Marion Cotillard: “It scares me a lot that one day I will be moved by an actor made with AI”

Special envoy to San SebastianFive years after receiving the Donostia Award, Marion Cotillard has returned to the San Sebastian Festival, but this time to compete for the Golden Shell with the family thriller crossed by politics 7h40 ce matin-là. In the film, she plays a former leftist revolutionary who, after 15 years in prison, reunites with the son she abandoned for armed struggle, who is now an adult working as a mechanic in a garage. Like in the thriller about cults Karma, which she presented at the last Cannes Festival, Cotillard moves away from her glamorous image as an official Chanel ambassador. Here she is a tough and opaque woman, who seeks a job as a waitress in a provincial town to be close to her son and watch him; sometimes she talks to him, but without ever revealing her identity, like a silent spy with a secret agenda.

“She feels infinite love for her son, but the yearning to change the established order diverted her from her path as a mother,” Cotillard reflected in San Sebastian. “However, she takes measures so that her son has a normal life, even if that implies separating from him completely. It was a difficult decision, the most important of her life. But the true revolution is the act of being a mother and her journey, almost an interior one, to recover what matters most to her.” The actress does not feel capable of criticizing the commitment to armed struggle that her character made when she was young: “Violence always breeds violence, but it is complicated to judge this decision, because revolutionary violence usually comes from another violence that is not usually mentioned, which is that derived from a political condition or situation. And in this case, the violent reaction seems sadly logical to me. When you reach that level of anger and frustration, it is difficult not to express yourself through violence.”

The actress also gave her opinion on the changes in the film industry, such as the appearance of platforms and the threat of generative AI in its cinematic applications. “I am very afraid that one day I will be moved by an actor made with AI, but for now they act like potatoes,” she assures. “AI can be a formidable tool in many fields, but in art, it baffles me. What is the point of making films with fake actors who do not have the experience that life provides? I don't believe AI can ever replace a beating heart.”

Victoria Luengo in the city of saints

The day has seen another return to the festival, that of Mikel Gurrea. After debuting there as a director with Suro, he is now competing for the second time for the Golden Shell with an unorthodox family drama tinged with noir and loaded with ideas that confirm him as a unique filmmaker in the landscape of Catalan cinema: imbued with the naturalism of the new generation of directors but with an evident vocation to play with genres and weave multiple layers of meaning into the stories.

Sants, which is set in the same Barcelona neighborhood—where the Basque director also lives—takes the conventions of film noir and heist movies and projects them onto the story of a woman (Victoria Luengo) who returns to her city to care for her sick mother (Ariadna Gil), a burden that suffocates her and which she does not know how to manage. Stealing a small religious icon brings her into contact with a gang of thieves specializing in these figures, a group led by an enigmatic woman (Eulàlia Ramon) where she also finds an unexpected community that cares for her and her mother: a kind of welfare state on the margins of society. With them, she plans a big heist at a complex of three churches in, precisely, the city of the saints: Vic.

The seed of Sants lies in Gurrea's desire to film in his neighborhood and in the fact of questioning the origin of its name. “When I found out that it came from the church of Santa Maria dels Sants, I went to see it several times and always found it closed,” he recalls. “This led me to think about why a church is closed and the need to protect its treasures, and also about how religious icons can be objects to be revered by thieves. After all, stealing them is also a kind of liturgical act, synchronized and silent, a kind of inverted cult.”

The other element that ended up shaping the film is more personal and has to do with the 700 kilometers that separate the director from his parents. “They are of a certain age and have had episodes of illness,” he explains. “I have had to navigate as a son the idea of where I want to be and where I must be. I am not Catholic, but in our culture we carry a heavy legacy of guilt and sacrifice.” In any case, what interested Gurrea most was exploring “the journey from duty to desire” through the arc of Luengo's character, an actress with whom he reunites after her explosive role in Suro. Although he did not write it with the actress in mind, the director acknowledges that “subconsciously I knew it was her” and that, after a couple of versions of the script, it was evident. “She is a great friend and we understand each other very well,” he says. “And she got very involved in the process long before we had the final script.”

But the great acting surprise of Sants is the small but essential role of an Ariadna Gil, for whom it is hard to recall a performance as raw and visceral as this one. “It is true that we have never seen Ariadna like in Sants, it was not an obvious choice at all, but we really wanted to and she liked the script a lot,” explains Gurrea. “And we didn't just focus on the issue of the illness, because even though the degradation is there, it was necessary to see that she could be charming and at the same time tough and mischievous, and that she has a lot of dignity but also a lot of fear.”