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Clearly, there's going to be some piano in this.
It was important for Arte and Gaumont to agree
not to have their sound signature in the beginning,
so that the first thing you hear is piano.
I really like opening credits.
For a while now I've been working on them with Olivier Marquézy.
After talking about fairly complex deconstruction themes for a while,
one day he showed me some footage he had shot
of the sun peaking through the leaves.
And... this is something I filmed by myself
in a really dense tree, in Brittany.
My son was opening the branches one by one to get this glistening effect.
I was thinking of the melodrama, the actors' names,
the director's name,
the title, and...
This is a beginning. It wasn't supposed to start like this.
The first thing we did before the shoot, of course,
was to build a past for these characters,
their family life in this house.
The old Polaroids that you see here were taken by Christophe Beaucarne,
over the course of two days when Vicky, Arieh,
Sacha and Anne-Sophie lived in the house and took pictures of themselves.
We came up with the photo memory idea
when Christophe was placing the Polaroids on the garden table
one by one after taking them.
Obviously, we knew...
some things would be imaginary and some would be real.
Without even talking about it, Christophe Beaucarne and I,
as well as Olivier Mauvezin, the sound engineer and everyone...
we had the intuition that they shouldn't be different.
The material should be exactly the same.
We thought we could show some discrepancies through sound.
Hence this internal breathing.
For those of you who have already seen the film,
you know that a clue is coming.
A little boy, stiff like a corpse.
The sound disappears
and she lays him to rest in the snow.
Then,
another corpse.
All in white.
Eyes closed.
All this, of course,
is insidious, subterranean, because what you see on screen,
and that's why I was going to say the film is welcoming,
is a woman leaving...
at dawn.
The musical note that triggers this dual time
is something we came up with
in the editing phase, with François Gédigier.
There were clues, traces...
...this shopping list,
this fridge which is like a memory that will evolve...
We did this so that once the film is over, the audience can really process
the moment when this woman is leaving
as part of her imagination, not of reality.
It seemed very sensitive to us,
obvious, to have this dual time.
A door opens...
and somebody else arrives.
The mittens...
In Claudine Galea's play... The first thing I did
was a sort of archaeology of all the objects
she put in the play.
The mittens were one of them.
Here we go. She sees the rod
which looks harmless.
There's something violent in locking up the audience inside but...
You can get out through the back door.
Same thing here. Another clue.
The car, we don't know yet which car she is going to.
The fact that she is wrapped in a shroud.
So we see a woman who is leaving.
But you get the feeling that there might be something wrong,
something else going on.
We shot the film in Saint-Gaudens, a town nested in the valley.
You can see the Pyrenees Mountains from there.
Some people are attracted to the valley,
others to the mountains.
And then there is this factory,
which looks like the Eiffel Tower of Saint-Gaudens,
a smelly Eiffel Tower.
We had to shoot over the course of three seasons,
because we have the mountains in winter, the mountains after the snow has melted
and we also shot in the fall.
In between the seasons, in between the shoots,
François and I would go up there.
We felt like doing this scene at the very end of the shoot.
It's a gas station.
So... since there was a gas station,
we had to have Aurelia Petit, just like in "On Tour."
And she's wearing rouge, just like she did in "On Tour."
I needed Clarisse to say a few things before leaving.
We find out that she is German.
Here we go. In truth, everything is said here.
But you can't hear it.
"You know, I see them."
All right. But this woman is leaving.
I also liked the idea that maybe it's like Thelma and Louise,
maybe she's in love with this woman.
When you're in the audience and the film starts,
you imagine a billion stories immediately.
We were always trying to find ways to include piano and music.
Hence this fanciful idea of a gift offered by the gas station.
It's a little far-fetched...
but it works.
We knew that Beethoven's Sonata No. 1
would be played again later by Anne-Sophie.
We had already shot the following scene.
This one was shot in November 2019
and the following scene was shot in May 2019.
You see, another clue:
"You made it up."
There are traces of Paul, the character in Claudine Galea's play
because she wrote the play "Je Reviens de loin" for the stage 15 years ago
and it was never produced.
These characters had never existed.
I like traffic jams.
I like it when there are three things happening at the same time.
This house was fantastic for that.
We could film people moving all around the house.
There are two things going on at the same time.
The lighter, which we've seen already.
He leaves, another one comes.
Here we have these little poems again, which were in Claudine's play.
I like the fact that for her, this car...
She imagines it's a booth
where she could be in touch with them.
