In All of a Sudden, the latest film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car), Virginie Efira stars as Marie-Lou, the director of an eldercare home that practices Humanitude, an unconventional philosophy of care centered on empathy and attentiveness to residents—sometimes at the expense of efficiency. The story is set in motion when Marie-Lou meets Mari, a Japanese theater director played by Tao Okamoto, and a tentative friendship forms.
Spanning France and Japan and shifting between French and Japanese, All of a Sudden is largely made up of bureaucratic meetings and characters on long walks. Yet Hamaguchi turns these seemingly modest encounters into something sublime, aided by the extraordinary performances of Efira and Okamoto, who shared the prize for best actress at Cannes.
Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto at Cannes in May.
We spoke with Efira after the film’s New York premiere about working with Hamaguchi, discovering a character from the inside out, false erotic lesbianism, the strangely intimate experience of making a 196-minute film inside a care home—and why its length may be essential to what the film is trying to do.
Vogue: What was it like filming inside a care home? What did the residents make of you?
Virginie Efira: It gives you the impression that the film continues beyond the scene, beyond the word “cut.” The care home wasn’t only where we filmed; it was also where we rehearsed and did all the work of making the film. Residents took part alongside professional actors playing people with cognitive impairments. In a way, the film’s method embodies Hamaguchi’s philosophy of melding the inside and outside. I remember once, while we were reading together, an older man with cognitive difficulties sat down, took a glass and a piece of paper, and started cutting. For another director, it might have been a disruption. For Hamaguchi, it was an opportunity to gently guide him out of the way using Humanitude principles. He had done two or three training sessions in the method himself.
I don’t know about America, but in France when a crew goes on location, people often don’t like it and say it’s a disturbance. I don’t think we disturbed anyone. We even held a screening of the film afterward. I never thought one of the most beautiful summers of my life would be spent in a nursing home.
The idea of interior and exterior kind of collapsing reminds me of something you said at Cannes about working on this project: The camera filmed what you were experiencing rather than what you were trying to play. Is that freeing? Or does it feel like losing control?
It goes beyond this question of control and experience. What Ryusuke puts forward is a situation where we can’t prefigure the emotional arc of any scene. I knew not to ask psychological questions about my character; I understood that wasn’t the point of the work we were doing. But I might still have wondered, for example, about that very theoretical scene on capitalism: How were we going to pull that off? What were we trying to hit? That wasn’t his way of working at all though. Instead we focused on preparing ourselves, so when shooting started, chance and a certain texture of listening would lead us where we needed to go.
At the beginning of the shoot, he said to us through an interpreter: “I hope that you will find the light.” I kept wondering, what is the light? I was waiting for some kind of epiphany, like “Hi, it’s Marie-Lou!” But it’s something you come to understand from within. You can feel it when you’re inside a scene, when you stop willing things to happen and simply inhabit them. The uninterrupted takes helped create that feeling as did his instruction not to use the text as a tool. One thing I found unusual with these long scenes was how he would follow a long take with a shot of the space—something very precise, like the hands of a clock. The rhythm felt unusual, almost documentary-like.
I read that Hamaguchi casts by having a conversation instead of auditions. What did you two talk about the first time you met?
I heard he was making a film in France and wanted to meet me, and that alone was something because I’m a fan. The script is so profound, so radical. It also put me in a vulnerable place, and in a way, reading it made me kinder. Not that I was a big shit before, but it was like being emptied out, with your heart open.
By the time I met him, I was very nervous. If you meet him, you’ll see there’s something very special in his eyes. Having three of us, including the interpreter, was actually wonderful because it gave us time to watch each other before we spoke. He’s shy and I am too. We talked a lot about Benedetta, which I made with Paul Verhoeven, and how I’ve been a big fan Showgirls since I was 16. I didn’t know how to say “Tell Ryusuke I want to do this movie [All of A Sudden].” It felt a bit vulgar to say it outright, so I tried to bring in something from my own life. I told him about my affinity for Japan, how my son’s name is Hiro; I like [Hiyao] Miyazaki, I like [Isao] Takahata. He asked if I wasn’t afraid it would be too much work, and I said no. The best no of my life.
Photo: Courtesy of NEON
A good chunk of the film covers the initial encounter between you and Okamoto’s character, Mari. It almost happens in real time. How do you establish a friendship that forms that fast onscreen and make it believable?
Remember the third story in [Hamaguchi’s 2021 film] Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, about the two women who meet? There isn’t necessarily much happening on the surface, just two women looking and speaking. When people talk politics and cinema, they sometimes bring up the Bechdel test. Hamaguchi explodes the Bechdel test. Tao started acting relatively late like me. We knew we’d share this experience working with this master, but it was also about experiencing something together. It’s important to have a certain disposition of availability, which we both had. We also hadn’t met before our characters did on camera, so we weren’t faking the novelty of that bond. The film really follows the step-by-step growth of the characters, and I relied on that.
Ryusuke also gave us the freedom to think about what our characters wanted. The script speaks of friendship, of an absolute friendship. But what does it mean, symbolically, to meet someone? What is intimacy—intellectually, physically, organically? Sometimes I tried to translate that into concrete gestures or actions. When I’m smoking a cigarette, I have the freedom to decide that rather than look at my feet, I want to look at her neck. That was my process of discovering the character—to infuse her with something the French have a more precise word for than “romantic.” “Romantic” feels a little flattening. But some kind of attraction, tension, desire. I didn’t discuss it with him. I told him maybe a month after we finished shooting that this had been part of my experience of the character to which he said, “If that’s how you felt, it must have been right.”
I remember shooting the massage scene in Japan, thinking this is the most erotic lesbian scene ever. After I saw the movie? No, not at all. Sometimes an actor has something in their head that isn’t necessarily what ends up onscreen, and I think that’s great. The director’s job is to film what he wants to film; my job is to decide how I want to respond to those questions.
.jpg)
Photo: Courtesy of NEON
The lesbian aspect is interesting because after I watched the movie, there were a few people in my theater who left thinking Mari and Marie-Lou were definitively lesbians. This kind of platonic intimacy and female friendship was lost on them.
The relationship was right at the line of “don’t go there” for me. I think it’s best things didn’t go in that direction for this film. There’s something inherently erotic about making different ideas and interiorities graze each other like that. This way of speaking feels a little outdated now, but hopefully it comes back—otherwise, I’m speaking like an old woman. It’s a beautiful mode of engagement where you open me up to a new perspective, and I then enrich it with my own rather than simply arguing or imposing a view. That seems to be what’s more common now, confronting only the surface of what we’re saying.
The film is 196 minutes long. What would you say to a potential viewer put off by the length?
You can say I’m not objective since I’m in the film, but it is the right length. Films today tend to err on the side of length in a way that can feel like fiction being distended. Here the duration has a different effect: You don’t necessarily feel the length as something to be endured. The film’s length and tempo, its internal sense of time, cohere with its subject. It has to do with the mysterious relationship to time that emerges when we’re really together. What is a minute spent together? What is a relationship, and how does time fold around it? How much time do we have left, and what do we do with it? This is a film that asks something of the viewer that isn’t an intellectual effort so much as an invitation to inhabit a different relationship to time. When I saw it at Cannes, I was very moved by the scene where my character sets a timer on her phone for pasta. It lasts two minutes. I cried.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
All of a Sudden will be released in theaters on November 25, 2026.
