Arnaud Desplechin: “Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Charlotte Rampling, François Civil and me”

The director of Two Pianos looks back on his collaboration with three of his main performers and details some principles of his direction of actors, at the center of his cinema.

With Two pianosyou return to the melodrama by staging the crossed destinies of Mathias, a pianist as tortured as he is talented, and Claude, his childhood sweetheart, whom he discovers is the mother of a young boy who strangely resembles him… At what point in your creative process do you start to think about the actors who will play him?

It usually happens late. But in the case of Two pianosfor Claude, it actually happened a little further upstream. In this case, for once, from the writing stage when I decided on the age of this character and to make her a young widow under 30 whose reactions are therefore necessarily different from a forty-year-old. It was from that moment that I thought of Nadia Tereszkiewicz! But I didn’t write Claude for her.

The desire to work with her was born from Almond trees ?

Exactly. For his mixture of naivety and extreme intelligence. Nadia reminds me of a scene fromEsther Khan where we saw a little girl on a roof in London, being made fun of by her little brothers and throwing bubbles at her. And she reacted like a little dog, biting the bubbles. For me, it’s all Nadia. His way of catching life. And for this character of Claude who is a little outside of life, I knew that Nadia would spontaneously know how to create fire under the ashes. She had this explosive ability that suited the character.

Was the choice of François Civil later?

As always with me, while I know my female characters like the back of my hand – without being able to explain to you precisely why – my male characters are much more mysterious to me. So I had no spontaneous idea for who would play Mathias. I started to think about the cinema couple that I wanted to create on screen with Nadia. Of François, I had obviously seen The Three Musketeers and all the Klapisch and I also loved it in No wavesthe wonderful film by Teddy Lussi-Modeste. So I wanted to meet him after sending him the script. And there, for an hour and a half, the reading he gave me from Mathias dazzled me. He already knew him almost better than me! (laughs) For me, it was him but he asked me to do some tests. And when I hired him, I told him: “You are much more brilliant than me in text analysis but deep down I don’t care. Now it has to be physical, embodied“. And François worked like crazy on it. He lost I don’t know how many kilos. He learned all the pieces on the piano. And the first day of filming, the character was there, like an almost miraculous evidence. That’s the incarnation of the actor. You don’t know how to explain it. François was Mathias, with his extreme goodness, his extreme delicacy and his extreme gentleness but also his ability to make a little afraid.

How do you work with both of them?

First, I don’t want them to meet before the first day of filming. But I do a very in-depth reading of the text with each one. With a sort of mantra that I keep repeating to them: “Break the text, I don’t care if you say what I wrote. You’re not here for that“. But no matter how much I insisted, they respected him too much. It was Hippolyte Girardot who gave me the key when I complained about it to him: “They’ve been waiting for years to have Desplechin’s lines to say, they’re not going to break everything right away!“(laughs)

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Watching them film after film, we have the feeling that Nadia and François are among the actors who feel good about success. Which is not the case for everyone…

I agree with you. It’s a strange thing because when you’re being filmed, there’s danger. Your face will be shown 200 times larger and your life will never be the same. You receive the light, the admiration of the spectators who cry with you, who laugh with you, who love with you, who hate with you… And only the actors who know how to accept it know how to give it back. They are brighter because of having been loved. Just like in “real” life. Nadia and François are among them.

At their side, we find Charlotte Rampling in the role of the conductor who was Claude’s mentor. What prompted you to entrust him with this role?

I’m going to tell you a secret: if she had said no, I would have been in real trouble! I didn’t see any other actress of her generation in this role. And otherwise I probably would have rewritten this character for a man. So I can tell you that I wasn’t acting proud when I went to the meeting to meet her. It turns out that my scenarios are not written traditionally – there is no writing of sequence 1, interior night… – but in a slightly more literary way. At this first meeting, I leave a little relieved because she says yes. Until, a few days later, I sent her a new version of the script and received an email from her. I turn pale, thinking that she has changed her mind. I start reading and I see written: “Dear Arnaud, we are facing a very big problem and we need to see it very quickly. Because in scene 112, my character, Elena, says she’s scared. But I have never been afraid. And since I’m not one of the types of actresses who changes a comma in the text, how are we going to do it?“I had never received such a letter where an actress expressed to me her inability to play an emotion that she did not know with the accuracy essential to the situation.

And how was this resolved?

Charlotte questioned me precisely what I meant by fear. I showed him the video of this wonderful pianist, Maria-João Pires Pires, who one day found herself with the wrong score to play a Mozart concerto and was therefore casting desperate looks at the conductor trying to make him understand her inability to play. And after seeing it, Charlotte said to me: “Arnaud, it’s not fear but terror. And I already knew that so I can play it!“

Can we forget that we’re directing Charlotte Rampling?

There is this article that Truffaut wrote that I really like: “Long live the stars”. And I admit to being a little girl, to loving stars. So nothing is normal for me about filming Charlotte Rampling. I am fully aware of it on set, I have to go over it because Charlotte wouldn’t stand for me to speak to her with deference. I can’t believe she’s in front of my camera, but I have to suspend too much admiration and I have to find camaraderie in the work.

Do you always play the scenes in front of your actors before the first take?

Not every time. And I obviously ask them if it doesn’t bother them but, I admit, in a bit of a coercive way so that they let me do it even if it bothers them a little! (laughs) With this gesture, I show them my choreography of the scene. And it’s like the text, it’s up to them to take it, break it or invent another. You shouldn’t be a fetishist with the director’s choreography. If it’s not embodied, it’s worthless! What is worth something and what spectators will see is the tiny gesture that Nadia or François will invent. The feeling behind the gesture.

Do you have a policy in terms of number of shots?

I am careful that we do not exhaust the text. There are scenes that require returning to. But I don’t think you’re a better actor in take 500 than in the first. And above all, I don’t like the mythologies that there may be behind the demiurge filmmaker. Because I know from experience that it is false. I usually choose the take I like best on set. And when, once on the editing table, for certain scenes, I watch others, I regularly see takes where the actor is much better, which had totally escaped me. All this encourages the greatest modesty!

Two pianos. By Arnaud Desplechin. With François Civil, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Charlotte Rampling Duration: 1h55. Released October 15, 2025