We came up with the antenna.
There's also the joy of these old cars.
You need an adapter to play tapes.
You see the word "piano."
Every morning I made a very detailed list of all the information
we had to communicate surreptitiously.
It's a film made of feelings.
The audience can only feel these feelings
if we have an extremely detailed canvas.
And here is Vicky.
This is the moment we really get to know her in the film.
During the editing phase, very quickly,
we realized that it couldn't be just a road movie.
We needed something to derail quickly.
Hence this sudden musical telepathy that she seems to be able to control,
between her and her daughter.
With dialog we've already heard,
with voice overs, soliloquies,
I was almost going to say ventriloquist stuff.
"Where are you?"
"Shut up."
Here we go. Who does she say "shut up" to?
Here, we think: OK, she's all right.
When we hear this music.
That's it. She's on the road.
So it really is a road-movie.
It really is a woman
who seems relieved of something,
relieved because she's on the road,
because she left her family.
But intravenously, there are a couple feelings from before
that we must have perceived.
There are urges in her that...
are shattered. Meaning...
Are they memories? Are they thoughts?
In any case she is haunted, she is not alone in her journey.
The music stops abruptly.
"You should give us a story we can tell."
I really liked this line in Claudine's play.
What is the story she can tell?
If she tells the truth, it's unbearable.
She can't tell the truth.
Here we are.
"That's what I am doing, dear."
She means she's making it up.
This scene came very late during the editing phase.
Always, paradoxically, with the aim to clarify.
We are 15 minutes into the film and she is telling exactly the truth.
But again, we can't hear it.
François and I realized that one of...
the exciting tensions of the film...
was denial.
This is something I figured out very late, during sound mixing,
with François and Nicolas.
This "Señora, Señora" will come back later.
She said she wanted to see the sea.
She can see the sea now.
But the sea doesn't answer.
So she leaves.
We extended this sequence too, it wasn't like this at first.
At first, we even had her go to a wellness center.
There was talk of madness.
We cut all of it because it curtailed imagination,
it shielded the audience. "Oh, all right.
She is crazy. This doesn't concern me."
It was more disturbing
to have her be just like us.
Because we're all like that.
Of course, there was a sort of interference in the sound textures,
which became a vocabulary of its own
and in truth, replaced the actual dialog.
Objects...
to hunt nightmares or catch dreams, it's up to you.
We'll see this again a little later.
I always asked Christophe Offret, the prop master,
to keep all the objects that were used in a scene,
because Clarisse might want to see them again.
Where is she in control, or not at all?
This scene was key.
"He's not calling me." Marc.
This strange sentence.
What do you mean? When we film this scene,
played by Vicky,
we are filming a woman who pretends she has left.
She's thinking that if she had left,
she might have left her phone too, or her credit card.
We've all thought about this.
We might not have left our family,
we might not have disappeared but we've all thought about it at least once.
There.
Here, what we hear is a scene of guilt.
A woman...
seems to have left. It's what we see.
And she feels guilty.
But...
what Vicky plays is a woman
who has lost her family and must wait for the spring
to find the corpses.
So she makes things up,
pretends she has left and they stayed behind.
For a long time, we debated.
Is it more touching if the audience knows or not?
I asked François so many times that I drove him crazy.
Actually, this scene in the café
should happen later, once we know.
Meaning after the scene that is coming up,
with the avalanche and the rescue team.
The way I shoot this kind of scene is that I set things up.
I play the role of Clarisse myself
and I try to give Vicky reference points.
So this man here is a local, he comes to the bar often.
That's all I said to her and Vicky came up with this.
We had to go deeper,
so that what we see on screen right now
takes us to the other side.
Expressions that come back... We just heard Vicky, Clarisse, use them.
Things seem porous.
I want to...
have control.
Like a prompter.
The orange notebook, again.
The rod, again.
Lucie seems to play the piano a lot better.
A merry-go-round, made out of wood.
It's not moving.
A carousel out of service.
There are feelings,
and also very tangible things.
How can she spend the winter as quickly as possible?
Since she must wait for the spring.
Work?
I liked the idea of her as a translator, working from home.
In Vicky's bag, Clarisse's bag, she always carries The Man Without Qualities.
That's why her name is Clarisse.
It's a character in the novel The Man Without Qualities.
In Claudine's play, her name is Camille.
So we thought, there it is.
For this kind of scene, of course, I tried to make sure
Vicky only had to do one take.
