Member of the jury of the 8th festival of the detective movie Beaune, the actor Melvil Poupaud (a Tale of summer, The Time found, A Christmas tale, Mysteries of Lisbon, Laurence Anyways, Head down) he granted us an interview on how he approaches his craft.
Festival du film policier requires, I asked Melvil Poupaud if he sometimes had the impression of investigating its character through the scenario to find the “truth.”
Far from a vision of the game “actor’s studio”, Melvil Poupaud tries instead to put forward the hand, intuitive to the player, evoking a kind of letting go, once the technical aspects (brands, movements, camera movements, etc) are assimilated.
At the border between embodiment and possession, the game becomes an experience of dissociation. In the first excerpt, Melvil Poupaud was talking about the “look” of the character as a good way to forget part of who we are. Here, he details the technique of “blocking” (express their emotions through objects that can be manipulated), that he has discovered with Raoul Ruiz.
Finally, I wanted to get back with him on his role as a drug dealer with the prostitution of minors in headlong of Kamen Kalev, a character who had seemed to reveal a charming aristocratic far removed from the cliché of gangster that you are used.