Kristin shared emotional journey with journalist Julia

Jewish Telegraph, July 2011

ACTRESS Kristin Scott Thomas avoided researching the Holocaust for her latest role.
The English actress, who is now a French national, plays journalist Julia Jarmond in Sarah’s Key.
The film, released in cinemas next Friday, could be seen as being a companion piece of The Round-Up as it covers the same event — the 1942 roundup of the Jews in Paris.
“I chose to confront those events at the same time as my character does,” Kristin said.
“Obviously, I knew something about that period because I feel that what happened to the Jews in the Second World War concerns me, too, but I’d never visited the Holocaust Memorial, for example, and I decided not to go there before the shoot so that I would experience that situation as Julia.
“I didn’t want to impose my preconceptions on the character, but build from nothing to some extent.
“I wanted to share the journey of this woman who is swept away by her emotions when she realises that events in the past are influencing her private life and the very personal decisions she must take.
“Of course, the desire to experience all that during the shoot also encouraged me to accept this project.”
She also revealed that her mother-in-law actively participated in ensuring that this black mark in French history is not forgotten.
“She was part of the committee that organised for plaques to be put up outside schools with the names of deported Jewish children,” Kristin said.
“When you see those, or when you enter the Holocaust Memorial and are directly confronted with all those faces, you
immediately get a different sense of things.
“As my character says in the film, when you delve into it, you can really imagine what it’s like to have your children deported and to feel powerless to protect them.
“So my reaction in the Holocaust Memorial was that of a mother. It was very intense.”
Sarah’s Key, based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s best-selling novel, tells the story of American journalist Julia on the brink of making big life decisions regarding her marriage and her unborn child.
What starts as research for an article about the Vel’d’Hiv Roundup in 1942 in France ends up as a journey towards self-discovery.
Julia stumbles upon a terrible secret and discovers the heartbreaking story of a Jewish family forced out of their home — a home that is now her own.
Kristin met director Gilles Paquet-Brenner in New York on the night Barack Obama won the American presidential election.
“The script was extremely interesting because it tackles head-on the complex issue of how to live with the past and keep moving forward as an aware, responsible human being confronted with upsetting stories that provoke feelings of guilt or shame,” she said.
“I also liked the fact that Sarah’s Key dealt with the 1942 round-up of the Jews in Paris, which is kind of taboo, from a different angle, by discussing how aware we are today of a tragedy that we tend to brush under the rug.
“At the time, France was divided between heroes and collaborators, on the one hand, and the vast majority who simply wanted to save their skins, on the other.
“I think it’s good, and liberating, to raise these issues.”
Paris-born Gilles says he was “dazzled” by the novel’s plot.
And he said it resonated his own family history.
“I’m of Jewish origin and the men in my family were victims of that period,” Gilles said.
“My grandfather, a German-Jewish musician who had settled in France, was denounced by some French people and died shortly after being sent to the camps.
“I pay tribute to him in the film through the character of the violinist who has a ring containing poison so he alone can decide when he dies.
“My mother told me that story for the first time while I was in pre-production for the film. Certain things resurfaced.
“Obviously, I wasn’t around when my grandfather was deported, but I saw how it had affected my grandmother and my mother and her sisters.
“The book brought that back to me — the living who have to learn to live with the dead.”
Gilles decided he wanted to turn the novel into a film before he had even finished reading it.
“I realised that Tatiana and Serge Joncour, my co-writer on (previous film) UV, knew and liked each other,” he said.
“Serge mentioned to her that I wanted to adapt her novel and we contacted her publishers. We were the first people to get in touch because I was lucky enough to have read the book only a few days after it was released.
“Its success meant that Tatiana was soon flooded with offers, especially from the United States, but Tatiana’s word is her bond and she kept faith with us.”
His and Serge’s adaptation stays pretty faithful to the book, except for one change.
“In the book, Sarah’s little brother spontaneously goes to hide in the closet when the police arrive to arrest them,” Gilles said.
“In the movie, Sarah tells him to hide in there, which alters her character and her sense of guilt. The other major change consisted in remedying something that frustrated many readers, myself included, who regretted that the book kind of drops Sarah after her brother is found.
“For the screen, Serge and I developed the character of Sarah as an adult. The adaptation wasn’t very difficult because the book is so superbly structured.
“The only real problems were the transitions from one period to another — 1942 and the present day — and keeping it under two hours. Serge sent me a first draft that was 250 pages long!
“But we immediately got positive reactions from the first people to read the final draft.”
One of Gilles’ major problems was recreating the Winter Velodrome, the stadium where the Jews were held after the roundup.
“I met with survivors whose recollection were always of the constant stifling heat, noise, smell and teeming crowds,” he said.
“Their accounts nudged me even further towards an immersive approach, capturing those aspects in an almost impressionistic manner, rather than trying to rebuild the stadium on set.
“Then I saw Monsieur Klein for the first time and I noticed that Losey shot part of the film at the Jacques Anquetil velodrome in Vincennes, near Paris, which has preserved the same Eiffel-inspired steel structure as the Winter Velodrome had.
“So we could envision shooting there, especially when the digital effects people told me that it was possible to put a roof on the open-air velodrome.
“So we shot the scenes there and the guys at MacGuff did an extraordinary job. In the end, there are only four shots with special effects in the whole sequence.
“For the rest, I broke down the scenes so that we’d get that crowded feeling without having 500 extras constantly in the frame.
“I wanted audiences to get a sense of the vastness of the velodrome, without being demonstrative because I was wary of digital effects that let you do whatever you want, sometimes at the expense of realism.
“I also banished the idea of any establishing shot, which could only have been from an external viewpoint, whereas I wanted to immerse the audience.
“Every shot in the velodrome is from Sarah’s point of view.”
Gilles admits to being terrified with the responsibility of telling such an emotive story.
“Writing the script, I didn’t really think about it because I take problems one at a time, but it brutally resurfaced when I read Annette Müller’s La petite fille du Vel d’Hiv, about her escape from the velodrome as a girl just a bit younger than Sarah.
“That’s when it really hit home that I was going to immortalise these events. I got even more worried when I watched Schindler’s List again. I wondered what I was getting myself into at the age of 35.”
He was particularly apprehensive about shooting the scene where the children are separated from their mothers.
“Even more so, when I started shooting it with Annette Müller beside me,” he added. “She came with her brother, Michel, who experienced it for real with her in 1942.”
Gilles also became the first feature film director to shoot at the Holocaust Memorial in Paris.
“The scene where Kristin’s character goes there is high-risk because we could so easily get drawn into something political.
“The man she meets there sums up his mission as ‘getting away from figures and statistics to give a face and reality to each of these lives’.
“Those words define my underlying aims with this movie.
“Until now, films about the Holocaust have stuck close to History with a capital H — understandably and indispensably.
“I didn’t feel comfortable with that. It’s been done so many times and, to my eyes, Schindler’s List just can’t be bettered.
“So I wondered how I could make my modest contribution, and what I hit upon was trying to make people feel the tragedy by forgetting the fancy words and making it palpable on a human level, so that audiences would feel in contact with the events irrespective of their opinions or origins.
“Kristin’s character is American and non-Jewish, so Sarah’s story and the Holocaust is not her story, but indirectly it touches her. It could happen to anybody.”