I really like to work with so-called non-actors,
like this adorable History professor and his incredibly charming son.
We had to put green make-up on him because he was too happy all the time.
I only gave Vicky a few words.
The word "statue"
to refer to the child.
And she's off.
She takes it from there.
Vicky Krieps takes it from there.
The word Friday comes back very often.
I wanted to show...
their everyday life as a couple, this innocent sentence
"Go without me for once."
Yes, they went without her.
I thought... one can pass the time
with work...
but there is also alcohol.
She is going to drift and start drinking.
Again, this realism... hyperrealism.
Like the poster you see here,
in the office.
Very tangible things.
Removing shelves.
At one point, we even had a scene where he was removing a chunk of hair
stuck in the sink pipe.
He removes everything.
Skis falling.
There are accidents like that,
where suddenly you take a fish seller's tool
and all you hear is the ice.
A sonic trajectory seems to be drawn.
Footsteps in the bathroom.
Again this variation on snow, the color white.
When I was location scouting with Dylan,
the First A.D. at the market in La Rochelle...
I am Clarisse when I am scouting locations.
And it was unbearable for me to see this ice.
These slates, of course, they looked like graves.
There.
Vicky takes it in, she really embodies it.
This kind of scene seems excruciating
but when you shoot with children, this little Sacha...
I'm laughing because he made us cry when he was doing the scene
and as soon as he was done,
he said, "Can I do another one?"
But that's why there are two angles.
We couldn't imagine doing it twice
but a child just wants to act.
Here we have another echo.
A woman with a white towel.
I asked Christophe, the prop master, to bring a white towel like...
We thought we might put these two shots back to back.
I always try... at least I tried with this film,
it was my job to keep a list of junctions, a list of tracks.
That's why I liked the idea of Marc working
with junctions and railways.
You see here for instance, this latch.
Vicky found it.
She thought of the kitchen's back door.
Don't keep the kitchen door locked.
This scene here,
let me say that we've been setting it up for 10 minutes.
The bath, white, the fish,
the latch, the tears.
The shelves destroyed by the husband.
Something that...
has been setting up this moment of horror.
We shot in the Spanish part of the Pyrenees
with an actual rescue team, a French rescue team.
Here we see Sébastien, who helped us tremendously
and gave us a lot of information. I spent a long time with them.
We also worked with a Spanish team
to know exactly how things were done.
We shot this scene last, in January 2020, in winter.
We ended the shoot in wintertime.
Here is the mitten again.
They told me that people are usually paralyzed.
They don't want to believe it.
When a tragedy happens to us,
the first cry that comes out of our mouth is usually,
"It can't be. Tell me it's not true."
That was the energy of the film.
Clarisse thinks it can't be true.
Except that here, reality is very clear.
The rescue team recorded the sound of walkie-talkies for us
towards the end of the editing phase.
We thought... I needed them to really hammer it home.
What they were saying was much more subtle.
But I told them,
"No. Be blunt. I want to hear the words Corpse and Spring."
We needed reality to come crashing in so that the character,
Clarisse, can then drift into her delusion.
"They're not here. It can't be."
She just found out.
And so she goes back to the origins.
How they met.
It's like being in a cave.
We can believe we're still inside the car.
She's wearing a strange coat.
It looks like... ...we went too far back in time.
They are about 35 years old.
Surely, they didn't meet in the 1980s.
Claudine's play talks about Bensons.
It's not possible.
She went too far back in time.
Just like she makes up her road movie,
she makes up a story about how they met.
She reinvents it. Most likely.
At least that's how I saw it in my mind.
If you listen closely, the lyrics to the song are "I'll be Waiting."
I'll be waiting. I'll be waiting.
For this club scene, I had always thought I would use
the song "Nage indienne" by Etienne Daho.
That's why the film is called Hold Me Tight.
"Hold me tight, if your body becomes lighter I can save us."
Towards the end of the song, this turns into...
"Don't hold me so tight, if your heart becomes lighter I can save us."
It's the only scene where Vicky and Arieh are together.
It was a very poignant moment where at last,
they were physically together
and not through a voice in their head, in their thoughts,
or the fact that they missed each other.
And... here it is.
That's how we justified the fact
and the joy of shooting with a beautiful car.
The idea that when they met 11 or 12 years ago,
Marc already had this old car.
It's really his car.
And that's also why she leaves in this car,
because it's the car that brought her children and her husband
to their deaths.
Some connections are inked onto us, they are indelible.
