23/09/2025 - The French director offers up his thoughts on his new movie - which is full of music, suspense and melodrama – as well as on film more generally and current events

(© Iñaki Luis Fajardo/SSIFF)

We met with Arnaud Desplechin who, after his usual selections in Cannes and Venice, is competing in the San Sebastián International Film Festival for the very first time with his new movie Two Pianos [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Arnaud Desplechin
film profile], which is toplined by François Civil and Nadia Tereszkiewicz.

Cineuropa: After making Filmlovers! [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], which was a reflective, experimental film about cinema, you’re returning with a fiction film. Are there any differences in the creatives processes for these two different types of films?
Arnaud Desplechin: Both films were written within the same amount time. Filmlovers! was a very lightweight film to make, because there were lots of clips; it was a montage film. At the time, I was already prepping Two Pianos. What I like to do is tell stories, so I don’t actually think there are any differences between the two types of film. There’s an amazing director, for example, who’s seen as a documentary-maker: Frederick Wiseman. When I see his films about the American institutions, and when I see the series The Wire, I tell myself they’re film students who’ve been inspired by Wiseman. So what’s the difference between the two of them? There are films with actors and films without actors, but they’re both fiction.

What made you want to tell this story?
The film was borne out of another collaboration with my American co-screenwriter Kamen Velkovsky. I don’t speak American, he doesn’t speak French, so we get on perfectly [laughs]. He told me the story of a pianist who returns to his hometown and sees his double in a child. It was like a sci-fi tale. And I told him another story, about a very young widow who has just lost her husband. So then I had the melodrama and the sci-fi. You might say that the melodrama is interwoven with ghosts. And it was brilliant, because melodrama is a genre I really like.

It’s a film about love and relationships. At one point in the film, Claude [Nadia Tereszkiewicz] reveals that she loved both men. If there were less restrictions on couples, would life be freer for everyone?
I couldn’t say, because of my age. I was born in 1960, and I look at my son and he says: "yeah, but we’re a free couple", and I think yes, but people have been saying that since 1968. I feel that love needs to be fulfilled in this film. There are times when you can love someone infinitely but it’s just not possible. So you have to give it up - not love but possession. And Claude liked being someone’s woman, but suddenly she realises that she exists in and of herself and she’s not that person anymore. She ends up winning herself over, realising that she has power, and that’s the most beautiful thing that can happen for a female character. I think that’s a really important theme in the film.

Why the musical setting? Are there any parallels between the demands of professional music and the demands of love?
There was that, but there was also something else: the solitude. All the characters are very alone, and music calms and soothes pain. It was good that Mathias [François Civil] was a musician, because it meant he felt love for something. There’s something inside of them that’s reconciled through music. I’m one of those filmmakers who thinks that films help reconcile us with life. And music tells a story too, it’s not just for decoration. The music brought suspense to the film.

You paint a wonderful portrait of the Jewish community in France too, and I imagine it’s not a very easy time for them right now, given Israel’s actions.
For the burial scene, I needed all the extras to be Jewish. One of the female extras wrote to me to say: "right now, being Jewish is a challenge, but with you, it was a good thing". And that’s the best compliment anyone could give me. It’s such a difficult moment for the world: war, regardless of people’s political opinions, we’re all entitled to them. There doesn’t seem to be an answer to the Israeli situation. There’s the situation in Ukraine, the planes flying over Estonia, etc., and there’s no answer to that either. And then, all of a sudden, when you’re asked a question you don’t want to answer, music comes along and tells you to run. Do what my characters do at the end of the film: save yourselves. If I’m not interested in a question, I run away from it. That’s my political standpoint: running away.

(Translated from French)