Nicolas Duvauchelle Sveva Alviti Riccardo Scamarcio Jean-Paul Rouve
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JULIEN MADON, LISA AZUELOS AND JÉRÔME SEYDOUX PRESENT SVEVA RICCARDO JEAN-PAUL NICOLAS ALVITI SCAMARCIO ROUVE DUVAUCHELLE DIRECTED BY LISA AZUELOS PHOTO THIBAULT GRABHERR - CRÉDITS NON CONTRACTUELS PHOTO THIBAULT ALESSANDRO BORGHI VALENTINA CARLI BRENNO PLACIDO NIELS SCHNEIDER VITTORIO HAMARZ VASFI DAVIDE LORINO HAYDEE BORELLI WITH SPECIAL APPEARANCES BY VINCENT PEREZ AND PATRICK TIMSIT WWW.DALIDA-LEFILM.COM JULIEN MADON, LISA AZUELOS AND JÉRÔME SEYDOUX PRESENT SVEVA RICCARDO JEAN-PAUL NICOLAS ALVITI SCAMARCIO ROUVE DUVAUCHELLE DIRECTED BY LISA AZUELOS DURATION: 2H04 DISTRIBUTION INTERNATIONAL SALES PATHÉ DISTRIBUTION PATHÉ INTERNATIONAL 2, RUE LAMENNAIS 75008 PARIS TÉL. : 01 71 72 30 00 ADDITIONAL MATERIAL IS AVAILABLE TO DOWNLOAD AT WWW.PATHEFILMS.COM FROM HER BIRTH IN CAIRO IN 1933 TO HER FIRST CONCERT AT THE OLYMPIA IN PARIS IN 1956; FROM HER MARRIAGE TO LUCIEN MORISSE, DIRECTOR OF THE NEWLY EMERGING EUROPE 1 RADIO TO THE HEIGHT OF THE DISCO SCENE; FROM HER JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY TO INDIA TO THE INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS OF GIGI L’AMOROSO IN 1974, DALIDA THE FILM, IS A TOUCHING AND TRAGIC PORTRAIT OF AN EMOTIONALLY COMPLEX WOMAN WHO WAS BORN TO BE A STAR. AN UNCONVENTIONAL MODERN WOMAN LIVING IN CONVENTIONAL TIMES. DESPITE HER TRAGIC DEATH IN 1987, DALIDA’S STAGE PRESENCE AND INCREDIBLE TALENT CONTINUE TO LIVE ON. WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO MAKE A FILM ABOUT DALIDA? To be honest, I wasn’t really a fan of Dalida’s before I began working on this film. In some ways, she was kind of thrust upon me! Saying that, as soon as I started researching her life, I felt an empathy with her, and, as time passed, the bond got stronger and stronger. Dalida wasn’t just a woman who broke a lot of records - she won more awards than any other French artist; sold 170 million records, recorded 2000 songs and had 70 gold records - she was also an exceptional person. Not every celebrity has a destiny mapped out. But she did. WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT? Her existence was both spectacular and tragic! Dalida’s life was like a novel, with all the ingredients of a good TV drama. Her fame and notoriety were on a par with her loneliness. I quickly came to realise that I shouldn’t just tell the story of a woman, but the story of this woman who never found happiness. I wanted to do justice to Dalida to her memory. I wanted people to understand who she really was and forgive her final desperate act. She was a victim of misfortune, in that she was a modern woman in an era that was far from modern! Had she lived twenty-five years on, she could have kept the baby that she conceived out of wedlock, or had an abortion in an environment that wouldn’t have made her sterile. She could even have been a “cougar” without worrying about it. And then – just maybe – she might not have been so desperately unhappy as to commit suicide. WHY DID THIS FILM TAKE SO LONG TO MAKE? Probably because when dealing with such an important and complex character, nothing is ever simple! The project changed direction, actress and angles many times. Yet strangely, I knew that I would get there in the end because back in 2012, a medium said to me, “Dalida is happy that you’re telling her story”. I replied “That can’t be right because even though I’ve written the script, the film has been abandoned.” She replied, “You’re wrong, in four years time there will be a film and you’ll direct it.” So whether one chooses to believe in those sorts of things or not, it did happen! COMPARED TO MANY OTHER BIOPICS, YOU CHOSE NOT TO FOCUS ON ONE PART OF DALIDA’S LIFE BUT ON THE WHOLE. WHY? Because I think that Dalida’s childhood, and especially her relationship with her father, explains a lot about her relationship with men all the way through her life. Her life and death were two sides of the same coin. In order to understand her being, it’s impossible to cut corners. Furthermore, all the different phases of her life as an artist and her love life are fascinating: from the San Remo years all the way through to the disco years. It would have been way too hard to leave any of that out! I already feel frustrated enough as it is for not being able to include everything - I had to cut the film, as originally, it was almost three hours long! HOW DID IT GO WORKING WITH ORLANDO (DALIDA’S