This one between the joy of meeting him
and her solitude was always there.
Of course, she removes the child seat.
This pink scrunchie, another object that was in Galea's play.
Here, Vicky and I thought she shouldn't cry in this scene.
To the contrary,
it was almost as though she was saying, "You're pissing me off, go to hell."
"Where are you?"
The railway theme.
The trains.
A man, still in love.
His wife left, he won't let his colleagues work.
He's stuck in a loop.
Samuel Mathieu, one of the only professional actors in the film.
There are very few of them.
His wife likes it.
She's chuckling.
Here, we added these lines, little by little, to clarify things,
leaving cairns along the way, references to reality
before we go back to her delusion.
There is nothing more simple than a face.
Vicky's face, looking elsewhere.
Maybe she wants to see her husband naked.
So, there. I show him naked.
And maybe time has passed.
He doesn't have as much hair, he has love handles.
Accordingly, Lucie is all grown up.
He can't be naked anymore in front of his teenage daughter.
We don't see her yet.
The scrunchie.
And this very simple sentence.
"What do I look like?"
Of course.
"What are you doing to me? What am I?"
A piece of advice: always separate road scenes
from the shooting schedule.
They always take a very long time.
It's better to take a small team with you
and spend one or two days with five people
doing all the road scenes.
Do not include them in the shooting schedule,
you will waste too much time.
This allows you to drive and see accidents like this one.
Vicky improvises this beautiful gesture.
That's so Vicky.
This blend of pain and light.
Driving at night, during the day.
Since we shot over the course of three seasons,
by the end we were so sick of this story, of this woman who had lost her family.
So I told Vicky we were only going to do funny things now, in January.
For this flirting scene, we had no actors
so our gaffer Victor ended up doing it.
We nicknamed him Clark Gable.
I liked the idea that she would stare at his butt.
Here.
Poor sad queen,
she doesn't have anyone to share her cake with.
The Eiffel Tower of Saint-Gaudens.
Again.
Another piece of advice, when you film a car leaving from a gate,
remember to film the way back as well.
We didn't plan for it.
For those who find this amusing,
the license plate number is CJ433BM.
I had fun with this. It's John Cage's initials reversed,
433 is in reference to his piece 4'33"
which is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence at the piano
and BM is for Black Mountain, which is where he wrote it.
So, there you go. It came about because Christophe, the prop master,
asked me what number I wanted on the license plate.
These are scenes we shot outside of the house
because we didn't want to bother the owners three times,
so the third shoot was only outside.
I call these portraits. We made portraits.
A portrait of Sacha, who clearly wants to climb a tree.
Here, we have what I would call the movie pitch.
"I'm not the one who left. I made it up.
So you could stay here."
The challenge was to stay at the fringe of denial.
Clarisse is not in denial.
She is perfectly aware of the game she has made up.
Aware of her survival mode, her tactics, her tricks, her ritual.
But we can't accept it.
She smokes to remember him. She is not actually a smoker.
She lights candles.
I liked the idea of showing them both naked.
We had already seen Arieh naked.
When we shot the...
Here you see the sign on the shelves.
It never went away.
I felt the need to add this line. "My trick doesn't work anymore."
Again, a reference to reality, a meeting point.
We shot this departure scene
at the same time as the fake departure scene in the beginning.
We went through the same rooms.
But we filmed it differently.
Here, she has to change tactics.
Her trick doesn't work anymore. It's gone. It didn't work.
The trick of pretending she was the one who left.
She was brave enough to come back to the house.
She will make something else up.
A new trick.
Something she hadn't planned, something that just happens.
We hear sacred music.
Rossini's Little Solemn Mass.
Because she might not be spiritual,
but there's definitely some spiritualism involved.
Kyrie means "have pity."
What a joy to film music for real, as it is being played.
In order to do this, we needed Anne-Sophie, who plays little Lucie
and Juliette, who plays Lucie here,
to be pianists in real life.
Live music,
with a little inside joke about me.
"Not so melodramatic."
A bit of fun.
We can feel through her moves that she might have an idea.
She's thinking of something.
And here of course, we think, "Wait, what?"
She's older.
It's Lucie. She's all grown up. She's wearing the same shirt
and here's the scrunchie on the piano.
It can't be.
But we believe it, and it feels good.
Here, a change of perspective that came from the cinematographer.
Now, we're going to the other side.
And we are with Juliette. She's looking out the window.
Someone who seemed to stare.
