philippe Labro who gives him his very first part in 1969 in Tout Peut Arriver.

Eric Rohmer casts him in Claire’s Knee, while at the same time Luchini signs up for acting school and discovers the treasures of classical theatre. With newly acquired experience, he gets cast again by Rohmer, in Perceval Le Gallois, followed by Full Moon in Paris, soon becoming one of Rohmer’s favorite actors. At first a darling of cinephiles, his role as an eloquent dandy in Christian Vincent’s La Discrete makes him a popular actor as well. From then on he becomes one of France’s most sought out actors with roles in Cédric Klapisch’s first film, Riens du Tout (1992), Claude Lelouch’s Tout ca… pour ca (1993), for which he wins a César for Best Supporting Actor, Edouard Molinaros’ Beaumarchais, L’Insolent (1995), and acts opposite stars such as Sandrine Kiberlain, Nathalie Baye and Sandrine Bonnaire.

His unique diction and brilliant verve makes him a favorite of French television talk shows. Luchini loves playing Moliere characters on screen and on stage where he also reads literary texts by La Fontaine, Céline and Barthes. His most recent role was opposite Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu in Potiche, directed by Francois Ozon, who cast him again in his latest film, “Dans la Maison,” currently in production.