Durga Chew-Bose interview: reimagining Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse

Canadian writer-turned-filmmaker Durga Chew-Bose first captivated readers with her critically acclaimed essay collection Too Much and Not the Mood. Since then, she has effortlessly bridged the worlds of journalism—contributing to The Guardian, GQ, and Rolling Stone—and filmmaking, collaborating with notable figures like Lena Dunham. Now, with her directorial debut, Chew-Bose brings a fresh vision to the screen in an adaptation of the iconic 1954 novel Bonjour Tristesse, originally penned by Françoise Sagan. Starring Chloë Sevigny, the film reimagines the classic coming-of-age tale against a dreamy, timeless backdrop, deliberately stripped of context to evoke universal emotions. In this interview, Durga Chew-Bose sits down with hube to explore her cinematic approach and the film’s recent theatrical release this May.

hube: Was Bonjour Tristesse always in your mind as the project you’d want to debut with as a director? 

Durga Chew-Bose: I didn’t really think about what a debut should look like—or what one should say with a debut. I didn’t really see it coming in some ways, even though I think it had been years in the making—which is a contradiction. I had come on board as the writer, so my relationship to the source material was very much limited to adapting a book. But as time passed, and as I built my relationship with my producers, and as the project evolved beyond just me as the writer—bringing ideas about casting and production elements that were unsolicited—it all felt like a meant-to-be scenario.

h: What was the research process in building your own interpretation for the film? Did you seek inspiration beyond the original novel—perhaps in cinema, visual art, or personal memory?

DCB: Because the amount of time it took to move from coming on board as the screenwriter to directing was closer to a decade. Personally, I went through many evolutions and many lifetimes. Things would just enter the project as they entered my life—films I was watching, books I was reading, art I was seeing—but not much formal research. There was some research, but I’d say it was less active research and more relational, involving everyone making the film. I did try to familiarize myself more, for cosmic reasons, with Sagan’s life—just to understand her, how important she was, how momentous the publication of her book was at the time, and what an adaptation could do to that while still honoring her and her work. I had many sources, and every time we met a new team member bringing a fresh element—whether our cinematographer, costume designer, or cast—those conversations were full of inspirations personal to each artist. For example, my cinematographer Maximilian Pittner and I often looked at the photography of Luigi Ghirri because we were focused on a white and blue palette, and he was a photographer we both admired. It was about building a visual language, a code, a sensibility. I learned early on that one of the most important things is to know the people you’re working with, understand what they love and what inspires them, and give them the opportunity to express that language.

h: Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse has long been regarded as a landmark coming-of-age story, written when she was only 18. It deals with complicated desire, disillusionment, and female interiority. You’ve mentioned being eight months pregnant when you were offered the project. Did entering motherhood yourself shape your relationship with the material? And did it deepen your sense of Sagan’s own youth and precocity?

DCB: In life, everything happens all at once. You can’t control the sequencing of events in your personal and professional life, and making a film or being an artist is also just so personal. It influenced how the movie was made from a very practical vantage point. I had to know that I had security with my producers, that I was building a family and I would have to travel with that family. It was a daunting decision to make because I knew this big life change was happening, but I also found it really generative, and there are so many elements of having my son there with me, which were really inspiring. I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s an Italian song in the film that plays during a car scene. And when I was living in Cassis making the film, my son’s nanny had made this playlist for him for bath time. And so one day we wrapped in time for me to rush back to our condo, so I was able to be there for bath time—which was rare, but always so lovely. And this song was blaring from the bathroom, and I ran in and he was so happy, and it’s so catchy. I immediately texted my producers and I was like, we have to put this song in the movie. I know the scene. And I mention that because having him there with me was always a source of life beyond the self-seriousness of making a film. There would be a night shoot and everyone would be like, okay, we’re all going to bed now even though it’s morning. But my son was about to wake up, and I wanted to be awake for him. So it’s hard, but it’s good-hard. And those elements were always useful to me. I found a way to find value in them too, in some ways. Generally, motherhood as an artist has provided me with a sense that my relationship to time is just different. I’m not trying to rush with wild ambition to just make for the sake of. I hadn’t had the experience of having made a movie prior without a child, so I didn’t see it—how am I going to do this again? Because I did it without. I didn’t have the knowledge of life before, in some ways. I went in a little bit not knowing—which can save you and give you a lot of courage.

h: Writing can be a very isolating position; one must disappear within themselves, whereas directing seems very externally focused, with many elements moving outside of oneself. What is your relationship to the “within” and the “outward” when creating, and how has it changed with your role?

DCB: I really love that question because I think I’ll always be a writer first. And that’s a good thing—and probably a very bad thing if you’re a director—because there’s no such thing as, there’s no script, there’s a movie. There isn’t just the script, especially if I want to write and direct my own films, and it’s something that I have to learn to incorporate more with the directing hat that I’m wearing now. I like solitude. I like to be alone. I like to collaborate—I do—but with a tight-knit group of people who want to work in service of the vision of the project. I don’t love a million different points of view. I need to preserve the original flame of why I want to do the thing I want to do. It’s an interesting kind of tug of war between the two, but I found myself very at home on set. I loved showing up every day. I loved spending time with the crew. I loved learning from them. I loved that there was this possibility of having an idea come to life with the help of others. And it’s also kind of magical and strange that you could write something and then have all these people work towards trying to make it real. It’s humbling. And I count myself very lucky to have had that opportunity. I wonder if more writers were exposed to that way of creation, how it would affect their writing. But it is something that doesn’t come completely naturally to me. In fact, the fact it takes so long to make a single movie—that there’s so much alone time in between—I think that’s good for me. I don’t think I could go from project to project and actually move from production to post-production, where I was working in a much more scheduled way with my editor. I was very at home in that environment because it was just me and her for months in a dark room, talking and working and trying things out and getting to know each other. And that was kind of splitting the difference between the two and really making the movie. And I felt myself probably even the most at home during post-production.

h: Has stepping into the role of director shifted how people perceive you—or how you perceive yourself? Did you encounter moments of resistance, internally or externally, when making this transition?

