Joris Laquittant

1. Congratulations on your film "The Beast" earning accolades at the BR. Banshee festival! Can you tell us more about the inspiration behind the narrative and the emotions you sought to evoke in your audience?

Thanks a lot! The film is not autobiographical, but I started the writting with the idea of transposing sensations of my own childhood in the countryside. When I was child, adults asked me to scare boars in the cornfields and I was frighten because adults made me believed that, if we came across a female with her babies, she would go to charge and kill us. So I wanted to tell a story from a child's perspective and to give the audience the opportunity to live again the sensations of childhood, when you didn't understand everything that adults were telling us and when their world could be seen as monstrous to us.

2. "The Beast" introduces us to a young city boy on vacation in the countryside. Could you elaborate on the symbolism of the wild boar hunts and the mysterious beast in relation to the protagonist's journey?
 

The film actually tells the story of a rite of passage from childhood to adolescence, so I was looking for an environment which favors rituals. Hunting, anywhere in the world, is full of rituals. It questions our relationship to nature, to bestiality, to violence, to death... When we agree to approach it in a non-Manichean way, it is a practice that is quite fascinating because it is full of ambiguity. I thought it was therefore perfect for telling my story because children need to evolve in a safe ground and need to be reassured by concrete things.

3. The film has garnered awards for Best Director, Best Horror Short, and Best Art Direction. How does this recognition impact your artistic approach and future aspirations?

​

I am very honored by the prize, all the more coming from a Brazilian audience. I know very little about your culture but I know that you are very receptive to magical realism. Receiving awards in Brazil is a real pride for the whole team because this magical realism was one of our major influences. As a filmmaker I'm always happy to be awarded, but I'm even more so when my collaborators are awarded for their work. So the prize for the best Art Direction pleases me all the more because it highlights the talent and work of Maxence Rapetti-Mauss, who made the costumes and in particular the Beast one, and Warina Contreras-Ramos who made the production design for the film. More generally, a successful artistic direction depends on all the team: sound, image, music, etc... So I'm very happy and grateful that their talent are rewarded.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Your passion for genre cinema is evident in "The Beast." How do you blend the codes of American cinema from the 80s and 90s with the unique elements of the French rural landscape?

Like many people who grew up in the 90s, I really learned cinema by watching the films of Steven Spielberg and then those of Shyamalan in the 2000s. These are two very important references for me and it was shared with the whole team, because we grew up in the same years. For me, it is not a transplant that would be unnatural. It is not because that I am French that I would would know better how to to film French landscapes. My imagination as a child and now as an adult, are also very inspired by these American films. They are part of my DNA, I also grew up while watching american landscapes. I owe Steven Spielberg's films like Jurassic Park my first childhood terrors, and E.T The Extraterrestrial my first tears in front of a film. I think this is very important in a life. My idea is not to copy or to pay a tribute, but rather to assume that these films have made who I am and how I see the world. These films have shaped my sensibility.

5. Your background includes working as a chief editor on various projects. How does your experience in editing influence your directorial style and storytelling choices?

​

Very significantly. I understood it on the set while discussing with my collaborators. My background as an editor certainly makes me more efficient : it is easier for me to decide if I have everything or not as a material in order to make the scene work. I visualize quite easily how the shots are going to follow one another and I'm not going to cover all the angles to decide later in editing. I also have great confidence in what sound editing and music can handle in terms of rhythm and emotion. Sometimes, on the set, things seem a little disembodied and that can freak everyone out. By having the ability to project yourself into what is possible in editing, with sound and music, it makes you feel a little calmer. But it also has drawbacks. I am used to judge the performance of actors behind a screen by watching them over and over. On the set, I try to recapture that feeling, spending a lot of time rewatching the rushes on my small screen, which tends to distance me a bit from the actors. It's something I'm working on. I would also add that when we edit the films of other directors we are in the front row to learn from their failures as well as their successes. It is a very good school.

6. Collaborative work seems important to you. Could you share how working with renowned figures like Anna Cazenave Cambet and Eric Judor has shaped your perspective on filmmaking?

These are very different experiences each time. With Anna it's a long-standing collaboration which started at the film school, so we grew up together and I would even say that we helped each other to grow artistically. Our understanding of the work and of our common sensibility is highly developed. Anna makes very different films from what I can do, we don't necessarily have the same cinematographic references, it's very interesting for everyone because we enrich ourselves. With Eric Judor it's something else, I started on his films and series as an editor assistant before having the chance to become co-chief editor on the TV show 'Platane'. Basically, I'm a fan of his work in the comedy duo Eric and Ramzy, they were my favorite comedians when I was a teenager. Working alongside him was a dream, I still find it hard to believe. Above all, I learned by his side that you could have fun at work and that it was also a great stimulus to creativity. Finally, I would also add the Canadian collective RKSS (Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell and François Simard) who are known for the hit "Turbo Kid" and with I have just finish to edited two feature films (We Are Zombies / Wake Up ). I would say that the work alongside them was the most decisive concerning "The Beast". Because I made the film between the editing of the two RKSS films. I learned a lot from their working method, they make a film much more influenced by American genre cinema so I learned a lot from their way of shooting. They also reconnected me to a desire for cinema very much linked to adolescence, to the pleasure of making films for fun, seriously, but always remembering that we have an incredible chance of doing the job we dreamed of when we were children. It's something you can sometimes forget...

