Interview: Director Benjamin Millepied opens up about the long journey to ‘Carmen’ and working with Melissa Barrera, Paul Mescal and Rossy de Palma

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Between the novel by Prosper Mérimée and Bizet’s opera, the story of Carmen has been adapted through books, film, stage and television almost more than any other classic tale. But, you’ve probably never seen it quite like Benjamin Millepied’s audacious retelling of the classic story. 

In his updated, contemporary version, Carmen follows a young and fiercely independent woman who is forced to flee her home in the Mexican desert following the brutal murder of her mother. Carmen (Melissa Barrera) survives a terrifying and dangerous illegal border crossing into the US, only to be confronted by a lawless volunteer border guard, who cold-bloodedly murders two other immigrants in her group. When the border guard and his patrol partner, Aidan (Academy Award nominee Paul Mescal) – a Marine with PTSD – become embroiled in a deadly standoff, Carmen and Aidan are forced to escape together. They make their way north towards Los Angeles in search of Carmen’s mother’s best friend, the mercurial Masilda (Almodóvar staple Rossy De Palma) and owner of La Sombra nightclub – a sanctuary of music and dance. Carmen and Aidan find both solace and their unwavering love for one another in the safety of Masilda’s magical refuge, but time is running out as the police hunt closes in.

Millipied, born in Bordeaux, France, has always wanted to dance. He began ballet training at the age of eight with his mother, Catherine Flory, a former ballet dancer, and began to choreograph himself in 2001. He founded a pick-up troupe, Danses Concertantes, in 2002, a vehicle for his choreography and commissions. In 2006, he served as a choreographer-in residence at The Baryshnikov Arts Center. That year, he created the solo “Years Later” for Mikhail Baryshnikov. Since 2005, he has choreographed for New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Berlin Staatsoper, The Mariinsky Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Lyon Opera Ballet, Geneva Ballet, and Dutch National Ballet. 

In 2009, he he served as choreographer for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman (who won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance), where he was also a featured dancer. In 2012, Millipied and Portman married and now have two children. The previous year he co-founded the L.A. Dance Project with Charles Fabius and since its inception, the company has given hundreds of performances at prestigious venues worldwide and site-specific performances in non-traditional venues, and worked on multiple commissioned dance films. Millepied is a past recipient of the prestigious “Bourse Lavoisier” scholarship from the French government; a winner of the Prix de Lausanne; a recipient of SAB’s Mae. L. Wien Award for Outstanding Promise; and a United States Artists Wynn Fellow in Dance. In 2010, he was awarded the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture.

Since then, he has directed a number of short films, commercials and music videos in collaboration with artists including Philip Glass, Mark Bradford, IO Echo, Lil Buck, and Zeds Dead. He also directed a short film for luxury jewelry brand Van Cleef and Arpels based on his original choreography entitled Reflections.

For Millipied, Carmen has been a passion project for the first time feature director, working with Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated composer Nicholas Britell (Succession, Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) for over a decade to create the film’s foundation of original composition and songs (with Julieta Venegas and Taura Stinson). I sat down with Millepied to talk about his passion, dance, movement the desire to tell a version of the story like this, how Melissa Barrera and Paul Mescal became Carmen and Aiden, the legend that is Rossy de Palma and much more.

Benjamin Millepied: How are you?

Erik Anderson: I am doing very well. I’m really excited to talk to you. I love the film.

BM: Thank you.

EA: It’s so fun and audacious and wild.

BM: Thank you very much.

EA: I remember the news about this coming out in 2017 when it was announced. So, it’s been quite a journey to get here. Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of that beginning? Because I know it’s a lot older than that.

BM: Yeah, I mean, I think the lesson is you don’t… Well, I think part of it was just a process of a first time for me and process of wanting to do something with music and dance. And finding a writer that understood that I wasn’t going in the conventional route was really difficult. And that I didn’t want things to be literal and on the nose. And just finding the right tone was really finding the right person. When you’ve never done it and you have to understand even how much it needs to be personal. So, I mean the script, the bit that… That’s what took forever. And as far as my experience and approaching it, I just finished another script now and it was a completely different experience. So, I learned a lot from this first time. And so, that’s why I think things dragged on a lot because we’re never really ready to go get the movie financed.

