Interview

For some people, a single biopic is simply too faint a gesture, which should explain the current fascination with Coco Chanel. In the wake of Lifetime's didactic Coco Chanel and the French indie flick Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which focused on the designer's brief affair with the Russian composer, Anne Fontaine's big-budget Coco Before Chanel looks at the formative events–cabaret singing, her work as a seamstress, and shacking up with aristocrats to earn favors–that tailored the woman behind the iconic fashion house.

Chanel's love affair with British polo player-turned-coal tycoon Arthur "Boy" Capel is singled out as the most important relationship of the former showgirl's life. Not only did he secretly finance her first hat shop, the two had a rather open affair during the first years of his marriage. Without Boy, the Chanel brand may not have existed, nor would the starring role for Alessandro Nivola, who plays Capel in the film. After four months in France, Nivola is back in the States finishing up two new films. "My wife [Emily Mortimer] is five months pregnant, so we're gonna have to settle back at home again," he says. "It's been a pretty chaotic year all around." On the phone from Iowa, where he is filming a new project with Abigail Breslin, he called to talk about his on-the-set crash course in French, his ill-fated college music career, and sporting a Freddie Mercury mustache in the Marais:

Michael Slenske: So what got you interested in the character of Boy?

Alessandro Nivola: The romance between him and Chanel begins in earnest from the moment he tells her he's going to marry someone else. I thought that was such an unusual twist to a period romance, where normally a character seduces a woman and then tells her he's going to marry somebody else, and that's the end of his story. I even played that character in Mansfield Park.

But in this story it's really that moment, the year after he got married, that their relationship deepened. They carried on having the affair for about three years after he was married, living in Paris openly together before he was killed. That, I guess, was the reason she never got married herself and he hid the fact that he'd financed her business, and act as the autonomous woman able to finance her work. It felt really surprising and morally ambiguous, and that's what attracted me to it, on top of the fact that I got to grow a porn star mustache.

MS: That is a great stache.

AN: [LAUGHS] I was living in the Marais while we were filming, and when we were on set in my fancy clothes it all made sense, but when I put my jeans and my leather jacket back on went back into the neighborhood, which was primarily gay, I kept having men walk by me and whisper, "Hallo, Freddie, Hallo, Freddie Mercury."

MS: Were you aware of the Lifetime film?

AN: I didn't see the other films, but when I was in France preparing for the movie I had to learn how to horseback ride and they took me to some farm where I was going to be trained by a stunt rider named Mario. He had this big black long mane of hair, wore these wide-shouldered, short-waisted jackets and carried a whip. The first day I arrived the girl who was playing Chanel, Anna Mouglalis in the Stravinsky film arrived as well for a lesson. We ended up out on the field together riding around and she had brought a video crew that was filming the making of that movie. They were filming us riding around together, so probably I'll be in both movies somehow.

MS: It sounds like it was a great place to film.

AN: The filming itself was just terrifying because I've never performed in another language before. And I was the only person on set who wasn't French or Belgian and nobody really spoke any English. The director hardly spoke English, Audrey didn't speak much English and my French in the beginning of the shoot was not that great.

MS: What'd you do?

AN: Well, I'd just sit at lunch kind of pretending to laugh at people's stories and not really understanding what they were talking about and hoping nobody would ask for my opinion.

MS: Hoping they're not making fun of you.

AN: It infantilizes you to not be able to communicate in your own language because you lose your sense of humor and personality. I was passable in French in the beginning, and by the end of the movie, four months later, I was totally fluent. Anne Fontaine's style is so controlled, which is what gives her movies their power, but that just made it really hard for me because she wanted me to play the character very understated and direct, so there was no room for error. So we were going again and again and again if the slightest sound of a consonant or vowel was something she didn't like.

MS: And you just finished Howl?

AN: A couple months ago. The film is very experimental, it's this mixture of all these courtroom scenes.

MS: What are you working on now?

AN: I'm working on a movie called Janie Jones, which is about a slightly has-been, indie rock star who's an alcoholic mess and one day a woman arrives backstage and tells him that she has their kid, who is 12. Then she abandons the girl at the show and I'm stuck with her and I have to take her on tour. It's me and Abigail Breslin. So we're halfway into that one.

MS: What kind of music is it?

AN: It's a little punky and Indie rock and then halfway through his band disintegrates so he ends up going on alone so then it all becomes acoustic. But he's a wild character, sort of like Keith Moon. He's kind of manic depressive and out of control.

MS: Do you play or sing?

AN: I've recorded an album full of songs for the film. I didn't write any of them but I've recorded all the vocals and guitar parts. The songs are great. The writer, Eef Barzelay, is this hepcat Israeli guy living in Nashville. After the Chanel thing anything would have felt back in my comfort zone, but this is material I feel really at home with because I play lots of instruments and played in bands in high school and college.

MS: What was your band's name?

AN: One was called Curious George, then there was one called Freudian Slip. For another we played at this bar called Paul's, so we just called ourselves Paul's Band.

MS: Were your bands any good?

AN: Uh, no. I used to think they were good then I discovered a box of audiotapes I recorded back then and I popped them in all excited to hear what it was like and it was pretty terrible.