Chicken Soup, Chicken Soup

I had originally planned to go on vacation to New-York with a friend but the trip fell through. My desire to visit the city remained so I wrote a screenplay that unfolded there, drawing on my experiences as a babysitter and incorporating a friend’s struggles with the American administration. At first, the elections were not in the script but when I calculated the time needed to prepare the film, the shooting happened to be scheduled for November 2024. Considering what happens to the characters, there was a certain coherence in letting their story resonate with real events, and in capturing that particular moment in time.

With the character of Lili, I wanted to portray a young western woman of her time, someone representative of a disorientated but also privileged youth. Evidently, Lili is heavily inspired by my own personal story, by my odd jobs and the struggles I’ve experienced. I was reflecting on the search for meaning and self-discovery through travel, which is quite common among young Westerners. As a mirror, it also made me question other types of migration. What I find touching about her character is her ambivalence and complexity. She is pursuing personal fulfillment but finds herself confronted with a collective reality. It is her fragility and her vulnerability that both interest me and that I wanted to put into perspective.

I needed to find a french actress before I left for New York and  I had very little time. Considering this, the requirements for the role, even before acting ability, were: she had to speak English and have a valid passport. I met several actresses, then I saw Louise in a film by Claude Schmitz (L’Autre Laurens) whose work I admire. She very much impressed me with her spontaneity. When we met, Louise was not the most bilingual candidate, but it immediately became evident to me that she should interpret Lili. The script was already written and I wanted every line delivered exactly as it was written. We started by studying the script in french to work through all the emotions and dramatic stakes of the scenes then Louise began working on the english and within two months she was able to fully carry the role.

Yes, from the very beginning I wanted the absurd to be able to turn into drama and vice versa, with emotions constantly being reshaped. For the cover of my screenplay I chose an image of Gena Rowlands in Une femme sous influence. I was inspired by the type of film where a very funny scene can quickly become super dramatic and where, even within tragedy, love and joy still emerge.

I wanted to make a film that starts like a chronicle, where we don’t really know where the character is going, or why we are following her, then I wanted to break that rhythm and head towards a sort of thriller, where, after having simply followed the character, we begin to force her hand. Above all, it’s the tone and the genre that evolve. 

At that point in time, I was feeling lost by the difficulty of convincing producers and overwhelmed by heartbreak, so I felt a real urgency to shoot this film. I met a few directors who had shot films out there, including Armel Hostiou. I listened to his advice and I set out to make the film in my own way. I had never set foot in New York, I booked my tickets and arrived six weeks before shooting to scout locations and assemble a cast. Raphaeël Vandenbussche on image,  Charlie Cabocel on sound, and Louise Leroy in the lead role joined me there for a two-week shoot. I had managed to raise a modest budget of twelve thousand euros. Everyone brought their own equipment, enough to shoot simply, since we didn’t have any additional crew on site. For the casting, I met several New York filmmakers, including Onur Tukel, who invited me to his screenings, where I was able to meet his actors. The other actors were my flatmates’ friends, poets and musicians. Then there was the magical encounter with the Safdie brothers’sister Eleonore Hendricks. She agreed to play the mother and became a friend. That’s how the film came together: without money, without permits, and without a production company. 

This idea stems from the experience of a friend’s younger sister, who went to Seattle in 2015 to work as an au pair and went through something very similar. She naively set out to learn English but was soon caught up by the kafkaesque administrative reality the minute she arrived at the United States customs. All the scenes involving the police were drawn on her experience, then adapted with burlesque scenes that push the film towards the realm of a political fable 

As Chicken Soup relies on a major plot twist halfway through, the editing had to keep the screenplay’s structure. In that respect, there were no major difficulties. The most time consuming part was finding the right comedic rhythm and the right relationship to Lili’s character. Together with Louise Leroy, we created, during the shoot, a character who was rather abrupt and rarely smiled, unlike usual female characters. The challenge during the editing was to maintain that characterisation while still allowing the viewers to connect to her. We therefore spent several weeks editing with Janina Casiano, who then had to leave for another project she had committed to. Garance Zipper then arrived and found the film’s final form. 

During the preparation phase of the film, I got closer to Democratic Party activists in New York. We wanted to capture the demonstrations, the hopes and fears, but the city greeted the results with a kind of stunted disbelief. Some of the film’s actors were also deeply concerned by the story. They were afraid, as non-Americans, to experience the same situation as Lili in the film. Today, with the U.S. immigration policy and ICE, their testimonies resonate even more strongly. In the film, this comes across almost as a premonition, a taste of what is to come with the anti-immigration and ideological upheavals embodied by Donald Trump.  

During the preparation in New York, I went through difficult moments when I doubted I would even be able to make the film, with money still to find, locations to secure and a casting to complete. My roommate cooked chicken soup for another roommate and I to cheer us up, and it was the best meal I ate during my two months there! Beyond that, the title also refers to the succession of policemen who appear throughout the film, as well as to the final meal offered to the prisoners before they are turned away.