Things Isabelle Coixt Didn’t Tell Us

I had no spirit of revenge. It just felt like the world was unfair to me, with my first movie, which was bad and unsuccessful, but not that bad… More than 30 years ago, when I started, being young and a woman was like a sheep going to the slaughterhouse. Like many others, I had to start when all the sticks fell on the “woman/young woman”. And now, somehow, a young woman has, quite literally, a trademark, to be much more wrong than we were allowed, which, of course, I think is pretty cool. But someone comes where I come from and I come from him: ‘Let’s first look at this girl over her shoulder because she didn’t go to film school, she did the ad, she’s young and she doesn’t come from any chapel cinema and she’s not the daughter of nobody. I think I had a desire, a courage that made me overcome it all. Since the script also went through several producers, no one wanted to produce it, and no one understood it from the start. So the film was born out of many intersecting circumstances: from a time I lived in the United States – from the cinema I’ve seen and from the things I’ve experienced – and, more intimately, from a frustrated relationship. The monologue was recorded almost word for word which Anne, the protagonist, records on camera as she speaks to the man who left her. I recorded it for someone I’d never sent it to… Putting it in a movie is like sending it, yes, and in fact, it caused some desired effect. But hey, it’s already too late. Sometimes the effects you want to make in others happen late, and then they no longer make any sense, they lose their reason for being. Things I never told you It was a great relief for me.”