Yes, said George Scott, he had heard of Carla Bruni – but only vaguely. The
film director was walking his dog near his home in Islington, north London,
last year when his producer called, suggesting she should be their next
project.
Scott, 42, wrote up a proposal for “a music film about a model who turns into
a singer and makes a success of it” – which was all Bruni was known for at
the time, apart from a few rock star boyfriends.
When he met her in Paris that October she was singing Fernande, a bawdy song
by the late Georges Brassens, which is banned on French radio. “We hit it
off. She’s charming, funny and flirty,” Scott says.
Bruni wondered why Scott had picked her for his film: she didn’t think there
was enough to say. She had seen Scott’s film about Rufus Wainwright, the
Canadian-American singer. “The interesting thing about Rufus,” she told him,
“is that his life is so interesting, but you don’t have much to work on with
me.”
Within a month, however, she became one of the most interesting women on
earth. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, astounded his nation – and the
world – by openly having an affair with her.
“I thought no way would she want to do the film now. I put it out of my mind,”
Scott remembers. However, Bruni told him that she would go ahead regardless.
“We just carried on the same way as planned. The only difference was that
the next time I went to her house, there were police outside.”
The result is a taboo-breaking film in which Bruni – now Carla Bruni-Sarkozy,
the French first lady – opens the doors of the presidential Elysée Palace as
well as of her Paris and Riviera homes for a documentary about her life, her
career as a supermodel and singer, and her whirlwind marriage to “Sarko”.
The film is the first to catch Bruni and her husband away from the spotlight –
they embrace at their home, Sarkozy nuzzling her neck, when he makes an
unexpected visit. No other first lady has given a film crew such access.
She has given Scott a dozen hours of interviews over nine months, laying bare
the romance and marriage that has intrigued the world.
Last week The Sunday Times had an exclusive preview of the 80-minute
film, Somebody Told Me About. . . Carla Bruni, which will be shown on French
television on New Year’s Day and in Britain in late January.
It opens with the first lady, in a break from recording her latest album in a
Paris studio, laughingly declaring: “No more sex, no more drugs, only
rock’n’roll!”
She was happy to record interviews for the film in both French and English –
in contrast with her husband’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who although he
spoke good English once stormed out of a conference because it was being
held in English.
Bruni relates how she told Sarkozy before they married that she had no
intention of giving up her music career just because she was to become the
wife of the president.
“I said to Nicolas, ‘I cannot choose between you and my music, it’s
ridiculous. I’m not going to drop my job and iron my husband’s shirts for
the next four years.’ So of course he didn’t ask me to choose, I decided to
keep my job,” Bruni reveals.
“I’m glad he didn’t ask me to choose. It would have been a wrench and a bad
way of starting love. Love has nothing to do with sacrifice.”
Of the couple’s state visit to Britain in March, Bruni says she was extremely
nervous on the flight across the Channel. “I was pretty terrified in the
plane. I was scared, like stage fright before a concert.” She adds: “It
could have been a nightmare but it became a dream.”
Bruni, who turned 41 on Tuesday, confides that she was “paralysed by shyness”
as a child and admits to having “a great need to be recognised”. She
describes the discovery that her father was not her biological father as “a
relief” and says she is still undergoing the therapy she started when she
quit modelling, adding that therapy should be taught in school.
The high point of the filming came on a sunny July afternoon at Bruni’s home,
a large house in a secluded cobbled alley near the Bois de Boulogne. She and
Sarkozy sleep there rather than at the Elysée.
Scott turned Bruni’s sitting room upside down and set up three cameras to
record her singing for her new album, Comme Si de Rien N’Etait (As If
Nothing Had Happened). They were taking a break when they heard the doorbell
ring.
In walked an unexpected visitor – Sarkozy, 53, his smart navy suit and tie
contrasting with the jeans and casual shirts of Scott’s crew. Scott recalls:
“I was a bit sneaky and turned the cameras on, but you couldn’t not.”
