Hi, my name is Mathilde Warnier, I'm 29 years old, I'm an actress
and I've been living in Paris for ten years now.
Cinema has been my life since I was 15 years old.
I was in a film school where we had film club every Wednesday,
and that was our life.
With my group of friends, we still talk about cinema,
we live through cinema.
I was supposed to be a producer and I became an actress.
That surprises many people because I wanted to be a journalist,
an apprentice journalist.
Some of my friends were teaching me how to write.
But I wanted a lot of things, so a friend said to me:
"There's this audition, would you like to do it?"
So I auditioned, and I got the part.
And that was a total surprise because I had never played before.
All I knew about cinema was to go to the movies,
or to make stupid quotes.
I enjoyed it a lot because I think I've forgotten myself.
In fact, to be someone else, to forget yourself
and play someone else and tell someone else's story,
is to discover yourself too as a person, I think.
Here we are in Le Sentier, right in the second arrondissement,
right next to the Porte Saint-Denis.
It's a small apartment that I found after a break-up.
I found myself with very few things.
I actually did a bit haphazardly, just like that, by intuition.
I took some furniture that I found, my few plants, and this is what I got.
Welcome to my Polly Pocket apartment.
I have a secret;
I don't really know where to store my stuff.
So...
ta-da!
I also have an obsession with turtlenecks.
A first turtleneck, a second turtleneck, a third turtleneck, a fourth.
It never ends. That's all I have.
I have a very, very ugly sweater.
I'm very proud to have such an ugly thing, but I love it terribly.
Are you ready?
There you go, now I think that's a no-style girl.
My grandmother and great-grandparents used to make lace.
They made fabric.
Sewing was their life,
so they taught me to sew before I could even learn to write.
I drew, I sewed, I made little lavender cushions.
They taught me a lot of things.
And it's funny because my grandmother didn't have any money, they had nothing,
but since they were dressmakers, they were always well dressed.
For them, it was something of politeness,
that is, you could dress up your emotions so you wouldn't put them on people.
It's crazy because that's what I wanted to do when I was five years old.
I wanted to be a stylist. I used to draw fashion silhouettes.
It never left me and it still doesn't leave me.
I love fashion because I feel like it's the continuity of what people are,
in everything you want to hide, in what you want to show,
in what you want to be.
For me, getting dressed was also about playing.
I remember, as a teenager, having moments when I totally reinvented myself,
when I wasn't the same at all because I was in a creative space.
It's the same today,
even if I obviously have something to do with the way I dress,
which can be a little serious sometimes,
but always with something that makes me laugh at the time.
I struggled a lot with my femininity. That's why I have short hair.
Today, through my clothing, I have tried to erase points
where I could be recognized as a young feminine woman.
I put on this costume of jeans, of slightly masculine sweaters,
so that people would listen to me and not look at me.
But today, I feel like I want the opposite.
I want to erase a little bit this costume that sticks to my skin.
People always see me in jeans and a T-shirt, which of course represent me,
but I'm coming to an age where I'm becoming a woman.
And I wonder what kind of woman I want to be.
I've been hiding for a long time, and now maybe I don't want to hide so much anymore.
I'm often asked to talk about the Parisian woman as an actress,
and I never really know what to say.
That's kind of the thing I'm always asked to talk about.
And what I understand is when I see my girlfriends,
when I see myself, the way we dress, it's not about acting.
It's about feeling good.
This is the simplicity in the clothing,
it's telling your story, the story you want to tell.
I go out a lot.
I get invited to things, galas and everything,
and I see the girls - and I think they look gorgeous -
dressed in mermaid stuff, and it makes great pictures and they look great,
but you can tell they're not comfortable.
I would say it's pretty natural for me.
I'm not looking for designer furniture or stuff like that.
I see the practicality.
For example, I needed a desk, I put two trestles and a wooden board.
I didn't bother.
I've always been drawing a lot.
It's my passion and I have a comic book project.
A short while ago, I wrote a film, but it's a bit hard to produce.
So I'm making a comic book out of it.
It takes me a lot of time and it's quite fun.
Right now, I'm looking for monsters, girls who transform, weird stuff.
Otherwise, I've got notebooks filled with years of nonsense.
There, it says: "A weird bed, an 18th century naked chick, a scared dog".
I think what I'm saying is very profound.
I spend my hours, my days doing that when I'm not learning lines.
Sometimes I draw while I'm learning my lines.
My neighbors probably think I'm a total nutcase.
They must be thinking, "There are several of them in her head.
How many of them are there?".
I wrote: "When there are more glasses in front of you than there are friends,
it's either because you're alone and you've had too much to drink,
or it's because your friends don't like you so much".
I'm a future Pulitzer Prize winner.
We're close.
And here it says, "Sometimes I see guys like that",
and he's a Cro-Magnon man.
It's funny because I bought this notebook ten days ago.
It's like I eat them.
I spend my time drawing.
It's funny because we all have passions in life.
For me, before acting, it's always been something I did
and that nobody knew about.
I think it's cool that it's stuck for so long, not being able to show what I was doing.
Before, it was impossible.
I would have put the notebooks and said:
"No, don't touch my private life, there are sad things in it".
But now I'm happy to show a very intimate part of my existence.
When I arrived in this apartment, I had broken up with my boyfriend
and I found myself alone.
Every time I wasn't feeling well, I bought myself a small plant.
So you can see it wasn't a happy time.
Now I don't buy a lot of them anymore, which means I'm feeling better, I think.
I've surrounded myself with little friends.
That's Plantula, for example.
That's Guy. It used to make little white flowers,
but it doesn't anymore because it doesn't like me anymore.
I didn't give this one a name, but it looks like a Leonie to me, maybe.
This is a chair that I like very much for example.
It's a bit of a rough chair.
I feel like the guy took his stairs and made it into a kind of abstract thing,
but I like it very much.
These are all my books.
I lost a lot of them, so it's really a tiny part of my collection,
but they're all books that I like.
I get annoyed when people buy books for decoration.
I read my books and I want to read them.
I'm not a materialist, so I'm not going to keep them.
If there is a book you like and you want to take it, go ahead, I'm happy about it.
I like books.
The relationship you can have with an object is a funny thing.
I have more of an emphatic relationship with my plants, my books, my souvenirs,
than with large pieces.
For example, sofas, tables, I don't know how to choose them.
It's terrible. I don't know how to choose them.
For me, anything is possible,
as long as you put your heart and soul into it and want to feel good.
You could find an unbearable Ikea table and a grandmother's chair,
and if you want something beautiful, I think it's easy.
I've hidden lots of places in my apartment where I can store my stuff.
Here are my skirts.
I don't wear any of them.
These are some pants.
There, I have all my shirts, which I don't wear either.
Some dresses that I don't often wear.
And shoes, and shoes, and shoes, and shoes, and shoes, and shoes everywhere.
I have suitcases full of shoes that I will never wear.
I had a time in my life when I used to go to stores and buy shoes that made me laugh,
that made me laugh a lot.
I don't advise you to do that because you never put them on afterwards.
I have a collection of shoes, bags, a lot of stuff, but I wear the same things.
I mean, I always wear my pair of Converse shoes that I've had for eight years,
that I've traveled around with, that have holes in the toe.
I find them so beautiful.
I really, really like them.
I think I'm becoming monomaniacal.
I'll end up with billions of turtlenecks and damaged shoes.
Yeah.