English translation of Céline Sciamma’s screenplay for Portrait of a Lady on Fire/Portrait de la jeune fille en feu

Dear Portrait Nation:

This is an English translation of Céline Sciamma's screenplay for Portrait de la jeune fille en feu that was recently published by Plain Archive. There are a number of typos in the screenplay.  Those that appear to be on Plain Archive's part, such as misattribution of dialogue to the incorrect character, have been corrected.  The typos that seem to have been Sciamma's (though really, there is no way to know for sure) have been preserved.

We have also preserved most of the punctuation as it appears in the Plain Archive screenplay.  The result is what Grey only half-jokingly refers to as Sciamma's tone sociopathy: in many instances where you would expect a question mark, for example, she simply uses a period.

This translation attempts to reflect Sciamma's style of writing and doesn't alter that for the sake of clarity.  There are sentence fragments and also what appear to be camera directions that may be her personal shorthand cues to convey the visual or emotional gist of the scene.  

There are many places where the dialogue here deviates from the official English subtitles seen in the film.  For the most part, these are due to translation choices that attempt to convey what's actually on the page: unlike the subtitles, we weren't constrained by having to compromise about what would be readable onscreen within the time allotted by the rhythms of the scenes.

The translation may be downloaded here.  This document was a true labor of love; we ask only that you not attempt to pass off the work as your own or sell it for profit. And if an official English translation ever becomes available for sale by Céline Sciamma and Lilies Films, please support it to the best of your abilities.

A personal note: I am indebted to @tonovember for her tireless work in putting together the transcript of the Plain Archive screenplay, as well as for formatting the translation into its final form. @morningmightcomebyaccident was invaluable in proofreading my endless drafts and acted as chief critic, goad and cheerleader. @ladyonfire28 contributed greatly to the translation and saved me from making a complete ass of myself on far too many occasions. @hedawolf kindly vetted the Italian dialogue for accuracy.  These brilliant women challenged me to justify my choices, flagged anything questionable for discussion or debate, and frequently came up with the perfect word or phrase that had eluded me.  Any errors or inconsistencies that remain are entirely my fault.  Thank you, Nov, Grey, Aimée and Vittoria: you made this immeasurably better.  And thank you, Céline Sciamma, for creating this exquisite masterpiece.

Dina

Updated 6/3/21: For those who have been asking, I'm afraid I don't have a copy of the actual French script that I can share, but last year several of us put together an unofficial transcript of the film's dialogue (the stage directions are in English). This is the dialogue as it exists onscreen, which is a bit different from what was written on the page. If you're interested, you can download it here: https://pensoakspaper.tumblr.com/post/627910789832081408/dear-portrait-nation-in-the-spirit-of-celebrating

Matthias Haker

Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen - Le Chat et la Grenouille (1898)

Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times

Sandra Oh Knows What's Great About Middle Age

by Lulu Garcia-Navarro - The New York Times Magazine, July 19, 2025

During the Los Angeles fires in January, the actor Sandra Oh, like many of her neighbors, had to make a decision: What would she pack in her car if she had to evacuate? Her first thoughts were about her journals. “There’s a lot of them,” she told me when we spoke last month onstage at the Tribeca Festival, “and I thought: I can’t take them all! Do I take the first ones? Do I take the past 10 years? It just makes you think, What are the things that are very, very important to you?”

Oh has kept diaries since she was a young girl growing up as the daughter of Korean immigrants in Canada. She wrote about her big feelings as a little kid, the discrimination she faced when she landed in Hollywood in her early 20s, the ups and downs of her 10 years playing Dr. Cristina Yang on “Grey’s Anatomy” and her thoughts around her more recent roles, like the intelligence agent Eve Polastri in “Killing Eve.” The diaries, she once wrote, are a place where she is “putting together all the clues of my life.”

That life has been a trailblazing one. None of the characters Oh is most famous for were originally written for an Asian actor, including her upcoming stint as Olivia in Shakespeare in the Park’s “Twelfth Night, ” which opens in August in New York City. Now in her 50s, she is reflecting on what it took to get where she is and how she’s still growing in this “ rich middle” of her life.

It is rare to be able to see a person processing the events in her life even as they are still happening. So it was wonderful when, onstage at Tribeca, Oh read from her diaries for the first time publicly. Then we spoke again, this time not in front of an audience.

We’re going to be reading from some of your journals. I want to start with an excerpt from a momentous day in your career: your last day on “Grey’s Anatomy,” which you were on for 10 seasons. Ten seasons. It was amazing.

