Cold Souls, is a surreal comedy in which souls can be extracted and traded as commodities. The film stars Paul Giamatti as himself, agonizing over his interpretation of Uncle Vanya. Paralyzed by anxiety, he stumbles upon a solution via a New Yorker article about a high-tech company promising to alleviate suffering by extracting souls.  Giamatti enlists their service - only to discover that his soul is the shape and size of a chickpea.  His expects to reunite his soul with his body after the performance, but all goes wrong when a soul-trafficker borrows Giamatti’s soul to give to a talentless, soap-opera actress.

Writer and director, Sophie Barthes, gives the details on creating the bizarre plot and how even though she couldn’t get Woody Allen to play the lead; Paul Giamatti’s was a perfect soul.

Q: How did you come up with the offbeat plot for the film?

Barthes: Three years ago, I found an old edition of C.G. Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul. According to Jung, the drama of modern man is his refusal to live the totality of his being. He tends to ignore the burden of his soul, believing that it is called freedom but, like Sisyphus, he is condemned to roll his stone up the hill. The night I finished the book, I had a strange dream. I had also just watched one of my favorite Woody Allen film, Sleeper. A strange synaptic connection must have happened in my brain. In my dream, I am waiting in line to see a doctor in a white futuristic office. I am holding a box, like everybody else in line. A secretary explains that the box contains our soul, which has just been extracted. The doctor will examine it and assess our psychological problems. Woody Allen is also in line, just in front of me! When his turn comes, he discovers that his soul is a pale yellow seed: a chickpea. Woody Allen is furious; he insists it must be a mistake – with all the movies he made, his soul cannot have the shape and size of a chickpea! At this point, I feel extremely anxious. I look down at my container to check the shape of my soul but at that precise moment the dream ends. I never saw the shape of my soul.

Q: How did you choose your lead?

Barthes: My first impulse was to write for Woody Allen, but I thought I would most probably never have access to him. Later on, I saw American Splendor and was so impressed by Paul Giamatti’s presence and emotional charge on screen that I decided to write the script for him. I like to write for a specific actor in mind, good actors are an infinite source of inspiration. I was lucky enough to win a screenplay competition at the Nantucket Film Festival in 2006 and, by coincidence, to meet Paul Giamatti in person, who was also attending the event to present an award to Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor.

Q: What were some of your influences when writing this script?

Barthes: Cold Souls deals with philosophical concepts but I hope that the approach remains playful. I’m very influenced by Surrealism as a movement (film, painting, literature, poetry) and the Theater of the Absurd, which is not really a movement but a number of playwrights (Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Tardieu, etc…) sharing stylistic characteristics: a tone mixing comedy, satire, irony, melancholy and tragedy, characters caught in dreamlike, nightmarish or hopeless situation, dialogue flirting with clichés and nonsense.  I’m also interested in poetic science fiction, low-fi from the 60’s like Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville.

Q: What does this film hope to convey about the soul and its purpose?

Barthes: To convince Paul to extract his soul, Dr. Flintstein finds a compelling argument: “A twisted soul is like a tumor, better to remove it!” Flintstein incarnates a naïve scientific positivism: the body is a simple skeleton wrapped in muscles, filled with organs and orchestrated by the mind. The soul is no more than a troublemaker. I believe that the desire to be artificially released from the troubles of the soul (from drugs to soul extraction and soul rental) is part of our obsessive quest for well-being. A depression or breakdown could be an opportunity for introspection, a rite of passage for the soul to grow and expand. But it’s perceived as a disease and must be treated immediately. Maybe the soul is a strange muscle, and it is possible to develop it or to let it shrink.