You have long been known as an actress. How did the project for your first film as a director, Journal du futur, come about, given that it is based on footage shot twenty years ago?
In 2004, my family gifted me a MiniDV camera, which I used a great deal for a couple of years. After that, everyone went their separate ways but I always wanted to do something with that footage. In 2019, I managed to digitise the images with the help of Brieuc Schieb, a Fine Arts student, who has since become a promising filmmaker. I rediscovered everything we had filmed but because of a lack of time, technical knowledge, and probably a fear of getting started, the footage continued to sit on a hard drive. The real impulse was motivated by my encounter and my friendship with Clément Pinteaux to whom I showed a few excerpts and who was immediately enthusiastic. That encouraged me. I then wrote a project statement, embellished with screenshots, and presented it to Julie Salvador who immediately backed it. I was very lucky to be surrounded by such supportive people!
When and why did you stop filming?
I didn’t stop filming abruptly but it largely faded away when I integrated hypokhâgne (preparatory literary studies) in 2006, with the pressure of lessons and the dispersal of my friends in their respective studies. And then, I started acting in films myself. Perhaps, the pleasure of being filmed and performing under someone else’s direction took over at that point.
The different timeline between shooting the footage and making the film seems essential in its elaboration.
Indeed, in reality, back then we were filming specifically so that we could watch the footage later, so that “later” had to arrive eventually. I probably could have made the film ten years ago but I wasn’t ready, and twenty years is a generation, it is truly the “fulfilled” future. What I also like about these images from 2004-2005 is that they reveal an almost vintage Paris and methods of communication that seem ancestral to teenagers today (no social media, no smartphones).
Do you remember what that amateur filming experience was like and what your thoughts were at the time?
I distinctly remember that the camera was constantly being passed around, I wasn’t at all the only one filming. On the other hand, I do remember being a bit of a control freak about how the camera was being used, I was always afraid that the images would be too long or not interesting enough. We didn’t think of the editing process at all at the time, or rather, we edited while filming: that is what can be seen in the clips, the trailers, and the question-and-answer segments facing the camera. We wanted to make short funny films to show to our friends, to record a testimony of our friendship for the future, while also expressing our hopes and dreams.
How did your friends also contribute to the making of the film?
The interviews came from Fanny and Marine during their holidays in Brittany. I was still very much a child at the time, and rather prudish, but I was already touched by the idea of the future and even by the idea of a vocation, so I played along. Everyone took control of the camera and used it to invent, like Flo who made surreal little clips by filming objects in my apartment. It was also the early days of reality TV so we parodied TV shows and news broadcasts. Ideas also emerged from watching what we had already filmed among ourselves or with others. Not to mention the films from the New Wave that we were beginning to discover thanks to the rise of DVDs and boxed sets that my parents bought as soon as they were released. I watched a lot of Truffaut, Godard and Rohmer during that period.
Where do the texts that appear on screen come from and what role do they play in the film?
The texts are almost entirely excerpts from the diary I held at the time. There are only two inserts that are entirely invented and some are slightly rewritten or put together a little differently. Clément and I spent a lot of time looking for a way to structure the film as the images in themselves did not suffice, we needed a thread, a narrative voice, but not an overbearing one. We tried a voice-over but it didn’t work at all. I then experimented with inserts written from my present-day perspective, with my adult voice, but that didn’t work either. That’s when I pulled out my old diaries (It has to be said that I keep everything and still write a journal today, at the age of 37). I extracted a few sentences here and there, and we created title-cards with AfterEffects. The lines that appear on them were accidents but we kept them because we liked their artisanal side.
Did you have a great deal of footage and how did you work with Clément Pinteaux in the editing process?
Not really. I had twelve tapes, each between one and one and a half hours long. We watched everything and quickly set aside what wouldn’t be useful, keeping only what we liked, or rather, what seemed to be the film’s purpose. There was a lot of vacation footage, for example, and even a school trip to New-York. The images are wonderful but it was very difficult to integrate them because they were too distant to the bedroom/Paris/high-school register that seemed to be the heart of the film. We worked chronologically and condensed two school years into one. The baccalaureate exams seemed to be a symbolically appropriate ending, and it was also at that time that I began putting the camera down.
How did you approach the sound mixing with Jean-Pierre Laforce?
Jean-Pierre and I immediately agreed that we wanted to preserve the rough, imperfect quality of the sound of the camera and voices (we of course didn’t have wireless microphones back then). Jean-Pierre did a very good job at restoring voices and conversations that were sometimes inaudible while preserving their grainy texture, sometimes reducing the noise of the camera or of some overpowering background sounds. It wasn’t easy because I didn’t want to simply smooth the film’s sound but the raw material was undeniably rather rough.
The film is both the intimate diary of a young girl full of questions about the future and a joyful and carefree teen movie. How did you reconcile these different genres and tones?
The different tones were already present in the footage itself: even without the diary excerpts, you can sense that I was inhibited and uncomfortable with my age at the time, especially whenever questions of flirting or sexuality arose. The inserts emphasise these feelings but I wanted them to be broad enough to characterize any teenager of that generation and social background. There needed to be a certain melancholy to contrast with the bursts of craziness and uncontrollable laughter, yet that melancholy was already there, hidden within the images and intrinsic to that age.
Interviewed by Olivier Pierre
