There is John Cassavetes in this man. As it is pointed out to him, Arnaud Viard smiles. “That’s doing me too much credit,” he says modestly. The director, who is making his fourth film today*, nevertheless shares many points in common with the American filmmaker. Like the author of Shadows, the Frenchman was revealed by a television series but it is thanks to the seventh art that he flourished.
As with Cassavetes, Arnaud Viard’s feature films deliver seductive portraits of women: those he loved, those he dreams of meeting (“I haven’t lost hope of one day falling on my Gena Rowlands “, he slips into a smile). But, film after film, it is of him that he talks more and more openly, exposing himself by telling stories of worried men who look like him.
Oscillating between romantic comedy and diary, this black and white film offers its actors beautiful moments of complicity. In addition to the director and his own children, the cast allows Marianne Denicourt and Romane Bohringer to play, in the truest sense of the word, with reality. An impulsive stroll through the streets of the capital as much as a wise reflection on fatherhood in a turbulent world, this story happily intersects melody and humor.
“I think that the good films are those where their author tells himself with sincerity as much as they tell their time”, emits Arnaud Viard. Since his first film, nearly twenty years ago, the director has practiced evoking the realities of his time. Better: to the description of the journey of a generation. In his first feature film, Clara et moi (released in 2004), he already addressed the difficulty of a son asserting himself against a father, a professor of medicine, played by Michel Aumont. This film was also a beautiful love story in the time of AIDS, offering Julie Gayet and Julien Boisselier their best roles to date.
With I would like someone to wait for me somewhere (2019), adapting the eponymous novel by Anna Gavalda, he signed a choral film in the form of a touching portrait of a large family, crossed with a reflection on the act of creating. . A story with melancholic overtones well in tune with the times.
If Arnaud Viard has been building a personal cinematographic work for nearly twenty years, he also lends his features to endearing characters in films made by others. In 2016, in Bonjour Anne, he embodied the quintessence of the “French lover”, opposite Diane Lane, in front of the camera of Eleanor Coppola. And in the first two episodes of the series Emily in Paris, he lent his features to a Parisian publicist eager to enjoy life after selling his communication agency to the character of Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu.
In the casting of the next Woody Allen (Coup de chance whose release is announced in September), with Lou de Laâge, Melvil Poupaud, Valérie Lemercier and Niels Schneider, we are already announcing him in the series that Netflix will devote, next May, to the racing driver Ayrton Senna!
However, nothing predestined him to become an actor. His father, a surgeon, and his mother, heiress of a family of silk workers very invested in Olympique Lyonnais, would have preferred to see him embrace another career. “To please them, I first turned to advertising after studying business school and civil service at Pernod-Ricard in the United Kingdom,” he admits. But at 26, he chose to branch off by enrolling in Cours Florent. “My path was to follow the path of my uncle (comedian Jean-Robert-Viard, editor’s note) and his wife Martine Vitez,” he slips.
The Covid crisis over, Arnaud Viard is now working hard to make up for lost time. He has several projects in his boxes. The first of these is a New York comedy in the footsteps of Tom Waits. Music plays an important role in the life of the filmmaker who has always cared for his soundtracks. “I would have loved to be a singer: we are under the sunlights, we tell our life but it takes less time to write a song than a film! he flares up.
For Clara and I, Benjamin Biolay had composed several original songs. “For the following, it was Mathieu Boogaerts whose humor I really appreciate. Then Clément Ducol who is now preparing Jacques Audiard’s next musical. The music of Cléo, Melvil et moi is by Vincent Delerm, who offers him a delicious ballad, a pretext for a sequence of song and dance of great poetry.
*
