Marion Cotillard sat with journalists in Paris to discuss her recent film “Ismael’s Ghosts,” but the conversation quickly turned to current events in the industry. Speaking of her earlier work with Woody Allen on “Midnight In Paris,” the Oscar winner said she would think twice about working with him again, although she doesn’t expect to be asked.
“When I worked with him, I have to confess I didn’t question myself,” she said. “I didn’t know much about his personal life. I knew he married one of his [step] daughters which I honestly thought was weird, but I can’t judge something I don’t know. I’m very ignorant of what he did or didn’t do. I just see people suffering and it’s terrible.
“But today, if he asked me again, which I don’t think he would — the experience we had together was very odd. I admire some of his work but we had no connection on set, I met him five days before shooting — I would question more if he were to ask me to work with him again. Maybe I would dig more. I’m very ignorant about the story with him, I just see it hurts.”
Asked about the recent Le Monde op-ed signed by 100 French women including Catherine Deneuve deriding a new “puritanism” and defending a man’s “right to impune,” Cotillard said she didn’t see herself “in that at all.”
“This revolution that is happening right now is necessary and this is a great revolution,” she said. “I have expressed myself and said without giving details that I was aggressed many times. It has happened many times when I was in a group of women and when we talk about that, most of the time 100 percent of the women have been in this kind of situation. So, it’s a massive thing.”
She continued, “We live in an excessive society and people need to cry out that they exist and some will need to lie and accuse people when they didn’t do anything. That’s what the world looks like. But most of the women who talked, what happened to them is real. So then opening of a discussion about this and talking about this excess — the lies — is also important. But I think it’s just very important to talk about it and to support this freedom of speech … and Deneuve has her freedom of speech as well. But I don’t recognize myself in what they wrote.”