The French procedural is having a moment right now. Earlier this year, ’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar was Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, and Dominik Moll’s The Night of the 12th won six César Awards, including Best Film. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet became the third woman to win the prestigious festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, for her courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall.

Each of these films has layers beyond the investigation and questioning of the crime, but Triet’s looks closely at the layers of truth within and outside of a courtroom: How a relationship looks in the context of a trial versus as observed by the child at home; how words from the past—from an argument or a book—can be litigated; how evidence doesn’t inherently remove doubt.

In Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra Hüller stars as Sandra, a successful novelist. (Coincidentally, Hüller also stars in Jonathan Glazer’s experimental Auschwitz drama The Zone of Interest, which won second prize at Cannes, the Grand Prix.) We meet Sandra during a press interview at the remote home she shares with her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner). Her husband, whom we do not see, blasts music on repeat from upstairs until Sandra has no choice but to cut the interview short. The journalist leaves; Daniel takes the dog for a walk.

Some minutes or hours later, Samuel has died, having fallen from the house’s top story to the snow below. An investigation and trial commence to determine if it was an accident, suicide or murder. The trial expands into areas of their marriage that Daniel was shielded from, and he must learn how to navigate the evidence and his own personal feelings.

We were both attached to how Triet masterfully uses side characters to dive into the central relationships of husband-and-wife, mother-and-son. But while these angles look at Sandra’s main arc as being guilty or innocent and in relationship to the man and child in her life, there’s an absence of consideration for her as a whole person. She’s not just on trial, she is a widow experiencing the immense loss of her husband and, potentially, her son—in part, due to her personal success opposite her husband’s lack thereof.

In her converation with Hüller, Adesola expressed this thought; the actress was grateful to receive the question because “nobody has asked before because nobody is really concerned about her grief.” Hüller continues in the video below: “If we speak about colors, painting a character, [grief] was the main color that I was playing with. Nobody really cared about that, because they were just busy with the question of if she’s guilty or not.”

Following their conversation, Triet subjected herself to our cross-examination about 50 Cent, procedural dramas, directing an award-winning dog performance and the shattering of truth for a child.

This is a family drama, a relationship drama, a courtroom drama, but the trial becomes more about moments of decline in a relationship. Can you describe your storytelling process? Did you start the script zeroing in on a thread and then build outward? How did you arrive at Samuel’s decline of personal success contributing to the decline of the couple?
Justine Triet: We wanted to dive into the complexity of that couple. But in going through the courtroom—and because many people are talking instead of her—she’s there to justify herself, to take some of herself back. The courtroom, too, lets her dispose of a narrative she might have held before about their relationship, about her success and his lack of success, and she is afforded the chance to reappropriate her own life. It was an original way to come inside the story through that couple. I did not want to have many flashbacks, but I wanted to start with a lack of images, a lack of precision, and let other people explain her life through evidence. Only in processing this does she get to tell her story, and it becomes more truthful than she might have been otherwise.

The relationship decline is really the center of the movie; the question of that couple, the reciprocity and the way people try to say, ‘Okay, this is your fault. This is my fault.’ I lived through many, many things in my life and sometimes I get very anxious about it. Sometimes I feel I have an emotion, a very precise story in my life, and then a few years later, people say to me, ‘No, that’s not my reality. That’s not the story.’ Sometimes people have an opinion that’s very different, not just in fault but even along the way. The subjectivity of opinion is really interesting, the way time destroys the objectivity of a situation and separates people between thoughts and truths.

I was obsessed with the idea of trying to say everybody has a point of view and, of course, in the argument scene, to show how it’s a little courtroom inside the couple. It’s a baby courtroom at that moment; it’s a battle of ideas. Before the blows, people are trying to defend their position. This small courtroom is played in a real courtroom and that makes it different.

You're doing something very interesting with Daniel—at a young age, he is learning how truth is maybe different in a courtroom than in his own experience.
When I was younger, I thought that that place, the courtroom, was the place where truths emerged. When I got older, I was like, ‘It’s a place for fiction and it’s a place for a battle between two fictions: the fiction of the prosecutor and the fiction of the defense lawyer.’ Daniel is in a very pure vision of truth that he must navigate. He comes to a place in the movie where he has to say, ‘Okay, I have to think of the angles within the truth.’ I think the question of the whodunnit is too neat. I liked playing with that.

The courtroom becomes a public space for all the worst moments someone can have in a relationship, and it forces you to think of the worst things you’ve said in interpersonal moments, and how that might look completely different if it were brought up in a case like this, through a narrow, confined vision.
Absolutely. It’s a nightmare. To get back to what I said before about lacking imagery in the beginning, when we started the writing process, we were obsessed with what was said. We wanted to put the spectator in the same position as Daniel and the jury, and we were upset by what we were going to discover, and we were also upset by the idea of purposefully not showing everything. The song is so important, because in the writing process a song is something you are lacking, and when you miss something, you start to fill in gaps and to imagine the worst.

But the argument scene is just sound. We don’t show imagery at a certain point and in the sound, there are blows. And the blows, if you don’t have the picture, could be worse because you start to say, ‘Who is fighting who?’ So sound, without image, blows up everything in your mind and you start to be in the jury’s position. I wanted the movie to always be working with that lack. The job of a lawyer is, of course, to fabricate. Not always, but it’s sometimes to fabricate stories and to magnify everything. We played a lot with that.

Speaking of lawyers, the French courtroom drama is really having a moment right now. I’m wondering if you think there’s a reason for that, and what are some of your favorite courtroom dramas of all time?
Maybe people need to analyze their life or to clean their room, because the courtroom is a place where we try to clean everything: to analyze and to clean. My favorite is, of course, Anatomy of a Murder, La Vérité by [Henri-Georges] Clouzot. I like Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion so much. In a way, Gone Girl by [David] Fincher was very important, but it’s not a courtroom drama.

But that also plays with time and marriage, context and flashback.
Yeah, and of course, Scenes from a Marriage by [Ingmar] Bergman and Marriage Story by Noah Baumbach.

Sandra's performance is amazing, but I also want to call out her performance in Sibyl. What is your working relationship like together?
She had to work a lot for that, because she had to learn French, so it was very special for that movie. But for this, I asked her to play it like an innocent person. I tasked her to not do sophisticated things in her performance: don’t do stylistic effects and don’t do the same bullshit you see in genre movies, when you see the actor think, ‘I’m doing something, but I’m thinking of something else, and I’m being duplicitous.’ It was very important to me that Sandra approached with ease and no effects.

Similarly, I refused to add additional music. Because I’m doing a genre movie, I don’t want to do the same thing other people do; Sandra and I were connecting on that perception. In editing, I chose only the documentary takes and not the very complicated, more sophisticated takes. It gives the spectator a very direct connection with her character and it’s closer to the author—it made a more realistic movie than a genre movie.