‘It’s a really beautiful place to be’

DRAMA-DOCUMENTARY FILM LIFE IS EVERYTHING IS A STUDY OF THE IRISH DESIGNER AND ARCHITECT

EILEEN GRAY. PART OF THE FILM IS SHOT AT THE MODERNIST E.1027 VILLA ON THE MEDITERRANEAN COAST, JUST EAST OF MONTE CARLO. DESIGNED BY GRAY, TODAY THE HOUSE IS CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT EXAMPLES OF THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE OF ARCHITECTURE.

JULIAN NEWBY VISITED THE SHOOT

PHOTOGRAPHY BY YANN COATSALIOU

DESIGNED and built between 1926 and 1929 by enigmatic Irish architect and interior designer Eileen Gray, E.1027 is today designated a French National Cultural Monument by the French government.

Perched close to the foot of a rocky clif that leads down to the Mediterranean in the commune of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, the villa was recently restored over a number of years and opened to the public in the summer of 2021.

It was Gray’s first house, created in collaboration with her lover, Romanianborn architect and magazine editor Jean

Badovici. The name of the house, E.1027, is an alpha-numeric representation of the couple’s names: ‘E’ was for Eileen, and the 10 and 2 represented Badovici’s initials — according to their place in the alphabet — and the 7 was for G, Gray’s initials efectively embracing his.

There were at least three people who stamped their names on this building: Gray, Badovici and Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, who added wall paintings to parts of the interior and built his own Cabanon de vacances — a holiday chalet — in the grounds of E.1027.

That Gray’s relationships with these two men were problematic is well doc- umented, but Life is Everything isn’t all about that.

For the flm’s writer and director, SwissGerman Beatrice Minger, the flm’s initial focus was Le Corbusier, which she was researching on behalf of producer Philip Delaquis. “While I was in the process of that, by chance I discovered this house and began to look into the story of the architect, Eileen Gray,” Minger says. “We quickly realised what a fascinating artist she was and that her story — and the story of the house — were much more interesting. So I started to write.”

Early on Minger and her colleagues realised that, if possible, they had to use the actual house as a location, so a great deal of efort went into seeking permission at the start of the project. It’s a treasured building, a national monument and so this process was not straightforward.

Development of the project started back in 2018 and the directors — Minger and fellow writer-director Christoph Schaub — started to visit E.1027 in 2019.

“A lot of the early research involved coming down here from Switzerland to see the house,” says Frank Matter of Basel-based Soap Factory, which co-produced the flm. “And we soon found out that getting the right permits was a little complicated — but every flm project is like that. You start with ideas and have to adapt to reality, all the government rules and so on.”

“It was always clear that we needed to be there; to make a flm about Eileen Gray and the link with Corbusier, for me it was always important really from the outset to understand Eileen Grey as an artist and as an architect and to understand how she built the house. How her architecture was diferent from Le Corbusier’s and wanting to understand it intellectually, but also to be able to portray the experience of being in that house and living in that house,” Minger says.

“To start with, we were thinking about maybe just flming it to depict the architecture. But the more I got into the project as a director, I realised, ‘No, we really need to be there with her’ — and also with the other characters. Because, for example, when Le Corbusier enters the house, he looks at it very, very diferently to her, which gives an interesting contrast.” She adds: “Also to have the opportunity to show it from different perspectives and angles — female gaze and male gaze — I think is really interesting.”

Natalie Radmall-Quirke, the star of the flm — of Irish heritage like Gray — turned down the part during her first audition. Although perfectly suited in so many ways, not least being an Irish woman who speaks French, she felt something of an imposter; that her French wasn’t perfectly fuent and that she was possibly taking on a part for which she wasn’t suited.

“So, I said ‘Thank you so much for giving me this time. I've so enjoyed spending time with Eileen and preparing for this, but I don't think I'm the person that you're looking for.’ It’s not something I’ve

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ever said at an audition before and I don't know if any of them have had to deal with an actor saying that at audition — but they just went, ‘Okay. Well, we'll just continue with the audition anyway, shall we?’ And as a result of having said that, I did one of the best auditions of my life, without any expectations for myself to be any good.”

“You can’t really intellectualise these things sometimes,” Minger says. “Natalie struck me as capturing some nucleus of Eileen Gray in a way, the Eileen Gray that I had in mind, who I thought I was connected to through all my research. We always said we didn’t want someone to be 101, we wanted some space for interpretation, otherwise it would be just re-enactment.”

A mix of drama and documentary, scenes with dialogue were shot in a studio in Basel, using white walls and projections of various moving scenes relating to Gray’s life and work — “a space of debate and refection about architecture and art”, Minger says. “The actual house is more a memory space, because she remembers the house and revisits it for the frst time in the flm. It’s a diferent approach to the studio and it will give another view. It’s very clear when we are in the studio that we are in an artifcial space.”

“We also did some documentary shooting out on location,” Matter says. “The crew travelled through France and up to Holland and other places, to shoot cer- tain buildings that inspired Eileen Gray — landscapes, architectural stuf, images from Paris. We are also going to use archival footage. We have old flms from the time, creating atmosphere.”

Back to the house, where scenes of silent contemplation are flmed — no dialogue — principally featuring Eileen Gray and also scenes with Le Corbusier (Charles Morillon) and Jean Badovici (Axel Moustache). E.1207 is comparatively small when you compare it with other Mediterranean villas. Its design doesn’t shout ‘extreme wealth’; instead it shows an extraordinary understanding of how a building should relate to its surroundings. All the rooms are designed so you can see and feel a part of the sea, the light and the nature outside. And the house is laid out so that people move from room to room in a way that corresponds with how Gray believed the space should be used. The furniture is also designed by Gray, so you have somewhere that refects a person’s personality and psyche like nowhere else.