Marion Cotillard is the August cover girl for Interview Magazine. I love the cover – and the rest of the photo shoot (here) is really lovely. Marion is a gorgeous woman, and the camera loves her, I’ve never doubted that. What I do doubt, however, if just how eccentric Marion is. I’ve mentioned this before, when I attempted to cull some highlights from Marion’s Vogue cover interview – this chick is strange, and it’s not all just “lost in translation”. Much like Sarah Jessica Parker, I think Marion tries too hard to be eccentric, but unlike SJP, I think Marion comes by her strangeness more legitimately, you know? Like, it’s less of an affectation and more that Marion has always been a strange duck, and she just plays that up for effect in interviews.

The interview is conducted by Nicole Kidman, and the whole piece is worth a read (here). Here are some highlights:

KIDMAN: I remember everyone on the set said the same thing about you. I know Rob [Marshall] said it on Nine: that you’re otherworldly, that it seems like you come from another planet—and I mean that in the most beautiful way. And yet you are the most Earth-based of all of us. That’s a very strange paradox. You have this fairy quality, like you’re flitting through trees and stars, and then at the same time, you’re really grounded. It’s very hypnotic . . . You don’t have to respond to that. I’ll say that!

COTILLARD: [laughs] I think the Earth and everything around it is connected—the sky and the planets and the stars and everything else we see as a mystery. I think we connect when we accept that the mystery is also taking place here on the ground. We live on Earth and have jobs and interact in society, but we still exist because there is a moon rotating around us, and a sun we rotate around.

COTILLARD: I think searching is a beautiful thing. There is this thought that goes, If you search and search and stop searching, then ultimately you’ll find what you need. But I think maybe if you don’t search you wouldn’t have the experience of searching and then won’t find it at all. You have to search first, if you know what I mean. It’s the experience of living. We can have one experience that can change our whole lives. I saw a documentary recently about a guy who was attacked by a shark. He was very injured and almost died. After this, he went all over the world killing sharks. Then an even bigger fear entered his mind: “I have killed so many of them. If I go on killing sharks, maybe one day they will all disappear.” The fear of his being responsible for the extinction of sharks made him change, and he then became a defender of sharks.

KIDMAN: Wow.

On Inception:

COTILLARD: I love the story because it has a beautiful balance between an action movie and a movie about dreams. I have a very busy nightlife in my dreams. [laughs]

KIDMAN: It’s about being able to enter people’s dreams and control them, isn’t it?

COTILLARD: Cobb [Leonardo DiCaprio’s character] is a specialist in entering people’s dreams. He tries to steal things out of them and manipulate the dreamer’s unconscious. It’s really an interesting idea to enter someone else’s dreams. I would love to be able to do that.

KIDMAN: I couldn’t bear it if anyone was privy to my dreams. It would be like reading my diary.

COTILLARD: You know what? I would love to go into an animal’s dream—like a lion’s or a cat’s. I’m sure that’s pretty awesome.

KIDMAN: I love that feeling when you wake up after a nightmare and go, “Oh, it’s not happening,” when it’s been so vivid and so real. I love that moment when you realize it was just a dream. Then there are those, which I had a lot of when I was young, where you wish that the dream had been real.

COTILLARD: Like flying in dreams . . .

[From Interview Magazine]

Blah. Since this piece was boring as hell, I’d like to share my thoughts on Inception. I saw it over the weekend, and I did like it. However, I didn’t think it was the Second Coming, you know? The way the critics were getting hot and bothered for it, I thought it was going to be the most amazing film in years – and it just wasn’t. It was visually beautiful, it had a solid story and solid performances by all of the actors, especially Ken Watanabe, Ellen Page and Tom Hardy. My problems with it were about the over-wrought “love” story that SPOILER didn’t make much technical sense in the end, and Marion’s performance was… stilted, to me at least. You know what the love story reminded me of? That suckfest Clooney movie, Solaris. Anyway, who else is with me? It was good, but not mind-blowingly awesome.

Photos courtesy of Interview Magazine.