Always filming a face
to show the thought process
and her thoughts are like waiting for a graft to take hold.
What if? What if?
What if I had her walk in the house?
Where would this lead?
This traveling shot is intentionally messy.
Here we go. No sound.
Again.
Let's see where it leads.
I have her walk in.
Lucie grew up.
I like this. I said to Juliette, "you don't know this house."
She doesn't know. Oh, OK this is my bedroom.
This was the first day of the shoot.
She gives her the diary
but Juliette, her imaginary Lucie, doesn't know what to write.
So her mother dictates.
The word Friday again.
Her mother's desk.
And her solitude, really.
This scene was part of what I called The Portraits.
We had shot the ball scene in the staircase six months prior to this
and it gave me this idea.
I wanted her to play soccer.
Maybe she will commit suicide.
She's having fun imitating the factory with smoke.
Clarisse doesn't drink anymore, that's good.
Here again, we came up with this scene at the very last minute.
The woman you see here, Clementine, is the Assistant Unit Manager.
She's playing the translator.
We filmed this during the third part of the shoot
and we got this idea that we wanted to speak ill of the dead.
That's how this moment...
...where she...
says things very clearly...
...and at the same time...
I didn't want to portray her as a saint, that was something I was obsessed with.
There. "Throw the kids out the window."
That's what Vicky told me when we met again for the third part of the shoot.
"A piece of furniture" is a lyric from a Brigitte Fontaine and Areski song.
This is the last scene we shot.
The last day of the shoot.
Here again, it's one of those moments where Vicky doesn't want to be alone.
So I thought...
she might want to make love to a man.
We had planned to have them
make love over there
on the rug, in the dark.
We also had to find an actor.
Unfortunately, I came up with this too late to get any actor.
So, guess who agreed to do it?
The Assistant Art Director, Jean-Philippe.
Why? Because he has a lot of hair.
We needed a hairy guy because I pictured her thinking of Marc
and Arieh has a hairy chest.
So Jean-Philippe became an actor.
Martha Argerich is in Claudine's play. Her name is mentioned.
I tried to include this kind of detail in a non-intrusive way.
There's an extraordinary, heartrending and playful documentary
made by Stéphanie Argerich, one of Martha's daughters.
This is what you see here.
The daughter asks her mother,
"How did you feel when you were pregnant?"
That was the key to surreptitiously include Martha in the film, on screen.
She sinks deeper in her delusion,
to the point where she dresses up her imaginary Lucie as Martha.
One day, Vicky put her neck-warmer on her forehead like this
and I told her to do it on screen.
It completely transforms her face.
They were supposed to make love.
Vicky and I both thought, instinctively... I never needed to talk much
with Vicky, we thought it was too much.
We did the part where she draws tattoos with her pen.
We see them later. They look like dreamcatchers.
They're on Arieh's collarbone.
But we edited that out too and we just kept this gesture.
We shot this really quickly.
Christophe was sitting on a small rolling stool,
which allowed him to do the shot and the reverse shot in one go.
This gives me goose bumps.
This is Stéphanie Argerich's documentary.
"The Cat and the Mouse."
Like Clarisse, who dresses up her daughter
with brunette or ash blonde wigs.
I really liked the sound, the idea that thunder became applause.
This is the ambient sound before a concert.
In a concert hall. With people coughing in the audience.
It's Rameau. You heard Rameau
played by Marcelle Meyer during the opening credits.
The prelude. But above all, there is the gavotte,
with six variations.
Always the same melody
but with a different scope, a different rhythm.
Like something that is stuck within Clarisse.
Like this note, incessantly coming back.
She continues her graft.
Here is Paul, grown up.
It's a tapestry film, with recurring themes,
things that come back again and again.
The lock on the door.
And here, we knew that we were in... for...
...a moment of absolute hyperrealism.
That's why we filmed it with a handheld camera.
In order to shoot this type of scene,
we only did two takes.
Two 25-minute takes.
The first one was shot from the back of the room,
with long-range zoom lenses,
and the second one was shot from the spot where Clarisse is sitting.
As though she was filming it.
They're living just fine without her.
So she comes back.
They've forgotten all about her.
She went too far in her imagination.
"Why is she coming back to haunt me?"
I liked the idea that she would haunt her in a domestic way.
He repeats her sentences.
Domestic squabbles are heaven, we just don't realize it.
Here, Vicky has a reference point.
How do you shoot this kind of scene?
Vicky was actually in the other room.
