Mélanie Laurent Finds Freedom As A Director

Mélanie Laurent is no stranger to the art of theft, having stolen every moment when she was on screen in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in 2009, as well as appearing in as an Interpol agent tracking down a gang of magicians-turned-thieves in Now You See Me in 2013.  The actress-turned-director even pulled double duty in the 2023 Netflix action comedy Voleuses (known as Wingwomen in the United States), about a trio of women who pull of spectacular heists. And now, with her new film, Freedom (or Libre, as it’s titled in France), she’s taking it to a new level by telling the true story of a famous French bandit. Is it possible that she’s developed an outlaw fixation? 

“Not especially. I’m not obsessed with that,” Laurent says. “In Voleuses, I really wanted to talk about friendship more than robbers, and I think in Libre, I wanted to talk about love story first, and then he’s a robber.” In Freedom, Laurent tells the story of Bruno Sulak (Lucas Bravo, Emily in Paris, Ticket to Paradise), who charmed and stole his way through daring heists in the late ’70s and early ’80s, starting out by robbing grocery stores and working his way up to expensive jewelers, though he took it as a matter of pride that he never personally fired a gun, nor ever physically harmed anyone. As Sulak’s fame grew, police commissioner Georges Moréas (Yvan Attal, Munich) pursued him relentlessly, sparking legendary prison escapes. Sulak’s escapades, and his whirlwind romance with the beautiful Annie (Léa Luce Busato), became something of a national obsession in their day. “What I really was into was the fact that French people and French history forgot about Bruno Sulak,” Laurent says. “When I read a book about him ten years ago, I didn’t know about him.” Laurent notes that while mafia movies and crime stories come in abundance in America, there aren’t nearly as many major films about criminals in her country. “We have more movies about poets and anarchists,” Laurent says. “Here, I had both. I have the robber, and then also, he’s an anarchist and he fights for freedom.“

Laurent fell in love with the art of film as a child, and still has vivid memories of the films that inspired her, including Peau d’âne (1970), directed by Jaques Demy. “When I was a little girl, I wanted to be Catherine Denueve,” Laurent says. “I wanted to be a princess in a movie, which never happened, but that was a dream. I think I maybe wanted to be an actor because of her in that movie.” As a director, Laurent has found that making films for streaming platforms such as The Mad Women’s Ball for Prime Video in 2018 and Wingwomen for Netflix has allowed her to indulge her love of genre films while pushing the boundaries of what that means. “You can pick up so many words to present your movie,” Laurent says. “Comedy, drama, heist movie, but also action—they can pick so many names.” Laurent was delighted to be working with Prime Video again on Freedom, precisely because it afforded her the ability to take the film’s title so literally in her artistic approach. “I wanted to treat the love story as a love story, I wanted to mix all the genres,” Laurent says. “I wanted to make a summer, sexy entertainment movie, but also there is drama there, and you want to have time with them, because you want to have wine and smoke cigarettes with them in the South of France. I wanted to mix all the genres.” 

A true innovator in terms of shot composition and visual storytelling, Laurent has created perhaps her most dazzling sequence to date with a montage of increasingly reckless robberies that Sulak pulled off with his partners later in his career, including two major robberies in Geneva in the span of one week. The sequence is set to the song “The Windmills of Your Mind” from The Thomas Crown Affair. As the lyrics describe “a circle in a spiral, a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning, on an ever spinning reel”, the frame moves on a counter-clockwise axis, as the scene shifts with each rotation, with the elegant camera movement all done practically rather than achieving the effect in post production. “That was a strong wish,” Laurent says, noting that she and her co-writer, frequent collaborator Christophe Deslandes, wrote the sequence with all of this in mind. “I kind of wanted to upside down everything,” Laurent says. “And I love when, at some point in the movie, you just find a way to shoot something you have in mind.” Laurent notes that there’s a great deal of symbolism to the camera movement that goes beyond the song. “That’s the moment where they have so many cops chasing them, and they’re taking so m[any] risks, and they’re playing with attention, and  playing with the nerves of the cops and they cannot stop,” Laurent says. “They are a little bit too insane in that circle of taking so much risk and getting so much excitement out of playing with fire.” As the search for a director to helm the next James Bond movie is the cause of much industry press and online discussion, Laurent’s considerable prowess with action makes her an intriguing potential contender. But would she do it? “I never have asked myself this,” Laurent says with a laugh. “But can you refuse something like this? Of course not!”

As Freedom makes its streaming debut on November 1, Laurent is in pre-production on another action packed thriller, The Mother, starring Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh, while as an actress, she has both a film and a TV series in production. Wherever fate, ambition and her devoted fans—#MélanieLaurentBond26Director—may take her, Mélanie Laurent’s incredible talent and artistic vision burns bright, as she continues pushing boundaries and putting out fires with gasoline.

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