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

7. "The Beast" has a distinct visual aesthetic. Could you walk us through the creative process behind crafting the film's cinematography and visual atmosphere?

It's a success that owes a lot to the fabulous work of Plume Fabre, our director of Photography. She was able to perfectly understand my intentions and to improve them. I learned, during the shooting, that the key to do the filml that you really want to do is to listen the people around you who are able to help you to go further. This is clearly what happened with Plume. It was an ambitious film in terms of cinematography, especially given our financial means. But Plume has shown great ingenuity and finesse. She helped me to clarify my mise-en-scène, to radicalize it too. We really found together, during the shooting, the filmic language of the film, always at the height of a child... it was really what guided us, the image as the sound had to reinforce the point of view of the child. We also had a common vocabulary linked to the fact that we grew up with the same films. But we didn't have the budgets of Spielberg films, so we had to be smart and to think about what defined the aesthetics of these films that we loved, and what we could do with them with our own budget: steadycam movements, optical flares, anamorphic lenses... and again, we knew that, in post-production, these images would be supported by the editing, color-grading, sound editing and music...

8. As an advocate for genre cinema in France, how do you see the landscape evolving, and what unique contributions do you believe French cinema can bring to the world of genre films?

​

It's a complicated question. I do not claim to be a prophet in my country. The proof is, if "La Bête" works really well in festivals all over the world, it has still not been selected in France... I can't explain it. Nevertheless, as a director as well as a spectator I have observed this for years. I always thought it was an anomaly that French genre cinema was not in the majority in French production, because we are the country of George Méliès, Jean Cocteau, Franju, Feuillade, Melville... that's part of our DNA and we also had a cinematographic current of magic realism with filmmakers like Julien Duvivier, Marcel Carné, Marcel L'Herbier, Jean Vigo etc… You still have to admit that things are changing and that some filmmakers are emerging, like Julia Ducournau who won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, but that remains an exception because many of these types of films are still quite complicated to finance despite our system of atypical and privileged financing. I think that French cinema should be less focus about urban representation and that it could also be more hybrid in terms of genras. Many of the recent French genre cinema proposals have in common to deal with French rurality. It is a territory to be reconquered by French cinema, which carries rites, legends, strangeness, mystical beauty. All that conveys in my opinion the relationship of human beings to nature which tends to be lost in our modern societies. Of course it's something I subscribe to.

9. "The Beast" resides within the horror genre. What draws you to horror as a means to explore human fears and psychological complexities?

​

What interests me mainly in the horror genre is that we deal with something linked to childhood. I wanted the spectators to be able to recall feelings of fear that they experienced as children. I think the child characters are very interresting for that, because we have all been children, and we all have in common to have shared this kind of feeling. And more generally, I like the idea that the audience feel sensations while watching a film. It's very fun to make and very pleasant when you see that it is working. It's the same with comedy and drama, making an audience laugh or cry moves me a lot.

10. The film's young protagonist grapples with fear and mystery. How did you approach capturing his emotional journey and weaving it into the larger fabric of the story?

It's a lot of work with the young actor, Lysandre Robic, to make sure that he understood the script and each scene. It was 80% of the work. I knew he wouldn't be able to play like a professional actor who studied acting, I preferred to trust there again in what the image, sound and music would support to help him. On the set, we developed a special system using a big speakerphone into which I could send sounds: gunshots, dog barking, bells ringing, the roar of the beast... We used it when Lysandre needed it and asked for it. He is a child who has a great capacity for projection in his imagination but sometimes he needed a little help, especially when there were ten people around him and that he had to imagine a monster in front of him.

11. "The Beast" is rich in atmosphere and tension. How do you balance these elements to maintain a consistent tone throughout the film?

 

First there is a long writing process, the French funding process being very dependent on the script, I wrote and rewrote it for five years... You can sometimes lose a little of your intentions in this process, even desire, but that it makes the scripts and their dramatic stakes stronger. Then, this dosage you are talking about, this re-balancing during filming, quite naturally, we feel the sequences which are going to be strong and we try to push them. Others are sometimes scaled down for lack of means... You have to find the proper balance. It is finally in editing that these decisions are the most concrete. Because of my experience as an editor, I think that I can feel these imbalances quite easily. For example, the scene of the blood ritual went much deeper into the phantasmagorical horror, but during the editing I quickly realized that it was going so intense that the confrontation with the beast was made less strong. The RKSS often say that a scary movie is a bit like a ride, if you put all the loops at the beginning you don't feel anything afterwards.

12. Winning awards for your direction must be gratifying. How do you envision further refining your directorial voice as you embark on new projects?Looking ahead, what can we expect from Joris Laquittant in the realm of filmmaking? Are there any upcoming projects that you're particularly excited about sharing with the world?

This is a question that I always have a hard time answering. This is due to the fact that I am first of all an editor and that directing always comes into my life unexpectedly. I really had a lot of fun doing "The Beast" and I would love to tell other stories, but first you have to find which one. It's the most complicated. My next achievement could be a series based on archives, without filming. An editor's job but with the responsibility of a director. I am also always very eager to edit the films of other directors. I will soon be editing Anna Cazenave Cambet's new feature film and it is always a very special and precious moment for me. And I can't wait for the two RKSS feature films I edited to be unveiled to the world. These are very fun genre movies (a zombie comedy and a slasher) that were a lot of fun to make.