08/07/2021 - CANNES 2021: The French filmmaker discusses her first feature, presented in opening of the 60th Critics’ Week

A bittersweet, mirrored story about an aging star and a young security guard responsible for watching over him, Robust [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Constance Meyer
film profile] is the first feature from French filmmaker Constance Meyer. The film opened the 60th Critics’ Week of the 74th Cannes FIlm Festival.

Cineuropa: Where did the idea for the film come from, and did you write the script with Gérard Depardieu in mind?
Constance Meyer: Yes, I wrote thinking of him and of Déborah Lukumuena, and of the two of them together. It is them who inspired the film. As for the initial idea, I don’t really know. I think I simply wanted to film these two bodies and tell the solitude of these two characters, a theme I had already explored in my short films. I also had an image in mind that would always come back to me, of a very robust man unconscious in the arms of a woman and I told myself that this woman was saving him, carrying him. I started from that image and I constructed the script around the meeting of these two characters.

The film revolves around very strong polarities (social class, age, skin colour, job) that hide deep similarities that bring these two characters together.
I always find it interesting to put characters who seemingly don’t have much in common face to face. I didn’t necessarily want to address differences in backgrounds because I didn’t treat the film in a societal way: it is more a film about the intimacy of the two characters as it is created throughout their encounter. But indeed, these great differences, almost oppositions, are the background, which enormously enriches their meeting. Because when we meet people who are like us, it is less fun, less interesting, less cinematic.

To what extent is the character of Georges inspired by the real Gérard Depardieu?
All the sequences are made up. Nothing was reenacted, like something I would have seen and recreated. But it is steeped in Gérard, of what I’ve been able to notice, feel or see about him, without me claiming a documentary or biographical aspect. I wanted to be inspired by what he was in order to create a fictional character. And Gérard is someone who creates myth, who creates fiction all the time: all his speeches are commented upon and there is always a kind of mise en abyme of who he is. His intimacy, his own truth, no one knows it except himself. I told myself that he had already played everything anyway, that it was so exhaustive that it would be almost more intimate to bring him back to something rather close to him without it being him either. And when he saw the film, he said, talking about the character, “this guy, he’s a bit of a moron, a bit selfish.” He wasn’t talking about himself, but about his character.

You know the world of cinema, which is Georges’ world too, but are you familiar with that of Aïssa, her job in security and wrestling as a high level sporting practice?
I love martial arts and combat sports as a spectator. I have frequented a wrestling club near my place a lot and I met Didier, a wonderful man who talked with me about that sport an enormous amount. I attended training sessions and it’s him who trained Déborah, playing a very important part during the entire preparation for the film. I also found that there was a game metaphor in wrestling because there’s a face to face. In wrestling, you have two characters who are looking at each other, turning around each other, trying to catch each other, and I found that this strangely resembled a more animalistic version of acting. That fascinated me a lot. As for Aïssa’s security guard job, that’s because I love different universes: police, security guards, wrestlers, actors.

The decor in Georges’s place is very important. What were your main intentions when it came to staging and direction?
This house was a crucial element: it’s a character in the film. It had to exist and to encompass all the characters, to almost exist outside them, we had to get the feeling that it had always been there and that it would always be there. We looked for a long time before finding this house made by a demented architect, built like a flying saucer. It looks like a belly, like a boat, and has a lot of glass. Staging was very much influenced by this choice of setting since there were rounded glass windows everywhere, and therefore reflections, which complicated the work of the boom mic person, the sound engineer and the director of photography who had to manage the light sources. But it gave the film a real atmosphere.

(Translated from French)