Chiara Mastroianni on Playing Her Father in ‘Marcello Mio’ and Why She Won’t Recreate ‘La Dolce Vita’ in the Trevi Fountain
Chiara Mastroianni has carved her own shape in the French film industry, even despite carrying her father Marcello’s name and being the daughter of Catherine Deneuve. She’s worked with Robert Altman, Claire Denis, Raúl Ruiz, Gregg Araki… we could go on. Yes, she’s the daughter of the stars of “La Dolce Vita” and “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” but her career is marked by bracingly original work with iconoclastic directors. Her father died in 1996, and she got the chance to work with him in a handful of films, including Altman’s “Pret-A-Porter.” But she mostly had to settle for knowing her parents as a couple onscreen, as they broke up when she was just two years old.
Still, see it in the picture above: Chiara does look like her father. In her new film “Marcello Mio” (Strand Releasing), now in theaters and directed by her friend and frequent collaborator Christophe Honoré, Mastroianni plays a version of herself who, floundering between film roles, decides it might be easier to live like her father. After all, casting directors and executives are asking this “Marcello Mio” iteration of Chiara to evoke his great film roles (which include “8 1/2,” “La Notte,” “Divorce Italian Style”). She starts dressing — iconic dark glasses, suits, mustache and all — and talking like him. What better way than embodying the likeness of your father to move through a world demanding you should?
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“Marcello Mio” begins, of all places, in the Trevi fountain, with Chiara Mastroianni, in a black dress and blonde wig, asked to recreate Anita Ekberg’s iconic “Marcello, come here” moment in 1960’s “La Dolce Vita.” That’s never happened to Chiara in real life, but as she explained in our interview, it’s certainly been requested of her. Of all the claimants to nepo baby regality, few have Chiara Mastroianni’s pedigree — and in “Marcello Mio,” which premiered in competition at Cannes 2024, she and Honoré interrogate that familial association with a puckish, winking meta comedy that even includes Chiara’s own mother, Deneuve, playing herself, too.
IndieWire sat down with the actress in December at the Criterion offices in Manhattan, where she’d just finished making her Closet picks. There, she spoke candidly about her father’s legacy (no, he was not the womanizer people pegged him as), the current state of horror movies, and how “Marcello Mio” was hardly a cathartic experience. Even as it brought her closer to memories of her father than ever.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and brevity.
IndieWire: We’re here now in the Criterion offices, where you’ve just selected a pile of DVDs from the Closet. What were your choices?
Chiara Mastroianni: I picked what I grew up with. For example, I picked “The Night of the Hunter,” which is one of the first films I saw as a child and I never get tired of it. I thought they would ask me for four or five films but in the end I picked so many because I talk really fast. At the end, I closed my eyes and picked one randomly, and the thing I picked is [“Things to Come,” a 1936 H.G. Wells adaptation directed by William Cameron Menzies]. It seemed like a prophecy of what we’re living right now. It’s as if I’d picked “1984.”
“Night of the Hunter” is a terrifying movie to see as a kid.
Yes, but I like to be scared. I was talking about it with a French director, I just did his first feature film, very interesting guy, Stéphan Castang. Have you seen a movie called “Vincent Must Die”? He loves horror movies since he was a kid, and he was like, why? Maybe it’s something when you are a bit of an anxious person. The fear of the image is something stronger than your own anxiousness. I don’t know. I’m not a shrink. I always grew up with horror movies. I remember seeing all the Hammer productions films. I remember I was so disappointed when I saw “Frankenstein,” with Boris Karloff, because I had always heard “Frankenstein, Frankenstein, Frankenstein.” I thought I would be scared, but it made me cry. To me, it’s more a movie about being different than a monster movie.
Do you still watch horror films? “The Substance” only just came out in France in December, but it’s already challenging industry-standard notions of how we absorb horror movies.
When I go back home, I will watch it. [As for horror in general,] I don’t like gore, and I don’t like screamers. I like horror movies that really play with your head. Sometimes, I find that they tend to be too much like a franchise. Maybe it’s too much about how it looks than how it plays with your head. For me, “The Shining” is something that stayed with me and was a very big shock, and it was a shock, of course, for the actors, the screenplay, but also an aesthetic shock because it’s so beautiful. It’s so weird to have those two aspects together: beauty and something scary at the same time, which makes it more powerful. Horror movies of today, like for example, “Saw,” I don’t like because this is sadism.
In Christophe Honoré’s “Marcello Mio,” you’re playing an actress. She’s named Chiara Mastroianni, but she’s not quite you. You inhabit your father Marcello Mastroianni’s identity after being pressured to play roles more like his. How did the project start?
