Laurent Tirard Up For Love Interview

Laurent Tirard Up For Love Interview

Cast: Jean Dujardin, Virginie Efira, Cédric Kahn
Director: Laurent Tirard
Genre: Comedy, Romance
Running Time: 98 minutes

Synopsis: Jean Dujardin stars in this French, romantic, laugh-out-loud-comedy that is all about the long and short of falling in love.

When successful lawyer, Diane (Virginie Efira) gets a call from the man who has found her mobile phone, she is immediately intrigued and charmed. As she and Alexandre (Dujardin) chat and make plans to meet, it becomes evident that the chemistry between them is great indeed. However, when they meet the next day it turns out there may be one small problem.

New relationships are always awkward and for Diane & Alexandre the challenges in their relationship could be somewhat of a tall order. Despite his charisma and good looks, Alexandre comes up a bit short (almost 2 feet, actually). Is Diane out of his reach or can they meet in the middle?

They're both looking for love but society is watching and judging. A perfect match in every way but one, will this new couple be up for the challenge? Will they be Up For Love?

Up For Love
Release Date: December 1st, 2016

Interview with Laurent Tirard

Question: What was the origin of the idea for Up For Love?

Laurent Tirard: A few days before the release of Nicholas on Holiday, I met Vanessa Van Zuylen, the producer who had bought the rights to Corazón de León, an Argentinean film by Marcos Carnevale that tells the story of a pretty woman's love for a charming man… who measures 4 foot 7. It was a huge success in 2013 in its country of origin, but never came out anywhere else. Vanessa wanted me to do the remake, but I already had something else in the works. I said I would look at it, just to be polite, sure that I would decline her proposal. Except when I saw it the next morning, I was captivated by the movie. It had a real subject, it was powerful, audacious and unexpected. I immediately saw the real emotional potential of the comedy. Since the film was typically 'South American", it was a real tearjerker - a lot like a telenovela – and I thought it would be a good idea to rewrite it and Europeanize it a little.

Question: Did you immediately call your co-screenwriter Grégoire Vigneron?

Laurent Tirard: Yes. Like me, he loved the story right away and saw its real potential. So we started writing in the summer of 2014, with the idea of shooting it in the autumn. At first, we thought that all we would have to do was to adapt the story to French society. But when I see the original today, I realize that we did make a lot of changes. By dint of detail after detail, Up for Love is not really the same film.


Question: Is there a big difference between writing a remake and adapting a comic book, like you did with Asterix or Little Nicholas?

Laurent Tirard: Yes, because first of all, a comic book is not meant to become a film. Adapting Asterix or Little Nicholas ultimately left us a lot more freedom. This time, there already was a film, and what's more, a good film. That was more of an inhibition, because we were afraid of being less good than the original.


Question: Have you ever met anyone so little?

Laurent Tirard: Not only did we meet some, we needed a 4 foot 7 stand-in for Jean. We used him for all our angles from behind. He was on location every day and Jean spent a lot of time with him. It was nice to have his view of the film, because we had a lot of situations that he had lived through. But the idea wasn't to make a documentary about Little People; it was to talk about serious things with a light touch. And we wanted to maintain some poetic distance, so that the film would always remain a comedy.


Question: At what time did you think that Jean Dujardin would do Up For Love?

Laurent Tirard: Once we had delivered the screenplay, we began to think about casting and we figured: 'let's be crazy, let's offer it to Jean Dujardin!" We learned from the original (carried by an Argentinean star), that reducing a famous actor who has a certain sex appeal and obvious charisma to 4 foot 7, would contribute to the jubilatory feel of the film. Jean accepted within 24 hours. And since it amused him a lot too, we waited until he was free andpostponed the shoot until spring 2015. Jean is a workaholic, very professional and rigorous. When you see him in Brice de Nice or OSS 117, you see that he is capable of going over the top, but my idea was to push him toward more reserve and sobriety, to endow the film with more emotion. I discovered that he has very good instincts. Whenever we discussed the screenplay or casting choices, he truly impressed me.


Question: Did you find the actress who was to play Diane quickly too?
Laurent Tirard: No, I had a hard time picturing the character. And so I opted for what is rather rare in France: I asked several actresses to audition. There were some well-known actresses, some less well-known, but they all went along with it. I didn't know Virginie Efira very well and I hadn't seen many of her films. But during her audition, she struck me as the obvious choice. She has an impressive flair for comedy, and plays her scenes with a rare subtlety. Virginie is also a workhorse. She says she has a complex about her Belgian origins, and her past as a TV anchorwoman, but I discovered an intelligent, extremely cultivated and clever woman.


