Set in alternate-universe present day versions of frozen-over Russia and the Manhattan theatrical intelligensia (the latter resembling something Charlie Kaufman might have come up with, minus the self-deprecating suspicion of success that leads him to mock the careerist stars of Needleman in a Haystack), Sophie Barthes‘ very strong first feature Cold Souls stars Paul Giamatti as an actor named Paul Giamatti, a movie star struggling to get into the character of Uncle Vanya on the stage. His agent points him to an article in the New Yorker about an extraction and cold storage facility for souls on Roosevelt Island. At the end of his rope, Paul goes through the procedure, but find that soulless, his performance is even worse — imagine Vanya as interpreted by a handsy William Shatner. It’s when Giamatti attempts to get back his original soul (shaped, in one of the film’s best running jokes, like a chick pea) that he discovers that the pristine New York clinic where he had the procedure is a front for a roiling Russian soul black market, and with the help of an attractive female soul mule (Dina Korzun), embarks on a journey to St. Petersberg.

In an interview at the Sundance Film Festival last week, Barthes discussed reading Jung, dreaming about Woody Allen, and why she hopes Putin doesn’t read film blogs.

So why would Paul Giamatti’s soul look like a chickpea?

Well, it came from this dream. Do you want me to repeat the dream?

Yeah, please.

In 2005 I had this dream that I was in a strange office, which looked like the office in the movie. Woody Allen was in the office, and we were like a group of patients holding boxes. A secretary who worked there came and said that our souls had been extracted and were in those boxes and the doctor would come and he would assess our problems, our metaphysical problems, by looking at the shape of our souls. And when Woody Allen’s turn came, he opened his box and his soul is a chickpea. So he’s super furious and neurotic and he said he made more than 40 movies, there’s no way he has a chickpea soul.

And at that time in the dream — because Woody Allen is my idol — I’m freaking out and thinking, “Oh my God, his soul is a chickpea. What is mine going to look like?” So I opened the box and then the dream ended. So I didn’t see the soul, you know. [laughs] The shape of my soul.

But at that time I was watching a lot of Woody Allen comedies. I was in between writing two things, and I was just in the south of France, watching comedies: Sleeper, Love and Death, and all those Woody Allen movies, so I think something happened in my brain. And I was reading Carl Jung’s “Man in Search of a Soul.” So something connected. I don’t know.

Actually, I didn’t think of it that way, but the film does kind of have a Sleeper vibe to it.

Yeah, totally. I love Sleeper. And then I was watching Sleeper, I think two nights before I had the dream, so it’s certainly connected, you know.

Yeah. It’s got that sort of dry, deadpan humor in a science fiction context. I mean, would you think of it as science fiction?

Yeah. I think it’s like this kind of weird science fiction, like being in France in Alphaville, the Jean-Luc Godard movie. I love this kind of science fiction. He shot in Paris in the ’60s and he didn’t change anything in the city, but it’s the way he framed it, and it’s beautiful. I really like that kind of science fiction. It’s today, but it’s a little bit off, you know?

Yeah.

Sophie: I don’t like the big special effects science fiction.

Exactly. Your film is so interesting because it’s not really reliant on special effects at all. It seems like it’s all practical to me. Are there any special effects at all?

No, no, no, none at all. The machine was built by an artist, Eric Lahey, who I met at the Sundance Lab. He loved the script, and he was sketching machines for months, and one day he was just trying to make it this kind of giant vagina. [laughs] He made the machine in his garage with his brother, and then they drove it from Oregon to New York in a truck. I mean, everything in the movie was handmade. Except the soul stimulator, which came from the UK and was an entertainment pod, and I wasn’t really happy. I prefer to do things with the hands. It’s more soulful, because it’s handmade.

So I love the territory of science fiction, and Paul Giamatti loves that too. He’s a big science fiction reader. He loves to be creative. And we always talked about how cool it is to make cardboard science fiction.

You were talking about Alphaville and how it’s set in the present day, but different. Would you say that Cold Souls takes place in the future, or is it more kind of an alternate reality of now?

I think it’s completely an alternate reality of now. I think if the procedure was available, and I read it in the “New Yorker” I would believe it. It’s the next Prozac. [laughs]

But I think it came out of from the last eight years. I wrote it in 2005, and I was feeling, that physically, my soul was shrinking, with the government we had and the country was such a mess. I don’t know, I think unconsciously the war’s inside of your head, and you want to find some kind of escapism, do something that is surreal to get out of that reality that was so gloomy and kind of depressing.

So it’s always a product - I think when you write, it’s a product of that historical moment. As a foreigner, I was living in New York, and I was like, “What am I doing in this country?” I’m was so depressed. And now I feel — I’m in a different mood, you know? I would write something different now, I imagine.

I wanted to talk about the philosophical ideas that form the basis of the movie. It starts with a Descartes quote. I’m interested in what other concepts you were thinking about in terms of what a soul is, and what it would actually mean to have it taken out of your body.

For me, the metaphor of the film, and what I believe, is that the soul is like a strange muscle. That if you don’t take care of it, it can shrink, and if you explore it, your soul expands.

And it’s like what Jung talks about, when he talks about the process of individuation. If you look inside yourself, and you try to give love to yourself as a human being, then you grow. Or you can just be in denial and just let yourself deflate, like shrinking. That’s how I see the soul. Almost an organ, you know. Maybe it’s a bit romantic.

So, did you write it for Paul?

Yeah. When I had the dream, I thought for two minutes to write it for Woody Allen, but I thought I would never get him for a first film. And I thought he would direct the movie. So then I wrote it for Paul, as Paul Giamatti. When I gave him the script, it said “Paul Giamatti,” and I was like, “I’m crazy. The guy is going to think I’m a nutcase.”

