Is Chevalier Based on a True Story?
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“I learned about Joseph Bologne when I was in high school,” says Stefani Robinson, the writer of the new film Chevalier, about the life and times of the trailblazing musician who lives in 1700s Paris. “My mom had given me a book that mentioned him, and while it wasn't an exhaustive history, immediately I thought, this person is amazing. How were all of his accomplishments—master equestrian, master fencer, master violinist, master composer, leading an all-Black regimen during the French Revolution, hanging out in Versailles with Marie Antoinette—real?”
Robinson’s interest in Bologne would stick with her, as would a notion that his story was one that deserved a larger spotlight. “Even as a kid, I was like, ‘Someone should make a movie about this guy who feels larger than life,’” she says. “I'm 30 now, and I learned about this man when I was 15, and throughout that entire time no one had made the movie. I thought, surely someone's going to do this.
That somebody turned out to be Robinson herself. And when Stephen Williams, who directed the film, first read her script, it had exactly the impact Robinson had hoped.
“First and foremost, Stephani wrote an amazing script; from line one, it just leapt off the page,” he says. “I had never heard of Bologne, it should be said for the purposes of being completely candid, transparent, and thorough, until I encountered Stephani's script, and I had no idea that this person, this who the American President John Adams referred to as ‘the most accomplished man in all of Europe’ existed.”
Still, when the two went about making Bologne’s life story into a film—which boasts a cast including Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Bologne, Lucy Boynton as Marie Antoinette, and Samara Weaving as the singer (and love interest) Marie-Josephine—they knew they had to do their best to tell the truth of his experience without making a documentary. How’d they do it?
Tell the Truth When You Can
While Chevalier is a fictionalized account of Bologne’s life, the movie does use historical events to guide it. Take, for example, the real-life scandal caused when a trio of France’s best-known opera singers sent a petition to Marie Antoinette protesting the possibility of Bologne taking a top job at the Paris Opera.
“The petition that the Three Divas presented to the monarchy to prevent Joseph from assuming the post of the directorship of the Paris Opera was a real event,” Williams says. “That actually happened and was a pivotal point in Joseph Bologne starting to understand the conditionality and the limitations of his ambition and the social order that he found himself in.”
He continues, “Ultimately, we were guided by this great quote from Tom Stoppard, who said, ‘Facts are facts, but truth is something else entirely and is a product of the imagination.’ In many ways, that was what we were trying to offer.”
Stay True to the Spirit When You Can’t
“That opening sequence is, in fact, not actually historically true,” Williams says of the film’s first scene, which finds Bologne crashing a Mozart concert and showing up the maestro. “But it’s spiritually true. They were contemporaries and peers in some true sense of the word. That opening sequence is a bit of a haiku that the rest of the movie endeavors to expand on.”
And even if the event depicted on screen didn’t happen to Bologne as far as we know, it’s not without historical precedence. “It is inspired by a real event,” Stephens says. “We understand that during the 1960s when Eric Clapton was a member of Cream and was performing in London, Jimi Hendrix invited himself on stage and proceeded to outplay Clapton and shred him off the stage. Clapton ran backstage and asked of the nearest person he could find, ‘Who the hell is that guy?’
Do Your Research
While Robinson’s interest in Bologne began with a book her mother gave her, it wouldn’t be the last reading she did on her subject. “The things in the movie that aren't capital T true, were inspired by things that were,” Robinson says. “I ordered biographies—and obviously there are not as many biographies on Joseph as there are on say, Mozart, but they do exist. I got my hands on children's books, there was a lot of time on YouTube watching his music being performed in a contemporary way. I was getting my hands on any document I could that mentioned him, even in passing, and seeing if I could get a friend who spoke French to translate it for me. Steph and I also did a load of research on the people around him, including Marie Antoinette to understand who she was and how she functioned within French society.”
Also on the reading list? Books about the French Revolution, orchestras, and opera. “If I couldn't get my hands on information about Bologne the person, it was just about getting everything I could about his world,” Robinson says. “From then on it was, ‘Okay, what materials exist now that could be helpful?’”
Cast a Wide Net
It wasn’t just history books that helped bring Chevalier to life, but pop culture, too. A Bologne-like character makes a brief appearance in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, but there was another film that Robinson found helpful to her work. “I watched Purple Rain a whole bunch,” she says. “I was trying to get into Prince's psychology and how operatic he was as a person who existed in the 1980s. It was a lot of being open to absorbing everything; when your brain is full of as much information as possible, you can filter out what is most emotionally resonant with the story you're trying to tell. Stephen was with me, shoulder to shoulder throughout that whole process. It was a lot of us cobbling articles and chapters of things together and reciting them through Zoom for hours.”
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