Original subtitles

Our first obstacle is to contact Félix and let him know.

This woman in Army of Shadows

is Lucie Aubrac,

who was my history professor during my studies in philosophy

in 1939-40.

Then I lost touch with her.

I saw her again after Liberation,

and I realized she was my old history professor,

because by then everyone knew that that extraordinary woman

had been a great Resistance fighter.

So when I made Army of Shadows,

it was very troubling for me to portray that woman

whom I'd known as a girl.

In Army of Shadows, she's Lucie Aubrac and other women.

She's a composite character.

But what made it even more ambiguous for me...

what made me feel a bit indecent...

was that my makeup artist on Army of Shadows...

a woman with whom I continued to work for many years, now retired,

a woman named Maud Begon,

was another Lucie Aubrac.

She wasn't as lucky as Lucie Aubrac,

because she couldn't escape to England.

She was arrested in Clermont-Ferrand

and imprisoned for months

and then spent almost two years in a concentration camp.

I sat there in front of the mirror

like any other actress at her makeup table,

and Maud tried to fix me up so I wouldn't be too ugly,

because a female Resistance fighter in a movie

can't be ugly, after all.

So she did her best to fix me up.

I remember one morning,

she was busy applying fake eyelashes to make me more alluring,

and I was ashamed, and I told her so.

I wanted to end that awkward moment.

I asked, “Did you wear false eyelashes in Clermont-Ferrand

when you went to meet people

in your network?”

She laughed and said, “No.”

It really bothered me that I was that age

and I was playing that role, when I knew I hadn't been

that type of woman in real life.

I remembered that incredible woman, Lucie Aubrac,

and next to me, trying to make me up,

was a different woman yet somehow the same woman,

and it was very troubling.

Go!

After the war,

of course we suddenly found ourselves being treated like stars

because we'd done things that were a bit extraordinary,

and our actions were the talk of the town, making headlines in every paper.

But we never imagined films would be made about it.

In any case, we never imagined it during the war.

During the war our first priority was survival!

That was what mattered.

We never thought we were in a movie.

Sometimes we realized we were doing extraordinary things

that had nothing to do with everyday life

or the lives we'd been prepared for.

But we never imagined that one day

we'd become the subject of films and novels.

Of course not.

I don't have any problem

with portraying a historic figure

from the very distant past,

because there are no eyewitnesses.

They're not there to watch you do the brave things they actually did,

watching you do them as an actor,

making your living using their heroism.

When this heroism

took place in the very recent past-

40 years may seem like a long time to children,

but it really isn't very long -

then I think it's difficult to portray these characters

without a certain sense of shame at not being as good as they were.