She had a monitor to see and hear what was going on.
And she had a microphone.
Arieh was the only one to have an earpiece.
Not the children.
He can hear what she says in real time. They are connected.
They had markers, as we just saw.
Vicky knew that when he was touching his son's hair,
she was supposed to say, "He's grown up."
But we could feel that it should be a seduction scene.
That's how "Cherry" came about.
What you're hearing is Vicky improvising.
She suddenly started singing "Cherry".
That's why six months after the beginning of the shoot, later,
"Cherry" came back like a binky.
This shot was not planned.
The way I pictured the scene, we could hear her voice
in her husband's head
and what we saw was the happiness
of ordinary life in the morning, at breakfast.
But thanks to our fragmented shooting schedule, which I like very much,
when I came back in the kitchen, it occurred to me
that Vicky could be on her own
and think the scene and the dialog,
which we had already shot, by herself.
Here are his tattoos.
And the more she feels good, the more she starts feeling this longing.
The railway.
She looks at him, she touches him.
That's why it's filmed differently.
It's as though she was filming with her iPhone,
where she is sitting.
Her longing swells and swells.
"Open Heart Surgery" by Brian Jonestown Massacre
was playing in the room,
they danced to this music during both 25-minute takes.
Vicky could see it.
She said, "I could see them live on my little monitor.
I was all alone in the room. They were far away from me."
She started to cry.
She sings the song to him.
It says, "I am never going away."
We had shot a scene where Arieh was preparing
the children's homework, their stuff.
And he was crying, in the kitchen.
It was very beautiful.
But we figured that she didn't want to see him cry.
Instead, we used these rocks, these stones.
I searched for a way to connect them through telepathy.
These are Arieh's stones.
In real life, Arieh is a hiker.
He goes on trips, he'll go who knows where for two years.
For instance, he knows every peak in the Pyrenees.
He has a special relationship to stones.
This scene was not planned either.
Since he was hiking and we were shooting in the Pyrenees,
Arieh came earlier.
He wasn't supposed to be on the shoot that day
but I said, "No, you're here."
There was such a shortage of scenes
where both of them were on screen together that...
We called this masturbation scene L'Atalante,
because they were separated and they fantasied they were touching.
This probably became a memory of their life as a couple.
One of the joys of being on holiday as a couple is clandestinely making love
while the children are in the room.
When you rent a small cabin.
Springtime comes.
I really liked this sort of... fairytale castle.
Evidently, I like filming girls who like flirting.
It occurs to me because this reminds me of Jeanne Balibar
in "Le Stade de Wimbledon." It's almost the same scene.
With a technician.
Of course, it's a rollercoaster. So to speak.
Laughter, and then horror.
Of course, this man is absolutely not an actor.
Poor guy. He became one half an hour before this scene.
This is a very powerful scene, which is also in Claudine's play.
I should mention that in the play, the revelation, the twist is at the end.
It's only at the very end that we find out.
This woman didn't actually leave her family.
She made it all up
so they could keep on living, in a way.
That's why I thought of this, when I was writing the screenplay.
I wanted this scene to have two different parts.
I thought of the fact that she could control time.
She would delay the moment the bodies are found
through this magical transition with the dog,
which becomes a video game.
She lacks imagination when it comes to her son.
She evidently connects with her daughter Lucie,
with what Lucie would have become. Her piano.
But with her son, she pictures a video game, a tree house.
All right. It was important to me not to give anyone any genius.
I didn't want any character to have any special ability.
It was really moving for me
to see Aurèle, who is here on screen,
being so reserved and introverted,
in contrast with Sacha, the little one in the beginning.
It is as though this child had shriveled.
Here we had fun with this Western scene.
A horse, things like a belt and a gun.
She's having fun. She's the one creating the shots.
Clarisse is imagining the scenes.
So, she can...
make jokes.
Like this very dirty joke.
There.
This wasn't planned. In real life...
It came about because Christophe Beaucarne told Vicky a joke
and she said, "What a dick."
This was one of those gestures I tried to nurture every day.
I wanted to keep Vicky busy, give her something to do.
So... Here, this is something I saw people do
in my own family.
This child Aurèle, who plays Paul, I saw him as the Baron in the Trees.
He leaves. He goes hiding in his tree house.
His sister takes the whole space.
Her mother imagines that she'll take her desk, now that she's older.
She sees her bedroom empty at first,
but suddenly she has a vision,
which we saw in a glance at the beginning.
