Caught Between

When French-Swiss filmmaker Ursula Meier made her first feature, 2008's house-by-a-highway parable, Home, she wrote the two main roles for her two main actors: Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet. Finding the child actor who'd play their eight-year-old son was far trickier, with Meier discovering novice Kacey Mottet Klein on the street. Having never acted, Meier worked more with Klein than any other cast member, undertaking endless rehearsals to help him understand his new craft. “After, I wanted to go further with him, deeper in the work,” says Meier, calling from Brussels. “He was in my head.”

So she set about writing her second film, Sister, inspired by a childhood memory - from the mountains by her home in Bescançon, France - of a ski lesson during which the instructor warned the kids away from a nearby child-thief who 'worked' the resorts. “I was so fascinated that there was a thief in this very expensive place, but also that it was someone my own age, who was always without friends, without parents.”

Shooting for Sister had to start by the time Klein was 12, “because, at that age, he's not still a child, but not yet a teenager; he's caught in-between”. Initially, the younger actor cast a “moral judgment” on his character, a thief providing for himself and his 'sister' (Léa Seydoux) by hawking stolen skiing goods on the black market. But Meier slowly taught her young charge the socio-political ideas of the film, inherent in the simple visual of a glittering mountain towering, sunlit, above the smoggy, dirty council towers of a glorified truckstop town down below.

“You have the population of this industrial town that lives merely five minutes below the mountain, but they never go up; it's like a different world. With just a simple vertical view of these few elements, you can show an image that really says something about our world, about this divide between the people at the top of the mountain and the people at the bottom.”

Sister captures the close proximity of extreme wealth and McJob drudgery. Meier is keen to show the workers' squalid conditions - “it's like showing the back of the stage, behind-the-scenes, the place that allows the performance out front to happen” - and even cast Martin Compston. “I liked taking [Compston], who comes from a more socio-political cinematic universe, and putting [him] into this place, which is so very clean, very beautiful, very wealthy.” It wasn't the only piece of international casting that particularly tickled the filmmaker. “I was excited to cast Scully from X-Files!” Meier laughs, of a role as a glamorous regent of the Alps. “Because Gillian Anderson is like a phantasm, an apparition, this beautiful model of this life - she's rich, she's a mother, she loves her children - that, for [Klein], almost seems like science-fiction.”