After Guillaume de Tonquédec, the La Rochelle TV Fiction Festival has entrusted the presidency of its jury to Sandrine Bonnaire. “A huge artist”, recalled, rightly, Stéphane Strano, at the helm of the event during a press conference at the Hôtel de la Monnaie in the Charente-Maritime capital at the end of August. Some might be surprised to see the actress seen at Sautet, Rivette, Téchiné and Chabrol presiding over a festival dedicated to television. “I am very honoured. I chaired the jury of many film festivals, a television festival, it’s a first”, rejoices the actress and director during a meeting with a handful of journalists.
“A role in ‘Santa Claus is trash’, I would have done it! »
“I seem like an intellectual actress, but not at all,” she says, all smiles. “I would have loved to play in Welcome to the Ch’tis ! I really like what Dany Boon and Franck Dubosc are doing… Recently, I met Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delépine, I told them that I wanted to work with them”, she says. And to insist: “If I had been offered a role in Santa Clause is garbage, I would have done it ! »
The actress does not like the term auteur cinema, a label that perhaps sticks too much to her skin. “There are simply good and bad authors, films that are successful, and others less so”. “I had films that were successful, but I think I also became popular thanks to television,” she says, recalling that she was one of the first actresses to come from the cinema in act in a television series, woman in white, in 1996. “She was a huge success. France 2 had produced it and TF1 wanted a sequel, it’s quite rare for TF1 to buy a project… And I did the sequel”, specifies Sandrine Bonnaire.
“You’re going to do a series, do you need the money? »
She says: “At the time, there was a snobbery of the cinema compared to television. People said to me: “Ah, well, you are going to do a series, do you need the money?” Television was then considered less qualitative than cinema, today that no longer means anything. I’m happy to have done television and I still do. Television and platforms are a great medium. With the series, we have time to stretch a story over several episodes. »
This is why the actress, director, screenwriter and producer is delighted to discover the selection of 41 works, including 25 unpublished French creations in competition, 10 European and 6 foreign French-speaking ones. Festivals allow “to discover authors, actors, forms of work. It’s very rewarding,” she says.
Sandrine Bonnaire considers her role as president “as a responsibility”: “Awards are useful, they allow works to be highlighted. In the press. When I receive an award, I’m happy,” she says. She intends to share this responsibility with her jury, “a presidency is above all a democracy”, she believes.
On what criteria will she judge the works in the selection? “I would focus on the substance of the subject, but also a lot on its form, because you also have simple subjects treated in a wonderful way. It’s important to salute the work of writing, staging, the form is important, because we are so invaded by images that there are things we want to see and others don’t. »
“The small vulgarity of formatting”
Sandrine Bonnaire likes entertainment: “It’s important to have fun, and even more so today, I think! » but hates « the pre-chewed work, the formatting of certain programs. The formatting, I find that there is a little vulgarity in there”. The president wants to proceed by elimination: “We’re going to start by eliminating what we don’t like! A film has to teach me things, that I have a strong emotion, like laughing or crying,” she explains.
In La Rochelle, the actress has her habits: “I shot here See the day by Marion Laine. I have memories of vacations there with my little sister Sabine, because I have a brother who bought a house here, which he sold. I also have very fond memories of the Francofolies where I came to sing with Jacques Higelin. »
But she won’t have time to take advantage of it during her presidency: “I’m not here for that, I’m just enjoying the beauty of the port”, assures the studious Sandrine Bonnaire. In particular, she will see there for the first time the episodes of female fighters, the TF1 blockbuster presented out of competition. On the bill alongside Audrey Fleurot, Julie de Bona, Camille Lou, and Sofia Essaïdi, she plays a cantankerous stepmother.
“It’s great to play a narrow bourgeois”
“She is far from me, but I love that we offer actors and actresses counter-jobs. It’s nice to play a narrow bourgeoise. She’s not just mean, but if she had only been mean, that would have gotten me more too. To play a role is childish, it is to dress up. It seems that I would be Éléonore and that she would be mean, ”she underlines.
A project among the countless that she leads from the front. “With my eldest daughter, Jeanne, we created A nos amours production, which will produce short formats,” she announces. The actress is developing a miniseries that she will direct and in which she will play with her eldest daughter, “who plays me young”, an adaptation of the book The underside of candles by Valérie Hervo and a film, The Sound of Silence, co-written with a Belgian screenwriter and produced by Dominique Besnehard, “on identity, on abandonment, on births under X, on what happens when you don’t know where you come from. “.
Sandrine Bonnaire will also star in Dance First, a biopic where she plays opposite Gabriel Byrne. Sandrine Bonnaire also continues her musical readings on stage with the jazz trumpeter, Erik Truffaz. We cannot therefore reduce Sandrine Bonnaire to an “intellectual actress”, because she is above all a talented jack-of-all-trades!