France’s Elsa Zylberstein Draws on Viral Lockdown Sketches for Directorial Debut ‘My Best Life’ (EXCLUSIVE)
French actress Elsa Zylberstein is making her directorial debut with "My Best Life," a comedy-drama inspired by her viral lockdown sketch series "Mytho du soir." Rather than adapting the sketches directly, she and co-writer Michael Pierrard kept only the central fantasist character and built an entirely new story around her, drawing on the huge online response the original videos generated to explore themes of imagination, family and self-invention.
In the film, Zylberstein plays a failed actress whose mother suffers a stroke and wakes believing her daughter has become an international film star; rather than correcting the misapprehension, the heroine sustains an increasingly elaborate fiction to protect her mother. Zylberstein, who co-directs with longtime collaborator Michael Pierrard, cited Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy" and films by David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson as influences, and said the roughly 60 original "Mytho du soir" sketches averaged around 80,000 views each on Instagram.
In short
- Elsa Zylberstein directs debut film "My Best Life," out now
- Inspired by her viral pandemic sketch series "Mytho du soir"
- Story follows a mother-daughter deception about stardom, imagination
Explained simply
Elsa Zylberstein is a French actress who has turned to directing for the first time with a feature film called "My Best Life." The project grew out of her online sketch series filmed during lockdown, which centred on a character who fabricated elaborate stories about her own life.
In the new film, Zylberstein plays a failed actress whose mother suffers a stroke and wakes up believing her daughter has become an international film star. Rather than correcting her mother's misunderstanding, the character maintains and elaborates the false story to protect her mother's well-being, creating increasingly complicated situations.
Zylberstein's original lockdown sketches, called "Mytho du soir," generated significant online interest, with each episode averaging around 80,000 views on Instagram. She developed the film with co-writer and co-director Michael Pierrard, keeping the central character from the sketches but building an entirely new story around themes of imagination, family and self-invention.
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