Behind the Scenes of Bleu De Chanel With Martin Scorsese & Timothée Chalamet
“Telling a story in 60 seconds — it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been making pictures, how long you’ve been trying to tell stories — this is a real workout,” declares Martin Scorsese. He’s just directed the campaign film for Bleu de Chanel, starring Timothée Chalamet. Behind the scenes, Chalamet and Scorsese discuss filmmaking, celebrity, and personal highlights.
The finished piece is a quick, mostly black-and-white reel filled with action. Chalamet stumbles through dressing rooms en route to a late night interview, dashing through the halls with all the fervour of a college freshman. Just before the video comes to an end, the hosts asks: “When you’re inside a role, do you destroy who you are?” To this, the actor responds, “No, no. You reach into yourself, you find yourself. And only after that are you free to be who you really are.”
It comes roughly one year after Chanel first announced Chalamet as the ambassador for their male fragrance, Bleu de Chanel. The campaign has taken a few different shapes in the time since, Scorsese explains. “We [took] the original idea we had for the presentation of Chanel Bleu back then and bring it, in a sense, up to date to now.”
Instead of a glossy-but-conventional fragrance film, the Bleu de Chanel video deals with the discrepancy between presentation and reality. “I’m playing a caricature of what my life could be seen as: a hyper-realized setting, and the publicity requirements that come with acting,” Chalamet says. It’s a fitting theme for the aromatic, woodsy Bleu de Chanel. Meant to capture a sense of “freedom through strength,” the scent has range; it can pair with the video’s elegant, Hollywood-esque settings and day-to-day events alike.
Through the lens of ‘celebrity,’ Scorsese and Chalamet take a close look at authenticity and artistry. “In this short film, there’s a film where I play a character named Simon. He’s sort of a trumpeter, who’s married to his art more than his relationships,” Chalamet says. It’s familiar ground for the actor, whose resume is dotted with tongue-in-cheek, ‘tortured artist’ roles including a stint as Zeffirelli, the leader of the ‘Chessboard Revolution’ in The French Dispatch. As Simon, he declares: “When I look in the mirror, I want to see an artist.”
“The conflict between celebrity and staying true to being an artist — you could confuse the two,” says Scorsese. “There’s nothing wrong with being a celebrity, but it’s a matter of where your heart is. Keep, always, in touch with that.”
A director as prolific as Martin Scorsese know what he’s talking about. In his long career, Scorsese has seen frequent collaborators like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro become Hollywood legends. “The world has changed,” he adds. “There’s another aspect of celebrity, in a way, which is even more extreme [than] 10, 15 years ago.
For Chalamet, representing Bleu de Chanel is authentic choice; cologne is personal to the actor. “I was thinking, as I was on my way here today, that scent is something that cannot come across in visual media,” he explains. “It’s one of the last bastions of creative self-expression that hasn’t been commodified in that visual space. It’s really for you — similar to how the way in which clothes feel on your body can never come across to anyone, whereas how they look and fall on your body are what comes across to everyone.”
The campaign is personal to Scorsese, too. To build the Bleu de Chanel film, the director exaggerates memories of his own on-set experiences. “Those images come from being in studios years ago. You have to behave comfortably, casually, but these all these lights on you. I don’t know how the actors do it,” he laughs. “The amount of light — the heat from the lights — was quite extraordinary. Very special.”
And, while he might be comfortable and casual on set, Chalamet was starstruck by Scorsese. “One of the highest honours, if not the highest honour, in my career [is] to get to work with Martin Scorsese in New York,” Chalamet says. “I’m a New York boy, I’m a New York actor, he’s the ultimate New York director and New York artist. It’s checking something huge off the personal bucket list.”
Bleu de Chanel is available in stores and online.
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