[INTERVIEW] Léa Fehner, for THE OGRES

To read also our review of the movie THE OGRES

We met Léa Fehner, the director, inspired by the brilliant THE OGRES on the occasion of its first presentation in Bordeaux. She spoke to us with great kindness and sincerity of her childhood, inspiration for the film, and the shoot with the real troupe of travelling theatre flamboyant of his parents.

 

Tell us about your desire to make this film ?

Léa Fehner : I grew up on the roads in the 1990s, alongside my parents who have decided to try the adventure, inherited from the fairground and the theatre of Molière. They wanted to bring the theatre where there was not, they have an appetite for game and share. For all that, the film remains a work of fiction inspired by the men and women of my childhood, who have an excessive fondness for life and who attempted the dream of the collective. It is a mixture of the reality of their harsh and violent and burlesque. I wanted to translate the breathtaking romance of these life choices. I also wanted to show that things are not clear-cut and are not from a single source in the community life. It is a movie with its paradoxes : on the one hand the feast of the group, the movement, the restlessness, and the other the need of breathing in the outside.

 

Why this title The Ogres ?

L F : I wanted a more energetic track, reminiscent of appetite, a joyful, side-splitting, earth-shattering artists. These are people who have a desire deeply living, a desire of all, a want to live life so voracious ! They have faith intimate to think that the mixture show life feeds of one another, and that the more the show is stronger, the life is intense. There is an aspect rabelaisian, monstrous with the ogres, a disproportion, a certain panache ! And then an ogre goes so far as to eat its own children. I had the idea to wake up, to bring the film drum beating, not to police this life. I hope that this will not be too loud for the public.

 

How did you choose the actors, including your own family, and how was the shooting ?

L F : At the outset, it was not expected to play my family. I worked for my scenario and thought about the dramaturgy of feelings rather than events. Then I felt the need to enrich it in contact with the company of my parents : the Is. Find a consistent carrier of meaning between the scenario and reality was important to me, it was a difficulty that I had encountered on my first film (editor’s NOTE: Qu’un seul tienne et les autres suivront) The artists started to improvise, and they naturally ended up on the filming, because the tour travelling was transposed in the film. We kept all their names but we avoided the risk of psychodrama and play my parents ! The troupe has experienced a great joy in doing the film, and life on the set was stronger thanks to this complicity.

Adèle Haenel, Marc Barbé and Lola Duenas are also of the theatre. Not the same genre, but they have in common is a curiosity about the other. This mixture of backgrounds has given rise to great people and has brought pleasure to the group. What I love about Adeleis that she manages to combine this power and lightness, this side is solar, and this side of insolent. Very committed and anxious to think just and strong, she had no desire to occupy the central place in the film. But she chooses her roles to be part of an adventure.

How have you worked with your two co-writers ?

L F : I first worked with Catherine Paillé, that I call my “Lady fiction” : it was in the ping-pong table standing between the subject matter of my childhood, and her desire to have fun. It was an ongoing challenge to work on the characters of the characters, their plight, their bad faith. I asked the question in the writing of the scenario if I had to integrate the money worries and insecurity of the job, but as they are ubiquitous, I have preferred to concentrate on the side of the intense lives of these Princes of the Night, who are anyway in a mess the next day. Then I showed the work to the troupe, which has allowed me to integrate their improvisations. Brigitte Sy ‘s arrival at the end, she had the heart to speak of the part of the childhood of the characters, while taking care not falling into the immaturity.

 

Can you tell us about the couple, Mona (Adèle Haenel) and Foul (Marc Barbé) ?

L F : Foul was a painful wound, and he uses provocation as a call for help. There is a strange mixture in him, modesty, excess, exhibitionism, and transgression. He does not dare to look to the future. On the contrary, the character of Mona, but it takes a lot of strength to be with a man who carries that much damage. It is in youth and in life, it has nothing to do with the grief of bereavement. She pulls it Foul to life, through a mixture of immaturity and wisdom.

 

You have found your own way in the cinema ?

L F : We sometimes need to detach from what we did to be able to come back then. As a child, I was very impressed by these big mouths in the company of my parents, very freedom-loving and very proud. I was like the children in the film. I believe that he must find his own path, his own tribe. I had a very nice troupe of technicians on The Ogres, with a lot of kindness on the set.

 

You co-wrote a short film with Deniz Gamze Ergüven when you were at la Fémis, what are your thoughts on her journey with Mustang ?

L F : We haven’t seen for several months because it has been a lot in Los Angeles. I find that she has made a beautiful film about the insolence, that looks like him.

Interview by Sylvie-Noelle