I’m interested in you saying that it was joyous. This was the end of the biggest thing in your career. Why were you so happy? I’m still figuring out what that decade of my life was. Not everyone gets to know that they’re leaving a show. I was in a very, very fortuitous position, and I took advantage of it fully, meaning that I wanted to leave well. And I think that for me, one of the proudest things that I have in my life is how I left the show. I was as conscious as possible with all the crew members and actually even with the public. It was basically to help people say goodbye as I was saying goodbye.

You gave an interview this year where you said there’s a chance you’d go back. What would it take? Let me redefine that for a second. What I have noticed — this is 10 years out from leaving the show — is the deep appreciation that I have for the people who appreciate Cristina, and it is that love that has made me go, Oh, the fans really, really, really want it. And for the first time, that’s when I started opening up the idea. But I think to really be true to the people who enjoy your work, you have to be true to yourself. So at this point, I don’t think so.

OK. I want to go back to your roots. You grew up in Canada; your parents moved there from Korea. Your mom was a biochemist. Your dad was a businessman. Clearly both very driven people. How did they influence some of your early ambition? I think that’s a part of when you grow up a child of immigrants. You see your parents work so hard. You know what you have, and you know what you don’t have. And then you can also see what you want in your life and realize that you cannot bother people for that. You’ve got to go do it yourself.

Sandra Oh as a child with her brother in Ottawa.

You’ve described yourself as a very emotional child, and you brought another diary entry that speaks to that. Yes, this is my very first entry, and I just want to actually prompt it with: Don’t worry.

Then:

I turned out OK. [Laughs.]

When you were revisiting this, were you surprised? I just have so much compassion for that young person. I’m so pleased with myself that at 11, with so much feeling, I unconsciously found some place to regulate myself, which was writing. I remember my mom didn’t like it, because I would always be writing, and she knew it was about her. It was like, “What are you always writing?” That has just been a receptacle that started out as an unconscious place to feel safe but eventually helped me figure out who I am.

Did you know that you needed to have artistic expression when you were a kid? Yes, I think I knew it real young. I loved performing, and I loved dancing. I started ballet when I was 4, and I loved it. I just had so much feeling. It was very hard to manage. I really remember my mom with this. She would just let it all happen, just let it run its course. I think it was a natural thing that I found an avenue to be able to express that, because I just had so much of it inside.

Let’s talk about your work today. You’re going to be in Shakespeare in the Park in New York, in one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, “Twelfth Night.” I played Maria in high school, you’ll be happy to know. That’s fantastic.

This one is very starry. It has you, Lupita Nyong’o, Peter Dinklage. How is rehearsal going? I started learning this very early because it’s just a completely different language. And I’m also finding, deep into my midlife, that the way that I learn things now and the way that I work is totally different. It doesn’t stay in my head. It needs to enter my body. I started learning these lines probably in February. Very slow. I’m slow. And it’s just been a joy. When you have time to really play with and wonder what’s underneath these words — it’s been joyous.

A lot of Shakespeare is up to the actor’s interpretation, so what are you thinking about for Olivia? Who is she? Oh, I don’t know. It’s impossible to know what you’re going to do without the other person. That’s the thing about theater, right? When you’re on film — I don’t know how many times I’ve acted to a piece of tape, because that’s just what it is — you can’t see the angle, you can’t see the person, so you’re acting to a piece of tape on a tennis ball. But the theater is all about reacting to what you’re saying and the questions that you’re asking me, so I don’t know how it’s going to be. And I don’t want to settle into anything before I know how Lupita’s going to say something.

I’m thinking of other female characters that you’ve played that are so iconic. The through line, if you think about Cristina and you think about Eve and now Olivia, is that a lot of these roles are about relationships with other women. Clearly you’re drawn to that. I don’t choose it for that, but, well, you’re right. [Laughs] I think also for me, the life of a woman — her full self, our full selves, the fullness and the wholeness of our psyche — I’m always interested in that. I’m always wanting to play in that field, not only for myself but just for us to see it. A lot of the characters I’ve played are not in service of the husband or the hero man. I’m never cast in that, by the way, and I was always so hurt by that, because it’s like: I want to get parts. I want to get parts in big things. And blah blah blah. But really, sometimes those characters are not full-fleshed characters and full-fleshed women.

You’ve brought up something interesting, which is the parts that you have been cast in and the parts you haven’t. I want to ask you here to read from a moment in your life when you encountered real discrimination in Hollywood. You’d just arrived from Canada and were looking for representation, and you took a meeting with a big agent.

What was that like? You know, that experience of meeting that agent and being told a bunch of stuff — it has taken me a long time to untangle that. It’s taken me a very, very long time. The saving grace I think for me was that question or that desire: I want to be an artist. What am I supposed to do? Because I think, ultimately, that’s how I figured it out. I followed that. I didn’t follow what that lady said. I followed the question that I think that I’ve always had or that drive that was there to say, What am I supposed to do? It doesn’t feel like what she just said. I know I’m here for something; I don’t know what. I think that so much of who I’ve become stems from that entry.

