Sandra Hüller and Justine Triet Talk Anatomy of a Fall and Their Whirlwind Year

For W’s Directors Issue, Triet and Hüller reunited for “Baby Alone in Babylon,” a story in which Hüller portrays another complicated woman: Marilyn Monroe.

Directed by Justine Triet

Photographs by Tyler Mitchell

Styled by Allia Alliata di Montereale

Written by Lynn Hirschberg

I: “I’m So Happy”

On a sunny winter’s day in Beverly Hills, Sandra Hüller, wearing a navy Chanel swimsuit, was doing the breaststroke across an amoeba-shaped swimming pool. Hüller, who is nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for Anatomy of a Fall, in which she portrays a woman who is accused of killing her husband, can be wonderfully inscrutable on-screen. In both Anatomy of a Fall and her other 2023 film, the stunning The Zone of Interest, she never relies on movie star poses or mannerisms. But for the W shoot with Justine Triet, the director of Anatomy of a Fall, Hüller would be channeling the life of perhaps the greatest screen goddess of all time: Marilyn Monroe.

It was, however, Marilyn with a twist. “Justine and I were wondering what Marilyn’s life would have been like when she was my age—in her mid-40s,” Hüller told me, before changing into a lemon yellow Louis Vuitton one-piece bathing suit. “Marilyn died before she was 40. Maybe her star would have faded, and maybe she would have become a recluse in her home. We are imagining.”

Triet, who is nominated for Best Original Screenplay (together with her partner in life and work, Arthur Harari), Best Director, and Best Picture Oscars, agreed with Hüller. “Look at this photo of Marilyn,” she said, showing me her phone. Monroe was in her kitchen, with a plate of food nearby. “She has a little sauce around her mouth,” Hüller exclaimed. “She had just eaten too much pasta!” Triet nodded—she clearly loved the small flaw behind the perfection. “Today I want to create a character that is as far away as possible from who Sandra is,” said Triet. “I am low-maintenance,” Hüller explained. “Marilyn was not.” Triet laughed. “Exactly.”

Before becoming a filmmaker, Triet, who is tall, lanky, and naturally elegant, was an artist working in both abstraction and figuration. “But I always loved films and studied classic Hollywood movies,” she said as Hüller went to get her makeup done. Triet lives in Paris and has a fast, unhesitant manner that is instantly engaging. She easily switches between French and English, much in the same way that the characters in Anatomy of a Fall do. “When we wrote the script, we sent it to Sandra, and she had to take French lessons,” said Triet. She and Hüller had worked together on an earlier film, and Triet wrote the part in Anatomy of a Fall specifically for Hüller—even naming the character Sandra. “I thought that would be a way for her to say yes,” Triet explained. “It was a little trap!” Hüller overheard her and came back into the conversation. “But I don’t react to these kinds of traps!” she exclaimed. “I said yes immediately because it was just the greatest script.”

Hüller lives in Leipzig, Germany, with her teenage daughter and her dog, which appeared with her in The Zone of Interest. She grew up in East Germany with very little awareness of Western culture. “We had some American TV, like The A-Team and Knight Rider,” she said. She didn’t see many American movies but did manage to catch Dirty Dancing. “I was, of course, in love with Patrick Swayze,” she admitted. She began acting in theater long before films. Her first movie was Requiem, in 2006, in which she played an epileptic who believes she’s possessed by the Devil.

“Let’s go to the water,” Hüller continued as Triet followed her to the pool’s edge. Hüller began to swim, and Triet took off her sneakers and stood on the steps of the pool in her bare feet. “I love it,” she said. Tyler Mitchell, who was photographing the scene, asked Hüller to stand in the shallow end. The idea was to capture the joy Marilyn clearly felt when she was submerged in water. “I’m so happy,” said Hüller, swimming with her head above the surface, as they always do in the movies. “I don’t ever want to get out of this pool.”

II: “I wanted her to be complicated”

The day after the W shoot, Triet and Harari sat down for lunch at the Four Seasons hotel. The pair wrote Anatomy of a Fall during the Covid lockdown. “We were stuck in our home with an infant and a teenager,” said Harari, referring to their children. “We had no real process.” They had an initial idea—a woman is on trial, and it’s unclear whether she’s guilty or innocent—but they worked on separate scenes individually, in separate rooms. “We had a 9-month-old baby, and we would write during her naps,” said Triet. “I wanted Sandra to be complicated, like Marlene Dietrich in the film Witness for the Prosecution. At first, Dietrich seems like a femme fatale, in total control of men. And then you see another side completely—there’s something much more complex underneath.”

“So,” Harari continued, “we were in the same house, but we would email each other scenes and then meet up in the living room and fight about the scenes we’d written.” Triet laughed. “That’s why the film is about people killing each other,” Harari joked. “But in truth, it was very intense to write.” The film was accepted by the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 and went on to win the Palme d’Or, the top prize. “At the ceremony, I wore a black pantsuit by Chloé and a T-shirt with a panther on it,” Triet recalled. “People drew some significance from the image. It was a crazy night—Sandra was there, and afterwards there were fireworks. I took the award home, and now my daughter treats it like a toy. She puts it in the center of all her dolls.” Triet laughed again. “They dance around the Palme.”

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