You also described the film as a sort of scrapbook, and I was interested in how you took that idea of the scrapbook—which is such a physical, tangible thing—and translated it into the medium of film.
It’s funny, because at the very beginning, the working title for this film was Scrapbook for Venus. It was the idea of the notebook of a filmmaker at work, that it would be a compilation of all the artworks that inspire me, that put me to work, that make me think. I like the idea that that remains throughout the film without the title actually revealing it. This film is nourished by all of that, by all these artworks, by all these texts that I had the opportunity to discover through my time in the United States, by the time that I spent wandering around in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, all the films that I made before. For instance, there’s a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, La Belle Ferronnière, which really determined the framing in Saint Omer. There’s also a painting by Rembrandt, which is one of my favorite images, that has really influenced how I film. And so, in a sense, this film is a collage of all these different images that have inspired me.
As a director, you have a wonderful eye for costume and its power as a storytelling device. What was your process in terms of integrating the Miu Miu clothes into the film? It felt very organic, but was it a challenge at all?
It wasn’t a challenge at all. For me, fashion is serious business. It’s political business, it’s aesthetic business, it’s cultural business—to dress Sephora in these clothes, a woman who does not have a normative body; to put Kayije basically inside a painting, The Wedding at Cana, through working on the color tones of her costumes. It was really interesting to look at Kayije’s clothes through that lens. These are philosophical and political questions, and playing with the costumes in that regard was really a pleasure, not a challenge. Really, it was at the root of the film as a political question. Questioning the beauty of clothing on a body like Sephora’s is, in my eyes, practically a political statement.