Hors-champ, les ombres is your first film together. How was this collaboration born?
Gustavo: When Anna and I met, we created a cine-club with three of our friends. These programmes allowed us to share our sensitivities, our tastes and our vision on cinema. Thanks to Anna, I got closer to French contemporary literature. This collaboration arose from our relationship and our daily exchanges.
Anna: We had planned to take a trip to Italy. Gustavo had the project to film during this trip. I suggested we do the film together. It was an intuitive desire. My idea was rather one of an experience: deterritorialise my writing but also our relationship to find a shared space.
The film appears as the travel diary of a couple and a film about writing and cinema. What was the project?
G: The starting idea was to make the portrait of a place: the apartment our friend Alli lends us every time we go to Milan. Anna wrote a text about that space and about the shooting process she was discovering. These elements triggered the film. It was mostly built on contradictions: what we know and what the other knows, the desire to be and to create something together, and the possibility of an “us”.
A: We could say a posteriori that it is about a two-voice travel diary, the story of a couple, a film about cinema and writing. But I think there is a mystery peculiar to creation. I like this Flannery O’Connor quote: “The form is organic, it arises from the matter of the narrative itself”. It is something I feel in the writing and that we also experienced in this film. Nothing was preconceived, in the sense of a script. We discovered the things by doing them, that is to say by giving them this space, this possibility to reveal themselves.
Anna is a French writer and Gustavo a Brazilian filmmaker. How did you work together? Did you develop a specific protocol?
G: Our differences in origin and cultural references is one of the characteristics of our relationship. It was a source of energy feeding the film in the form of a dynamic tension. We explored our different languages to reach something right. For example, these differences further projections and interpretations, which at some point had us slip into fiction.
A: In the film, Gustavo tells his story in Brazilian Portuguese. It is a lonely and inner voice. He also had a dream in German, which he speaks fluently from living in Berlin. In his dream, I speak perfect German and in German, I refer to him as my man. At another point, he speaks Portuguese to an Italian man who does not understand him. Together, we speak French, including in a conflict scene. These different languages reflect the difficulty of hearing each other as well as its attempt. And from this attempt emerges the romantic connection.
At the start of Hors-champ, les ombres, you often allude to the making process. Why this choice?
A: In my books, there is often a matter of life being written and this writing making life possible or tolerable. Alluding to the making process comes under this same fascination for moving matter and the building of a reality.
G: Making a film starts with creating a situation. It is in this situation that the film will build itself up with our help. The text at the start questions the process to start it off.
The film is very precise with its frame and the composition of the shots, and sensitive to detail and light variations. How did you think about the image?
G: The shots had to be of a certain length allowing us to calmly gaze at the space and at things. Additionally, it was only the two of us. When we show up in the image together, the camera is rolling alone. So we had to frame very precisely to know how to enter and leave the frame in order to engage and stop the camera by wasting as little film as possible.
A: Gustavo and I have in common a liking for things. We wanted to show these objects that shake us, show their soul, their silent reign. There is a scene where we have dinner with Alli at a table. We chose to not put our faces in the frame to give all the agency to the table, the dishes, the cutlery.
Do the black shots interspersing the sequences have a rhythmic value in the editing?
G: It’s like a paragraph in a book, allowing us to set what precedes and make room for what’s to come.
A: There is a scene where Gustavo and I mention a Hong Sang-Soo film, a totally hazy film. It allows the viewer to see through the image, to picture what shies away from the gaze. Similarly, the black shots offer a possibility to project, undergoing introspection.
Why choose the voice over for the narration, which, incidentally, evolves throughout the film?
G: The film goes through several dimensions at the same time, in the present, the memory, the dream, our respective narratives. The voice over, presence-absence, reports on this hybrid temporality.
A: In the reproach scene around the bed, the voice overs produce a dissonance that may better show the reality of the conflict than if two actors were to literally play the scene. By creating this distance, the voice over allows to hear differently and to bring our attention to these mundane words with a new acuity.
The film is divided in five chapters with respective titles. How did you develop each of them in relation to writing, and their relations?
A: This sectioning in chapters came when we started editing, by discovering what we had filmed. Once again, the film is organic. We worked with a substance; emotions, affects, more than with a particular theme. This substance then shed light on the subject of the film.
G: Even if going to Milan, we had a starting point, we mostly dialogued with the atmosphere of every place to create a narrative. We staged our relationship with very little distance, as we moved forward. At a certain point, the film found its own dynamic.
Could you talk about the original score by Alli Papes? Gustavo also composed music.
G: After shooting, we offered Alli to compose the music for the nightmare scene. He sent us several pieces, we chose one and kept the others for other scenes and for the end credits. Alli was present at the beginning of the film, with his apartment and as a character, it felt natural for his presence to also manifest itself through his music. Anna suggested I compose a guitar refrain for the vaporetto scene. When editing, we decided to play a few chords at different points to bring the chapters together and create unity in the film. One of the last gestures of the edit was to add Anna’s voice on top of the refrain, musically materialising the relationship.
How should we understand this title, Hors-champ, les ombres?
A: The title is from a talk between Gustavo and I: I wanted to appear in the film as a writer, that is, as a voice, an invisible presence, hors-champ. This project did not last, as I end up appearing in the film, but we kept this idea in the title, referencing the meeting of two languages and their specificities, the crossing of literature and cinema.
Olivier Pierre
