How Angelina Jolie’s Real Life Influenced Alice Winocour’s Deeply Personal New Film, Couture

Mild spoilers for Couture below.

In Couture, art imitates life. Alice Winocour’s new film stars Oscar winner Angelina Jolie as a film director who finds out she has breast cancer and is recommended to have a double mastectomy. If that sounds familiar, it’s because, like her character, Jolie is also a director—and though she was never personally diagnosed with breast cancer, the actress did lose her mother to the disease in 2007, and eventually underwent a preventative double mastectomy of her own in 2013 after learning that she was a carrier of the BRCA1 gene. None of these similarities were accidental, either. As Winocour tells ELLE, she wrote the film with Jolie in mind.

In theaters today, Couture largely plays out in the final days before the start of Paris Fashion Week, when Maxine Walker (Jolie), a filmmaker specializing in low-budget horror indies, arrives in the City of Love to direct a short film that’s meant to open a runway show put on by a major French luxury house. The project brings her into contact with Ada (Anyier Anei), a young pharmacology student from Nairobi who’s cast as a “new face” for the brand but struggles to adjust to the cutthroat world of fashion modeling; Christine (Garance Marillier), an overworked seamstress making endless adjustments to ensure that the opening gown is perfect; and Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a makeup artist with aspirations of writing a book about everything she’s witnessed through her work.

Angèle’s prospective book would serve as apt source material for the film itself, which uses the perspectives of these four women to tell a compelling, behind-the-scenes story about the ins and outs of the French fashion industry. (For the film, Winocour consulted with real-life artisans from the Chanel ateliers; parts of the film were also filmed inside the historic maison.) But at its heart, Couture is ultimately a film about reconsidering your priorities when your back is pressed against the wall and finding new meaning in life after realizing it’s shorter than we think it is.

Ahead of Couture’s release, Angelina Jolie and Alice Winocour hopped on Zoom to speak with ELLE about reinventing the cancer story, their personal connections to the material, and why Jolie worked so hard to nail her spoken French.

In the film, Maxine is slightly out of her element as a low-budget indie director now tasked with directing a film for this large French luxury house, and yet she still takes it on with confidence and aplomb. It reminds me a lot of your career, Angelina, because you’ve done huge films but also very small and intimate ones. What was your main draw to Couture?

Angelina Jolie: There were so many things that I loved about this. For one, I just thought it was a beautiful script. It felt bold, but very grounded. Clearly, the lived experience Alice has, the way she approaches people, the way she sees them, the openness and her humanity with her also bold way of being and thinking, it was very exciting. Meeting her, I knew I would be in good hands. She’s a great director and a really solid person who allows each of her actors to bring their own life into the material. Even though she’s the writer, she allows you space to breathe and create with her. It’s a very open environment.

Also, I love that there is now more cinema with many people from different countries and cultures coming together. I really loved this aspect of it and want to see more of it. To be in a film with Ukrainian, Sudanese, French, and American actors all together, in a very natural way, feels very much as the world is in some areas. It’s one of the most wonderful new things about working internationally in film, so I was very excited to do that.

Alice, for the film, you chose to focus on these four different perspectives of women working in the fashion industry, which I found very refreshing because we don’t often see (or think about) what’s actually happening behind the scenes to create the finished product that we see walking down the runway or photographed for a magazine. What inspired that decision?

Alice Winocour: It was really just to look behind the scenes of fashion and to tell the story of people you don’t usually see. I knew I wanted to [depict] the reality of a maison couture and for it to feel credible. But it’s very hard to believe in a maison couture in a movie, and I didn’t have the money to really re-create one. But I really wanted it to feel true, so that’s why I went to Chanel to ask if they wanted to collaborate with us and give us access. They [agreed] to have no branding in the movie—that we should have no logo—and to have a maison couture that would be fictional. But at the same time, I worked with them to have this atmosphere of a real maison couture.

While watching the film, I kept thinking about the meta idea of Alice being a woman director, making a film starring Angelina, another woman director, who’s playing a woman director character, Maxine. Were you both thinking about these levels?

AJ: I tend to not think about “women” or “men.” I tend to just think of being a woman, trying to live a full existence, and wanting other women and all people to have the space to live a full and equal existence. So I don’t think we ever thought about it as “this was man and then this is woman.”

