Dreaming about Woody Allen: A Q&A with Cold Souls Director Sophie Barthes

One night, Sophie Barthes had a dream. She dreamed that Woody Allen had his soul extracted. It looked exactly like a chickpea. That’s how she came up with the plot for her first feature film, the calmly wacky, surreal Cold Souls, opening in theaters this Friday.

Barthes, a French native who graduated from Columbia film school and has been living in New York City for the last eight years, quickly realized that she wouldn’t be able to cast Allen as himself. So instead, she convinced Paul Giamatti to play a character named Paul Giamatti, an actor so stressed out about performing in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya he opts to have his chickpea-looking soul extracted rather than deal with the angst. Though a series of snafus, his soul is trafficked to Russia by a beautiful mule, and Giammati must go to St. Petersburg to retrieve it. We spoke with Barthes, who is eight months pregnant and has a lilting French accent, about dreams, Jung, Mormons, and what exactly her soul looks like.

Do you get a lot of your ideas from dreams?

Sophie Barthes: I write my dreams. I don’t do it every day, but for a long time I did. I’ve had this book of dreams since I was a teenager, with hundreds and hundreds of dreams. I was very influenced by surrealism when I was younger. I loved Buñuel and Dalí, and they used their dreams a lot. So I started writing them down, almost training the mind, because the more you write them down, the more you remember. It’s a kind of gymnastics of the brain. Dreams can be very narrative, so there are lots of dreams in Cold Souls, not just the chickpea, that I had when I was a kid. Dreaming is very close to the filmmaking process because you are lying in the darkness, and you don’t control those images, and you are a sort of audience in your own dream. Your mind makes things up that you can’t.

Isn’t that part of what’s so fantastic about dreaming? You know this crazy scenario is coming from your imagination, but you have no control over it, so you can almost feel impressed by your subconscious without any self-aggrandizement. It’s basically like being knocked out by a stranger’s weird, funny thoughts.

Barthes: Yeah, it’s mysterious! I could have sat for hours and I would never have come up with this idea that Woody Allen’s soul is a chickpea. And there are so many weird meanings behind it, like, the meaning that you have a huge complex about the people you admire. Do you know Jung? I’m a huge fan of Karl Jung, and he says some dreams have a connection with the collective subconscious. When I was a kid, I loved the Princess and the Pea. It was my favorite tale, about a pea disturbing the princess who is sleeping on all of the mattresses. And it made me think, maybe there is something in the pea that is a collective symbol. The chickpea in the movie, it is such a small thing, but it is disturbing Paul a lot.

Do you write your dreams down to analyze them, or because they might make potential screenplays?

Barthes: The reason I write them is a sort of self-psychoanalysis, since I’ve never done psychoanalysis. It’s a personal interest in knowing what the mind is producing. I’m not really thinking, “OK, I’m going to use this for a film or a book.” Sometimes you are surprised and you get something very narrative. But most of the times, dreams are more fragmented and full of strange images that would be almost impossible to make into a film, because they interest you but they wouldn’t interest anyone else. Someone was telling me the other day, “When someone tells me a dream at a party I just get so bored and I try to get out of the conversation.” But sometimes you get one that is striking and other people can relate to.

What do you say to people who think dreams don’t mean anything?

Barthes: I say that is overlooking an entire part of the psyche that is so important. Why would they exist if they were completely useless? Why would the mind produce that? Thinking of things as being useful or useless or functional or pragmatic, sometimes it’s very shocking to me.

At the end of Man on Wire, the documentary about Philippe Petit, the man who climbed a tight rope between the two towers of the World Trade Center, someone asks him, “Why would you do that?!” and he just sort of smacks his head and says, “Why! What an American question. Why does there have to be a why? Can’t it just be? And be beautiful?”

Well, I think that there’s a danger of saying Americans this, or that, because the beauty of this country is it’s so diverse, and there are so many opinions. It’s much more open than France, which is so judgmental. There isn’t much space for someone to do what the man on the wire did. There is still a sort of admiration in the U.S. for human acts that defy, completely, the imagination. But I loved Man On Wire. People were admiring him for the will it took to do what he did. The beauty of his gesture was it is so completely poetical, that it doesn’t serve any purpose, it’s just an act. That’s why it’s art.

