French Exit director Azazel Jacobs on ‘poignant’ Michelle Pfeiffer experience

There are few screen stars who could still attract as much fervour and respect as Michelle Pfeiffer. Her latest director couldn’t agree more.

French Exit director Azazel Jacobs knew early on he wanted the illustrious Michelle Pfeiffer to play the lead in his absurdist satire about a blue-blooded widow and her adult son who finally run out of money.

An apologetically original woman, Frances is the kind of role Jacobs said would “take everything” from an actor. He and screenwriter Patrick deWitt had written the character with Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis in mind – of course, those grande dames of the screen haven’t been available for decades.

“Michelle’s name came up very, very early and I thought, ‘OK, I know she is very, very selective,” Jacobs told news.com.au. “But if she responds to this script, if she wants to meet, it tells me something about her as a person and what she’s looking for.”

Luckily for Jacobs and deWitt, Pfeiffer did respond and in that first meeting, she peppered Jacobs with what he said were “pointed, thoughtful questions”. Which only made him more determined to convince her to come onboard.

“I remember she wanted to meet Patrick as well and said to him beforehand, ‘don’t mess this up, do not mess this up, she clearly wants to do this, don’t give her a reason not to’. I had him sweating.”

Michelle Pfeiffer in French Exit.

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There is no French Exit with Pfeiffer – or if there is, it would have been a vastly different movie. So intrinsic is Pfeiffer’s energy to the quaint and pleasurable film as the sometimes prickly, sometimes frustrating but always eccentrically fabulous socialite, it’s difficult to imagine a version without her.

“It wasn’t until the first day of shooting that I could see the Frances that [Pfeiffer] was going to bring and it made my mouth drop,” Jacobs explained of the vulnerability Pfeiffer was able to imbue the character.

“It’s hard to describe on the page. You can’t see it – it’s the cracks in between, it’s the space between the words. It’s the way Frances is looking in, the defence, she’s strong and so fierce. But Michelle has this way that in between those words, you can see the things that she’s scared of and why she’s closing up.

“But how open and loving she actually is, and that struggle of expressing that love. It’s all there in the way she lifts her hand, the way she lights the cigarette, every movement.

“I’ve worked with many incredible actors. I’ve never had a more moving and poignant experience than I have working with Michelle Pfeiffer.”

Frances, Malcolm and a cat with secrets.

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Shot in Paris and Montreal in the months before the pandemic, French Exit is the story widowed Frances and her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges), who have an unusually co-dependent relationship. When she’s down to her last few stacks of cash after her inheritance from her late husband finally runs out, she and Malcolm move to Paris, staying in a generous friend’s apartment.

Frances had no contingency for such a scenario, convinced she was that she would die before the money was gone. In Paris, she and Malcolm collect an assortment of oddball friends while some old ones start showing up too, plus dead husbands reincarnated in a cat.

The privileged Frances with her furs, nonchalant stares and propensity to leave €100 tips for a cup of coffee is an unusual choice for a movie heroine, especially at a time when the world is reckoning with the widening gap between the haves-and-have-nots.

Even Jacobs, whose previous films includes Terri and The Lovers, admits that Frances’s world is so far removed from his own. “It’s Upper East Side money and that’s not my world. Even though I grew up in New York City, it might as well be planet Mars, right?”

When friend and collaborator deWitt first sent him the manuscript to his book, from which deWitt adapted his screenplay from, Jacobs was immediately entranced with the characters. He consumed it in one sitting.

“Every character really goes by their own path, they’re just going to be themselves,” Jacobs explained. “I fell in love with these characters, seeing people really be who they’re going to be without apology, and that was something that I was envious of and I wanted to learn from them.”

The oddball friends collected by Frances and Malcolm in French Exit.

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But Jacobs conceded that relating to an elitist widow who squandered away her wealth might be a hard sell to hook an audience. But he’s confident that once people see Pfeiffer’s performance, they’ll realise that there’s more to connect us than not.

“I understand somebody going ‘Oh, this must be a story about rich people and why would that matter?’ but the reality is that this a story about class, and that class and having money are two separate things.

“The person I think who has the most class in the film is probably the person with the least amount of money.

“What happens to Frances when she loses what she thinks defines herself is something that we can all relate to in our own way.

“I think this is a world we can find ourselves in. It asks a lot, but we’re all in there, in the sense of being like, ‘Oh, I feel alone and there’s somebody else that feels alone and together we can feel a little bit less lonely’.

“It’s a gathering of lonely souls and that’s something that I relate to in my own life. If an audience gives this a chance, it’s such a nice world to be in.”

French Exit is in cinemas now

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