23/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: The French filmmaker talks about the origins and the stakes of his new feature, which fictionalises the Liliane Bettencourt case

(© 2025 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it)

French filmmaker Thierry Klifa presented his new feature The Richest Woman in the World [+see also:
film review
interview: Thierry Klifa
film profile] out of competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. The film fictionalises a news story that made a lot of noise in France and internationally, namely the Liliane Bettencourt case, in which a woman’s daughter wanted to put her under a conservatorship following the huge amounts of money she had given to photographer François-Marie Banier. During a roundtable, the filmmaker explained having been, “like everyone else”, fascinated with this story, “but if I’d had to settle for putting images on what had been said in the press, that wouldn’t have interested me, that wouldn’t have been cinema. What was most interesting for me was the intimacy, which no one had talked about, no one knows about. Characters had to be written, to whom we gave different names, and whose lives had to be imagined. What got press attention were the sums of money, the political figures involved, and the legal case – in short, everything that didn’t interest me. What was interesting to me was the love and falling-out-of-love story, and this trio made up of the mother, the daughter and the photographer, taken in an infernal machine. We very quickly got rid of the news item in order to tell a melodramatic story. In the end, for me, it’s also the story of a daughter who discovers that her mother is capable of love, even though she has never loved her. In that respect, Marianne is an unconventional woman, who owns up to the fact that she has no maternal instinct. She probably had a marriage of convenience, then a child because it was the done thing. Pierre-Alain’s arrival is for her like that of a mad dog, who brings back to the surface all her frustrations, everything explodes like from a pressure cooker. And Marianne finds a path to emancipation there.”

The Bettencourt case is marked by the outrageousness of the sums in question, as well as the symbolic violence of the legal action. We are far from the concerns of ordinary people, and the way the story is told echoes the excessive character of the situation and the protagonists. “What fascinated me from the start”, Thierry Klifa continues, “was the Shakespearean quality of the film. There is at once tragedy and farce, the two blend together. The film’s tone has been at once easy and difficult to find. Everything is multiplied by money. The characters have a real exuberance, a real folly to them. In any case, I wasn’t going to make anybody cry for the extra-rich, so we might as well laugh at them – especially since most of the characters are often mean and cruel, and are often very spirited. Their wit is funny, and so is their cruelty. But we also laugh at their ridiculousness, their excess. This bigger-than-life aspect, and their extreme financial comfort, could only be funny to me.”

Still to be found was the cast that would embody these excesses, this world of privilege accessible to so few people, especially the trio at the heart of the story. Playing Pierre-Alain, the gay photographer who will seduce the businesswoman and heiress with his audaciousness and directness, Laurent Lafitte hams it up with great pleasure, loudly taking space on stage. Marina Foïs has a more ambiguous status, she is the filia dolorosa, the one expressing suffering first in her gaze, then in her words, before moving on to the ultimate hubris of a trial. She is the tragedy actress of the group. Finally, the richest woman in the world had to be found, the actress who would measure up to the superlative. “Isabelle Huppert was an obvious choice, I thought about her while writing, it had to be her. I knew she’d do it in an unexpected way. What she offers is very surprising, she plays on multiple registers – seduction, distance. She is at once powerful and depressed. Cutting, hard, cruel, and yet also likeable. There was a lot for an actress to play with in that part, but it had to be neither predictable, nor cliché. After all, neither Isabelle nor myself is very much fond of hyper-psychologising characters, we follow them in their actions. We first found much of Marianne in preparation, asking ourselves what her hair would be like, how she would be dressed and made up, how that would at once reflect and influence who she is. And then, during the shoot as well. If I know in advance what an actor is going to do, I may as well stay in my hotel room and not go on set. The first day, when she started acting, I didn’t know what she’d propose. It’s interesting to let yourself be surprised, to know how to receive what she was offering.”

(Translated from French)