Michael Rozek was at his home in rural Nebraska on a Zoom call with Isabelle Huppert and members of a production crew in Normandy, back in November 2022. The first-time director was in the beginning stages of a film shoot for “Marianne,” a movie he spent the past decade trying to make with Huppert and an Oscar-nominated producer. Rozek, now 70, had no filmmaking background, only a passion for the arts and to find people willing to help him make movies. The shoot began as a dream and became a nightmare after it finished.
Film festival rejections, no hopes for distribution, and a lack of interest from the press left a film he made to spark debate without a chance to be seen. Ironically, the current fate of Rozek’s film ties directly into what it’s about. For 90 minutes, Huppert talks directly to the camera about the idea of narrative itself. Rozek, through Huppert, interrogates the purpose of plots and stories in films, considering them distractions from the medium’s ability to reflect reality back at us. The film also confronts the industry’s business side, referred to as “they” and “them,” for chasing escapism in pursuit of the almighty dollar. At one point, Huppert literally yells at viewers to “wake up” from their complacency to demand better films.
Rozek sees the hostile indifference towards“Marianne” as an injustice summed up by a line Huppert says in the film: “They never let you have any of it.”
“I’ve not had a conventional life,” Rozek told IndieWire. He grew up in New Jersey in the 1960s before studying English at Vanderbilt University, where he began writing articles for The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He spent time in public relations before he walked away from office jobs to pursue freelance writing full-time, with over 2,000 articles to his name, and even ran his own independent publication in the 1990s called Rozek’s.
Rozek remembers traveling to New York City as a teenager to watch movies, although filmmaking wasn’t a career choice he had in mind. A purchase of a DVD player in the 2000s rekindled his interest in international film through The Criterion Collection, and after a difficult 10-year period of his life, he knew he reached a point where he had something to say: “I needed to go through those 10 years to learn what life was all about, to live in poverty, to be under severe duress for a long time, so you really find out who you are and what you want to do. And then I found that I had things to write about.”
In 2011, while living in Boise, Idaho, without a computer, he wrote his first screenplay at the public library and deployed a simple, persistent strategy: write as many scripts as he could and only send them to European producers, a choice he made “somewhat under the illusion that European cinema was much freer and artistic than American cinema.” Rozek applied the same tenacity from his career as a freelance journalist, claiming to have sent over 20,000 emails to producers. He got a response back from Philippe Carcassonne, a French producer who’s worked with directors like Benoît Jacquot and Florian Zeller (Carcassonne received an Oscar nomination for Zeller’s “The Father”). Carcassonne enjoyed Rozek’s writing but passed on his scripts because they were, according to Rozek, too American.
Rozek stayed in touch with Carcassonne and in 2013, while living in what he described as “a 300-square-foot cottage in the jungle” in Hawaii, where he wrote “Marianne.” The film was inspired by the ideas of renegade independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, so Rozek initially saw Cassavetes’ wife and muse Gena Rowlands in the lead role. Before he even received a response from producers to his script, Rozek got a hold of Rowlands’ home phone number and called her up himself to see if she’d be interested. His brash effort did not go over well.
“It was like the CIA was called. Everything went nuts,” he said, detailing the way an “old school agent” chewed him out over the phone. Rozek sent the script to Carcassonne, who expressed interest in producing it, but the experience of trying to get Rowlands soured him on finding an actress through representation. Rozek asked if Carcassonne knew anyone he could hand his script to directly. Carcassonne responded with one name: Isabelle Huppert. “I thought, man, I’m starting at the top,” Rozek said.
Huppert loved the script and met Rozek in 2015 to confirm she would take on the role. The radical nature of a one-character, direct-address feature meant even someone as connected as Carcassonne had difficulty finding funds for several years. A budget of around $350,000 was eventually secured, and “Marianne” filmed over three days, with Rozek remotely directing from home due to travel restrictions amid the ongoing pandemic.
The short timeline meant some aspects of the script, like Huppert delivering a monologue in a town square, were scrapped in favor of only using one location. Rozek didn’t mind as long as his ideas weren’t compromised. “What matters to me is my script and a great actor,” he said assuredly. “After that, you can call it your mama if you want to.”
Production wrapped over Thanksgiving weekend of 2022, and Rozek locked his cut by Christmas. The hopes of premiering at Cannes or Venice, festivals where Huppert is a mainstay, were dashed once the rejections came in. The film eventually premiered in November 2023 at the Torino Film Festival, although Huppert couldn’t attend and Rozek didn’t want to spend the money to travel. And while Rozek offers nothing but praise and respect for Huppert in what he calls her “Brechtian” performance, she has not spoken publicly about “Marianne.” When I asked him why she hadn’t done anything to promote the film, his response was succinct: “I don’t want to speak for Isabelle Huppert.” (Her representatives did not respond to request for comment.)
Since the premiere, and with no prospects of “Marianne” screening at festivals or securing a release, Rozek is now a lone crusader for his film, and he isn’t afraid to make as much noise as he can to get anyone’s attention. His attempts to drum up interest for the film through “guerrilla marketing” had limited results.
He turned to social media, repeatedly calling out the film industry and media on his X, formerly Twitter, account for “suppressing” the film, a confrontational strategy he won’t speak to me about (“it’s self-evident,” he said). He indirectly addresses it when he mentions a response he gave to someone who asked what he’d be willing to do to keep “Marianne” alive: “Anything, including making a complete ass out of myself, being willing to be perceived as loony.”
Knowing the story behind “Marianne,” his online antics read more like exasperation at the film’s current limbo state. A film designed to confront viewers and reject conventions of plot and narrative, “Marianne” would always be a tough sell. The way Rozek sees it, given Huppert’s star power and his film’s low budget, the industry’s aversion to “Marianne” is another sign of their lack of creativity: “You can’t make a profit with that? You’re not thinking straight.”
Rozek explained how it all linked into “Marianne” and his ongoing fight to get it seen: “You’ve got an industry that is taking away your humanity, calling you eyeballs and butts in seats, running a diet of unreality toward you with no other chance of consuming anything else. When a film like mine appears, and they basically exterminate it, you got to get mad, man.”
While Rozek continues to wonder why, in his eyes, people “hate” his film, he remains optimistic about its future as the film slowly gains admirers. One of those admirers includes self-described “distribution veteran” Nick Newman (also an IndieWire contributor), who said Rozek’s debut was “already suggesting a major auteurist stamp and flying in the face of conventional wisdom.”
Newman will help Rozek independently distribute “Marianne” across theaters in America and is currently looking for North American venues to screen the film. It’s a move that ties back to Cassavetes, who independently released his films, and Rozek hopes the film will connect with audiences willing to engage with its ideas.
Despite the rough journey Rozek has taken with his first feature, it hasn’t slowed down his ambition. He has other scripts he hopes to make, and mentions a film manifesto he’s working on that relates to his ideas in “Marianne.” He summed up his aspirations with a declaration one wouldn’t necessarily expect from a filmmaker starting out in their 70s: “My goal in doing what I’m doing is to be known before I die as one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived.”
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