It looks like a picture.
Her two children on a highway.
It looks like the 1970s in America.
A picture, in short. Of reality.
But...
something is not right.
As we get closer we realize,
like Juliette, who is looking at it, that it's a painting.
This painting by the American photorealist artist Robert Bechtle,
to me, seemed very similar to what Clarisse is doing.
She needs to redo everything exactly as it was, to recreate every detail.
That's why we thought it would be more powerful
if her imagination
and the fragments of reality were the same.
Like hyperrealism.
"I'm not going to remain a child forever," she says.
I played the piano a lot when I was a child.
I quit when I was young.
This film allowed me to picture myself as a pianist,
as if I had continued playing.
And if I had continued playing,
I would have played Ligeti.
We shot this scene in a very fragmented way.
We did six takes with Juliette.
She played this piece entirely six times.
As it happens, my sweetheart Barbara Hannigan,
who is both a soprano and a conductor, has worked with Ligeti a lot.
The only day she could come to the set was precisely that day.
Being both musicians, something happened between Juliette and Barbara.
Barbara imparted Juliette with Ligeti's animal quality.
This scene was built like a kaleidoscope
where all of a sudden Clarisse's imagination is diffracted.
There is more than one thing at the same time.
She worries about many things.
Ligeti's music is the music that destroys everything.
Percussive.
It's as though Clarisse wanted to stop the damage.
She experiences the conflict between her two teenage children,
which is something she will never live.
Never. She wants to burn everything.
You can hear the same words as in the beginning.
What hurts is that it really looks like a teenagers' quarrel
and then, nothing.
It's all right. She can turn the light back on.
But in order to stop the delusion, she needs to accept it.
Shot after shot, Juliette achieves something musically
that is absolutely incredible.
Here is the last take.
The sound is the sound of the last take.
It's a piece written only with A except the last note, which is a D.
We did variations.
Arieh wasn't looking at Vicky but during the last take,
I don't know why they wanted to look at each other.
It's the only moment they are in a shot together.
Even though it vanishes.
This dialog makes me cry.
Alone with her imagination.
One has to nurture it.
It's like making a film.
Sometimes, you can hold a set only with plastic straps.
They wanted to restore them but I said, "No. Leave them. Please."
Her imagination is going to morph, now that she's given up hyperrealism.
Now it's going to really go off the rails, so to speak.
It becomes total nonsense,
to the point where she herself plays the train attendant.
That's Vicky's voice
and everything is fake.
No more hyperrealism from now on.
You can guess that it's not the Paris Conservatory.
Nicolas Moreau, the Sound Editor, came up with the idea of this recurring note.
It drags on...
and it gets weird.
In the back of our head, we thought
if this was really a woman who had left her family,
and her daughter hadn't seen her for years,
when she shows up at the conservatory the day of her daughter's exam,
it would look like this.
You just heard Franzo, our Casting Director.
He's playing the president of the jury because 11 years ago,
him and I shot in the exact same room,
at the Coupe d'Or theater in Rochefort.
It was for "On Tour" and in the scene, he was bringing Dirty Martini flowers.
Same setting, 11 years later, and a completely different scene.
And here once again, bam!
Reality.
Supra-reality.
Everything crumbles.
We are in Saint-Gaudens' elementary school, for the end of the year concert,
the school where her little eight-year-old Lucie was learning Für Elise.
The delusion rebels.
Vicky's gesture. She touches her belly, as though...
...she was keeping her in her belly.
Vicky comes up with these things. She feels them.
I say supra-reality because the parents here are Juliette's actual parents.
It's something that...
This supra-reality sounds fake, we find it unbearable.
Clarisse is called Clarisse because of this line.
Like Clarisse in Musil's The Man Without Qualities,
who flirts with madness
and ends up...
alone.
There were voice-overs in Claudine's play.
They were intertwined.
Superimposed.
A second delusion crumbles.
Here again, this is Aurèle's real mother, Sandra,
who plays... I was going to say the fake parent
of the real child on screen.
One can also imagine, implicitly,
that she haunted these places.
That's why the parents want to call the police.
Everything needs to be erased like an ice cream machine
that removes all traces.
We start from scratch.
With her children. Small and real.
Here, this sums up the whole movie in 20 seconds.
That's it, the whole film is contained in this.
It's the kind of idea that comes up when you're playing around.
And it becomes surprisingly powerful.
An actor was born.
Jean-Marc, on screen here.
