The cross : There was already a fantastic dimension in your first film, The fightersthen more specifically in the series To live on Arte. What did these two experiences bring you in developing the? animal kingdom ?
T.C : It was in there The fighters (3 Césars, including the one for the best first film of 2015, editor’s note) a shift towards the fantastic. The film begins as a chronicle of a first love and the further it progresses, the more it becomes contaminated by Madeleine’s beliefs and leads us towards an apocalyptic ending. There is already this path that leads from reality to something else that we find in it The Animal Kingdom.
InTo live, it’s different because the plot takes place more directly in the future. On the other hand, after this series, which deals a lot with death, I wanted a project that moves towards life, towards a world that does not fade and wither, but on the contrary becomes more diverse, more lush and turns towards the living. In a sense, this idea of mutation is almost a utopia, the beginning of a world rather than its end.
Did the introduction of fantasy with these half-human, half-animal creatures make the film’s production more complicated?
T.C : It’s not the fantasy part that was the problem, but the genre mix. The film stands at the intersection of everything: the intimate and the spectacular, the auteur cinema and the general public, the fantastic and the realistic. I didn’t want to choose because the DNA of the film is there, it gives it its strength and its uniqueness. It is, above all, a character film. The viewer is at eye level with this father and his son and can therefore accept the diversity of their experiences. Bong Joon-ho does this very well, he goes from tragedy to completely burlesque scenes with ease because we feel comfortable with his characters and have fun with them.
What cinematographic references exactly did you draw on when constructing the film?
TC: Steven Spielberg, Night Shyamalan or Hayao Miyazaki are very important references for me, but there is never anything other than fantasy in their films. If we take AND, we could tell almost the same story without the aliens and still have a heartbreaking family drama. I wanted to succeed and I didn’t want to let the genre get me down. The focus of the plot is the story of father and son.
In addition, the references I used to prepare this film were more At the end of the racede Sidney Lumet, A perfect world by Clint Eastwood or He was a father, by Ozu. Films that deal with very strong childhood relationships. The questions of transference, what it means to be parents, and the difficult art of teaching them to leave us moved me throughout the writing of the film. But this story has a stronger resonance because there is this fantastical dimension.
For what ?
TC: Only in this way can the story be both accurate on an intimate level and resonate on the scale of a large-scale popular spectacle. The plot is structured like a series of nested puppets. The mutations affect Émile’s body as a metaphor for his transition into adulthood, then change the relationship between the son and the father and, moreover, redefine their place in a changing society. The film questions the question of differences and our belonging to the world, including non-human ones, by recalling the original idea that we all come from the same cell. What happens when a mutation removes this barrier that we have created between ourselves and all other living things? At what point do we stop being alike? This refers to current questions that are at the same time political, ecological and even philosophical in nature.
This return to the wild was already present in your previous film. Is this something that obsesses you?
TC: The world is not doing very well and we all live worse if we stay away from nature for too long. Humans are the only human species that one day decided to free themselves from the rest of life. So yes, I think that this limit and the hierarchy associated with it are really questionable. It is artificial, invisible and biologically illegitimate.
How did you work to make the transition from reality to fantasy as believable as possible?
TC: The question of the balance between the two was important, but never presented us with a problem. Perhaps because the preparation took a very long time – around eighteen months – and the technologies chosen for the special effects were all based on reality. There was always an actor in front of the camera who transformed himself first with makeup, then with prosthetics and finally with digital effects.
Each shot is a mix of technologies so that the human eye cannot understand how it is made, thus creating the illusion. But we had no room for error. If even one creature was missing, everything else would collapse because the pact with the viewer would have been broken.
A lot of work is done on the atmosphere and sounds, which are almost as important as the special effects…
TC: During preparation, we edited the scenes in chronological order to bring about evolution since they are mutations. What the viewer can grasp or believe in the 30th minute is not the same as in the 90th minute. The universe must evolve, become more and more disturbing, more and more surprising. The creatures at the beginning of the film are not the same as those at the end. At first we catch them fleetingly and they frighten us. Then they are all equally frightening, but in the meantime our view of them has changed. We show them more and more frontally. As for the sound, the idea was to show a world that is awakening, reactivating and becoming richer. There is a gradual journey towards the heart of the forest, becoming more and more inhabited, deeper and wetter. The entire film unfolds this spectrum.
Paul Kircher’s performance is amazing. How did you work with him?
TC: I have to say that Paul had many qualities right from the start and trained intensively. He first observed animals, especially wolves, in pet stores. He then worked with a choreographer on his body language, then on his vocal range with bird singers, which ranged from panting to screaming to breathing. He arrived on set after six or eight months of preparation and had a very wide non-human lexical palette… From then on the rest was almost easy.