He filmed Sarkozy bending down to kiss Bruni – who is sitting, guitar in hand,
on an antique sofa – on the neck. “You smell of cigarettes!” she exclaims
with a grin. Sarkozy shakes hands with the crew, introducing himself in
English with the words: “Nick, nice to meet you.”
Sarkozy then stands by the french windows, looking both bemused and
embarrassed with his hands in his pockets – but smiling broadly – as his
wife sings L’Amoureuse.
“Nicolas is very charming, very friendly and obviously very much in love,”
Scott says. “I don’t think he’d ever seen his wife singing those songs live
before and he wanted to see it.
“You just know when two people are in love and when Nicolas and Carla are
together you can’t escape it. After half an hour he said he’d love to stay
but he had to go back to work” – he had an appointment with Barack Obama.
With Bruni’s help, Scott won access to a host of her relatives, friends and
acquaintances who gave a deeper insight into her relationship with the
president and into her own background.
She was born in Turin into a wealthy family that moved to Paris when she was
seven. Her parents feared that Red Brigades terrorists would kidnap Carla,
her sister Valeria and brother Virginio if they stayed in Italy.
Marisa Borini, Bruni’s mother, recalls her as a thin, pale child. “When Carla
looks at photographs of herself as a child, she says, ‘Oh my God, how ugly I
was!’” Borini says.
She started modelling while still a teen-ager to assert her autonomy from her
rich parents. “I wanted to be financially independent because the money you
get from your parents isn’t the money you made with work. I never thought
that my father’s money was my money,” she says.
In the film, John Galliano, the fashion designer, pays tribute to her
“piercing sapphire eyes” and “the luminous quality coming from within”.
Another friend, the singer Marianne Faithfull, says it was no easy ride
being a supermodel, “staying thin, perfect. Carla told me she used to get
rashes before shows. It’s very stressful”.
Bruni makes a rare comment about her discovery in 1996 that her father,
Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, a composer and tyre-making industrialist, was not
her biological parent. Her real father was Maurizio Remmert, an Italian
businessman and guitar player. Asked whether this caused her turmoil, she
replies: “It didn’t cause me much turmoil, no. Actually it gave me some
balance. I think children feel better with the truth whatever the truth is .
. . so I just felt more stable.
“My father [Alberto] told me and I was like, I knew it. Maybe because I am so
different from Valeria, physically and psychologically. So it was not a
turmoil, it was a relief,” Bruni says.
Her mother, a concert pianist who met Remmert through their love of music,
says of this discovery: “Obviously it must have been a shock for her, but
life is like that.”
Borini also speaks of the loss of Virginio, who died of Aids. “I think Carla
suffered most for the loss of her brother because she and Virginio were very
close. He admired her very much . . . Carla called me at 2am and told me,
‘Voilà, he’s no longer here.’ She suffered and thinks of him all the time.”
Bruni’s decision to quit modelling at the age of 29 and launch a career
writing and performing songs created more anguish for her, and she started
therapy “because the end of modelling was abrupt and hard to cope
with”.
She adds: “I still do it, I would recommend it to everyone. The thing about
therapy is it makes you responsible for your life . . . because if you
believe all depends on others you will always be unhappy. It changed
everything for me. I would suggest it from childhood, they should teach it.”
She says “confusion” pushes her to write songs and she is still struggling to
understand at least one contradiction in her character: between what she
says is her timidity, and her seeking out such high-profile occupations as
model, singer and first lady.
“I was paralysed by shyness when I was little. It’s interesting I have chosen
to always live something in contrast with that. It’s almost a rape for
someone so shy to be always photographed, overexposed. Perhaps you
unconsciously seek out what is most difficult, or perhaps contradiction is
really important in a human being,” she muses.
Bruni’s high-profile lovers brought her much media attention; they included
Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and Laurent Fabius, the Socialist former French
prime minister. The documentary does not tackle this. “I don’t care about
people she had sex with. My personal life is private, so unless that of my
subjects impacts on the story I’m telling, I don’t go into it,” Scott says.
