/ Don't hate the media, become the media.Jello Biafra

What was it about the theme of loneliness and isolation that interested you as a screenwriter and how reflective are you as a writer?

 

The years of loneliness I spent in post-production had a lot to do with it, but it's also because loneliness affects us all in one way or another. Of course, the discourse developed throughout the film will be more complete than anything I can say here, but solitude is also a theme that is an ideal “Trojan horse” for conveying a whole host of sub-themes such as “the quest for identity”, “Western malaise”, “responsibility”, “greed”, “honesty” (...). Sub-themes which, in this film, are most often mocked in the hope of putting the viewer's own condition into perspective.

Because yes, even if I don't know the true measure of it, being reflexive in my films is all I aspire to now. Moralism and militancy are methodologies that may have appealed to me at one time, but they lock the viewer into the narrow vision of an author persuaded of holding a truth that he wishes to spread. Reflexivity tends to be more impartial and, today, I associate it with my desire to offer a personal reflection on the world, without directly issuing a definite judgment and while remaining as sincere and self-critical as possible.

 

How essential is the creative collaboration between you and your team once you start shooting a project? 

 

I'm infinitely grateful for my team's support and mastery. But, strictly speaking, there is no creative collaboration on my projects at the moment. There are, of course, suggestions, particularly from actors or technicians, but to tell the truth, holding so many positions on my films has led me to build up, in spite of myself, a kind of autocracy. It may sound scary when you put it like that, but I'd rather be an honest artistic dictatorship than a collective of hypocritical artisans. What I mean by this is that many of us only remember the name of a director and give him or her all the credit without taking into account all the artists behind the scenes. And that's something I don't want to do. I'm aware that this can be perceived as narrow-mindedness, but while I admit that cinema can be a collective art, I believe that it might also be a more individual one. For my part, I haven't yet been able to work any differently when it comes to a work I consider to be my baby.

 

Do you allow yourself much flexibility with your screenplay once you start shooting?

 

For this film, without a shadow of a doubt. The particularity of this project was that I didn't plan everything in advance, and each story emerged gradually throughout the production. Above all, I followed my heart, without knowing in advance where the final chapter, which would bring all the stories together, would lead me. In other words, getting this film produced would have been mission impossible... I'd have had to walk into a producer's office and say: “I'm going to make a film. I don't know where I'm going. Who's with me?”

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What was the hardest scene for you to write and direct?

 

This is more of a “special effects” part than a “directing” part, but I'd still say these are the sequences where the teddy bear appears. The actor, Eddy Del Pino, who had his head in a teddy bear, was dressed in green to make it easier to integrate in post-production. But all his scenes included ambient smoke, which compromised the integration. I had to cut out the teddy bear frame by frame, which took seven months and led me to burn-out. My brother was kind enough to do the last month of rotoscoping. As for the writing, the final scene was probably the part I worked on the most, since it synthesised all the speeches. But it paid off in the end, because when we shot the psychoanalyst's final monologue, it was the first time I could say that a take was perfect... but that was mainly due to Eddy Frogeais' masterful performance, who ended up being truly possessed by his role. 

 

Looking back now is there anything you would have done differently on Solitarium?

 

With the documentation I've continued to accumulate and what I've learned in the field, one thing's for sure: I'll be doing things differently for my next feature film. But the mistakes I made in Solitarium are an integral part of its uniqueness. An “antithesis” had to be chaotic. Even if, for my own well-being, I should perhaps have taken less literally the old adage that says “from constraint comes creativity”, which has often led me to take an unhealthy pleasure in putting obstacles in my own way. In short, post-production on this film was a nightmare, but it was necessary to get me out of my comfort zone.

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As well as write and direct Solitarium you also did the cinematography, music, and post-production. How did you manage all these creative roles on a feature like this, and would you do this again?

 

To tell you the truth, I don't really know when I'm going to stop doing that. It took me a little longer to start composing my own music, but overall, it's a working method I've had since the beginning... even if it makes more sense in this film about solitude. I was talking earlier about the conscious or unconscious way in which directors appropriate the work of artists in the shadows. That's because it's something that deeply affected me when I was younger. One story I often repeat is that, as a kid, I was a Star Wars fan. I even had a photo of George Lucas hanging in my bedroom. When I was making my comics and little films, I even told myself to “think like George Lucas”. And one day, in a making of, I saw him enter a room where fifty artists were proposing all kinds of different designs for a single character... I took it as an affront. I was convinced that everything I saw in his films came from his own imagination. It was my first idol fall. So, in order not to disappoint the child I was, and to do everything I could to avoid “appropriating someone else’s artistic talent,” , I told myself that I was going to do as many things as possible in my films. As well as being a personal challenge, it was essential at the time, because when you start making films on your own, you can only rely on yourself. And then, finally, it became a visceral need, as if practicing all the arts that make up cinema gave me a better understanding of cinematography as a whole. And since I see creation as a perpetual search, I wouldn't feel I was searching as much if I did fewer things. But it's true that the more time passes, the more testing it is, and despite the 5 and a half hours of film that Parias represented, the fact that I'm getting older and the experimental singularity of Solitarium made this two-hour film the most grueling post-production experience I've ever had.

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Have you always had a passion for filmmaking and storytelling?

 

Always. From my earliest years, my difficulty in expressing myself led me to drawing, and then to comics. In my head, I could see my stories coming to life and sometimes even accompanied by music, but the modest background I grew up in made me think it was impossible to make films out of them... until the day a summer camp counsellor showed me an editing table... and the path of possibilities suddenly opened up for me. I quit comics, started a humorous web-series (Tripeman) at the age of fourteen, then began directing its feature-length adaptation (Tripeman - Legend), which I released in 2007 in the cinema in the town where I lived. After that, I quit school and never did anything else but cinema.