With the poster of “Mystère”, family film based on real facts and which proposes a humanist fable through the relation between the man and the animal, Marie Gillain signs her return, five years after her last role on big screen. On this occasion, we met her to evoke with her memories of filming: her first film in 1991 and her meeting with Gérard Depardieu, the experience of a film like “The Hunchback”, and what drives her today. hui to invest in films like “Mystery”.
Marie Gillain, back to the cinema in Mystery
After five years of absence on the big screen and a last role in Mirage of love with fanfare, actress Marie Gillain is back in the movie Mystery by Denis Imbert, alongside Vincent Elbaz and the young actress Shanna Keil. Together, they tell an unusual story, that of a little girl (Shanna Keil) bereaved by the death of her mother, and walled in silence. As the father (Vincent Elbaz) and the daughter move into a small village in Cantal, they collect what appears to them to be a puppy. Named Mystery, this one will quickly turn out to be a wolf. In this film, Marie Gillain plays Anna, a veterinarian stationed at the National Forestry Office, who will bond with the father and his daughter.
Souvenirs…
With a first role in 1991 in My father, this hero by Gérard Lauzier, Marie Gillain plunged into the deep end of French cinema, never to leave it. A debut on the screen which is also the meeting with a giant of French cinema, Gérard Depardieu, and which she tells with enthusiasm.
First meeting of a young actress, who has never done anything, with Gérard Depardieu! Who is just the most wonderful actor we can have in France, both a monster of charisma and a totally poetic being, disarming of humanity, full of contradictions … It’s not the same to meet Gérard when you are 16, than if you were 30 or 25. I would have trembled a lot more!
Another film mentioned, The Hunchback. A great swashbuckling film in which she plays with Daniel Auteuil and Fabrice Luchini. A shoot that she remembers as the one where she discovered that the cinema was also a ground of confrontation of egos. But a film that was also a surprising experience, with a cheerful and apparently detached director, while it was a production of very high caliber, with high stakes.
And the human challenge
For Mystery, second feature film by Denis Imbert after Vicky, she enrolled in this project because she liked the human challenge. And also because today, she favors projects where her characters resemble her. A way of combining her professional activity with her personal commitments, for one who says she has always had a very strong relationship with nature and a deep respect for animal life.
