Mélanie Laurent: ‘I’ve had bad experiences with actors, never actresses’

The Parisian actor, who shot to fame in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’ in 2009, has directed a film about one of the most fascinating criminals in French history. She speaks to Tom Murray about ‘Freedom’, why she cast an ‘Emily in Paris’ heartthrob as her lead and how – at 41 – she became a ‘free woman’

‘My job as director is to be a captain of a boat and the boat needs to not be hitting an iceberg!’ (Gregory Pace/Shutterstock)

Ten years ago, Mélanie Laurent read a book about Bruno Sulak – a real-life Arsène Lupin known as the “gentleman burglar” because of his lack of violence and charming interactions with his victims. During the 1980s, Sulak carried out 19 sensational holdups of posh jewellery shops in Paris and on the French Riviera, all without firing a gun. He evaded police for years until his eventual capture that preceded his death in 1985. Now, the actor-turned-filmmaker Laurent is reviving Sulak for her latest feature, titled Freedom, with a perhaps unlikely lead: Emily in Paris heartthrob Lucas Bravo. Netflix’s global hit, in which Bravo plays Lily Collins’s dashing on-off chef squeeze, wasn’t the reason, though, she insists. “I’ve never seen his show,” she says. “I met him at a dinner and I didn’t even know who he was.”

Speaking over Zoom from a press junket in Paris, the 41-year-old Laurent – who shot to fame as the vengeful Jew Shosanna Dreyfus in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) – wonders why we are obsessed with telling the stories of violent criminals and never characters like Sulak. “When someone is an anarchist, someone searching for freedom more than blood, who doesn’t use violence, has a beautiful love story, treats women well, who’s smart, charming, creative… It’s funny that we forgot about that one and we remember the bad ones. All those guys in the Eighties who had so much blood on their hands and never respected any women around them. We made biopics about those guys.” Notorious murderers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, have been alarmingly ubiquitous on screen. She nods. “How many documentaries about serial killers do we need?”

Laurent’s in a casual blue shirt with shoulder-length, messy blonde hair; she has the happy serenity of someone who knows that they are exactly where they need to be. Not that this affects her naturally assertive, acerbic edge. Fame, she says, is much harder for female actors than it is for their male counterparts: “Everything is way more f***ed up for us.”

Freedom begins at a pivotal point in Sulak’s life. He has deserted the French Foreign Legion and met the love of his life, Annie (newcomer Léa Luce Busato), who doubles as his getaway driver. She is beautiful, playful, and confident. Did Laurent ever think about casting herself? The romantic lead, after all, is a role in which she has shone in films such as Mike Mills’s Beginners (2011) and Every Jack Has a Jill (2009). She laughs incredulously. “You know what, you’re not the first one who’s said that and I’m very touched because she’s 20 in the movie! Thank you, everybody, but I’m 41 and not self-obsessed!”

Instead, Laurent cast 25-year-old Busato in her first-ever screen role. The director sees unearthing talent almost as a duty she must repay to the industry after being discovered at 14 by Gérard Depardieu. The icon of French cinema – whose legacy has been tarnished with numerous accusations of sexual assault since 2018 – met Laurent on the set of Asterix & Obelix in the late Nineties and gave her a part in his film The Bridge (1999). Seven years later, Laurent proved Depardieu’s instincts right with her César Award-winning turn as an anorexic woman in Philippe Lioret’s Don’t Worry, I’m Fine. “One day there is a director who says, ‘You’re going to be my lead,’ and it changes everything,” Laurent says. “It’s so crazy, and I remember it so well that every time I can reveal someone who just needs that little push, I’m obviously doing it.”

The big tensions on set that I’ve had came from male actors who were just arriving late or not knowing their lines

Likewise with Bravo, who has vocally criticised the writing on Emily in Paris in recent weeks, Laurent was excited to subvert expectations. “I met him three years before I started to write and then I thought about him when I was writing because I remembered he was funny, which is not always the case,” she grins, alluding to men with jaws as chiselled as Bravo’s. “I think that experience he has playing charming guys all the time, maybe if we can break that in a way and do something different… But he also has that magnétisme already,” she says, subbing in French words either when she’s at a loss for English or just for a bit of Gallic éclat. “So I really wanted to play with all those different sides of him.”

Nevertheless, Laurent had her concerns about working with a male actor – a first for her as a director. “It’s not that I don’t care about men on screen,” she says. “It’s just I feel like, as a female director, I should make movies that everybody can see but that are about women.” Her reluctance was partly triggered by two bad experiences with male actors, whom she doesn’t name. One of them was also a director, she says. “Maybe he was too stressed about things, I don’t know. I’ve had bad experiences with actors, never with actresses.”

Laurent as the vengeful Jew Shosanna Dreyfus in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ (2009) (Universal Pictures)

It’s clear that Laurent would see tension on her sets as a personal failing. “My job as director is to be a captain of a boat and the boat needs to not be hitting an iceberg! My actors are my babies, like, my nickname on set is Mama. The reality is that I shot with crazy, amazing icon actresses like Angelina Jolie [in 2015’s By the Sea, which Jolie directed] and everything was so smooth and so cool and so easy that I just realised that the big tension on set that I had, like really few times, came from male actors who were just arriving late or not knowing their lines. That’s disrespect that suddenly changed the chemistry on set, which is hard to fix.”

After appearing in Inglourious Basterds, Laurent was quickly touted as France’s next big star akin to Léa Seydoux or Marion Cotillard. It didn’t quite work out like that. Roles across from Jake Gyllenhaal in Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013) and Cillian Murphy in Aloft (2014) followed, but Laurent’s recent major film credits include the Netflix duds 6 Underground (2019) and Murder Mystery 2 (2023). Was there pressure to book something major after Tarantino’s 2009 epic? Laurent shakes her head. “Pressure is not in my life vocabulary,” she says smiling – but she’s dead serious. “I think pressure, stress, drama, all these are real in the real life,” she says, referring to life off set. “I feel so lucky to be living in a bubble of creation and creativity. And my job is literally to tell stories – that’s how you extend childhood, almost.”

This is a hold-up: Lucas Bravo in ‘Freedom’ (Courtesy of Prime Video)

Laurent has two children, a son named Léo, 11, and a daughter named Mila, around 4, with a husband whose name she has managed to keep private since initially revealing her marriage in a 2013 interview with The Independent. Her children follow her around the world, itinerant film kids “raised by technicians”, she jokes. “I’m the luckiest mother because they’re so cool, and they love being on set,” Laurent says joyously. “They never stopped me from being creative and working.”

Tarantino remains an influence, in sometimes surprising ways. She still plays music on her sets as he did for his actors between takes. “I can die with that memory of being a young actress in that red dress, in that beautiful window and he put David Bowie on to dance together.” She pauses, becoming philosophical. “I think the key is to enjoy every minute. I love my age. I think 40 is a super cool age for a woman, and I am enjoying every minute. I think I became kind of like a free woman, and I fought for it, and I think I’m there now.” Sounds like freedom alright.

‘Freedom’ is streaming now on Prime Video