French contemporary directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani – who also happen to be a very wholesome married couple – share a rare gift for building worlds that are fraught with chaos and CGI-free beauty.
Through frequent bursts of laughter and contagious excitement, Cattet and Forzani spoke to the BRAG over Skype about their most recent creation, Let The Corpses Tan, a psychedelic, Spaghetti Western adaption of the ’70s crime novel by French authors Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The BRAG: I read that you met in Brussels in 1997. Can you share the story of how you met?
Bruno: We met during our studies and began to go to theatres to watch movies. At one point, we discovered some that we both liked, because we had different tastes at the beginning.
There were two films that we both liked: [one was] I Stand Alone by Gaspar Noé, a French director. It’s a genre movie, and the approach is very original and personal.
It was an [independently] produced film, which gave us the will to make a movie with our own little money, because we didn’t have much. [Laughs.] We made some short films with 70 Euros or something like that.
Watch the trailer for Let The Corpses Tan here:
We loved this movie, I Stand Alone, because it was shot on 16mm film and it was in cinemascope. So it was a strange mix between this very grainy image and cinemascope, which is more often used for blockbusters. And after that, there was a second feature that we both loved: it was called Deep Red by Dario Argento. It’s a genre movie; an Italian movie.
Bruno and Hélène’s daughter: Gah!
Bruno: Uh, oh Hélène is taking our daughter out of the room. She was sticking her head in front of the computer, because she thinks you can watch her.
And yes, just to finish that thought, you know, the Dario Argento movies were experimental movies too. The mise en scene and the directing; it’s very rich with the music and all of the elements of the cinematographic language. So this let us collaborate, in fact.
How do you both compliment each other’s vision when you’re making films together?
Bruno: We try always to have our two universes inside the movie, so that not one of the universes gets, uh…
Hélène: We try to be really fair, and for nobody to have any frustration. So we can compromise, but without frustration. [They laugh.]
Bruno: Sometimes…
Hélène: …it’s very hard [Laughs.]
I read the film is based on a novel by two French authors. What was it about the book that really drew you to it?
Hélène: In fact, those writers were a fan of the Western genre. So that’s why, when I read the book, I experienced a lot of Western imagery. That’s one point I liked in this book. And as you can see in the movie, there is this game with the time, with this chapter with the clock.
Bruno: The hour.
Watch Cattet and Forzani talk Let The Corpses Tan:
Hélène: Yes. It’s in the book. We were interested in playing with time; with the chronology. We felt very close to these two writers, because they had a special way of writing. They created a movement, a literary movement called neo-noir. We loved that, when characters are described only by action and not with didactic psychologies and things like this.
I read that Jean-Patrick Manchette changed the way crime novels were written in the 1970s and that he moved away from formulaic storytelling, and explored the human condition to provide social criticism. Was social criticism something you wanted to include in your adaptation?
Bruno: Yeah, we kept that dimension because in fact, Jean-Patrick Manchette has been adapted a lot in cinema. He was adapted in France a lot by Alain Delon, a French actor who is very famous in France, and the last one was The Gunman by Sean Penn, and each time the political aspect has been erased. It’s one of the spices of his writing, and it’s always missing.
We wanted to keep that aspect, because it reminded us a little bit of Italian Westerns where everybody is grey: everyone can be a bad person. In American Western, you always have the good sheriff and the bad Indians – it’s very good and evil.
But here, in the Manchette style and Italian Western, the sheriff can be a bastard and everybody is bad. It’s something that we wanted to keep, because it’s part of the Manchette universe.
One of my favourite scenes in the film is when one of the characters walks out into the night and there are embers floating around him – it was beautiful. How difficult was it to get that shot?
Bruno: It was the most difficult shot, in fact. It was very, very hard, because we were never happy with the result. And we had made so many tests, and at the end all we had to do was…
Hélène: No, no, we can’t say that!
Each time we [make] a movie, I want to learn something new.
Bruno: Oh, okay, I won’t say the trick. [Laughs.]
It would be like giving away your secret ingredient!
Bruno: Yes. And it was the morning of the shooting that we found that solution. And it was very scary, because it was an important part of the film.
Watch an interview with the directors of Let The Corpses Tan:
Hélène: We wanted to have an organic, special effect, meaning most of the special effects [were produced] on the set, so I guess we were stressing.
What do you think drives you both to make films?
Bruno: Patience, because each time we try to find something that we’re passionate enough to work on for four years. You have to love it at the beginning. To really love it and be passionate about what you are going to do, because it will be so long and so repetitive.
When you do the first production, it’s like a total of nine months straight and it never ends. You have to be passionate at 200 per cent, because if it’s just 100 per cent, then in the end you won’t make it.
Hélène: And for me it is to learn, because each time we [make] a movie, I want to learn something new, and try something different, and live another adventure. So yeah, it’s about learning again and again, and experimenting.
Let The Corpses Tan is playing as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival. For tickets to Let The Corpses Tan, head here.
