So I'm just jumping right in with rambling reply because I can never seem to be simple with my words.

I realized I want Aviva to have dark hair. I was toying around with details in my screenplay, and I think it works much better to keep the dark hair. I do admit, women such as Rachael from Blade Runner and Mal from Inception with their dark hair has been an influence. I would put Aviva alongside them with the innocence and strength they're capable of, as well as being so intensely loved by the men in their lives.

Again, as far as aesthetics are concerned, Mélanie is very striking with dark hair, for the beautiful contrast it provides with her pale skin and green eyes. It's an image that stick with me when I first planned and wrote the opening, of seeing Mélanie as Aviva, with dark hair, pale skin, wide green eyes, and the streaks of blood upon her face from her wound.

There's another visual that sticks with me very strongly, too. Manfried has kept a photograph of Aviva that she had given to him when they first began their relationship in 1941. It's black and white, taken by her mother before Aviva was to leave Nevers for Paris. I see Aviva in a modest dress and a long, black overcoat. She's outside, with a field and forest stretching back behind her. She looks into the camera with those same wide eyes, but they're large and clear with anticipation of the life she's going to set out to make for herself.

The photograph, along with others of her family, was hung on the wall in a frame. She removed it and gave it to Manfried to keep. In his time away on the Eastern Front during their separation after the round-up of 1942 to him making his way to Holland and back to France, he always kept it, even when he lost everything else. As he tells her when they reunite,
"I couldn't let them take you from me."

I think of these details and these moments, of a dark haired Mélanie as Aviva; this young woman who is guarded and careful, yet very open with the man she loves, and who, no matter what she did to survive the war and to be reunited with him, is still such an innocent.