Question: How did you choose the other actors?

Laurent Tirard: It went very fast with my casting director. Cédric Kahn, who plays Diane's ex-husband, had never played comedy, but I was sure that he would be perfect in the role. It was the same with César Domboy: I had total confidence.


Question: You play a cameo role in the film. Was that fun?

Laurent Tirard: Not at all. I didn't like acting and I don't think I'll ever do it again. But I figured that it would make my kids laugh and I wasn't wrong there.


Question: On set, do you leave room for improvisation?

Laurent Tirard: Very little, but there are two or three moments in the film where I left the cameras on and let the actors play. The entire dinner scene in the clandestine restaurant was improvised, for example. We had written some dialogues but, on the spur of the moment, I wanted Jean and Virginie to feel free. Something magical happens there, because it feels very light. And the same goes for the sequence in which she offers him a pretty ugly sweater. Jean's reaction looks sincere, authentic. It almost looks real.


Question: What was the atmosphere like during the shoot?
Laurent Tirard: Studious, but cheerful. It was a lot of work, but Jean and Virginie were able to lighten the mood. And then we were filming in Marseille, a city I didn't know, but that I immediately fell in love with.


Question: Why did you choose Marseille as a decor?

Laurent Tirard: I didn't want the story to take place in a big megalopolis like Paris or London, because you see so many kinds of people there that even a 4 foot 7 man would go unnoticed. But we needed a big city, and I wanted some sun, to give the story a somewhat Californian feel. I fell in love with Marseille on first sight. It has that chaotic, shambolic look of Paris in the 70s. Seeing people on scooters without helmets has a romantic feel. And in a world that is increasingly uniform and aseptic, Marseille comes as a breath of fresh air.


Question: Some scenes take place at the Opera de Liège. Was that to bring a touch of romanticism to the story too?

Laurent Tirard: In the Argentinean film, the hero was also an architect, but we never see what he does. Grégoire and I wanted to show him at work. And a few months earlier I had seen Cathedrals of Culture on Arte, a magnificent documentary produced by Wim Wenders. One of the episodes was about the Oslo Opera, which exuded a wonderful atmosphere. That inspired me to film meetings with the hero, dancers and clowns in the background to give the film a poetic ambience. But for questions of rights, we filmed in an old railway station transformed into an opera house for the film.


Question: In Up For Love, we see some of the codes of romantic comedy. Which films inspired you?

Laurent Tirard: I was inspired by Capra, because he too flirted with fairy tales and he had a kindly view of people. He never showed any wickedness, just a lot of humanity. But having been brought up on American and English romantic comedies, I admit that there is also some Pretty Woman in there – for the modern fairy tale aspect – and a little of Bridget Jones, with pratfalls during the most intensely romantic scenes.


Question: For this film, you needed several special effects. Is that a part of the job that fascinates you?

Laurent Tirard: I had had my fill on Astérix, and it isn't necessarily what I enjoy most about the job. But they were indispensable in Up for Love, and I have to say that ultimately it wasn't all that complicated. We did as many special effects during the shoot as in post-production. It wasn't enough just to reduce the character, because then he would have had a little head and little hands, and would have looked weird in close up. And he wasn-t supposed to have the morphology of a little person. But the many tests we did before the shoot allowed for the right proportions and to check which techniques would work.


Question: What kind of effects were you able to do?

Laurent Tirard: It could be as simple as filming Jean on his knees (framing him at shoulder level) or forcing perspectives (placing him farther back so that he would look smaller), or more complicated, like in the scene in the office, when Jean is interrupted by Cédric and has to jump from the chair. For that shot, we had to raise the room 40 cm, except for the spot where Jean lands. But all that was in fact very artisanal.


Question: Did you know from the start what kind of music you wanted?

Laurent Tirard: I thought of Emilie Gassin very early on, who had done a superb acoustic version of Freed from desire during the first part of a Renan Luce concert. Since she had not yet brought out an album, I asked her to send me some demos and I listened to them while writing Up for Love. That is when I thought that her songs could punctuate the film, like Aimee Mann in Magnolia.


Question: What did you think when you saw the finished film?

Laurent Tirard: That I had made my first adult film! There is some personal experience and baggage in it. And it's the first time I allowed myself to go a little further into emotions. It was a challenge and it's what I'm most proud of to date.

Up For Love
Release Date: December 1st, 2016