He came to me with the idea before writing because he said, if you tell me you’re disgusted by the idea, I’m not going to write it. No one else can do it but you because of the subject. At first I thought, OK, not very exotic for me. He wanted to do a portrait of an actress who goes through an identity crisis. ‘What I am interested in is to talk about actors in between films, what happens to them, how does their brain work?’ Of course, it’s me but not me at the same time. At first I said, if it’s to play ourselves, no, because me, what I like in cinema is being taken to some other planet, not my own planet. He said, no, it’s your name but I will put you in fictional situations that came from my imagination. It was very different from my real life. He didn’t look for anecdotes about my life. He just sent me a list of questions: Did you used to watch TV with your dad? What kind of show would you watch? Did you have a dog? Did your father like dogs? Really basic stuff. From there, we started writing this story.
But even if you aren’t playing exactly yourself, some of this movie does dig into your own life, as you’re co-starring with Melvil Poupaud, who is your actual ex.
Melvil Poupaud was like, “No I don’t want to because, in real life, I would never stop you from trying to do this kind of metamorphosis.” I said, “I know you wouldn’t.” He’s my closest friend. We’ve never been in a fight in our life. We’ve known each other since we were 15 years old. He said, “I feel very uncomfortable having a fight with you in the film.” I said, “It’s us on the paper, but we are not playing ourselves.” It’s not situations I have in my own life. The only thing that, of course, is a link to my own life is that I do miss my father, and probably this idea of disappearing to let him live is something I can relate to quite strongly.
Was it cathartic playing a version of your father?
Actually, what’s weird is that the movie was exactly the opposite of cathartic. When we were shooting, I was like, “This is so cool.” When I was getting into that man suit, my father’s kind of suit, I felt like I was doing Superman. I thought I was becoming this superhero who could do anything … It felt almost like a spiritism Ouija board, but not a scary one. It was not cathartic at all … It made me so melancholic when the film was done, and we had to release it, and everything was like, “This is finished.” That was very hard for me, and that has never happened to me before with a movie. Being allowed to talk about my dad all day without breaking anybody’s bones … sometimes when you are nostalgic, I am afraid of being too invasive with my [memories] or melancholy. I try to be discreet about it, but in this case, it was needed. When I was shooting the film, I met some very old people who knew my dad. Suddenly, this father I lost so many years ago became so alive again. When the movie was finished, and we released it six months after, that was painful. It was the opposite of catharsis. I was very na?ve. It’s very much my fault because I didn’t see it coming. I really thought it was like a wonderful spell, but I’d never thought that waking up, going back to reality after that, would be so hard.
As an actor trying to form your own shape in the industry despite being the child of two cinema legends, do you ever feel frustrated living under your father’s shadow? There’s a scene in the movie where you’re being asked by a photographer to get into the Trevi fountain, to reenact the famous scene from “La Dolce Vita.”
I’ve had moments in my life where someone would say, “We want to do a photo shoot for a magazine and we will put you in the Trevi fountain.” I would always say no. But this really happened. [I say no] because it’s obscene. Often fashion magazines say, “We’re going to redo ‘Seven-Year Itch’ with Marilyn Monroe to sell a designer dress.” So you have a model or an actress trying to imitate an icon no one can imitate just to sell a dress. I don’t like it. The casting scene [in the movie] is a caricature of course … yes, in life, it has happened to me sometimes where people … put you in a box because they think that because they know who your father is, they know who you are. I am very different from my parents. It’s not something that has stopped me from living or made me go nuts.
“La Dolce Vita” is an example of a movie that’s become fetishized by Italophiles in the States. But it’s actually a dark depiction of the failed pursuit of love in Italy in the 1960s, one hardly worth romanticizing in the aftermath.
It’s a true mystery to me because it’s an incredible film, beautiful, but if you listen properly to the dialogue, it’s so dark. It’s amazing to think this was such a big success, that 90 percent of pizzerias are called “Dolce Vita” by people who don’t even know what the film is. Even my father was called “the Latin lover” after that. In the film, he conquests no one. He’s a loser. A melancholic, dark loser. Because the cinematography is so beautiful, people forget about the darkness and sadness. It’s a deeply sad film. It became such a success, even if it was a scandal because of the Vatican. Italy in 1960 is, like, medieval, and, suddenly, you see nightlife, sexuality, naked dancers. It’s something Italy was not ready for, and I suppose now they’re still not ready for it. This movie has given its name to so many pizzerias, and at the same time, the message of that film is so dark.
