Your film is an adaptation of The Dialogue of the Dogs, one of the 12 exemplary novels by Miguel de Cervantes, written in 1613. What made you choose this text?
I came across the text during my readings these last few years on the subject of dogs. With its simple, funny and subversive narrative, De Cervantes’ short story has a special place in these readings. Two dogs discuss their place in the world through personal stories, mirroring the human species. Throughout the dialogue, as they address social and political mechanisms, the line between the world of dogs and humans becomes finer. I was curious to explore how that could be represented in a film, given that the story is simply a dialogue, with the only other contextual element being the location of their discussion. There was the question of speech assigned to dogs, creating that blurred line, and also the resonances that the dialogue could have in our contemporary world, despite its age.
You use prosopopoeia, taking the context of utterance of the short story literally. How faithful—that well-known canine quality—are you to the text? What choices and edits to the story did you make?
The short story is much too long to be exhaustive in its adaptation. I firstly kept everything that allowed me to introduce fiction into the narrative: the fact that the dogs realise that they are talking and their reflections on their relationships with humans – all this rhetorical play was in order to enter clearly into the dialogue, give it depth, and also exit from it. Then I chose to engage with the memory of shepherding, as it’s a world I am familiar with and have filmed, and also because it holds up a mirror to the human species. From there, things evolved organically. I rearranged these fragments so as to establish a clear thread of discussion. We reworked it with the voice actors, Pascal Rénéric and Gabriel Dufay and then during editing with Laura Rius Aran.
In terms of space, I was looking for something that could serve as a bridge between the era of the story and the present day. I thought of these two dogs as spirits from art history, lost in a postmodern world, and that through their absurd presence and their discussions, this postmodern world would become a means of reflection on our “humanity”. Faithful to the short story, they are in a hospital, whose architecture and atmosphere reflect the darkness of the text, but also recall the COVID-19 period. This is also how the dog cemetery and the public park came about. All these spaces bring a contemporary rereading to the dialogue, creating tension with the pastoral past.
How did you work with Ivar and Drogon, the two dogs who play Scipio and Berganza? What were the filming constraints?
Ivar and Drogon are not trained dogs, and they are rather reserved. Therefore, we had to work together to find a way to make our collaboration succeed. Before the shoot, we did some tests in open outdoor areas with the aim of matching the original setting of the story, but that proved impossible. They were constantly moving, and none of the match cuts worked for the desired shot-reverse shots. On putting the dogs in the boot of the car at the end of yet another unsuccessful test, Marie, the dogs’ owner, remarked that they were much calmer in this familiar space filled with their scent.
This is how the idea of the car parked in the hospital parking lot emerged, and served to place the scene somewhere more contemporary and narrative. We filmed over two nights in the hospital parking lot. Ivar and Drogon played along without it requiring much effort from them or causing them stress. The car offered camera angles which made the match cuts easier, and we filmed a lot to capture as many expressions as possible from the dogs, sometimes calling their names or making little sounds to get them to react.
Could you tell us about the images? The visual material seems to be heterogeneous and come from different projects but finds its unity through the text. In what ways does Le colloque des chiens follow on from your previous film, Syntonie d’une ruine?
The film is indeed made from several projects, in particular images leftover from my previous film, Syntonie d’une ruine, which were filmed around a sheepfold, but also from other previous shoots. All of these images were made in a documentary spirit, in the same way that Cervantes must have—I imagine—studied, surveyed, and collected stories of dogs to render the dialogues realist and develop the characters. I had already spent a lot of time filming dogs, which enabled me to enrich the narration with images and stories of dogs I had previously collected.
In Syntonie d’une ruine, humans and non-humans alike contribute to a portrait of a crumbling farmhouse, and to giving a sense of the landscape, along with a poem by Pessoa: The Keeper of Sheep. The narration is developed through the interweaving of these multiple presences in the landscape with the poem. To build on this work, the idea came to me to adapt The Dialogue of the Dogs, imagining it as a literary and cinematographic essay. What happens when non-humans become the main characters and narrators of a story?
Le colloque des chiens conjures up quite a bestiary. What role do animals play in your cinematographic practice? And what about dogs in particular?
As mentioned just before, my cinematographic practice is full of animals, particularly animals linked to rural and agricultural life. I grew up on a farm in the centre of France, so there are naturally ties between my rural origins and the subjects of my films. I lived with farm dogs, working dogs, pet dogs, and later began my practice filming wild animals and walks with my dog, Adri. As such, it could be said that Adri was my first character and that from there, I began to develop my cinematographic research exploring a particular relationship with animals.
At what point did you include a wolf through computer-generated images? What did CGI offer you?
It came after the shoot, at the beginning of the editing process, to link together the heterogenous sequences of the film and to bring more tension to the narration. CGI allowed me to make the figure of the wolf appear, partly as a fabricated apparition and partly as a floating presence in the image, in keeping with its role in the story.
Interview by Claire Lasolle