BROTHER/PRODUCER), WHO CO-WROTE THE SCREENPLAY? Very, very well. His involvement was a safeguard mechanism and a way to ensure that the true story of Dalida was told. He soon realised that we both shared the same ultimate goal: to make Dalida live on for eternity. Orlando only had three requests: he wanted to approve the screenplay, choose the actress who would play his sister, and choose the actor who would play him, which is fair enough. In exchange, he totally respected my artistic freedom. From time to time he guided my writing (“You can’t leave that out, Lisa!”) but he also let me depart from reality too. I wrote quite a lot intuitively, just letting myself be guided by how I imagine Dalida might have felt. I’ll never be able to thank Orlando enough for the faith and trust he put in me. THIS IS YOUR FIRST BIOPIC, SO HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT MAKING DALIDA’S STORY YOUR OWN? I began by reading, watching and listening to everything by her and about her! I was also helped by the fact that her lifestyle FACED WITH SUCH A TRAGIC LIFE, WERE YOU EVER was relatively familiar. Being the daughter of Marie Laforêt, I WORRIED THAT THIS FILM MIGHT BE TOO DARK? understand what it would have been like to be a singer in the I knew that it would never be a feel-good movie, but I also 1970s and 1980s: the glamour, the etiquette, the conservative knew that Dalida had two sides to her character: on the one nature of this period, the constant attention from everyone hand she was a very unhappy person but when she was (especially men who determined almost everything for you), singing, she shone. That’s why I chose to tell the story of her but also the small details, like having a lady whose job it was life through both the men that she loved and her songs. And to stamp your signature on autographed photos. I knew about she had other moments of great happiness in her life and not all of that stuff. There was no danger that I could get any of just in her career. For example, her passionate love affair with that part of the script wrong. As for Dalida herself, it’s very Richard Chanfray is a very uplifting passage in the film. strange to delve so deeply into someone else’s life, especially when I began to realize that through her, I was also going to reveal a lot about myself. The first year of writing was very TELL US ABOUT THE CASTING. IS IT TRUE THAT YOU hard, probably because I found a lot of similarities between SAW 200 ACTRESSES BEFORE FINALLY COMING ACROSS SVEVA ALVITI? us, such as her interest in spirituality and her relationships with men. Like her, I have never had any doubts about my Yes! We started in France, but all the actresses I saw rolled career, but I have regularly had doubts in my private life. Yet, their ‘R’s, it was too much! Maybe it’s because culturally I was lucky enough to have children and that makes all the speaking we don’t really have that many accents, so it all difference. Through Dalida, I learned a lot about myself, and in sounded rather fake. So, we decided to cast the net further particularly that I couldn’t have lived my life without children. afield to Italy and the Middle East. When I saw a video of This was something that I had never admitted to myself until Sveva, I had a very good feeling about her. When she came working on this film. to Paris, there were still 20 actresses in the running. Sveva sang Je Suis Malade and in that instant, I was overcome with emotion! I literally cried. She was a very inexperienced actress and she didn’t speak French but at the end of her audition when she said, “I am Dalida” I said, “I know.” AND WHAT ABOUT THE MALE CAST? I thoroughly enjoyed that part, as Dalida only liked really good-looking men! I was very lucky to get the actors I wanted from the start. And they all amazed me: Nicolas Duvauchelle (Richard Chanfray) and Jean-Paul Rouve (Lucien Morisse), that goes without saying, but also among the actors playing the men with lesser roles in Dalida’s life such as Niels Schneider (Jean Sobieski), Alessandro Borghi (Luigi Tenco) and Brenno Placido (Lucio). Patrick Timsit (Bruno Coquatrix) and Vincent Perez (Eddie Barclay) were both so true to life. And when Riccardo Scamarcio, who I went to meet in Puglia, agreed to play the part of Orlando, I knew that I had the best male cast on this earth! CAN YOU SAY A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE COLOUR PALETTE OF THE FILM: THE COSTUMES, DECOR, LIGHTS ETC. Visually, I didn’t want the film to be too real to life.