Alice Winocour Talks Working with Angelina Jolie and Ten Years Since Writing Mustang

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Director Alice Winocour's work prioritizes the stories of women going through emotional transformations, such as girl to woman, from liveliness and freedom to aging and mortality. Her latest feature, Couture, brings together all of these threads for a story set in the world of high fashion following a horror director (Angelina Jolie) struggling with a breast cancer diagnosis, and a young South Sudanese model (Anyier Anei) just starting out.

For Winocour, the allure was in telling a story focused on outsiders coming into the insular world of fashion and modeling. "I was interested in those perfect images of fashion. What was behind how those images were made," Winocour tells The Film Maven. "Fashion is entering our world because we live with those fashion images," she says. "Instagram everywhere in the street, but the geopolitics also enters fashion as well, so that's what I wanted to show."

In her desire to look at how the images get made, Winocour looked beyond the usual model narrative. The script includes the story of Anei's Ada struggling to learn the rules of the world she's entered into, to Angele (Ella Rumpf), a freelance makeup artist trying to find something worth writing about alongside the perceived shallowness of her day job. It was an opportunity, for Winocour, to focus on the "perspective of the power" in the industry and exclusively cast her eye on those who are underrepresented.

Working since the 2000s, Winocour came to the prominence of American audiences through her writing work on the 2015 feature Mustang, the story of five orphaned girls whose lives are changed when they're entered into arranged marriages. In a way, where her previous features have focused on individual women, Couture feels akin to Mustang in focusing on a group of women. "I thought it was more contemporary to tell not a story of one woman, but a story of many women, and to have all those different voices," Winocour says. "The film is a self-portrait. I've identified to all the women in the film. It's all the same. It's fragments of myself, women in her 20s, women in her 30s, women in her 40s, and so it's like fragmented women and they reignite, in the end, in the fashion show."