Clearly, the film is based on personal experience. What made you decide to make a film out of this situation?
The original idea was to see how my mother and close friends were doing, to go and see them and ask them a simple question: “How are you?”
It’s a question that’s haunted by my mother’s health; she was diagnosed with a degenerative neurological disease not long ago. So I wanted to make a film about something very personal, with simple but free dialogue whilst looking for anchor points that would resonate with the viewer. The plan wasn’t to make a self-absorbed movie, obviously, but to understand and show the pleasure of reunions, the importance of sharing and support, in this case for our ageing parents. Especially by shifting the image of a place like a retirement home, which may not be as oppressive as people think.
The film is constructed using the contrast of different types of images, some representing memories that collide with the present, others in the present filmed with a fixed frame, and others still using a phone… Can you tell us more about your filming methods?
The film calls for several registers of images. The images of the story in the present, the journey bringing me back to my mother, alone and free-standing, and the different layers of the past, the archive footage. Fragments shot with different cameras, at different moments, dotted along my mother’s story. Images edited in chronological order. As the film progresses, the closer I get to my mother, the more she ages, the less she walks. When I meet up with her, when the past meets up with the present, she’s in a wheelchair. Another kind of fragment involves the mental images from my brain; they appear at the start and the end of the film to offer a different approach to the real images, a different interpretation. These are images shot instinctively with my daughters, my partner or on my own. I wanted to juxtapose very realistic images with a dreamlike, neurological register, to bring their registers into play.
Another narrative arc is the journey made by your friends (and brother). Why this choice of meetings in the form of milestones? How was the shoot organised with your friends?
The journey is the starting point. Going to see my brother, asking him if he’d like to join me to go and visit our mother, then organising the milestones… which ended up being quite stylised, some of them staged, inspired by the chosen decors. Like the “walker,” Pierre Felix Gravière, invited to join me in the Ariege on the Way of St James.
I wanted to multiply the settings and the people to try and find myself (again) in these encounters. I was looking for some peace and quiet, going to places that were increasingly wild, before returning to the town of my birth and my mother.
The journey was planned like a rally, with stages, liaisons and bivouacs.
A journey that was like a sort of headlong rush. I wanted the film to navigate an awkward terrain with a light-hearted tone, making myself a character tending towards the comic, the ridiculous. Someone jeered at by sometimes comical situations for which I alone am responsible.
The editing is crucial to this film, organising its different layers. How did you set about the editing process?
This is the fundamental writing point of the film. There were endless discussions with Sarah Derny and Fred Dubreuil (the film’s producers) to try and dose the interventions of my friends and my mother, who, as the versions multiplied, took on a bigger and bigger role. I played out the chronology of the journey.
I wrote a voiceover that describes the evolution of my inner state of mind, and my mother’s story.
I added titles that situate the places, the dates of the footage. The editing allowed us to place these “supporting struts” so that we could set up the narration and eventually remove them once the film was there. As if to relieve it, and trust it more in situations and silence – in short, in the cinema.
At first my idea was to make a film about close friends and family who come together and share a very personal moment. In the end, I made a film about a man who tries to shed light on his present.
Interview by Nathan Letoré