So, we didn’t have a script. And so, that was the process, and then COVID and all of that. But then it worked out. All of that worked out in the favor of making a film that was in a way very close to the way I make dances and have the freedom to tell parts of the stories with just movement and music and still speak of a character that is driven by it, by its integrity and its freedom and fearlessness and how does he relate to that, to her and how she gives him an experience he’s never had and same with him. I think it was important for Carmen to have an experience with a man that wasn’t just somebody who was this fantasy of what… which is in the opera. She’s just this male fantasy of someone who can’t love and be or be loved and gets punished for her sins. And so, to make them human and to have a special experience together. That is something he’s never had, and that’s something she’s never had, but she’ll carry with her.

EA: And you’re obviously not a stranger to filmmaking. You’ve made short films and dance films and music videos. But what was it about Carmen that made you say, this is a story I have to tell as a feature film versus doing a stage production?

BM: Well, because it was the idea for the feature, the first feature to take this classical story and that I was drawn to. And I think the female protagonist was something that I was drawn to and something personal. And then having the composer [Nicholas Britell] that could really completely reinvent, totally write a brand new score for brand new story. Which is a completely outstanding score, by the way.

EA: I was just hanging out with Nic this weekend and…

BM: You were in San Francisco?

EA: Yeah. I went to his SF Symphony program and then we talked after, and I talked with him at TIFF too. And he could talk about Carmen for just days and days. He’s obsessed with it. He had nothing but just fantastic thing to say about your passion and your collaboration on it, which goes back really far.

BM: Yes, very far. But it really was also about unleashing his freedom, his freedom as a composer, because so much of the process that he goes through is his music is cut and pasted. And for me, there was this sense that I wanted the music to be played from beginning to end. I wanted it to live and live fully, and him feel like he was unleashed to really express himself with his images and with the story in a way that felt unrestrained. 

EA: Yeah.

BM: That was really important.

EA: It’s some of the best work of his career too. It’s fantastic.

BM: I think so. Oh yeah.

EA: One thing I think that was pretty fantastic for you with the time period of this is that you have a cast led by two people that have blown up really since this. The release of Carmen is here. You have Melissa Barrera with In The Heights and the Scream films, and then Paul post Normal People, but then before Aftersun. Tell me a little bit about the casting process. I know Melissa came in really early.

BM: I wanted a Mexican woman who could sing and dance and I looked at a lot of tapes and she was just cast in La Vida. She had done the first season, I think, and I saw her on tape singing amazingly well, and then I saw her in, So You Think You Can Dance in Mexico and that’s how I really found her.

EA: Was there a bit of a bootcamp? Because I know at least for Paul, it was a little different.

BM: There wasn’t a bootcamp, exactly. I knew she could move and then of course we rehearsed. He rehearsed and practiced a lot.

EA: You mentioned COVID, everything was kind of happening at around this time. How did the impact of that quarantine help or hinder? Was there any advantage?

BM: I mean, the advantage was that we shot a movie without masks. I mean, we had masks. It’s not true. We had masks on set, but not really. I mean, it was a country with no masks. It was no COVID while we shot the movie. It was incredible. So, that was very special. I mean, it was very, very lucky. It was insane.

EA: What’s the genesis of choreography for you? How is it different from a stage production to a film production?

BM: Well, as I choreograph, I start to block the scene with a camera. So, when I’m thinking with the choreography for the screen, it’s always linked to how the camera’s going to move. So, it’s not the same thing at all, because you’re not just going to watch it in a box on stage. You’re going to be immersed in it. And so, I start to play with this interaction of physical movement and camera movement.

EA: The camera movement really does mimic dance movement quite a bit in a way that just carries the audience around.

BM: Yeah exactly, I think that was the point. It’s not only to be immersed in it, but to also give her movement, more fluidity and more credibility and have these long takes in the dance. Where you carry the audience, you want to forget that the camera’s moving, you just feel like you’re where you want to be. It’s not just to showcase virtuosity, it’s just to be in the right place at the right time with the camera and the actors.

EA: Did you go in with any film or music video inspirations to guide you? Or where did the concept come from?

