Grégoire Colin comes to Vary. Star of 35 Shots of Rhum, Colin introduces his directing debut Fox Bay
French director and actor Grégoire Colin presented his short debut Fox Bay and a new Claire Denis feature film 35 Shots of Rum at FFF. After his Tuesday night arrival in Karlovy Vary, we asked him not only about his cooperation with this French director, but many other things.
Extract from “Seneca” and One Dance
When and how did you actually start making films with Claire Denis?
Our cooperation started about seventeen years ago in a usual way – through casting. But actually it wasn’t an ordinary casting because Denis had the actors read an extract from Seneca and then dance. It was an interesting experience to work with such a text, and then simply just dance and feel how you are being observed.
How did this long-term cooperation influence you?
I met Claire Denis for the first time when I was eighteen. I remember that the first thing I told her was that I didn’t want to act any more. I started acting when I was very little, when I was twelve. I worked on several movies that made me quite disappointed. I wanted to focus more on music and writing. And I wanted to work on my own film, because that time I was just shooting a short experimental movie. But Denis’s approach was completely different. When we were first cooperating on US Go Home, she was forcing me to improvise because that’s what her lifestyle was. And in this way I got the feeling, that as an actor, I can work creatively on something too. Before that, I had been feeling more like a robot, I hadn’t felt anything while I was acting. In her directing, she let herself be influenced by the actor a lot, by his position and motions. Seldom did she decide in advance the width or angle of the shot. That was one of the reasons that it was hard for me to cooperate with a director because they would always have everything prepared in advance.
You acted in films of many different famous and extraordinary directors. How did they influence you in your own directing?
For example, recently I was working with director Naomi Kawase (on a film called Nanayomachi – editor’s note) and I was shocked by her style of work because I’d never experienced anything like that before. But I learned a bit from everyone, of course. It’s like looking into different kitchens and then choosing what is suitable for you from each recipe. In the end you don’t even know which particular influence is taken from where.
Could you tell us something about your short film Fox Bay, which you are presenting at FFF?
Working on Fox Bay was quite difficult for me because several years before that I had been working on feature films with very strongly directed structures. This short film was a bit different, and I shot it in a way as a compulsory pre-step before the eventual shooting of a feature-length film.
At the same time I used a short form so that I could make a more emotionally based story which probably wouldn’t be possible with a longer film. The story itself came to me very quickly. I know Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films and books, and it’s probably good that I didn’t read one of his short stories in the book Stories from the City of God until after the shooting. Otherwise, I would have adapted that one probably. I found many similar points in it, even in the story structure.
OP
