CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 8/07/09

In Dreams:
Cold Souls' Sophie Barthes

BY JENELLE RILEY

CS Weekly's Jenelle Riley talks to writer-director Sophie Barthes about how Woody Allen, Carl Jung, and Paul Giamatti helped her bring Cold Souls to life.

Sophie Barthes' feature film debut, Cold Souls, stars Paul Giamatti playing an actor named Paul Giamatti who opts to have his soul removed and stored in order to better perform the title role in a stage production of Uncle Vanya. But when his soul goes missing, he's drawn into the world of Russian mobsters who specialize in the underground soul trade. So it seems ludicrous to imagine that anyone would find Barthes' script derivative. Yet, her surreal, dreamlike storytelling has earned comparisons to Charlie Kaufman, who brought strangeness and meta-celebrity references to the mainstream with films like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

If Barthes shares a common ground with Kaufman, it's a wicked sense of humor and an appreciation for the strange and fantastic. But Barthes' film, while dreamlike, is set in a firmly established reality—albeit a very, very strange one.

I understand the idea for the film actually came to you in a dream?
Yes, it was a dream I had three years ago. I had just finished Carl Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul, which he wrote at the end of his career, when he was in his 80s. The main theory in the book is that we neglect our souls. He talks about how the most feared thing in primitive society is the loss of soul. People believed souls could leave their bodies and go into trees and animals. Today the equivalent of this is depression, how we feel disconnected from our feelings and ourselves. At the same time, I had just seen Woody Allen's Sleeper a few days before, so I think there was a weird collision. I dreamt I was in this futuristic office holding a white box, and Woody Allen was in front of me, also holding a box. This doctor walked in and said he had extracted our souls and was going to examine them; see what shape and color they were. When Woody Allen opened his box, he saw his soul was the size of a chick pea. He got super fidgety and nervous and said there was no way he could have a chick-pea soul. And I was thinking, "If his looked like a chick pea, what would mine look like?"

And what did your soul look like?
You know, my dream ended right as I was opening my box, so I didn't see my soul! [Laughs] But I thought the dream was hilarious. I've been writing my dreams for a long time and using them for ideas, and this one was so specific and absurd and interesting, I thought I could make a film of it.

Have you ever bothered to have your dream analyzed?
No! I really want to, but I think the person would have to know me to really know what it was about. I think one of the obvious themes was having this complex like I have with Woody Allen—that I will never be as good as that person. One thing I realized later was that as a kid, my favorite story was "The Princess and the Pea." My mom would always tell me that story, but she never told me the meaning; she didn't want to interpret it for me. It bothered me as a child; I never understood how this small pea could be bothering the princess so much. That's the power of good tales for children—they're not fully explained, but they keep growing in your unconscious.

And what made you think of Paul Giamatti for the part?
The first draft was written for Woody Allen, but I thought that wasn't realistic. Then I saw American Splendor, and while I didn't know anything about Paul Giamatti, I fell in love with him. He had something in that character—that fidgety, neurotic, agitated quality Woody Allen has—but also a soulfulness and vulnerability and melancholy that was so touching. It's very hard to find an actor that has all those qualities. He's one of the best actors of his generation; he can go from broad slapstick to sweet melancholy in a heartbeat, and he is so human. I saw Sideways and realized he had a recurring persona on screen, this victimized, sad-sack guy, that made him perfect for Uncle Vanya. So I was obsessed, and wrote it for him.

I know that Paul is a very self-effacing, modest actor who can never quite believe people are interested in his work. How did he react when he found out you'd written this script for him?
He reacted exactly as you describe it. He said, "If I have to play myself, it's not interesting, I'm not an interesting guy. I'm not like Woody Allen; I'm not even that recognizable. People don't really care about me." I was like, "No, you have a fan club! I'm a fan!" I think a lot of women have a thing for him; he has this quality that is so touching. But more than playing himself, he loved the idea of this script and how it came from a dream state. He's been writing his dreams for a long time and he loves science fiction. He's a big fan of Phillip K. Dick. We love all the same sci-fi films. So I think he was really drawn to the writing. Maybe it was beginner's luck.

Did you do any research into his life to write the script, or was it all fiction?
He didn't want the character to feel too close to himself, he wanted to just play a character called Paul Giamatti. I had been trying to frame the role to him, to nail his speech patterns, but he didn't want that. He's a very private person. At the same time, he got the humor of it. At one point, the producers wanted the name to be something like "Bob Gianelli"—not his actual name but close enough that we would get the joke. But even Paul said, "No, it's funnier that it's me." I think I was trying to play with audience's perceptions, because we think we know actors and they belong to us and we can have a little piece of them—and in reality, we don't know them. They appear to us in movies. Paul was completely into that playfulness. He has a great sense of humor and doesn't take himself seriously at all. I mean, the movie doesn't make him look good at times, and he was fine pretending this was him.

Have you tired of the comparisons to Charlie Kaufman yet?
Not really. I really love and admire Kaufman and Spike Jones and Michael Gondry and enjoy their work. A great thing they've done is pave the way for other filmmakers to make absurd and surrealistic movies that have a mainstream appeal. But I think my legacy—well, I'm French, and a lot of my influence comes from French surrealism. People haven't seen those or forgot them, so people go straight to Charlie Kaufman. But I have a lot of other influences. Like Bunuel and Ionesco and even George Lucas with THX-1138. But I don't want to sound defensive; the comparison is inevitable and there's nothing I can do. At least I'm in good company.

What is your writing process like? Do you have a set writing schedule?
Now I'm doing promotion for the film, so it's taking up time. But when I was writing Cold Souls, it took a lot of discipline. Every day I would put four to six hours aside to just write. Even if it was bad, I would keep writing. I think sometimes you write and 80 percent is no good, but you can keep 20 percent. It's important to keep going. It's a gymnastics of the mind and spirit. Things may not work, but you can rewrite it later.

Do you find the dialogue or the action easier to write?
For me, I enjoy writing dialogue so much that I force myself to not write it at first and just write action. My first language is French, so I write in French first, imagining the scenes more cinematically, and then integrate the dialogue once I have the structure. I like to be very dreamlike and write to music. I used the same composer for this film; I was listening to his music when I was writing. I find it nice to be in that melancholy mood. I might turn it off to write the comic dialogue, because the tone of the script changes.

Do you ever encounter writer's block?
I do. And if I have it, I write in my journal or write down my dreams. I can be blocked for days. I think it comes out of fear, because you're judging yourself and being hard on yourself. There's a fight in your brain as a writer to censor your creative side. You can be so demanding on yourself, you need to be softer with yourself. But you need to judge, because otherwise you just write crap. So it's a balance.



Jenelle Riley keeps having that dream where her teeth fall out.



Sophie Barthes, Cold Souls courtesy Samuel Goldwyn Films

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