Oublie pas le gruau, Don’t forget the oatmeal

To begin with, it was mainly the idea of working with Jean Marc Dalpé and Kayo Yasuhara. Then there was the desire to make a film about grief and death, whilst avoiding the usual pitfalls of the genre, or rather, the tedious paths one often feels compelled to take when tackling heavier subjects. I wanted to explore that, partly as a challenge, to ask myself, “How would I go about portraying a character on the brink of death?” And quite quickly, I realised I needed to find a way to blend it with humour – to tackle profound issues whilst also treating them with humour, to strike that balance. That’s the sort of cinema I prefer, in fact, the kind that seeks precisely that balance between these elements, a bit like the humour in Ford’s or Hawks’ films, which is often interwoven with the most dramatic moments.

I’m itching to make a proper children’s film, and this Gruau might well be the first step in that direction. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I had children of my own. I have great admiration for children’s cinema when it’s done well, because it has to navigate a huge number of constraints. And I find that children are very generous in the way they take things in. There’s that quote from Godard: “You mustn’t understand, you must take it in.” For a child, it’s much easier to take things in without understanding them, and I love seeing that in my own children when they’re exposed to something new, surprising or astonishing. All this to say that there was this idea, with my Gruau, of making a children’s film for adults. With my stories about counting erections, it’s perhaps more of a teenage film for adults, but you get the idea: in the tone, in the light-heartedness; I wouldn’t call it naivety, but there you go, I wanted to play with themes like death, the end, love, but to approach them with a certain care, a risqué, impure, childlike delicacy, behind which something, perhaps, strong, mysterious or ambiguous might be hidden…

The blending of genres is something that has always interested me, films that defy categorisation, or pay little heed to genre labels; seeking a form of unity through the fragmentation of genres, and pursuing this quest gently. And I like to extend this approach to the choice of actors and actresses, who in my film Gruau all have different backgrounds and a different relationship with language. Some are professionals, others are non-professionals. And there’s a sort of impurity in this idea of having people who act differently, whom I direct differently. And I find you need impure elements to make films. And at times, this results in a sense of fragmentation, in every sense of the word, a slightly rough-around-the-edges quality that I really like.

I’d already worked with them in the past. This is Jean-Marc’s and my third collaboration, and Jean-Marc is a bit like our own Yves Bonnefoy, so to speak; he’s a very important playwright, but also a significant translator. When a Shakespeare play is staged here, it’s usually Jean-Marc’s translation. I’m hardly exaggerating. Before I knew him as an actor, I knew him mainly as a playwright. And when I saw him a few years ago in the role of Falstaff, I remember feeling a very strong emotion…

And I first met Kayo on the set of my previous film, Irlande cahier bleu, where she plays a role that’s somewhat based on herself: a teacher of traditional Japanese dance, which is what she does in real life. I found it such a pleasure to work with her, even though it was only for two scenes. I also felt I was in the presence of immense talent. At that moment, the idea of a bigger role for her took shape in my mind; I imagined her in a sort of romantic comedy, a genre that has always held a slightly fantastical quality for me. The first meetings between her and Jean-Marc confirmed and validated my intuition: they clicked; there was something rather beautiful about this unlikely couple, united by all sorts of elements that go unnoticed but which you can sense.

As for the amateur screenwriters, it was more of an intuition I followed. There was the idea of a chorus to accompany the love story, which would allow me to “smooth out” the film’s structure in a different way, if I may put it that way. But I wanted a chorus that remained thematically involved in the story, because the film is very much about stories. I think I read something recently in Clara Dupuis-Morency’s book to the effect that we cannot shake off our narrative voice; we need it to give ourselves the illusion of understanding ourselves, and it is this voice that allows us to connect with existence. We need narrative to construct our own identity, to exist, to grapple with the world, and in the case of the barbarian, to survive. And screenwriters, too, deep down, find their reason for living in this. I found it both beautiful and significant that their need to tell stories doesn’t necessarily manifest itself in a desire to bring them to life on screen. In short, there was this idea of building something around the value of stories. The opening quote in the film, by Robert McKee, says that stories are equipment for life. The chorus of screenwriters echoes this idea somewhat, but also, of course, the love story, which is central and which is built around the faith we place in the stories we tell one another.

I work on a very tight budget, in what I call an “artisanal” way. And when you work like this, you need constraints to avoid having to compromise; you have to base your approach on a network of strict constraints, which, for me, often stem from narrative ideas. In this case, here’s one: you’ve no doubt noticed that the main character, the barbarian, doesn’t move. He is either sitting or standing, but he never walks. And I liked this idea of a motionless main character, around whom everything else orbits, everything moves; there’s Kayo, Marie’s character, who dances; there are characters who float, the Chorus; others who fight, but he doesn’t move. He’s waiting for the end. This stillness made sense, and it was a directorial constraint – almost a formal one, that I found stimulating and which invariably, shall we say, influenced my visual grammar. It dictated a certain way of filming, writing and structuring the film. And within all that, the dance and the kung fu became like a massive climax, the climax of his life, nothing less.

Ana is a long-standing collaborator; she’s done the sound for many of my films. She’s completely immersed in sound. She also has a very musical ear (she’s a filmmaker and musician herself, in fact). She’s so passionate about sound that she always ends up giving me even more than I’d asked for. That’s always the case. Textures, ideas, elements. And as I’m my own editor and do my own sound design, it’s a real pleasure and a real asset when I download the sound files and find myself with far more sounds than I could ever have asked for, because she has an ear that picks up on all sorts of noises you hear on set or elsewhere. And when it comes to sound effects, in fact, this is a film that lent itself to that; a rich and generous soundscape that quietly takes root in the film through ambient noise, everyday gestures and silences, and which becomes like music.

I wanted the pace to be fairly slow, but punctuated by little touches, little intuitive, one might say imperfect, conjugations. It has a structure that seems free but is, shall we say, measured against the emotion one might feel. What’s interesting, and new to me, is that I worked with two cameras. Originally, I wanted two cameras for a single scene (the long scene of exchanged glances), which I wanted to film in real time. I’d decided to hire one of my former university students. He had free rein to film whatever he wanted. That said, I never watched what he was framing (I didn’t have the time); I concentrated on the main camera, with Renaud (Després-Larose). I wanted to be sure I could tell my story using it, the main camera, but I knew that by inviting him to film, I was treating myself to a little editing indulgence: ending up with completely new footage that might allow me to tell the story differently. That turned out to be the case in certain scenes: it allowed me to give them a different rhythm, either by speeding things up or by taking them in a different direction with greater flexibility. The same goes for the inserts. I realise this doesn’t appeal to everyone, but I liked the logic behind them, the element of surprise they allowed; in the same way, it allowed me to think about space differently, to reflect a character’s inner world in a different way.