French director Jeanne Herry hits the red carpet this evening in Cannes for the premiere of Another Day, starring Adèle Exarchopoulos as a jobbing actress navigating the instability of her profession, alcoholism, family tragedy and love.
It is actress, director and screenwriter Herry’s fourth feature directorial credit after Elle L’ Adore (2014), In Safe Hands (2018) and the multi-César-nominated drama All Your Faces, for which Exarchopoulos won the Best Supporting Actress César in 2024.
Deadline spoke to Herry ahead of the premiere.
DEADLINE: What was in the inspiration for Another Day and the film’s protagonist Garance?
JEANNE HERRY: It’s the fusion of two projects. I’ve been interested in addiction and alcohol for a long time. It’s so widespread, so common, and we all know people who are addicted, or have been.
DEADLINE: What sparked the interest in this issue?
HERRY: There are many ways to be an alcoholic. It’s a huge public health problem. I had organically started reading books and listening to podcasts on the subject. Then I met a young woman who was kind enough to tell me about her journey with alcoholism and her relationship with drinking, but also about her journey as a woman in general, across all of aspects of her life, whether it was family, professional, social or romantic.
DEADLINE: What was the second project?
HERRY: I’ve long wanted to do a portrait of an actress but not an actress who has made it to star status, but rather an actress who resembles many of my friends and what I would have become if I had remained an actress. and how it’s a way of life that can be very tough. I kind of merged this with the story of the woman from whom I borrowed many biographical elements, from her family life, love life, and relationship with alcohol.
DEADLINE: The film taps into the precarity and the instability of the acting profession. Is this based on personal experience?
HERRY: A bit but I’ve also observed how difficult it is through my friends. It’s difficult to be an actor, it’s difficult to be an actress. I always think about actors when I write because I love collaborating with them. It’s always for them that I write and this film allows me to express even more strongly the love I have for them, for the difficulty of what they do.
It’s a profession that is well known but isn’t very well understood: the craftsmanship of this profession, what it entails. It’s very unstable. It’s a nomadic profession where you go from project to project, from collaborator to collaborator.
DEADLINE: How did you come to cast Adèle Exarchopoulos for the lead role?
HERRY: We worked together on my previous film and that went well. There was clearly a professional alliance that worked between what I write and her acting skills. It needed a young actress as my character falls into alchoholism very young and manages to function well until things spiral out of control.
It’s also a character-driven film, meaning nothing happens without her, we’re constantly glued to her, I needed an actress who could generate empathy on screen. It was also a very demanding role. There were many different moods, many different situations. We really see her in all the different facets of this woman. I needed a very strong actress, and Adèle is at the top of her game right now.
DEADLINE: So, you think this is a big moment in Adèle Exarchopoulos’ career?
HERRY: I can’t predict what will happen next, because I imagine it will continue on this trajectory, but the fact is, this is a young woman who has been acting for a long time, since she started very young, and she’s played many very strong, very intense roles.
There’s an intensity in life of Adèle that perfectly matches the intensity of the characters she’s offered. She’s very committed. She’s also a good little soldier, in the sense that she puts herself at the service of the story, she puts herself at the service of the film, the character, and she is indeed currently, I think, at the very peak of her acting abilities.
DEADLINE: Your last film All Your Faces was more of an ensemble piece, but this film also has a lot of moving character parts?
HERRY. With All Your Faces, it was bit like a chessboard, with many different perspectives. Here I wanted to really focus on the portrait of one person, but she’s also someone who moves in many different groups, so we cross paths with many people along the way as she undergoes this sort of personal revolution. There was a profusion of backdrops, we shot in 60 different settings, with a lot of group scenes. With All Your Faces, I had the actors sitting in a circle. I’m someone who loves the precision of directing two or three people, with scenes that transition from words to silence. Here, it was about working with abundance, with the collective, with noise, with music, with different bodies, different energies. It was also a way for me to revolutionize myself and my directing.
DEADLINE: Without giving the plot away, the film ends on a positive note, but it’s not clear whether Garance will be free of alcohol forever. What do you think happens to her character in the long run?
HERRY: Addiction is a difficult path, and relapses are common, but I wanted to offer my character, Garance, a way out of this rut. While the film is the portrait of a woman, it’s also a love story… but love isn’t enough, it doesn’t save anyone from addiction, otherwise it would be easy to combat, because addicts have children and they fall in love… But the film does show how it requires a combination of favorable circumstances to be able to stop and how important it is to meet the right person who understands addiction, even it is very hard for those who support or live with people who are addicted.”
DEADLINE: One of your past credits is directing the episode in Call My Agent! in which Juliette Binoche has a tumultuous time at the Cannes Film Festival. Did you shoot it while the festival was on?
HERRY: We did a few shots, but we mainly filmed outside of the festival. I’ve never had a film selected for Cannes or any other major festival before. This is my first selection. So Call My Agent! was a little taster. I was already here two years ago because I co-wrote the screenplay for a film called The Kingdom by Julien Colonna which played in Un Certain Regard. That was my first time walking the red carpet. Now it’s for my own film. I am extremely honored, curious and joyous about that.
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