He is the owner of the house where we shot the film.
Again, not a professional actor.
Here, he was acting in his first take, his first shot ever.
It was very moving to see. It's uncanny to see...
ordinary people...
get into cinema this way.
They, themselves, are surprised.
Same thing for Cuca, the bartender,
who is obviously not an actress.
She's really extraordinary.
Behind her you see Jaime, who owns this cabin.
Hotel del Port in Baqueira.
Professional actors need to have a certain generosity
in order to like acting with non-actors.
Vicky is like that.
And here, what Cuca does, is the work of a real actress. Look.
That.
What she does with the bowls.
Vicky really liked shooting this scene.
It was done all in one take, she walked in
and then it lasted five minutes.
Many things happened.
Of course, I knew I couldn't keep five minutes.
It wasn't planned this way.
It's our job, Christophe Beaucarne and I,
to find cutaway shots that don't look like cutaway shots.
Hence the bathroom, the face cloth.
Here, it's still the same shot but because we were shooting in 6K,
we could get inside the image.
We actually reframed the wide shot.
It's the end of the five-minute take,
where Vicky acted many things in this room.
There are loops in this film.
There is the Polaroid loop, which opens and closes the film.
The film, the memory. And these lines that repeat.
It was written this way.
It was extremely detailed in the outline, in order not to repeat the shots.
Film them differently, from a different perspective.
As if she knew.
That's why even though I originally pictured this melodrama without violins,
here they seemed to... make sense.
Another piece of spiritual music.
Messiaen's Quartet For the End of Time.
For the type of shot you're about to see, of course,
the goal is that Vicky should only have to do one take.
We had to set everything up with the rescue team,
none of them were actors,
make sure they block her at the right moment
and then let her see at the right moment.
Find the right rhythm, make sure Jean-Marc, the cop,
arrives to get her at the right moment.
Make sure everything goes well
so that Vicky only has to get in this state once.
She was in such a state
that we had to lower the level of her screams.
Here are Arieh's stones.
All these fragments of shots were done on the side.
That's why they're a little blurry and shaky.
Bits and pieces of life. Not this one. This was a planned shot.
We grabbed stuff everywhere.
This violin and this man that we've already seen a couple times.
There are gestures like this...
It gives you faith in humanity.
And you realize that just like Cuca...
This man, bringing her a chair
Everyone knows what she's going through.
We, the audience, are the only ones who didn't know.
We needed to have a cemetery. We wanted to go there.
We debated but... we needed the elements. The wind. The earth.
There was another loop.
The film was supposed to open with Erwan Ribard,
the actor who plays the real estate agent.
It was the same scene but the dialog was inverted.
He was the one saying, "We'll need to paint the gate."
She was the one asking, "What year was it built?"
It was the other way round.
It was supposed to be the beginning of the film.
But the Polaroid memories won.
It needed to...
hit you in the gut
and that seemed a little too controlled, too clever.
These are little bits of shots we grabbed
and used in the crepe scene
when Vicky sits down to prepare.
Memory connects things.
The scene Vicky is about to do was supposed to be real.
We were supposed to shoot with the children and Arieh in the kitchen.
For real.
Lucie said that.
But...
it wasn't right anymore.
We had already tried incarnation.
Now it all had to be in her head.
She had to accept the idea of "never."
She could tidy up, organize,
which she couldn't do in the beginning.
To me, it was obvious that she couldn't stay in this mausoleum.
She had to leave.
I like driving.
Driving. Thinking.
Imagining things.
She had to leave.
And here the loop is complete.
Her first word at the beginning of the film is also her last.
She is wearing a raincoat and she's herding animals
like Cassavetes in "Love Streams"
when he takes care of Gena Rowlands' animals.
A little private joke.
There are many in the film, I didn't want to bore you with all of them.
Marcelle Meyer plays her fifth variation of the gavotte
and will soon start the sixth.
I wrote the screenplay to this music.
I wanted to have this kind of energy.
A kind of galloping melancholy. I don't know
Something... as if to say...
It's going to be all right.
Even though you realize at this moment
that all the music you heard in the film never existed.
She never went beyond Für Elise.
We believed it. We needed to believe it.
She locks us up inside the house.
No, don't leave us.
This is where I start crying because there is no more imagination.
She stopped imagining.
We are left with only tragedy. Don't leave us here.
This is why François and I wanted to have...
after this car locks us in...
with the dead,
one last burst of light where she takes us with her.
She saved us with her imagination.