Lucile Hadžihalilović’s fourth feature, The Ice Tower, starring Marion Cotillard, premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival and is out now in theaters. Her previous features Innocence (2004), starring Marion Cotillard; Evolution (2015), and Earwig (2022), starring Paul Hilton, Romola Garai and Alex Lawther. In the early 1990s, she founded the production company Les Cinemas de la Zone with Gaspar Noé, with whom she worked on Carné and Seul Contre Tous. Their collaboration continued with her contribution to the screenplay of Noé’s Enter the Void.
Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the current release in theaters of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s gorgeous, fairytale-like drama, The Ice Tower, starring Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl and Gaspar Noé, the award-winning French writer-director shared some of the things she loves most in life. — N.D.
Swimming in the Sea
I really like swimming in the sea, particularly in the Atlantic Ocean rather than in the Mediterranean, because the waves are more powerful there. I love when it’s at the very beginning of summer and the water is still cold and it’s very hard to go into the water – and when you do, it’s suddenly burning. It’s an ecstatic feeling being in the cold water. I also love the opposite – when it’s a bit cold outside and then you go into the warm water and you feel so protected and so separated from the rest of the world. I feel so alive and protected in the water. I don’t even need to be swimming, I can just be floating. It’s a feeling of freedom.
In those moments, I am fully in the present and am not thinking about anything else and can let my imagination go, so it’s a moment when I can get ideas. It’s a bit like dreaming; you think you have got a wonderful idea or a visual, but after you get out of the water, it can disappear very quickly, so you have to write it down. But when you’re in the water, it’s not easy! When I get inspiration, it’s not stories, it’s more like images. It’s a feeling. Sometimes I feel like I can build a story just with the clouds. It’s all fantasy, and not a realistic all, just imaginary bits of a world. But then, as I said, it can disappear as soon as I come out of the water.
I’m not a very good swimmer, so sometimes I’m very scared. I stay close to the shore and I don’t swim a lot when the waves are too strong. I just love to be in the sea and to feel the waves. I also love scuba diving and suddenly being in the quietness of being underwater, of being totally in another world.
I lived by the seaside when I was a child growing up in Morocco, so it was very common for me to go to the seaside to swim. There were some very strong currents, which are dangerous even if you are a good swimmer, so maybe the fear I have of swimming out too far comes from that. Nevertheless, it was such a pleasure to swim there as a child. I remember my first impression of the sea when I was very young, the smell of it, and the vivid experience of being in the sea and in the sun.
Brainstorming with My Screenwriting Collaborators
I love the time when I’m writing a new script, especially the beginning of that process, because then it’s not about writing at all. In that moment, I’m building or imagining a story or a film with the two people I usually work with on my scripts, Alante Kavaite and Geoff Cox. It’s a very different approach with each of them, but with the process of brainstorming with them is always very exciting.
With Alante, who is also a filmmaker and an editor, we make cards, which is pretty normal, but we do it with drawings. She draws things or we choose colors and we play with the cards a bit like children. We put them on the floor and then we spend the whole day rearranging them. It’s like creating a game of cards – we change the order, we find connections, and we find ideas through the echoes of those connections. And then we create more cards! It’s very playful and we have all the freedom possible. This is how we built up the plot of my 2015 film Evolution, and we had a lot of fun with that, because it was imagining a totally other world.
With Geoff, it’s quite different. Especially when we are not yet ready to write, we will just walk in the countryside. Usually we find places to go together, so it could be Normandy or near where Goeff lives in Oxford, in the U.K. We walk for hours in nature and we talk about the characters and imagine the type of characters we want to put in the story, or we imagine their fears, their desires. And then maybe we’ll invent other people, not their whole life, but some facet of it. By walking, it gives our minds an emptiness (it can even be a bit hypnotic), and then we can begin to brainstorm in a very different way than we would if we were alone. When we walk in the countryside, sometimes we meet people who feed our characters and stories. We usually also see weird houses, so we’ll imagine who lives there and how they might be somehow connected to our story. It’s also very playful, and every free moment we’re trying to find elements and flesh for our story – it can be the pattern of a flower or a dead animal we see in the road.
Alante is very focused on structure and is very good at that, so she takes me in that direction, while Geoff is more about imagination and characters and mood. Because they are both my friends, it never truly feels like I’m working – it’s just talking and imagining stories and new worlds with these special people that I really care about. So that’s what makes it so wonderful, and it’s a way to become even better friends with them.
Going to the French Cinematheque
I love going to the cinema, and my favorite place to go is the French Cinematheque in Paris. If some cinemas are like churches, then the Cinematheque is a cult! I love the feeling of being there. I really like to go there during the day, when it feels even more special to stop what I’m doing and go to a dark room.
The French Cinematheque is not just a cinema, it’s a whole building – there is a park around it, there’s a library, a bookshop, a cafe, so you can go there and be among lots of people. Sometimes I’ll go there without knowing what films are playing, and it could be anything, as there’s Japanese films from the ’50s, Italian films from the ’70s, a film that was made this year! Very often there are also people talking about the film in a presentation, a Q&A or a masterclass. And then you have the audience, and not only the old guys you’d expect to be at the cinematheque, but also young people, who have a different taste and are a different type of audience. Except they are all members of the same cult, which is cinema! I love to be in a dark room with other people and have the experience of seeing a film together, to maybe be surprised and not know where it’s going to take me and what emotion it will give me, especially when I don’t know what it is that I’m going to see.
The first time I went to the French Cinematheque was when I moved from Casablanca in Morocco to Paris to study, when I was 17. One of the first things I did was to go to the cinematheque, because it seemed to be a magical place that almost couldn’t exist. It was like, Wow. It was a world of cinema and everything was there. At that time, there wasn’t even VHS, so the only way I could see lots of movies was to stay the whole day and be around these people and listen to them talking about films. It was beautiful to see so many people in love with cinema; I was not used to that, and I thought it was amazing.
At that time, the cinematheque was in a building called the Palais de Chaillot, and it was a very big, mysterious place, with underground corridors. That’s when I realized that cinema was like a cult, and some of the people were maniacs – but that was very exciting! The cinematheque is now in a different building and it’s very different today, but there is still that same feeling that watching films there offers a protection from everything that’s happening around us in the outside world.
