A condensed version of this interview was published in BOMB Magazine on April 18, 2023, the week that Other People’s Children opened in select U.S. theaters. Here is the full, lightly edited transcript of my interview with its director, Rebecca Zlotowski.
Other People’s Children (2022) is a complete revelation. For the undernourished lover of romantic comedy and drama scraping through the most sexless and aromantic era in recent US cinematic history, the fifth feature from Rebecca Zlotowski cracks off like a geyser — ecstatic, embodied, and beautifully lived-in. A perfectly cast and crafted film like this, unyieldingly honest about the precise conditions that make modern womanhood such an obstacle course, only comes around once in a blue moon. This film is unique even in its country of origin, France, which rarely lacks for sex and sensuality in its cinema.
Other People’s Children stars Virginie Efira as Rachel, a high school teacher embarking on a new romance with a sexy, separated but not divorced guy in her guitar group named Ali (Roschdy Zem). Zlotowski expands the frame beyond the expected ins and outs of their relationship to encompass the impending decline of Rachel’s fertility; the almost maternal responsibility she feels for her students; her identities as daughter, sister, and friend; and, most complicated of all, her increasing devotion to Ali’s young daughter, Leïla (Callie Ferreira-Goncalves). On the eve of her film’s United States release, Zlotowski and I discussed the difficulty of taking a typical supporting character and making her a heroine, directing while pregnant, and the virtues of the banal.
Rebecca Zlotowski
Hi Ryan
Ryan Coleman
Hi Rebecca. How are you doing?
RZ
Very good. Thank you very much.
RC
So are you just doing press all day, basically?
RZ
No, just like two hours.
RC
Okay, not bad.
RZ
So you're the lucky guy, who’s the last one. I'm going to just say probably the same things with very broken English, you know?
RC
Well, I'll be sneaky. I'll try to ask you things in different ways. I am so excited to talk to you, because I am honestly obsessed with your movie. I do not like to gush like this to people I’m interviewing, I find it to be very cheesy and unprofessional. But I have seen Other People's Children like like four times now and it gets better each time I watch it. It immediately felt like a classic, like it is a classic already to me.
RZ
Thank you very much, Ryan. You cannot know how happy I am to hear that. You can gush with me no problem. I'll take it.
RC
Yeah, good. I saw it at Toronto Film Festival for the first time. It was one of the last movies I saw there and I think the day before I had seen Saint Omer, the film by Alice Diop. And I thought, “My God, you know, how could anything be better?” That movie is just so incredible. And then I saw your movie and I was like, “Well, never mind.”
RZ
[Laughs] I love Saint Omer as well, and we're very close with Alice. She’s a filmmaker that I really admire a lot. It’s funny because we do not at all have the same language. But there's definitely a strong connection between each other. Maybe the fact that language is our subject, the fact that we are so strongly, French, both of us … I'm very happy that you said that.
RC
Yeah, that's interesting. I have so many questions for you. It’s been almost 20 years since you started making films. I always like to ask people this. If you could go back to when you were first starting in filmmaking, is where you are now what you had envisioned for yourself, or have you been taken on a different path?
RZ
It’s actually more 12, 13 years, maybe 15 years max, even if I look like 100 years old. But I don't think it's that far. You know I’m not the best exegete of my films because … I like them, but I just never see them. So they're like a part of my personal diary in my life. As filmmakers, we don't count our life regarding the holidays or the people we've been dating or children we had; it's just about films. They’re like milestones in my life, and it's difficult for me to disconnect the moment I did them from what they mean, you know, in the path of my filmography.
But I can definitely say that with this last film, I felt entitled to open up another layer of emotion. A simpler one, a more … connected to the body one. Not only with the thematics of the film, which asks what happens when you touch the end of your fertility. But also the fact that in the organic way I wrote it it was absolutely not plot-oriented. It was not about the twist of the plot, not the antagonism of the characters, none of those old recipes that we've been taught are necessary to a script, but I feel they're absolutely not, and even that it’s our responsibility to debunk them. Probably I went from a very brainy place, somewhere inside the head, to a place of the body, you see what I mean? I had a journey from the brain to the body. I think that cinema that is connected to the body, even when it's very analytic, full of cohesion and very scripted and very written, it's not about the info or the plot or any of that stuff. It's connected to another level of emotions and empathy. I feel that as a filmmaker, as a cinephile, it's a goal that I'm trying to achieve, to move toward.
RC
When you first set out to write the screenplay that became Other People’s Children, was there one element that drove you forward?
RZ
As I said, you just have to connect different paths, different aspects, and different interests in order to create a film. It’s not only a personal state. It's not only a societal state, it's not only a cinematic state. It has to connect every part into one.
