Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy, the story of 10-year-old Laure and her developing gender identity, is deftly handled without ever cheapening the issues at the heart of the story, and it boasts an exceptional lead performance by Zoé Héran. Sciamma spoke to LWLies recently about why the themes of the film resonate, and how she came to cast it in a hurry.
LWLies: Tomboy is your second feature, but it has some similarities to your first, Water Lilies. Was Tomboy a deliberate attempt to cover different aspects of childhood and gender with younger children?
Sciamma: I was actually just looking for a story that could be made really fast and really cheaply, to try and go against the usual rule that your second feature has to be bigger than your first. It certainly was not conceived as a prequel to Water Lilies. I basically decided in March that I wanted to make a movie in the summer and shoot it in August, and wrote the script for it really quickly in about two weeks. The idea for the story, about a little girl pretending to be a little boy, had been in my mind for a long time, but my main interest was in finding the right balance between a very lightweight production and a very strong story. I never even thought that it could be connected back to my first film. Which is silly, of course, because the connection is so obvious.
How has Tomboy been received in France?
Extremely well. Admissions in France totalled more than 200,000 people, which was a big step up from the 80,000 who saw Water Lilies on its release. But Tomboy has gone on to become part of a bigger project, and will be shown to children as part of the cinema programme for primary schools and high schools. It’s on its way to becoming a reference point for discussions of the topics dealt with in the film, which is amazing.
A big part of the film’s appeal is the performances of Zoé Héran and Malonn Lévana, as Laure and her little sister Jeanne. Was it easy to find the young actors that you wanted for the roles?
As a result of my wanting to make the film really quickly, I found myself with just three weeks to complete the casting. Which was really scary, since finding child actors can take months. There was no time to go looking in schools or on theatre courses, so I went straight to agencies of registered child actors to spread the word that I was looking for a little girl who could resemble a little boy. And I heard back about a girl who had been registered for several years but was not working much because she was ‘different’. And that was Zoé, who has the perfect mix of androgyny and acting talent, and she got the part right away.
Then I went looking for a little sister to match her. It is really hard to estimate how good an actor a six-year-old will be, but what you can do is estimate how badly that six-year-old wants to be there, how much she wants to be a part of the film, and what kind of pair the two actors will make. I put Zoé and Malonn in a room together and they were fighting after about five minutes, so I thought “Okay then – this could work!”
The film is not judgemental at all about Laure and her decision to pass herself off as a boy, and never exploits the situation just for entertainment. Was this a deliberate approach?
I never wanted the film to be about the ‘why’ of Laure’s actions or the psychology of it, but to stick to how she does the things that she does. Everyone who sees it can have their own opinion about Laure and the other characters. You might decide that Laure is a transsexual child, or that this is just a phase in one crazy summer, and the film embraces all these hypotheses. Different people do react very differently to the film. Some find it joyous, and some do not. People always bring their childhoods with them to films about children. I have had many letters from people talking about their own childhoods after seeing the film, and what touches me the most is that a lot of the letters are from men. I am really glad that it reached people that way.
When Water Lilies was released, you described it as being about ‘the tragedy of being a pretty girl.’ Do you think of Tomboy as being a little tragic too?
To me, it’s an exceptional journey that actually describes everybody’s childhood. What Laure does might not happen every day, but it does resemble a lot of what we do as children, reinventing ourselves regularly and playing at being someone else before we subsequently stop doing so. But Tomboy is not a tragedy at all, that’s for sure. I haven’t come up with the perfect catchphrase to summarise the film yet, but I’ll find it.
Céline Sciamma (text) by Tim Hayes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