Oh in the second season of “Grey’s Anatomy.”Credit...Richard Cartwright/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty Images

What helped you say: That’s not me. I won’t internalize that. But I did. I think I did internalize that profoundly. Not to be too much of a downer, but there is a lot of internalized hatred, racism, sexism. This is the great thing about hitting midlife. I can’t be the only one that it takes this long to try and untangle.

You’re now in your 50s. How are you settling into that? It’s great. Don’t let anyone fool you. It’s tougher on my body. It’s tougher on my mind in certain ways. But it is great, because I feel balanced enough to really start digging into very important questions. When you realize that it is not up to anyone else to free you, it’s up to yourself. So whether you have body issues, things about your past, how you grew up, your trauma — those are the things that now you have some space and are able to handle grappling with. But my joints hurt.

I want to end with your journal. You chose something that you wrote in the last few weeks. I think I write a little differently now. It’s rarely just a straight journal entry. It’s much more poetic, and there are images and drawings and scribbles. But I’ll share this.

Sandra and I spoke again several days later.

Since we spoke, you gave a commencement speech at Dartmouth. I’ve got to tell you, the commencement speech was very stressful for me.

Why was it stressful? It’s the call to speak to young people, especially at this moment. When Shonda [Rhimes] presented the offer to me — it was actually last year, at the end of September ’24. So many things have changed since September ’24. And as things kept on ramping up, the depth of where I felt like I had to go to be able to speak honestly to this group of graduates became much more serious. I was nervous, but I think this is my tendency — to put a lot of pressure on myself to be able to really deliver something that will hopefully be useful to them.

Oh giving the commencement speech at Dartmouth in June. Credit...Katie Lenhart/Dartmouth

In your speech, you did nod to this political moment. You said: “What if I say the wrong thing? What if I were to talk about diversity? Equity? OK, OK. … What if I changed the words? Like ‘including diverse equalness.’ Or ‘diverting equitable inclusivity.’ Would that still be bad? Could I get deported? See, that should be a bad joke, and it is. But it’s not.” What it made me think about was that you’ve said before that part of the reason that you were initially cast in roles early in your career in Canada was because the government there had mandates for multiculturalism. And I was wondering what mandates for inclusion have done for you personally? Huge! Are you kidding me? And because I am an Asian woman, and I also speak French, oh, my gosh. I ticked off so many boxes. It’s a double-edged sword because I couldn’t move so high up the ladder, because the structure of casting and racism is entrenched. But the way that Canada is set up, there is more inclusion. There’s more understanding that people have come from someplace else to this country and that this country was taken from our Indigenous people and First Nations people. And during that time, it wasn’t like I didn’t know it, and that itself causes things that you have to figure out as someone who benefits from D.E.I. But it gave me a foot in the door, and it also gave me a lot of experience.

Through your own experience, I’m wondering what you think we might have lost with this push against D.E.I. And then, because you talked about that double-edged sword, might there be gains because we are re-examining how we deal with this very persistent problem of structural racism? This is such a huge question. I want to start at the beginning of your question, which is, What is lost? For me, what is lost is the real beginning of a recognition that I thought was happening in the past five to seven years. That there was a recognition that racism actually exists, and it’s a structural issue. From my point of view, it is not a blame game. It just is. But it’s trying to come to a truthful or an agreed-upon reality in the larger picture of what we know. Life is not fair. And so the words “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” are good things. To be awake is a good thing. Those are words that I take to heart and that have now been co-opted and vilified. It’s heartbreaking to me, because what’s being lost or what’s being dismantled is a recognition that life is not fair. So that’s the thing that is really painful.

We ended our first interview with one of your journal entries, and there’s a line in there I want to come back to. You wrote that you thought maybe the journals could be “one fell swoop to see all the patterns, where I grew and how I didn’t.” Where do you feel like you still need to grow? Lulu, I want to ask you the same question, because I feel like we are at very similar points in our life — you know, women who are deep into this very rich middle part of your life. And I really appreciate this time, because I also think that only now do you have enough strength and hopefully curiosity to go into the places of asking the question. Why did I do that? Who has been steering the ship? Because now on this back half of my life, I’m the captain of the ship. I am. Me. Now I am really working with the internalization of my own issues, which, my god, we all have. What it is to live in a patriarchal society. What it is to live as a person of color in a predominantly white society. How that has made me who I am now. And what I need to do to free myself from it as much as I can for the rest of my life.