With this film, I wanted to impose a different breed of emotions, not the fake, hysterical cinematic moments of yelling at each other, being bitter and struggling with each other. Emotions you don’t often see on screen, the in-between and indeterminate feelings. So in the writing, I would say the fact that I took a secondary character and made her a protagonist is probably the most resounding aspect of the film. In the filming, I used long lenses; typically, I would need to have the background blurred in order to focus on a character that is far away, but here I don’t. That choice creates a kind of intimate skin, a bodily perception of the character and their relationship with the rest of humanity. I know why we don’t see these emotions on screen more often. It’s difficult to portray them without being cheesy, trivial, or banal.
What if you just have one year, and it’s not just a chronicle? It's not seasons passing in her life. But there's a story — after one year it’s the end of the fertility of this woman. She’s going to be given charge of her own narrative to transmit even without being a mom. I finally realized that this is a story you can write. It's difficult to write it. But if you succeed, if you have in mind that a secondary character, someone who is often confined to the background, you can bring her up to surface of the screen and you can write her story. It’s what I did with Other People’s Children.
RC
That word banal — Rachel says it in the scene she has with Ali on the street. She says, “I’m banal; this is banal. I’ve become the woman on the street who says, ‘I want a kid.’ I hate you for making me realize that.” It’s right after this gorgeously naturalistic love scene between them. It highlights something in the film I absolutely marvel at, which is this contrast of a banal kind of realism and heightened romanticism.
RZ
How can I answer this question? First, it’s very, very nice from you, and I’ll tell the actors, because for you to say that you could feel that they're real people is probably one of the highest compliments they could receive. It’s one of the most simple and childish pleasures we can feel as cinephiles.
You know, we go to the movies because we are orphans, because we are unhappy, because we are feeling lonely. But also because we want to be surrounded by other lonely people and feel that we’re not lonely anymore. I’m sorry to open the very, very wide door to banal things, but we cannot just have the romance.
A funny thing that occurs to me, I've been working with student scriptwriters recently, and they had to read the script for Other People’s Children before doing the master class, and they were surprised because it's very, very scripted. For instance, even inconsequential lines of dialogue, I would say to Roschdy and Virginie, “You know you can change the lines if you want! Make them yours and just give me the musicality that you need for these scenes.” But actually they just followed the script very, very orthodoxly. I think it's because, first, there is a lot of trust in our triangle, there’s trust in me as a filmmaker … sometimes too much. Sometimes I want to say, “No, just do your thing!” But they believed in the script. So the fact that it looks so realistic emotionally, even if it's totally poetic and stylish in the script, that’s an interesting movement to me. This is the movement of cinema itself and the movement of life itself.
As filmmakers, I think we like to make films to control a little bit what is uncontrollable. At that moment of my life—I’m sorry to say personal things — I was this almost forty-year-old woman without children, and I felt that I had no control. The fact that I became pregnant during the shooting of the film was a one-of-a-kind moment in the life of a filmmaker. I mean, we’re a very small club of filmmakers, filmmakers who can say, “I did a film while pregnant.” Primarily because there aren’t that many women.
But the environment for the film because of the pandemic, it was already so extraordinary a moment in our lives, and that ended up creating the most trivial, and most simple film in my filmography. I don't know, it's ironical, but it’s also my fifth feature. I knew that it needed a lot of work to make the sensation of simpleness, but also fullness. For a film like this you need very, very strong actors, and I feel that I've been blessed with Virginie Efira, and I've been blessed with Roschdy Zem who accepted a kind of supporting role in the film. The fact that you have amazing actors and actresses for even secondary characters, Chiara Mastroianni for instance. We noticed that it had never happened that you have Chiara Mastroianni and Virginie Efira together in a film. It’s because there are never two good parts for women in the same film! When you're a very strong and amazing actress like they are, the fact that Virginie accepted this part, which is a kind of lead but again a supporting character who’s become a lead, and Chiara with her part, which is supporting. I thought, “The fact that they accepted these parts is a good sign for the film.”
I don’t … I don’t know how to answer your question. How did I make a good film? It’s unanswerable!
RC
That’s what I really wanted to ask you. [Laughs]
RZ
I felt ashamed, too, telling this story. It felt too small, too therapeutic, as an object. I felt it was like too female in a way, too cheeky. After I made it, I hated the fact that I didn’t entitle myself to write it earlier in my life. But I’m cherishing the moment we are experiencing. I have teenagers who tell me they connect with the child, Leïla, which I did not foresee. It makes me feel that it was fine to do it when I did it and as I did it.
RC
I imagine you created the Rachel character with great difficulty. She could very easily have fallen into one of two cliches: the miserable, single woman who’s of course desperate to have a child, or the empowered feminist who’s thrilled to have the choice not to become a mother.
