His biopic about the writer Colette allows the English actress highlight issues you care about such as feminism, art and sexual identity. In summary: good-bye, ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’
Colette, the writer who devoted his life and work to his desire for pleasure
Keira Knightley is eager to talk. Of the women in the world today. How to “blew up” her life when she became a mother three years ago. Of how good it feels to recompose the pieces. And Colette, his latest film, a biography of the French writer, which opens Friday, and his long career compressed into these 33 exciting and gesticulantes years that contrast with the image corseted that we had of this british actress in Pride & prejudice, Atonement, and so many other movies of the era…
What I knew of Colette before you get on your skin?I had read ‘Gigi’ and ‘Chéri’, and I knew she was a heroine in France, and something like the precursor of the sexual freedom in the belle époque. But was unaware how she had been silenced by her first husband, Willy, and how he appropriated his early works, the series of Claudine. If you think about it, that’s been a bit of the story of the women until very recently: the oppression, the silence and the struggle to find your own voice. I think that is a story in which all women can relate, even a century later.In the time of Colette, the voice of women was marginal in the world of literature. Do you pass today something like that in the film?I know by memory the numbers and I hope not to be wrong: 50% of the graduates of film schools are women. The 27% can’t even shoot a sequence and, in the end, is the 13% that have at least a chance. So we come to the fateful 4% of directors in comparison with 96% of principals… I don’t know if there is any other sector where there is more inequality. The problem is that the financing of films is in the hands of men. The film continues to silence the stories of women. Do you see a solution?The root of the problem is complicated. The age to direct a first film is usually between 28 and 30 or so years. Most women feel to these age the call of motherhood. It’s as simple as: or you are the director or you’re a mother. The two things are incompatible as long as there is parity in the home and while having a child suppose to be out of the game for one or two years. Then it costs a lot to join because the care of children still falls overwhelmingly on women. How it has affected you maternity?All the experiences make you see the world with other eyes, but this is incomparable. All jumps in the air in the moment that you’re a mother and for a time you’re aiming to recompose the pieces, and sometimes it can be better than before, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.Is it true that in ‘Colette’ put conditions to adjust the shooting to their status as a mother?I was lucky that the director, Wash Westmoreland, was very understanding with my situation and wanted at all costs to me to do the film. She settled herself tremendously in the shoot, with pauses to observe the shots of my daughter, with a direction assistant dumped all the time… My dressing room became a roving home. In the end, the actors put sometimes requirements extravangantes, what less adapted to the condition of the mother? Everything worked great and I found the perfect balance. ILLUSTRATION: CARLOS RODRIGUEZ MARRIED
I would like to gay actors give to them without problems roles of heterosexual
You made movies produced by Harvey Weisntein, as The Imitation Game. Did you have any bad experience with him?My relationship with him was always very professional. But all the world knew that he could be very aggressive and call you in the middle of the night or yell at you in public. At that time I did not know the abuse and sexual harassment, all that was behind, we have started to know it after.Can you be an actress and a feminist without paying a price?Depends on what you deem as a feminist… To me raised me to believe that I could be capable of anything, but I soon realize that there is a false ceiling. At 12 years old I gave my first feminist discourse on women in the sport, and that was five years before I Want to be like Beckham. We have made progress, but the inequality in professional sports is still fucking terrible. An athlete has many ways to monetize on your recognition or your fame;a woman has to start from zero and almost necessarily changing career at 30 or so. Machismo abounds in the sport is tremendous.Colette had to fight her way in a male world, and came to shock with their relationships with women…That is another facet that I had not known all about it. At 33 years of age, which is my age now, not only managed to remove the yoke of her husband but chose the path less beaten. The normal thing would have been that rentabilizara fame, but he tried his luck as an actress in cabaret, he acknowledged his bisexuality, and began a relationship of seven years with a person who today would identify as a transsexual. She had the courage to follow your instinct and not go back to give up the freedom.What do you think of the controversy caused by the resignation of Scarlett Johansson with her role as a transgender in ‘Rub and Tug’?At Colette, there are two actors who are transgender and are part of the campus. I hope that the buzz that was built with Scarlett Johansson is soon forgotten. I would also like to gay actors give to them without problems roles of heterosexual, because I know that many of them are hard. I would like to live in a world in which sexual orientation to stop though as a stigma.You began to make cinema very young, how are you feeling at this moment? What would you change something?I’m fucking lucky right now. Don’t usually look back, and think if I had to have worn so many times the corset in period films and in films of pirates (laughs). I have found a certain balance in my life and I’m satisfied with my cart, making the films they really want to do.Is ‘biopic’ and not parecePor Luis Martínez
The overabundance of ‘biopics’ in the cinema of prestige contemporary can only be a symptom of how little we trust already in the fiction. For something to be real now has to be before part of the same reality. And that, although it may not appear so, it is a very bad news. Only fiction gives meaning to reality, not the other way around. ‘Colette’, in effect, is a biographic film. And that, we say as we say, uncomfortable. However, and without a precedent, this time no apology. The director Wash Westmoreland (who for the first time signature only, and not with Richard Glatzer) manages to rebuild a universe around the main character enough fun, unbiased and as far away from this world that today we stand, for a moment, until it seems to lie. And that, contrary to what you may think, it is good. A lot of even. We are in the Paris of the ‘belle époque’, and Keira Knightley manages to deliver a performance so delicate and accurate as to your rather strange. The entire tape revolves around her. Dominic West is limited to give a replica sonorous and forceful. And between the two of you get to build a bright archetype of freedom. Simple and pure freedom against the imposture of reality. That is the key. Pure fiction. Then there is the matter of feminism. And here it is advisable to be careful. A long time ago that it was proven that the consumption knows no boundaries, and offers the possibility of being denied. Each time it arises, a movement against the ‘establishment’, the latter manages to make a product for sale. This is not the case of ‘Colette’, which has enough arguments to not be swallowed by the obvious, but be careful. Either way, it’s ‘biopic’, but it is not what I would say. And that is good.
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