Growing up, you only ever knew your parents as a couple onscreen, since they broke up when you were a toddler. Isn’t that strange?
In one [“Liza”], my mother becomes the dog of my father. One [“A Slightly Pregnant Man”], my father is pregnant with my mother — which, by the way, is really modern, because this is 1973. The image of my parents together is like a fantastic puzzle for a shrink. I have no memory of seeing my parents kiss because I was only two when they separated. Anything I can see with them on film is so weird that I cannot rely on that to have the image of them as a more or less normal couple.
When did you figure out that your parents were just people, capable of flaws as anyone is, and not only celebrities? Your father had a womanizing reputation.
Wrong! I always knew they were people. The two of them were the same in the way they were two movie stars. I couldn’t compare them to two movie stars. I was not aware of the popularity and all those things. There were a lot of paparazzi in our lives, and that always freaked me out because they come physically onto you … I was in an American school, Montessori, so no one really cared about who my mother was, and then one day, when I was really young, I was maybe like seven or eight, she goes to New York to shoot a cover for Elle magazine, or Vogue or whatever, and she comes back and she’s posing with Miss Piggy… and I am a big fan of “The Muppet Show” [at the time], and I was like, “How did my mother manage that?” That’s when I started thinking, “My mother is something. She managed to pose with Miss Piggy.” That was a sign that something was going on. Until then, we had a very normal life. She’s a very normal person in private. She cooks, she gardens. She is very absent because of her work, but she doesn’t have the lifestyle of a movie star.
What were your observations of your parents as a child?
There were never bodyguards or anything like that. Never. So the Miss Piggy magazine cover was really a step into knowledge that she probably was someone famous. With my dad … we were very close, but he’s not a guy who had bodyguards or was disconnected from society. He was very easy to talk to. He was always very curious [about] people. Women liked him a lot, that’s for sure, but he was much more sentimental than the image they try to stick on him. He was not a womanizer. He truly fell in love with other women. He got married really young. I’m not justifying, I’m just saying he was much more sentimental than what people say. “La Dolce Vita” really triggered that kind of thing. My dad was charming, but charming doesn’t mean you were a big fucker. He would fall in love, that’s true. I knew him for 24 years of my life, and in 24 years of my life, I’ve only known him — well, I don’t remember him with my mom, I know he was with the mother of my sister as well — I’ve only known him with one woman.
What about Faye Dunaway? They starred in “A Place for Lovers” and had a turbulent affair that ended badly for both parties.
Faye Dunaway was a real love story with broken hearts on both sides. Very, very broken people after that story. Her, I don’t know, but my dad, for sure. For me, it’s not a womanizer. It’s someone who falls in love quite deeply, but then it’s a mess because the guy is married. He’s not a playboy. It’s really strange this “Latin lover thing” came up with “La Dolce Vita.” People tend to make someone handsome and charming [into] a warrior of sex. You can have very charming, very handsome people that are not necessarily having sex with anything they find.
Why do you think your father became an icon?
The image of masculinity he brought was so different from Italian cliches. There was this male figure, very macho — and actually, my dad was dubbed in the first movies he did because producers thought he had such a soft voice that it was not manly enough. He arrived — proposing without calculating, it was not “manspreading” — with a very different proposition of an image of male figures. A very sensitive and delicate one. Italian society was not used to that at all. The modernity — it’s not something he chose, that’s the way he was. What was modern about it is that people got seduced by a man that was an incarnation of a man very different from what they were used to seeing in society.
What about your mother, Catherine Deneuve? Did seeing movies like “Belle Du Jour” or “Repulsion” at a young age unsettle you?
No. My mother is a very iconoclastic person and very unconventional, and she’s always been such a cinephile that, at home, we had this huge closet with VHS, with movies that she’d record from TV, old movies. It was out in the open, and I was allowed to watch anything. She loved vampire movies.
With “Repulsion,” of course I was less attracted to see movies with my parents because I already had them at home. I loved the musicals she did with Jacques Demy. I knew all the songs and would sing them. They are great songs in great films. It could’ve been my mother or some other actress. I was very struck by “Tristana”… I never felt uncomfortable with it. I thought she was so cool. In those days, those years, these kinds of movies, nowadays we call them “masterpieces.” But [back then], you’re in a certain society with some narrow-minded [audiences]. Those movies were scandalous back then. Nowadays, no one would care. Back then, you had to have some balls to get into that kind of project.
“Marcello Mio” is now in theaters from Strand Releasing.
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