Interview: Mia Hansen-Løve on Goodbye First Love

THERE’s a moment in Mia Hansen-Løve’s new film, Goodbye First Love, that sums up the divided response her deeply felt coming-of-age drama may inspire among audiences. It features the film’s head-over-heels twentysomething protagonist Camille (Lola Créton) discussing a film she’s just been to see with the guy she fell completely in love with at the age of 15, but hasn’t quite managed to get over, despite it being eight years since they split up.

Leaving the cinema, the guy (played by Sebastian Urzendowsky) complains that the film is just so French. “The actors are annoying,” he scoffs. “It’s talky; complacent.” Camille retorts that he doesn’t get it: “It’s beautiful and deep. You’re not sensitive enough.”

Créton’s character, of course, is experiencing the kind of raw adolescent yearning that can seem like the most important thing in the world in the moment, but embarrassing in hindsight – the film spans nearly a decade in the life of its lovesick protagonist. It’s quite possible, then, that Hansen-Løve included this scene as a way of letting audiences know that, yes, she’s fully aware of how her film and characters must come across at times. But if she did, she says it wasn’t a conscious choice.

“I don’t really know whether people will appreciate that or not, or whether [the characters] will sound irritating to people,” she says. “I’m not thinking of that when I’m writing the film. I only write about people I understand and love.”

This is easy enough to believe. Over the course of a 45-minute interview, Hansen-Løve is so sincere about the film, about her similarities to Camille, about her burning need to make sense of the chaos of her own adolescence by framing it within fiction, that any cynicism melts.

It’s what allows her to get away with saying things like “cinema saved my life” without coming across as precious or pretentious. Any over-the-top-sounding declarations she makes are always enveloped in effusive, almost confessional and certainly genuine sounding attempts to answer questions in a meaningful way.

When I start, for instance, by asking the 32-year-old filmmaker why her three films to date – her addiction drama All is Forgiven (2007), the Cannes-wining Father of My Children (2009) and now Goodbye First Love – feature characters who become thoroughly and destructively consumed by one thing (be it drugs, filmmaking or young love), she launches into a detailed, wide-ranging discussion of her intuitive writing style, her family background, and even her desire to find an answer to this question for herself, before homing in on the film at hand and offering a possible theory on why she embarked on making it.

“I think,” she says, “it was a way to try to unite my life as a filmmaker with my adolescence and the things that I went through myself. I think when you put things in order and make a film out of it, the reality of that film gives it a meaning.”

If this sounds like an abstract way of acknowledging that Goodbye First Love is her most autobiographical film yet, it also reflects her desire and need to understand and explain what filmmaking means to her.

Her first important connection to cinema, for instance, came at the relatively late age of 17. It occurred not through watching movies, but by being plucked from obscurity at an open audition for a small part in Olivier Assayas’ 1998 film Late August, Early September.

“It came by accident and was overwhelming,” she says of suddenly being on set, making a film. It’s an experience, she says, that opened her up “to cinema and the beauty of fiction”, largely because she realised that, unlike literature or painting, filmmaking was a very physical art form.

“It involves the body; it’s very carnal. I experienced that at 17, at a moment in my life where I felt very lost. It felt like being alive again.”

She didn’t, however, have much self-confidence, so closed herself off and endured what sounds like quite a few miserable and frustrating years attempting to become a poet. “It’s what I wanted to do, but I hated everything I wrote,” she laughs.

It was only when she tried to pen a screenplay that writing felt natural. “I realised for the first time that the truth of the writing would come not from the writing itself, but from the interpretation from the actor, so it led me back to this idea that fiction could connect with something physical. Suddenly I felt that there was this connection between writing and experience.”

It also led her to making her first short film and, at the age of 20, into a relationship with Assayas, now her husband and father of her child. She credits Assayas (whose most recent film was the epic Carlos) with encouraging her filmmaking ambitions.

However Hansen-Løve quickly distinguished herself as a filmmaker in her own right, thanks largely to the critical success of Father of My Children. Nevertheless, their relationship remains a frequent topic of interviews, although that’s perhaps unsurprising this time as Goodbye First Love sees its protagonist embark on an affair with her much older mentor after finding her calling as an architect (a profession Hansen-Løve likens to filmmaking). Is she comfortable that people will scrutinise the film in this way?

“It’s not something I enjoy so much, but whatever disagreements I get from it are unimportant compared to the relief I feel having made this film.”

She lets out a sigh. “I just don’t know how to write differently, and because of that, I just have to face the consequences of that in terms of people interpreting my life through my films.

“If didn’t accept that, I wouldn’t be able to write.”

• Goodbye First Love is in cinemas from 4 May.