BM: I don’t know if there was a concept as much as ideas of what the atmosphere should feel like, how the set should look, how the scenes should be lit, what the actors are supposed to feel, and how the scenes should be staged. And then really it was from scene to scene, making decisions of how I wanted to put the camera and how the actors should move or not move.

EA: I was getting little bits of Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom. It reminded me of that in a really great way. And then the boxing sequence with Paul had sort of the eroticism of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail and it was pretty fantastic.

BM: Yeah. Yeah.

EA: I had recently watched The Forest Swords music video, “The Weight of Gold.” I felt like the bones were there too. I can see this. I can see it. It’s fantastic.

BM: Oh yeah.

EA: I felt like the bones were there too. I can see this. I can see it. It’s fantastic.

BM: Yeah, nice.

EA: When you do a stage performance, it’s immediate and there is no do-over. It’s just, “Here is your one take.” What were the advantages, or I guess disadvantages, of doing film, where you can stop and edit?

BM: Well, there’s something really pretty magical about the idea that you create something that people will experience much later on. Just, the way that you watch the Kurosawa movies or Antonioni or Bresson. That’s really something magical, that you can go back and learn from them. Because there’s also such a beauty to the craft that these guys had mastered, where they probably felt like they were on a tough schedule on their movies, but in a way took the time to do exactly what they needed and what they wanted. And when you think of The Cranes Are Flying, for example, how long it took to make that movie. That movie’s so incredible.

It’s amazing that you can choose to honor a detail or you can take the viewer wherever you want. And that’s an incredibly liberating thing to have because creatively it offers you so many options. And that’s a really, really amazing thing to… It’s a gift to have the capacity to do anything you want with a camera and think the viewer anywhere you want.

EA: I’d love to get back to Barrera and Mescal for a moment and just hear about your experiences in working with them and them together.

BM: Because also it was the first time directing actors I tried to pressure myself to make sure that I was giving them directions that were inspiring from take to take, which is a very hard thing. But to always think about what is the thing that I can tell them to find some interesting tension, something maybe they’re thinking about while they’re telling the scenes that gives the scene some tension.
And Paul was very, very good, creative ideas and really understood how to play that character. And Melissa too, I mean, Melissa was really hugely helpful with the script. And when it came to performance, I think she was terrific, terrific. And we worked together to find the best angles to tell the story, what made the most sense for the character’s journey. And of course we didn’t shoot in order and all that, but yeah, we did.

EA: Rossy de Palma is so legendary. What was getting her like?

BM: I mean, it was incredible. She was attached to the project from the moment she read it. And even though the project fell apart multiple times, she was there. And when she arrived on set, she had so many interesting ideas. I really didn’t do much, I just let her be her. And she was the character. The first take is the scene with Melissa in the bar, in the club the next morning, and it’s a single take and that’s her first take on set. And it’s remarkable. It’s remarkable. And I had chills because it was hearing Rossy de Palma on my movie was like hearing the voice of my twenties. I was in all of our movies, so I really couldn’t believe it when I heard her voice on my headphones in Spanish. I was like, “Oh.” Yeah, it was special.

EA: It really is. It’s again, one of the things that’s so unique about this film because she’s so associated with Almodóvar seeing her out in the wild, outside of that, just feels absolutely exciting.

BM: I really loved working with her and I love the three of them. But she… The eyes painted over, that was her idea. A lot of these interesting, magical, sorcerer kind of ideas were hers.

EA: You said you’re working on another script. Are you eager to get back behind the camera?

BM: Yes, yes. I really am. Yeah, it’ll happen when it’ll happen. It’s very hard to manage a career in sort of life performance and film because films… You just don’t know when it’s going to happen and you have to keep your schedule clear for foreseeable future. And then ‘life’ performance, you’re booked in 2025, so it’s like I’m trying to manage the two, but I want to get back there on the camera, I assume. Yeah, that definitely.

EA: Fantastic. Benjamin, thank you so much.

BM: You’re welcome. Thank you very much for seeing the film, enjoying it. I really, really appreciate it.

Sony Pictures Classics will release Carmen in New York and Los Angeles on April 21, with a wider release in the following weeks.