You didn’t know him before?

I didn’t know him at all. I met him at this Nantucket thing. And he loved it. Because I think he writes his dreams, he’s uses his dreams a lot. So we connected on the dream thing. And he’s a very modest guy, so it wasn’t a vanity project that attracted him. But he told me the first time he read the script, what he liked the most was the dream-like feeling and the deadpan humor. The two things he liked.

Did he make any sort of suggestions, like, “Well, I would do this differently”?

Well, it was a bit tense at one point, because I tried to imagine him — and he’s so humble and modest — and he said, “I don’t have a persona. I’m not like Woody Allen, no one knows me.” And it’s like, “No, you do. When you see Sideways, American Splendor, you do have a persona. If people try to imagine you, they imagine you as this neurotic, goofy guy.”

So he pushed me in the rewrites. But he was happy with the character becoming its own character. And he is very different in life than the character. It’s a fantasy of Paul Giamatti. It’s not him, really. It’s flirting with that: who is he really? No one knows. I don’t know. [laughs]

That clip of a Paul Giamatti film that the soul mule rents from a Russian video store — that was a fake film, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s completely fake. This is supposed to be an homage to Manhattan. You know that scene where he’s under the bridge with them kissing? And then we just added a crazy line of dialogue: “Let’s go somewhere and make love.”

Did Paul relate to the idea of soul burnout?

Yeah, I don’t want to speak for him but I remember we met just before shooting and it was after John Adams. And John Adams was an extremely draining role for him. And he said, “I feel like the character in the script. I feel completely burnt.” He needed a vacation I think. He was very exhausted.

One of the things that I thought was really amazing was he seems to give three really distinct performances of Vanya. How did you work out things like how he would behave with the different states of his soul and how that would affect his performance within the film?

This is the most difficult thing because we can’t talk about it in theoretical terms. We met and we had lunch and were like, “OK, what is soulessness?” We were trying to define it.

We thought that OK, it cannot be robotic because then it’s not interesting. It’s just like there’s nothing. It’s a caricature of soulessness. We thought it’s funnier if in soulessness, we could see people that we know. You know, like some people are oblivious to your feelings or they’re insensitive.

So we were trying to portray soulessness but still have some sort of human recognizable feeling in that. And that’s why I am so happy I got Paul because I don’t think many actors could play it out. Pull it out? Pull it? [laughs]

Pull it off.

Yeah, Pull it off. Because it’s super tough. The guy has to go from numb to feeling too much to doing a performance. Paul is super modest and he says that for him the scariest part was to do Vanya well. But I think he does Vanya well without any problem.

I think the most difficult part was to do Vanya badly. Paul Thomas Anderson said it takes a very good actor to play a bad actor. And  joking and he says, “No, it takes a bad actor to play a bad actor.” [laughs] It’s actually really difficult when he does the William Shatner kind of thing.

I was going to say, as the soulless actor, he seems totally inspired by William Shatner!

That’s the choice he made. He made that choice. But I was trying to tell him that he would take every direction literally. This is soulessness, like you don’t have any more distance for irony. So the mimics he does is supposed to be an actor taking directions at first, completely in a literal way. This is the choice he made.

The last thing I want to talk to you about is the part of the movie about Russia. I can see how you could have made a choice to talk about just the soul business and an actor getting his soul removed, but you chose to include this issue of global trafficking as well. Why did you make that choice, and also what was specifically interesting to you about having the business be a Russian thing?

I love this idea of flirting with cliche. And the cliche of the Russian soul is one that I think is very funny and interesting. Whenever you talk to Russian people about the Russian soul, you get into this crazy conversation.

And I don’t know. I grew up with reading Gogol and Chekhov. So I love Russian literature. I wanted to do something in Russian at one point. And I thought there was something very poetic about Russian mules, women that traffic.

I think because that side of the movie is a bit more melancholic, it reinforces the comedy in a way. I didn’t want to do something too formulaic. The movie could have taken place only in the US and be only about Paul and his journey and be much more conventional.

I wanted to do something a bit different, like explore another country or visually bring something that is different. Naturally I thought it would add some more melancholy to the film to have them physically going to Russia and going on a journey to get his soul back so far away. The soul was with him, then he has to go all around the world to get back what he had.

And that’s a metaphor of life sometimes. I think we do these things that there’s something that is right in front of our eyes. We don’t see it. And when we don’t have it, we miss it. But it’s gone and far away and we have to get it back.

Were you trying to say anything about the current state of Russia?

Yeah. I’m not Russian, so I have to be careful of what I say. But all the Russian friends I have, and I travel a lot to Russia, and I think the Russian actors and people that we worked with in Russia couldn’t stop laughing when they read the script. They were like, “Yeah, that’s what it is. We all like to talk about the Russian soul. What are we doing to the Russian soul?”

The country is a bit frozen right now, politically. There is so much nationalism with Putin. So it’s in a weird situation. I don’t want to say transition phase, but you feel that it’s a bit, in terms of cinema and all this, the country is a bit on a standstill. There isn’t anything really great happening right now in the arts world. And it’s kind of eaten by capitalism.

Now maybe with the recession we are going to see the resurgence of more interesting stuff from the arts. Right now the country when we went was a little bit in a weird phase, I think. Without judging it, because I think the Russian culture, with all the greatness of the Russian literature was the 19th century and 20th century. You are kind of looking like, “What’s going on in Russia right now?”

Well, culturally, it all seems extremely influenced by what’s going on on the political level.

Yeah, yeah. I’m going to get shot. [laughs] I’m going to get poisoned. [laughs]

No, no, I don’t think Putin reads my movie blog. [laughs]

You never know. You never know.