Cold Souls: From Chekhov to Chickpeas

Writer-Director Sophie Barthes explains the inspiration behind her debut feature

By Laura Pearson
Published: August 24th, 2009 | 9:10am

Cold Souls, Sophie Barthes' surreal first feature, follows the soul-searching quest of a man named Paul Giamatti played by the inimitable Paul Giamatti. At the film’s outset, Giamatti isn’t yet searching for his soul; in fact, he’d rather ditch it. Immersed in rehearsals for the Chekhov play Uncle Vanya and unable to effectively interpret the eponymous role, he feels frustrated, exhausted, and soul-heavy. That's when he discovers, via a New Yorker article, the cutting-edge procedure of “soul extraction,” in which a man named Dr. Flintstein removes a person’s pesky ol’ soul; the person, in turn, feels overwhelming relief; and the soul is shipped to a storage facility in New Jersey. Giamatti undergoes the procedure but is shocked to learn his soul looks a lot like the key ingredient in hummus and chana masala: yes, his soul resembles a chickpea. To make matters worse, his chickpea-shaped soul is traded on the Russian black market, and Giamatti, who decides soullessness isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be, has to travel to St. Petersburg to reclaim it.

Barthes got the idea for Cold Souls after dreaming of standing in line in a futuristic doctor’s office, holding a box that contained her soul. In the dream, Woody Allen was in line, too, but when he opened his box, he was horrified to find his soul looked like a garbanzo bean. Barthes got to work crafting a screenplay out of this strange dream, but rather than write for Allen (one of her heroes, albeit someone she assumed she wouldn’t have access to for the film), she based the story on Paul Giamatti. He agreed to get onboard. In Cold Souls, Barthes fuses elements of drama and comedy, existential musing and deadpan humor. While the film takes on deep philosophical questions, it maintains a kind of fantastic distance, hinging on spare (often funny) dialogue and plenty of wintry atmosphere — a specific “moodscape” that Barthes and cinematographer Andrij Parekh worked hard to achieve. I spoke with the soulful screenwriter-director about Carl Jung, the Russian Soul, and her willingness to stalk Paul Giamatti (if necessary).

When you initially presented your screenplay to Paul Giamatti, how did he react to its being based on a character named Paul Giamatti?

He’s a very modest actor, you know, so I think he was a bit surprised that someone would write for him. When I first approached him, I told him about the dream I had, so we connected through that, and then I told him I’d written [the part] for him. He was actually really accepting and nice about it. I was mortified, but he was pretty cool.

Did you consider what would happen if he had declined the role? Would you have rewritten it for someone else or were you pretty set on him?

I got really stubborn about having him. I was ready to stalk him if he didn’t cooperate! Once you write for someone, in your mind, you can no longer separate [him or her] from the story... Of course, in Cold Souls, it’s not really him; it’s just my idea of who Paul Giamatti is from seeing American Splendor and Sideways and the kind of roles he’s been doing. But I didn’t want to do the movie if he wasn’t going to participate.

I think I read in another interview that he thought he didn’t have a distinctive enough personality or character to play “himself.” But he often plays some version of a sad, slouchy guy, which I think works so well in your film.

Yeah, he has these kinds of Woody Allen qualities — fidgety, neurotic, agitated — but the same time, he’s very present and soulful, so I think it’s a humble thing to say he has no persona. He doesn’t want to compare himself to big comedians like Woody Allen, but ... I think as an actor he has an amazing range — from slapstick to melancholic to any kind of nuance you ask him to do. He could literally do any role, so maybe he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as the neurotic New York guy.

Speaking of going from slapstick to melancholic, that’s an aspect of your film I really liked. Just when you think it’s going to stay focused on this existential questioning, you throw in the hilarious fact that his soul is shaped like a chickpea. Were you always trying to achieve this blend of drama and comedy?

Yeah, the whole idea was to try to follow a bit of the Chekovian tone. I love Chekhov because he’s a master at infusing his plays with this very strange shift of mood. Some people see the plays as tragedies, but I’ve always seen them as tragic comedies. There’s so much irony and humor, but it’s a very discreet humor. With [Cold Souls], we pushed the humor a little more to be a bit more physical at times. It’s a tightrope, because you’re asking a lot from the audience: You’re asking them to be sad and melancholic, and then the next second they have to be laughing. But I think life is like this. In one day you go through all these shifts of mood.

When you had the dream that prompted your screenplay, was it triggered by something in your waking life or was it just kind of an off-the-wall dream?

I had seen Sleeper, the Woody Allen film, maybe a day or two days before. And I was reading Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, which is about what modernity has been doing to the human soul and how much we’re neglecting our souls, which can show up as neuroses or depression. I think both things, Sleeper and this book from Jung, kind of collided in my mind.

What was your motivation to include the Russian element, the part of the storyline that deals with “soul-trafficking”?

I wanted to play a bit with the cliché of the Russian Soul ... It’s interesting to see how nations perceive their own souls. It’s a theme that is very present in Russian art and literature, even in Chekhov’s plays. Also, I had this book by Nikolai Gogol called Dead Souls, a satire of period Russia, and it’s about a man who is basically trading souls to get some tax exemption from dead peasants. So this theme interested me. The film is about souls and “soul-trafficking,” so it made sense that [Giamatti] would go to Russia.

Besides providing thematic content, the Russian storyline works really well with the atmosphere of the movie — the winter vibe. Did you set out with an initial plan of how the film would look?

Yeah, I spent a lot of time with Andrij Parekh, the cinematographer and also my life partner, going to the museum and looking at paintings and photography. We had a visual treatment, with pictures from Bill Henson, an Australian photographer; Deborah Turberville, an American photographer who spent a lot of time in St. Petersburg; and some Francis Bacon paintings. We had maybe 100 pages of images, and we would look at them very frequently to stay in this kind of winter tone. Then we made some rules to create the kind of mood we wanted to achieve. We said that the movie could not have any primary colors — no red, no yellow; we had to stay within a very pastel palette. I think the great thing is that we didn’t really have a budget — it was a very tiny movie — but at least we had a lot of time to prepare visually, so that was nice.

One of my favorite parts of the film is when, after his soul is extracted, Paul Giamatti attempts to perform the Uncle Vanya part again. I liked how you portrayed his soullessness; instead of acting hollow or robotic or even evil, he’s simply unable to convey any emotional nuance. It’s an interesting portrayal of not having a soul — like you no longer have any emotional layers.

This was completely the idea. It wouldn’t be interesting if not having a soul was just being a robot, because I think being soulless is much closer to something we experience every day. Sometimes there are days where we feel soulless, like nothing can affect us ... I think we go through various states of depth and shallowness, and that’s what we wanted to explore. The film is not really trying to say what the soul is. I mean, some people in Q&As were like, “But you didn’t give a definition of the soul!” I think the movie is really trying to avoid providing a definition, because I think the beauty of the soul is that it’s mysterious.

I was thinking of those books, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and I wondered if you ever considered maybe a book tie-in called Chicken Soup for the Chickpea Soul?

[Laughs]. I almost used that book in the film! At one point, I had the idea that Paul would be in bed reading it, but then I thought, maybe it was just a little too much.