Unveiled in competition at the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival and toplined by Marion Cotillard and Théodore Pellerin, Milo is Nicole Garcia’s tenth feature-length directorial effort. She has been selected three times in competition in Cannes and twice in Venice.

Cineuropa: Where did you get the idea for this enigmatic woman who’s the driving force of your film?
Nicole Garcia: I was inspired by other people to create this character and her past. I really liked the idea of having her turn up in a small town in Isère, with a clean slate, stepping off the 7:40 coach and making a western-style entrance: we don’t know anything about her, we don't know what she wants or what she's looking for, she doesn't know anyone and, most importantly, no one knows her. She gets hired as a waitress and tells people she lived in Quebec for 15 years and was married there. There's something quite grave and very closed-off about her, which hints at a seemingly opaque past which she doesn’t reveal anything about. And, little by little, she gets close to a young mechanic.

What about the protagonist’s revolutionary, political past which gradually comes to light?
I was entering my twenties around the time of May ’68. When groups like the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades emerged, I didn’t get involved with that political struggle because I was from a far more moderate left. But I was intrigued by those young people, like the character of Alice in the film, with their ideals about social justice and who felt—at twenty years old, when you think you can do anything—that political commitment is all or nothing and that it justifies violence. In the film, we understand that Alice was instrumentalised by a professor who later tells her that she and her comrades-in-arms couldn’t distinguish between ideas and actions. And she was incarcerated for a criminal act. And then we learn she had a child at the time, during that politically driven time in her youth, which seems totally at odds with motherhood. A child that she abandoned.

How did you want to approach the reunion between this mother and her son who are total strangers to one another, since they haven’t seen each other for almost 20 years?
They realise who each of them are very gradually, whereas the audience is quick to understand that he’s her son. What mattered most was their relationship: at what point will he start to understand? At what point will she confess? We’re in this in-between zone throughout almost the entire film. You sense she feels gagged. She speaks to him, but not very much, and he only sees her as a cafe waitress. She’s sincere when she says, much later in the film, that she only wanted to see him, but it’s not true—she’s fooling herself—because when you find your son, you want to go further. So I also wanted the character of Milo to exist on his own, replete with dreams, plans, a fantasy of being "adopted" by this bourgeois family he does odd jobs for, which is rather ironic when you think of his mother’s past in urban guerrilla warfare. We had to show Alice’s path, her journey towards Milo, and Milo’s path towards Alice. They’re small within the space allotted to them, but their impulses and passions are very strong.

What were your main visual intentions?
I worked a lot on the film’s mise en scène beforehand, I went scouting for locations, I brought back photos. It’s a winter film, and I think it’s the harshest I’ve ever made. There’s no romanticising it, and there’s even a roughness to the ensemble that Yves Cape’s lighting embraces beautifully. But the faces are very beautiful, especially Marion Cotillard’s, who I think is on top form in the film. She’s extraordinary.