Florian Zeller interview: The Son director on fighting the shame of mental illness
Who among us hasn’t dreamed of a meeting that forever changes the direction of their life? This is exactly what happened to French author, playwright and director Florian Zeller.
The meeting in question came about after Zeller had adapted a screenplay from his harrowing 2012 portrait of dementia The Father, in which he tailored the central role to none other than Anthony Hopkins, despite never having met the acting legend.
He posted the script to Hopkins’ agent… And waited.
“Writing the part for Anthony was a very strong conviction,” he tells me in his thick French accent. “It’s the reason I wrote the script in English, and as you can see my English isn’t perfect…”
And for a while, nothing happened. People told him he would never hear back – Hollywood, after all, is a tough nut to crack. But he held out, “because everything starts with a dream when it comes to cinema.”
Eventually the call came and he flew to Los Angeles to meet Hopkins. “It was the most important breakfast I have ever had but after a few minutes it was obvious it would be easy to work with him… He took me in his arms and said ‘let’s make the movie’.”
International acclaim followed, including two Oscars – one for Best Adapted Screenplay, alongside his collaborator Christopher Hampton, and a Best Actor gong for Hopkins. Zeller made the inevitable move from France to California, evolving from the enfant terrible of the French literary scene to one of the hottest young directors in Hollywood.
The Oscar opened enough doors for Zeller to fund his second film, The Son, which is also adapted from one of his plays and forms part of a loose trilogy alongside The Father and The Mother (the latter was staged in New York in 2019 starring Isabelle Huppert).
“I knew if I got an opportunity to do another film it would be The Son,” he says. “It’s a story I felt needed to be told. When the Father came out everything was already there in my mind and I was ready to jump.”
We meet in a cold, echoey office in central London, Zeller wrapped up in a thick navy parker, his sandy hair gelled upright like he’d just touched a Van de Graaff generator. He has piercing blue eyes and looks younger than his 43 years, only the greying stubble in his beard giving him away.
While The Father was about the horror that can lurk at the end of one’s days, The Son follows the family of a teenager whose depression threatens to derail his life before adulthood has even begun. His divorced parents, played by Laura Dern and Hugh Jackman, are well-meaning but utterly out of their depth amid the spiralling chaos of their son’s breakdown.
Zeller says the themes are deeply personal; he has two sons aged 24 and 14, the first, Gabriel, to whom the film is dedicated, born when he was just 19.
“I am familiar with these emotions and not a stranger to some of these situations,” he says. “As a parent I experienced powerlessness – I remember feeling like you are the only one in that situation. The Son was a way to share these emotions, to heal something, and also to fight against the shame.”
Zeller says he wants to start a conversation, to help shift mental illness away from the realm of taboo. “We need to be comfortable talking about it, remembering that we are not alone on this journey, that we’re all in the same boat, that it’s not shameful to have a crisis and to ask for help.
“There are so many people in pain. I feel like we are in the middle of another health crisis, especially after Covid, and so many people do not know how to deal with that, partly because there’s so much guilt and shame.
“When we did the play in Paris, people were waiting for us afterwards. They were saying ‘I know what you are talking about because my son, my daughter, my uncle…’ It was as if something new was beginning after the play finished.”
I wonder if dedicating the film to his son was a tough decision?
“It took me a few weeks to decide – is it too much of an exposure? But I was trying to invite people not to feel shame so I thought I should be transparent myself.”
While The Father was released to universal acclaim, The Son has proven more divisive, with some critics finding it overly sentimental and others criticising its portrayal of mental illness.
Perhaps most controversial is the character of 17-year-old Nicholas, who remains inscrutable throughout, defined by his depression, often a source of frustration to his parents. Was the critical response hard to take?
“Yes, it’s never…” he starts before trailing off. He thinks for a second before starting again: “For this story it was something I was expecting. The play has been staged in many, many countries so I had already experienced the uncomfortable reaction it can create – some people love the film and some think it’s manipulative and emotionally brutal.”
Some of the negative reaction seems to be born out of frustration at the relatively straightforward approach to telling the story, which feels out of step with Zeller’s other work, which has drawn comparisons with David Lynch and Harold Pinter.
While The Father was a surreal, stylistically innovative film that placed the viewer inside the decaying mind of Anthony Hopkins’ character – time, geography, even people’s faces are in constant flux – The Son is far more traditional in its structure.
“It’s true that David Lynch had a strong influence on me,” he says, leaning forwards, clearly happy to talk about the director. “I remember when I discovered Mulholland Drive, and what I looooved” – he draws out the word in a way that sounds almost comically French – “about it was, as a viewer, there’s room for you. It’s like a puzzle and you have to play with all the pieces and make it meaningful, so you’re part of the narrative, you’re in an active position. I love art that trusts your intelligence and that’s something that had a strong impact on me in both my films and plays.
“But in The Son I wanted to do something linear and simple, like a line straight to an obvious destination. I had the feeling it should be a tragedy, that you know where it is heading from the start but you can’t change the direction. I wanted to face this question and this pain without shying away or doing something gimmicky.
“I was not trying to go into this brain, to try to understand it as I did with The Father, it was about telling the story from the perspective of the people surrounding him, this frustration of not knowing what to do.
“It was important to me not to try to explain anything. This boy is in pain and we don’t know why. There is something frustrating about it, which isn’t what a script is supposed to deliver. But for me it was the right way to do it because it mirrors real life. Sometimes there are no explanations and it’s hard to accept this mystery, like a black hole, because you always want an answer, an explanation, and when there is none your brain starts to think ‘What did I do as a parent for my boy to be like that?’”
When I ask what’s next for Zeller he demures, saying he is still mentally tied to The Son and would like some space before his next project. Still, surely the logical next step would be a film version of The Mother?
“It’s not The Mother,” he says, before correcting himself: “I mean, who knows, I don’t… It’s very hard to finance films and sometimes that’s good, it makes you question your desire and your reason to do it.”
He’s been linked with a TV adaptation of The Lehman Trilogy, a play whose serpentine structure would lend itself well to Zeller’s style. And he has a sizable back catalogue of plays to draw from, which has the added bonus of giving him a chance to revise his past work (“I would rewrite everything,” he jokes when I ask how he views his early novels and plays).
Rest assured, though, that it won’t be long before he’s back at the writer’s desk or the director’s chair: “I’m working all the time. I wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t working. It’s my way of being alive.”
• The Son is in cinemas now