Director Statement:
The family is a vast subject that concerns everyone. But who can say, no doubt, that he knows or doesn’t know what the family is? Everyone has a definition and a very personal point of view on this yet universal subject. One can not deny a way of loving or disliking one’s DNA.
I think it’s the role of art, but here, especially the cinema, to be interested in a subject such as this one. To create situations in order to be able to touch something and why not be touched by this thing, with the distance necessary to the intelligence.
When I read “This Child” by Joel Pommerat, I was immediately upset by this scene between a father and his son. Even if the literature of this talented playwright is unquestionably strong, I also think that the resonance was not only intellectual. I am a son, and even though my father has nothing to do with Mr Pommerat’s fiction, I felt concerned.
I think that some scenes or stories that can be told between a father and his son, a son or a father will always identify a little. This is exactly what I find brilliant in the scene of Joel Pommerat because it is a father who blames his son his way of educating his own son. He even goes so far as to tell him how his father had educated him. It’s actually a never-ending story, a big circle that is expanding, but never break the two ends.
This is why I do not wish to distort the
original subject of the scene. I think the theatrical literature will bring more strength to the characters and therefore to the story.
What I want to show through this film is the importance of a relationship between a father and his son in a man’s life and the choice to accept or oppose it. Indeed, it is always the father who initiates this relationship. It is he who decides, at least until a certain age. Are we “killing the father” or are we waiting?
Here the character will “kill” the father, in any case he will try.
The scenery will bring a living context to the fable, hence my desire to stop at each table in the room and to make exist all these people who are, for me, essential to the credibility of the result. In addition, this will give a reduced space for the actors who will sit during the entire didactic journey of this story. Only the passages of the server will bring a few movements and heights to the stage. Locking them up at this table will allow the story to tighten up to the viewer to the anxiety that the father will impose on his son. The life of the restaurant will remain active in the background in order to never lose the real and better mark the imprisonment of bodies in this small space that is the dining table.
The music will have a great importance in the staging. I want to play with the atmosphere of a convivial restaurant between the sweetness of the voices that speak and the bristling of the metallic sounds of the glasses and cutlery on the porcelain.
Indeed, this represents the idea I have of this relationship between this father and son, the reassuring tone of the voice of a father sometimes clashing with the claws of authority. The sound objective will be with the composer Yohan Intonti to find a harmony between ambient noise and the sound of cymbals (Ref: “Birdman” Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu).
After a long brainstorming with Olivier Mandrin, the chief operator, the frame will make him nervous according to the narrative course, while keeping a fluidity in the movement. I thus aspire to a frame in steadycam on the movements of the characters in the space, for example all the way made by the waiter at the beginning of the film where the camera will settle a few moments at each table of the restaurant leaving guess the relationship that exists between the seated people.
Then a framing shoulder tighter on the moments of dialogue to create a balance with this confined space and static restaurant table.
The food will also play a key role in the staging it will be the symbol of the ogresque relationship that the father imposes on his son, it is also the food that will somehow trigger the wrath of this son exceeded by the His father’s ill-asserted assurance: “we do not kill the hand of the one who feeds us”, which here has a double meaning, the father is the boss, but the son is the head
As for the light, it will remain fairly simple without too much superficial additions to the surrounding context. That is to say a warm and subdued light.
Regarding the interpretation, the game will be sober but engaged emotionally, without being tearful to bring this daily in a text rich in literature. These characters must o be all endearing, but especially the father, we must immediately love him so that his speech already insistent in the story, passes more sweetly in the eyes of the world. The position of the girl in favor of the father will support this choice of interpretation. The son will, however, be worthy of his father’s attacks to the point Godwin of this dialogue he exult in a cold anger towards his father and a modest emotion to his wife. This film would be an end result as personal as professional. I have struggled on a daily basis to get what I want, be it for a playmobile or to understand who I am. I do not distinguish between the two, in the sense that today I want to know and for that, I’m sure I have to go through art. The idea of this film, would be that the execution of this situation finally anecdotal between this father and this son at this table and in this place, put an end to a more sustained story in exergue in this unique place which seems to me the best place to express the world. Between the course of miracles and the miracle of the course, the world would finally find itself around these essential things that are; drink, eat, share, meet. I would like each table to tell its story, with its personality or universality
EUROPEAN Short Film and Screenplay Festival 