RZ
On one hand, it was incredibly hard not to fall into those sorts of pre-written stories. Nuance is difficult. Nuance requires self-confidence in your political values, like when Rachel says, “I got an abortion, and I’m glad that I did; it was the right decision at the moment. But sometimes, now that I’m turning forty, I think of that moment differently.” In order to admit something like that, it takes all the political self-confidence that person possesses. That is a powerful feeling. That can be a dangerous feeling to share.
On the other hand, it was actually easier not to fall because I had a kind of guide in the writing of the film. It was these archetypes that are always standing behind you, that are so strong when it comes to stories of women and families and love—I had to resist them. It was important to me that Rachel is absolutely not bitter when she’s sharing these feelings. She’s a healthy person. There’s nothing that she lacks. She is, in fact, overwhelmed with her ex, her guitar lessons, her students, and her new lover. In a sense, I actually felt super free to do what I wanted because a character like this isn’t the kind of woman you see in every other movie.
I had something else in mind, but I lost it, because I'm obviously still hungover from yesterday…
RC
There are so many scenes that don’t center Rachel, like the party for her friend or the promotion of her coworker. Even the final scene, where she’s walking straight toward the camera but at the last second turns and is caught halfway out of the shot in freeze frame. The title, Other People’s Children — that’s how life really is, isn’t it? We aren’t always the center of our own lives.
RZ
Yes, I thought of that constantly while writing the film. Does it ever occur to you that you’re five centimeters out from the center of your life? Or even further? It’s strange, right? We are the protagonists of our own experiences, of course, but sometimes we see the scripts being written for our own lives. And you can be like, I don’t agree with this, but I’m still living it.
That is what interested me about the relationships you might have in between two strong relationships, where you’re just less interesting to the one who came before and the one who comes after. It’s happened to me a lot. You just have to accept it. You can’t be angry. You can be deeply loved by someone, but you cannot force them to make you the most important person in their life. That experience is rarely depicted on screen because it’s supposedly less interesting, less violent, less burning. But I think it’s so fucking interesting. These relationships teach us how to be good people and how to look at the world. We look at the world differently when we’re not the main character.
RC
Can I ask one more question? Do I have time for one more?
RZ
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
RC
What you're saying is bringing up that last shot again for me, when Rachel is walking across the sidewalk and makes eye contact with the camera and begins walking toward and walking toward and walking toward. And then she looks down and around and finally looks up. That last moment freeze frames just as she looks away, and it feels like a real encapsulation of the whole movie. It's about the grey areas. It's about the things that happen in between the big moments. There are lots of big moments that happen in the movie. Her sister gives birth, her partner leaves her, she gets in a car accident, people die. But it's about far less consequential things too. I think all the scenes of Virginie walking and running around the city, they feel just as important as these big moments. Because they are the connective tissue and that is what 80% of your life is, right? The connective tissue?
RZ
It's exactly that. You know what, at the beginning, there were sequences that I cut from the final cut of the film. But Rachel was supposed to be a writer at the end.
RC
Oh, interesting.
RZ
She was a teacher. But there was a scene with the student where he was like, ”Hey, you're not just a teacher, teaching sucks and you're a cool person, you must do something else. Are you like a guitar player?” And she says like, “No.” “Are you a writer?” And she’s like, “Hmmm.” She wasn’t entitling herself to be a writer. But then at the end, the book that she had written is published, she did not become a mom but she became a novelist. Her novel was called “The Rebound Girl.” I was obsessed with this idea, I mentioned it several times in the press. I’d mention those screwball comedies from the ’30s, the American films where there was this stock character of the rebound boy or the rebound girl. It’s that same idea of the girl or the guy between relationships, the one who doesn’t get a movie made about her.
RC
I think about the line that Virginie says with the coworker who has a crush on her.
RZ
Vincent, the guy flirting with her at school.
RC
Right, Vincent. They’re talking one night, and she says that maybe she’s missing out by not having a child. He says, “Is it really that important to have children?” And she says, “It’s a huge human experience, and I may not get to be a part of it.” I had never heard someone give that explanation before, that motherhood opens you up to all these other human connections.
RZ
It’s frankly how I felt when I was a child-free woman. I felt that having children was not a biological thing that I needed. It was about feeling connected to adults, to other women around me. There was some resistance between me and the other women around me. I think I was jealous of their connection to something that I would never feel. It’s just another possibility of connection with our fellow humans. Sometimes you feel like it won’t happen. That’s why I created this film. It was like a good hand on my shoulder saying, “It’s not going to happen, but it’s going to be fine.”
The last shot you mention — if you are a very good cinephile, there’s a poster of a fake film on the pole behind her. You know we have to pay for everything in the frame, so I asked my set designer to do fake posters in the streets. The poster behind her is of Léa Seydoux. For me, it was like the end of a cycle: Seydoux was in my first film. And if you look at it, it shows the title of my next movie.
RC
Wow! I hadn’t noticed that.
RZ
There’s something about this film being so much like life. It’s my way of saying that nothing really ends. It just starts again.