Have you thought about what your soul would look like? I know you didn’t see it in your own dream.

Barthes: I feel it depends really on my mood. I tend to be very melancholic or then be, like, really high, so maybe I have a soul that is sometimes very liquid and heavy, like mercury, and sometimes it’s light and airy. I think it’s changing. That’s a thing that I couldn’t do in the movie, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought the soul is an ever-changing shape. It evolves.

Are there other things about the film you would want to change?

Barthes: I’m very critical. I’ve seen it so many times, I only see the problems. I only see the things I would do differently, or write differently. At some point you are just brainwashed . . . It’s a first film, so I’ve learned a lot.

Audiences have been pretty open to it considering that it’s a first film. Have you been surprised by that?

Barthes: Yes! But so far we’ve been at festivals, and festival audiences are special audiences. When we went to Salt Lake City, Utah, they had questions that were much more oriented towards religion. Some people asked, “How can you talk about the soul and not talk about religion?” So I am trying to explain: The film was more inspired by psychoanalysis and philosophy than religion. And some people had problems understanding it could be spiritual without being overtly religious. That was interesting for me as a French person, because I think it’s very specific to certain kind of people in the U.S. where spirituality is very linked to religion.

Will you go see their reactions for yourself?

Barthes: I will try to go. The thing is that I’m eight months pregnant. I’m going to give birth the same time that the movie is released.

Do you feel like you’re giving birth to two things?

Barthes: Exactly. It’s been a hectic year. I was very anxious that people wouldn’t get it, get the sense of humor. Humor is so cultural and local. I’ve been living in the States for eight years, but I thought maybe the humor is not going to connect with an American audience. I have been pleasantly surprised. I think because of the undertones of comedy, once you make people laugh, they warm up, and then they just open up. I wanted to do something that is not a full comedy and is not a full tragedy; it moves in between.

But that’s just like life.

Barthes: Yeah, but some people are allergic to that! They want to know exactly what they are going to consume: Is it going to be a comedy or is it going to be a tragedy? And when you are playing with tone, some people will be cut off because they are not ready for the emotional shift, and other people like it because that’s how they see life, one day you can cry and laugh. Will people go along with the shift of mood and tone?

How did you decide what soullessness would look like?

Barthes: Paul and I had a few conversations. There could have been another film made on this same topic that took a more classical Hollywood approach, where the main character gets his soul taken out, and he’s either a complete robot or he’s a very happy guy. But we thought that’s not really interesting. What’s interesting is if you can relate it to people you meet every day and think, “This person is soulless.” So the characters when they’re soulless, they are just in this one-dimensional life where they don’t question themselves, they don’t try to go into any layers of meaning or feeling or depth. When you’re soulful you are trying to explore life and to look inside. It’s important not to pretend the soul is something that is unimportant and that you can neglect. Maybe soullessness is about neglecting your soul and not accepting that there is something, without being religious—or even being religious—that is very mysterious that needs some sort of care and attention.

Also, that unhappiness can be part of being soulful. Paul begins the film miserable but comes to realize that was better than being soulless.

Barthes: Yeah, it’s fine! You don’t have to be on Prozac. Since I came to the U.S., and it’s a lot like Europe, too, now, once you have a little depression, they put you on all this medication. But it’s part of the human psyche to go through cycles, like seasons almost. If your soul is in the middle of the winter and you’re very melancholic, you can create from that melancholy, or grow from it, or nurture yourself from it; you don’t have to get rid of it.

So what is the soul?

Barthes: Philosophers have been trying for 2000 years to define what the spirit and the soul and the body are, so I’m not going to find the solution in a little movie. Some people were upset because they thought the film had to give a clear definition of what the soul is. And I think it’s very funny that they get upset about it, because I can’t fathom what the soul is. It’s a personal thing. I just want people to ask themselves: What is the soul?

Has Woody Allen gotten in touch with you?

Barthes: Well, did you see the article in New Yorker [2]? He must have read that because he writes for them. I hope he does, but maybe he’s upset that I said his soul was like a chickpea.