Biography

Older sister of Carla Bruni and younger sister of Virginio Bruni Tedeschi (1959 - July 4th, 2006).

As her family became a target of the communist Red Brigades in Italy, they moved to Paris in 1975.

She wrote, directed and starred in A Castle in Italy (2013). The movie was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 and is in many ways autobiographical.

Sister-in-law of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Aunt of Giulia Sarkozy (second child of Carla).

In March 2009 Valeria and her former boyfriend, French actor Louis Garrel, adopted Celine, a Senegalese baby girl. Celine was born in 2008 and was 6 months old.

[press conference for A Castle in Italy (2013) at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival] What we wanted to show in this film was two people: there was the mother and Louise, for whom faith is very important. The mother is deeply involved in faith - there are disputes, quarrels, but you have the impression that she's a real believer. With Louise, there is a scene that we cut out during the editing; she was a believer when younger, but she's lost this belief, so she tries to knock on the door, she tries to open up the door to belief and to faith, but she somehow seems to remain outside all the time. She's not far from believing - it's a sort of a borderline situation which intrigues me a very great deal. You have this issue of both faith and superstition. We wanted to talk about someone who was trying to enter this house of faith.

[Cannes press conference for A Castle in Italy (2013)] Often the desire to make a film is based on a scene. I wrote a scene where a man and woman are quarreling, you don't know why they're quarreling but they keep quarreling, and after three or four pages you finally understand that they're going to do an in vitro fertilization. And he changes his mind during the trip to the clinic, and that was the first scene that I wrote. Then what do I do? I show it to Noémie [Noémie Lvovsky] and Agnès [Agnès de Sacy], I say, "Do you like it?", if they say "Yes, it's pretty good", then we generally say we're going to produce a whole film. The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov was a great source of inspiration. I also wanted to shoot in the family house, which we didn't own any longer, I thought, "Maybe people will lend it to us free of charge", and that is in fact what occurred. It's a place I filmed in Il est plus facile pour un chameau... (2003) and, from a cinematographic stance, it is full of inspiration and I could imagine people calling from a window - the brother who calls from a window - that's something I wanted to have in the film right away. The film occurred to me in images - we do the opposite of many other people - we write lots and lots of scenes, bits of dialogue, images, and then we try to create a whole story and put things into place. This takes much longer than when you actually write a story and then make the dialogues. It entails a huge amount of work to create a story that really is coherent, but Chekhov's book was a source of tremendous inspiration for us.

[2019 interview, on why her films as a director are often semi-autobiographical] It helps me breathe better, it's my way of putting oxygen into my life. Giving meaning to senseless things like separation, death, desertion and sorrow.....I've always got this lump in my throat, it's been there most of my life. The anxiety is always there, and my job is to try and turn that into something joyful. It's true that it makes things easier to have my family and friends play in my films: they understand exactly what I expect of them. But they are also great actors.

[on The Summer House (2018)] We are all in the same boat: we're all lonely and we're all going to die, we all have dreams and desires, but we cannot ignore our background or where we come from - even when it comes to love. You can be imprisoned by your social status. The character of the scriptwriter wants to be free to love the cook, but in the end, she's afraid because she's locked up inside her social class. I am wealthy. I come from the bourgeoisie, that is my story, and that is also why we had to leave Italy - because of the Red Brigades. There's something about that which makes me very uncomfortable. When I get to play characters that come from a different social background, I feel more free. I take great pleasure in those roles.

[press conference for Forever Young (2022) at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival] A friend of mine [Thierry de Peretti] said to me one day, "You should make a film about the theatre school." I said "No, I've already done a film about the theatre, I've already shot in Les Amandiers." So I dismissed the idea. A few years later, he was speaking to me again on a day when I wasn't feeling very good and sometimes when you're not feeling so good things seem very real and true. Ten minutes after that, I found myself in the middle of a Gay Pride parade and I started to feel a bit better - it was my first Gay Pride - and when I talked about this to Noémie [Noémie Lvovsky] and Agnès [Agnès de Sacy], they felt this was an obvious choice. It seemed such an obvious idea that hadn't occurred to me before. And I thank Thierry very much - giving someone the idea to make a film is a huge gift.