Bruni’s leap into yet more exposure began at the dinner party where she met
Sarkozy at the home of their friend Jacques Séguéla, an advertising guru,
outside Paris in November 2007.
“There were only eight people and we were seated next to each other and it was
instantaneous, immediate . . . I don’t know what he has but he has something
very protective that I never found before, maybe because I was much more
attracted to artists,” she says.
“I realised people were shocked when I first started dating, because
presidents don’t date and I understand that. But it’s just another world for
me because I come from the modelling and the music – we can date for ever,
we don’t have to get married. Also it was the first time a president got
divorced, usually they don’t get divorced because that’s not good for their
position. So I guess Nicolas is having a life like a normal 50-year-old man:
he can get divorced and he can get married again,” she says.
The dynamic Sarkozy was anxious not to waste any time. Bruni’s mother recalls
the first time she met him, early in their relationship. “Carla called me,
she said, ‘I’m coming to see you at home with my new fiancé.’ He came at
5pm; he sat on the sofa and he told me, ‘I want to marry her’,” Borini
relates.
Scott had another up-close glimpse of the presidential couple when he visited
them in August at Bruni’s family mansion in Cap Nègre, a rocky, pine-clad
promontory on the Côte d’Azur west of St Tropez.
“Carla is very conscious that Nicolas is a man with a busy life, so she is
very respectful of any time off he can get. She says that if she lived at
the Elysée, she would never get him away from work,” Scott says.
“But their regime was pretty strict. They’d go jogging together, then
swimming, then have lunch, then sleep, then go jogging and then go
swimming,” says Scott. “It’s very much a family place out there: Carla’s mum
was there, so was her aunt, her late brother’s partner, her son Aurélien and
a friend of his.”
A barefoot Bruni strolls through the mansion’s garden and along an earth path
by the sea, pointing out her favourite spot for a bathe. When her dog
interrupts the recording of an interview there, she jokes: “He has a great
ego this dog, this is going to be a film about this dog.”
Bruni is almost as relaxed standing on the lawn of the Elysée, dressed in
jeans and a grey T-shirt stamped on the back “Au-secours pardon [Help
sorry]”. She points out the private wing of the Elysée, the three windows of
“my husband’s office” and makes a dig at her Gallic countrymen (she now has
dual Italo-French nationality).
“You know, [the French poet] Jean Cocteau used to say we are cousins, and the
French are Italian people in a bad mood,” she says.
The film concentrates on the state visit she made with her husband to London.
She pays a warm tribute to her hosts at Windsor: “The royal family was
incredibly welcoming, the Queen adorable. They are so courteous that their
intelligence, courtesy and charm rub off on you.” The visit would remain
“one of the greatest moments of my life”.
She cannot forget the publication by British newspapers, coinciding with her
visit, of a nude photograph she posed for years earlier alongside other
models in a book to raise money for Aids. “The English press can be
violent,” she says, adding: “So can the French and Italian press. I believe
in freedom of the press.”
She says of the picture: “I cannot deny my past and I won’t. I never did
anything I should be ashamed of . . . Other models posed nude but none of
them married a president.” She takes comfort from the enthusiastic coverage
of her visit: “I saw the English press in the morning [of the second day];
the French press, well maybe they like me anyway. People can change their
mind. I did, I was against marriage and now I’m really for marriage.”
As first lady, she hopes to “convince people that I’m a serious person”. As a
singer, she wants to continue “writing new songs, writing songs for other
people as much as I can as long as I can until I die. Maybe when my husband
is no longer president of France, I can play live again and be an old lady
singing the blues. That would be nice”.
After Bruni watched the finished film, she told Scott: “If it wasn’t me, I
could watch it over and over again.”
Scott insists: “She hates watching herself, she really does. I don’t know why.”
