Unveiled in the Cannes Premiere line-up of the 77th Cannes Film Festival, Being Maria [+lee también:
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entrevista: Jessica Palud
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Cineuropa: What drew you to the idea of adapting the novel Tu t’appelais Maria Schneider?
Jessica Palud: I started my career with Bernardo Bertolucci at the age of 19. I was an intern on The Dreamers [+lee también:
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entrevista: Bernardo Bertolucci
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How did you pick out the key moments in Maria Schneider’s journey?
It’s a fairly loose adaptation because Vanessa’s book is based on the viewpoint of a family witness, Maria’s younger cousin, and her childhood memories. So it was important that I met with lots of people who’d spent time with Maria and that I had different opinions, especially people who’d met her at the time of Tango. While carrying out all this research, and discovering the original screenplay for Tango, the one which had been used on the film set, I learned that the infamous scene in the film hadn’t been written and that it had simply been developed by the continuity person as they shot it. So I looked into how it had happened. The scene was written a certain way but, at a given moment, the director says he’d like to go further so as to have something more intense, but he isn’t clear on what needs to be done, and that’s where the scene went wrong. It’s central to my film, which is a portrait and not a biopic. Tango is about the upending of Maria’s life, but we needed to have the before and after, to cover some powerful and very specific moments in her life, fairly elliptical scenes which moved the story forwards: her absent father, Maria’s yearning for cinema because, ultimately, that was how she wanted to rediscover her father, her dysfunctional mother, her meeting with the great director and what happened after Tango in terms of drugs, the film premiere, an interview on how she suddenly found yourself in a pornographic film, etc. And the same went for the part about the filming of Tango: we had to create a close paternal bond between Marlon Brando and Maria, to then show how everything changes afterwards.

How did you go about casting Anamaria Vartolomei, Matt Dillon and Giuseppe Maggio to play Maria Schneider, Marlon Brando and Bernardo Bertolucci?
The most important element in this head-on portrait was obviously Maria, because I wanted to make her the driving force of the film. I met lots of young actresses. Anamaria Vartolomei had a real way about her, and strong cinematic qualities, although she was very different from Maria, physically speaking. She’s not afraid of letting go, and we saw each other a lot in the year leading up to the film shoot. She participated in my research, we rehearsed, we met with people who’d been addicted to drugs, etc. I wanted her to fully understand Maria, because it was crucial that she inhabited the character in order to ensure Maria’s voice was heard. Matt Dillon was my first choice because he embodies a Hollywoodian style of cinema, when you think about Rusty James, for example. He started his career very young, very good looking, but he also has this slightly out of place quality to him, and he’s taken an unusual path: these were all things he had in common with Brando, who’s an idol of his. He was really worried about ruining Brando’s mystique, but he also really wanted to advocate on behalf of Maria, because he was really moved by her story: having started out very young himself, he knows that it’s a profession that leaves you vulnerable. As for Giuseppe Maggio, Bertolucci was 31 when he made Tango, so we needed a young actor. I held auditions in Rome and I found Giuseppe’s calm nature, his beauty, his angel face and something in the way he spoke reminded me of Bertolucci and made this character even more powerful.