Léa Seydoux is pulling double duty at the Cannes Film Festival, with Mia Hansen-Løve‘s One Fine Morning and David Cronenberg‘s Crimes of the Future both premiering at the French fest. In the middle of this, Seydoux sat down with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg for a live episode of his Awards Chatter podcast, co-presented byTHR and SAG-AFTRA in association with OuterInsight.
The podcast was recorded at the Campari Lounge at the Palais, overlooking the Croisette, which was bustling on a Sunday morning. The lounge sits next to the Palais, where Seydoux will on Monday attend the premiere of Cronenberg’s first film in eight years and first at Cannes since 1996’s Crash.
Crimes of the Future is set in a near future where humans have adapted to their synthetic surroundings, making traditional food and sex obsolete. The story follows performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), who, thanks to a technologically advanced bed that anticipates his body’s every need, grows new organs at a rapid pace that then are removed in front of sold-out crowds with the help of Caprice (Seydoux), a surgeon turned Tenser’s creative partner.
“The script was kind of strange. I didn’t think I understood it but I find his films extremely poetic,” said Seydoux of the project. “It was just a new adventure.”
On the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum, One Fine Morning is a slice-of-life drama play a woman juggling a romantic affair and raising her daughter while securing care for her ailing father.
“What I like about working with women [directors] is they don’t fantasize,” she said. In addition to Hansen-Løve, Seydoux has worked with a long list of female directors that includes Jessica Hausner and Ursula Meier. To some male directors, Seydoux laughed, “A woman is a strange creature.”
It was announced ahead of the Cannes Film Festival that Seydoux will work with director Audrey Diwan in a feature film inspired by Emmanuelle Arsan’s erotic novel, Emmanuelle. “When I spoke with Audrey Diwan, she told me that she wanted to talk about a woman of nowadays that she sees and knows but she doesn’t see on the screen. I understood what she meant,” she said.
Seydoux continued: “It is a female perspective on a female’s relationship to her sexuality.”
Seydoux is a Cannes veteran, having debuted more than a dozen titles at the festival and winning the Palme d’Or for the 2013 movie Blue Is the Warmest Colour. During the wide-ranging conversation, she also talked about working with Quentin Tarantino (Inglorious Bastards), Tom Cruise (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol), Wes Anderson (The French Dispatch) and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris), as well as her extended career in both French and American cinema.
Watch video of this episode above, and listen to all other episodes of the Awards Chatter podcast here.
Scott Feinberg and Lea Seydoux
Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for The Hollywood Reporter