Mia Hansen-Løve Tends to Her “Children”

Cahiers du Cinéma writer-turned-director Mia Hansen-Løve on drama "The Father of My Children."

At the same time, your dialogue and the performances are very naturalistic. What does a script for a film like this look like? Is everything planned out in minute detail? Do you improvise at all?

It’s both very exact and open at the same time. For example, I left a lot of the scenes I’d written for children open so that things would develop while those scenes were being shot. In scenes without children, the dialogue was very precise, but there was still some openness there. I wanted to make sure that as things developed and came up, they could be incorporated into the script.

Before you became a filmmaker you spent some time writing for Cahiers du Cinéma. What kind of perspective do you feel that brought to your work?

When I was writing for Cahiers, I already knew that I wanted to be a filmmaker. My experience wasn’t so much based on a cinephile approach. In my specific case, I look at films that are important and that are important to me, but I don’t think of myself as a cinephile. What writing for Cahiers did do for me was to help me find clarity, and it made me understand the need for clarity.

When did you realize you wanted to direct?

I can’t put a precise moment to it, but I think it came fairly early, when I was acting in “Late August, Early September.” It was a revelation working on that film, seeing how a filmmaker makes a film and how he’s able to transform fiction into something that has truth in it.

You and Olivier Assayas have been partners both creatively and personally. But your filmmaking style seems rather different from his, which tends to be more impressionistic, while yours seems more exacting and precise.

Of course, we’re very close, and intellectually we’re very close. But when I’m working and I’m writing, I go into myself. Needless to say, I’m happy to hear that our styles are different.

“The Father of My Children” is now available on demand and open in Los Angeles; it will open in New York on May 28th.

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