But we both are directors, and we both have been touched by women’s cancers, and we both are mothers, so there was certainly a lot that just felt very natural. Sometimes, you’re playing something that is a big stretch from you, and you’re trying to learn about a new world, and you really have to perform in one way and act a certain way. But for this, I think it was more about being comfortable enough to just allow a truth to come forward. Because it was so true to both of us, it was more about just being willing to be emotionally and physically naked and honest.

Alice, did you notice anything different about directing someone who was also a director in their own right?

AW: I haven’t thought about it. But it’s true that I was happy that some part of her life—of her real life—was similar to the character. She’s also a director, though not a horror movie director. She’s also a mother. She went through this moment where you have to talk about the illness to your daughter. So the [fact] that she was a director was part of all of those other aspects that were similar to the character of Maxine Walker.

Angelina, you learned French specifically for this film. What can you tell me about that process, and how did that help you to connect more with the material and this world?

AJ: I don’t speak very much French, so to do it well in these scenes took some practice. But I think, maybe above all, to be in Paris, in a country where everybody on set [is a French speaker, inspired me]. This is a beautiful language spoken beautifully by everybody around me, so you don’t want to just get it “technically” right. You want to get the feeling behind it, with the tones and the sound. So, yes, I was a little nervous at first. But everybody was very kind to me.

AW: You worked a lot on it as well.

AJ: I worked a lot to get it right, and everybody was kind. If I’d mess up or something, everybody was very kind.

You’ve touched a little bit already on how personal this story felt for you, given that your mom died from breast cancer and that you have had your own experience getting a preventative double mastectomy. I think this connection can obviously help you to understand the material in a special way, but I’m curious if revisiting an event from your past in such a visceral manner also provided any sense of catharsis for you.

AJ: Oddly, I find catharsis in almost every film. Anytime you’re just letting something out, or expressing it, or exploring it, that’s one of the privileges of being an artist. But I think for this, I was, maybe more than ever, doing something where I was very conscious of the other woman or man who’s dealing with something like this, sitting on the other side of the screen and watching. I was very conscious of the viewer, which I don’t always think about as much when I’m working. But I felt like, with this, we were all sharing and communicating something. We were inviting the audience to kind of be with us inside these moments and really hoping to communicate with them. So it felt like a real sharing, and I hope that people feel that when they watch it. This is coming from a personal place from all of us, and by sharing it, I hope that it inspires others to feel less alone and to try to find ways to live through this, because it’s very life-affirming, which is important for subjects like this.

On a similar note, I love that this film doesn’t take the expected “sad” route, even though it’s dealing with something as obviously scary and painful as a cancer diagnosis. Instead, there seems to be a real effort to reckon with what life can look like beyond this diagnosis—whether that’s Maxine asking for what she wants sexually from new love interest Anton (Louis Garrel) or her choosing to see the glass half-full when she’s forced to pull out of her next film because it means that she can spend more quality time with her daughter. Why did it feel so important to tell a cancer story that feels hopeful instead of despondent?

AW: Again, it comes from my own experience. I think when cancer is represented in cinema, sometimes it’s all about the cancer. But when you’re dealing with “the thing,” there are so many other aspects of your life going on, like children, jobs, money, and sexuality. Everything. So I really wanted to show that on screen, because it’s really about life.

In the end [of the film], we see all those people screaming in the swings. It’s a mix of terror, but at the same time, it’s joy and excitement, and I think that’s really what life is. It’s a very difficult and tough time right now in the world. I think everyone is going through a very difficult time. But at the same time, there is joy and there are beautiful things and there is beauty. Even if you’re confronted with the idea of your death, you feel life so much more. [You’re asking yourself], “What is life?” and you’re enjoying the little moments with people.

That’s really what happened to me. I was less focused on me and my life. That’s probably why I wanted to make a film with others and with other stories, just to celebrate life. So we see this love story—or the beginning and the hope of a love story. I thought it was interesting that, in this terrible time, she would [pursue a romantic connection]. But it’s like, yes, [a cancer diagnosis] is also an acceleration of life, because you don’t know for how long you [will be] there. I wanted to show all those aspects in the life of someone who learns that kind of news.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.