James Frain's Passion for Vigo
from Hot Tickets (1998)
by James Frain
Jean Vigo was a French film director who died in 1934 aged only 29. He was racked by ill health, and tortured by the memory of his anarchist father's murder when he was a child, yet he made a handful of movies that have influenced film-makers in the decades after his death. Elements of these films ~ especially Zero de Conduite and L'Atalante ~ help form the narrative of his life.
Before being sent the script I was not familiar with Jean Vigo and his work. When I read it, I thought it was a fictional story, and in that context felt it worked well. That was important to me because, even though it's a homage, it had to stand up on it's own. But as I learned more, the thing that I found appealing about him was the intensity with which he lived his life, and loved his wife Lydu (played by Romane Bohringer) 
~ which is central to the film. Despite the fact that he was dying and the clock was against him, he was determinedly living in a spontaneous, energising and enervating way.
Peter Ettedgui, who wrote the first draft of the screenplay, described meeting some people who worked with Vigo and were still deeply affected by the man over half a century afterwards. not just as an artist, but as a man.
They said he was a great practical joker, someone who really siezed life, so the fact that he was dying wasn't a depressing thing.
There's biographical information
available on him of course, but my approach to the role just involved watching his films and imagining what kind of spirit would have come up with this combination of humour, strange satirical surrealism and anarchistic rage. And then having the confidence to marry this documentary style and the love story. But it's all there, all the things that were going on in his films give you clues as to what sort of personality might have been behind them.