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

Photograph of Sophie Barthes by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images.

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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.