Lou Doillon - Brief Article - Interview

Interview, Sept, 2001 by Sheila Benson

SHE'S TAKING PARIS BY STORM-AND IT'S JUST THE BEGINNING

At 19, Lou Doillon has Paris abuzz. She is singular, secure and seemingly everywhere: on catwalks, on movie screens, on television, in magazine editorials and advertisements. Her beauty contract for the house of Givenchy is not strictly as a model, but as something more haunting: their muse.

To understand what anchors Lou In this whirlwind, you have only to look behind and beside her. Her mother is Jane Birkin, the English actress/singer/writer/cause celebre, who has long made her home In Paris and shared it with some of the city's legends: first Serge Gainsbourg, France's pop Baudelaire; then Lou's father, respected film director Jacques Doillon (Ponette, 1996). Lou's half-sister Is the award-winning actress Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Lou made her screen debut in 1987, a five-year-old attached to her mother's hip in Agnes Varda's Kung-Fu Master. At 15, she made her second film, and first grabbed the public's attention, playing a disgruntled teen in her father's Too Much (Little) Love (1998); this year saw their second collaboration, the comedy Totally Flaky. Her own wild-child adolescence, with its recklessness and pain, informed her arresting performance in Jean-Pierre Ameris' Bad Company (1999), released earlier this year in the U.S. And this month, France will see her in the television drama Nana, playing Emile Zola's classic bad girl.

SHEILA BENSON: In your first film, you were clinging to your mother like a little limpet. The next time you took to the screen, you were 5-feet-9-inches tall, a young woman in your father's Too Much (Little) Love. And now, in addition to all of your films, you're one of Paris' biggest models, with a Givenchy beauty contract and worldwide fashion shows. How does all this strike you?

LOU DOILLON: I don't really understand it. It's quite amusing, actually. Suddenly I hear my name being called out by strangers all over Paris. I hear good rumors and bad rumors [about myself]. It's funny to be the "thing" everyone's talking about.

SB: Do you worry that this may be short-lived?

LD: You're always scared that when your career goes up that fast, it's going to go down that fast as well. But as my father said recently, "It's not as if [you] only did one movie and started to be famous for that." I've done eight movies and I've worked consistently since I was 15.

SB: How old were you when you started modeling?

LD: 1 was 16 and a half. I had been asked to do some photographs, and I was very scared. I always thought perhaps I could have a bit of charm in a movie where I had two hours, but in one photograph? Impossible! [laughs]

So my agent sent me to a modeling agent who said, "Do the castings for the pret-a-porter shows." It was completely exhausting. I was an actress: I wasn't used to doing 35 castings per day, and having people tell me to my face that they didn't like me. After one week, I was absolutely depressed. And then my agent called and said, "It's amazing! You've been confirmed for 13 shows."

SB: And now you've been chosen by Givenchy to be...what, exactly?

LD: I'm not a model, I'm an egerie, a kind of a muse. I'm also kind of an ambassador. [laughs] It's very weird.

SB: Did your famous family cast a long shadow when you were growing up?

LD: It was very hard being the daughter of someone who is that beautiful and not feeling beautiful myself, which is exactly how I felt until I was about 15. I was such a tomboy. I had absolutely no bosoms, and I wore my hair really short--shaved, like a boy. My father was pissed that people would go on saying. "God, Lou's got beautiful hair." So he shaved it all off and said, "Now they'll say she has a beautiful face." It was a nice act, really, but also quite shocking.

SB: I'll say.

LD: And suddenly when I was 17, Ellen von Unwerth said to me, "I want to make you sexy." It was such a relief to discover that I could be sexy. It made me much more open [in my approach] to movies, because I always worked without makeup, no hairdressers, looking quite horrible. I'm not scared anymore of not looking pretty.

SB: So is it still difficult being "the daughter of..."?

LD: No. People are now starting to think of me as Lou, as my own person. I think all the "daughter of" business is going to be over soon, because I've got a strong character that's not at all like my mother's or my papa's.

SB: Yet, at the same time, it is a marvelous heritage.

LD: Yes, it's wonderful. The good thing is that I'm not the daughter of a bad actress or an ugly woman or of a bad director. [laughs]

SB: Would you say your father is responsible for you becoming an actress?

LD: Certainly. When I was about 15 years old, I was living in Paris and I was insane, very wild. I had red hair and piercings all over my body. I was taking drugs and not really caring about anything. My papa thought that putting me in one of his movies might help settle me down, so I did his movie [Too Much (Little) Love] and I just loved it. And he was right: it calmed me down. It made me a new person.