DCB: I had no proof that I could do it. People love insurance. They love insurance, they have proof of concept. But it did make me realise that it’s really important to work with people who believe in you without any of that proof. And it made me realise that it’s really important to have people around you who believe in you, who will support you, who will let you have a half-formed idea, and then they will help you bring it to life. My producers, Katie Bird Nolan and Lindsay Tapscott, are really good at that. They really see something in me and they want to nurture it—which gives me a lot of confidence. My writing has always been quite visual, and film has always been such a huge element of what I write about, that the world of filmmaking wasn’t daunting in the way other transitions might’ve been because it was like a playground I already loved. My actual writing style is quite visual, and a lot of my original writing and criticism and journalism was around film. If it was interviewing directors, writing profiles of actors or actresses, doing film reviews—it was a medium that was interesting or fuelling or paying my bills in some ways. I was very familiar with directors and I admired what they were doing, and I was curious about it. And I was curious about it beyond just the finished film. I’ve always been interested in who makes the film. So I would watch a film and then immediately go on IMDb and be like, who’s the costume designer? Who’s the production designer? Who is this actor that’s in one scene I’ve never seen before—but I will never forget their face. The world-building involved in filmmaking always interested me.

h: If you had to reduce the meaning of the story Bonjour Tristesse into three words, what would they be? And how did those words guide your visual and emotional approach to the film?

DCB: One word we talked a lot about creatively—but also just sort of like a touchstone—was beauty, and not necessarily just in a superficial way, even though that for sure interests me as it relates to youth. We talked a lot about summer and what summer means, why summer memories are sometimes richer in our imagination, why some of the biggest moments in our life happened in the summer, what it means to slow down and experience heat on our bodies in the summer—seduction, love. In terms of pacing and rhythm and slowness and holding a shot, summer doesn’t feel particularly accelerated to me, even though it’s a really fleeting season. And lastly, this notion of morality. Sagan wasn’t particularly interested in morality in that way, and I found that really important to remember as I wrote the script, as I worked with my actors, and we talked about motivations. It wasn’t about having a moral story or having moral characters. Their choices were driven by something else, and the accountability and who was at fault weren’t of interest.

So, I guess those words: beauty, summer, morality.

h: In prose, you have full control. In film, there’s compromise: budget, weather, time. Did you find those constraints inspiring or challenging to work with?

DCB: Inspiring. There were so many false starts. We were supposed to go into production one year and had to push it back a whole year—which, at the time, felt devastating. But every time we got a “no,” it became an opportunity to fight for a “yes.” Early on, we learned to adopt a kind of marathon mindset as a team making this film.

That said, it also taught me how to let go quickly. If I had written a song into the script and we spent months trying to negotiate the rights—only for it to become financially impossible—I found I could walk away from it more easily than I expected. I really believe in a “meant to be” approach when it comes to making the work you want to make. Things happen for a reason. The right opportunities will find you at the right time. Something serendipitous will present itself — and if you’re not awake to those moments, you’ll miss them.

So whenever we hit an obstacle, it didn’t break my heart. Sure, it was frustrating at times, and it could completely change the course of how I imagined the day. But I always tried to see it as a moment to pause and ask: What are we making? What actually matters right now? It helps you recalibrate. In a way, those interruptions are useful—they keep you from running on autopilot.

h:There’s a lot of sensuality and moral ambiguity in the novel—qualities that might be read differently today. Did you feel the need to reframe or recontextualize anything for a contemporary audience?

DCB: It’s a great question because I think that in some ways we made a movie that feels really out of step with the time. It feels really classic. It doesn’t feel super contemporary. The ways the characters dress and talk feel not the most ‘right now’—but that was by design. I wanted to create a sense of elsewhere, build a world that felt sort of familiar, but only to a point. I’m not super interested in relatability all the time with art. And so definitely it was something to keep in mind—why even bother adapting it. But the book itself was so modern that it lent itself to a contemporary lens well.

h: What does melancholy mean to you—particularly the type of quiet, graceful melancholy that permeates Bonjour Tristesse? Do you think there’s value in sadness as an aesthetic or emotional state?

DCB: I’ve always felt that way. I don’t think one should live in that state all the time or use it as a compass for making decisions in life, but I think you should honour it and live with it and get comfortable with it. I especially think, in the case of Cécile’s character as a young woman, it’s a very sacred emotion to have—and it gives her an opportunity to have an interior life. Sadness doesn’t scare me. In fact, I actually trust it. It’s honest, and it catches you off guard, and it awakens you to your vulnerabilities. And it’s so important to be vulnerable as an artist—even as it can ambush you, which is what’s hard about it. And if more people were comfortable in their sadness or their melancholy, I think they would be closer to their hearts, and they would be more open to the world.