Marion Cotillard Recalls 'Being Manipulated' By a Male Director: 'I Felt Like an Object'

Marion Cotillard is recalling a time where she felt "manipulated by a director."

In a 2023 Cannes Film Festival interview with Variety about her new movie Little Girl Blue, Cotillard, 47, described her on-set experience.

“It happened to me only once where I felt that I was being manipulated by a director, and I really didn’t like that," she told the outlet, adding that she originally believed working with the director would feature "a process of working together with a collaborative connection."

“I thought: ‘Is he manipulating me because he thinks that I’m going to be unable to give him what he needs, what he wants, if he doesn’t act this way?' " Cotillard recalled of the experience. "And I felt like an object, and I really hated it."

The Oscar winner added that she "saw right away all the manipulation" and did not approve of the unnamed director's tactics.

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“...I had the judgement that it was kind of dumb that you can’t ask me to do things without trying to use ways of manipulation that really don’t work with me, with my personality as a woman, I mean, as a human being, and as an actress," she told Variety.

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Cotillard's new movie Little Girl Blue, written and directed by filmmaker Mona Achache, sits "halfway between a documentary and fiction" as the film follows Achache's attempt to examine her mother Carole Achache's life following her death in 2016, per an official Cannes Film Festival description of the film.

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"After her mother’s death, Mona Achache discovers thousands of photos, letters and recordings, but these buried secrets make her disappearance even more of an enigma," reads an official synopsis for the movie. "Through the power of filmmaking and the beauty of incarnation, she brings her mother back to life to retrace her journey and find out who she really was."

Cotillard, known for her roles in La Vie En Rose, Inception and Midnight in Paris, portrays Carole Achache in the movie as the late photographer and writer's daughter Mona seeks to recreate her mother's life.

The 2023 Cannes Film Festival runs through May 27 in Cannes, France.