11/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: The French director chatted with us about his energy-filled first feature, which uses a horror film exterior to explore the malaise of young people living in the inner city suburbs

Vermin [+see also:
film review
interview: Sébastien Vaniček
film profile] by Sébastien Vaniček, the closing film of the Venice Film Festival’s International Critics’ Week, follows a group of young people living in the inner city suburbs which are suddenly overrun by gigantic spiders.

Cineuropa: In your film, you show images of housing estates which defy clichés, where the characters support one another and grow together. Why?
Sébastien Vaniček: I grew up in Seine-Saint-Denis, where I shot the film. The image of the inner-city suburbs as violent places where drug dealers and misery reign supreme doesn’t fit with what I saw growing up, and I always wanted to give my version of events. When you live in a building where everyone knows one another, you support and help one another. Any problems mostly come from the outside or from the image that the outside world has of the suburbs. It’s xenophobia, a fear of strangers, which then creates tensions within the housing estates themselves. What I wanted to show in Vermin was the "crime of having a nasty face", of being judged based solely on our appearances or our origins. I wanted to show the impact which other people’s opinions have on the world in which my characters are evolving. The horror genre helped me to talk about it. I used spiders in Vermin because, like the characters, they’re creatures which we judge on their appearance. Spiders represent what we might feel in these contexts, or at least what I myself have felt as a young person from the suburbs.

Just like you say, there can be real political power hiding behind seemingly “light” moments in horror films…
Yes, Stephen King said that "horror is the best way to talk about human beings" and maybe the healthiest way because you don’t show things, you imply them and, as a result, anyone who wants to see and is sensitive to the message will see it and feel it, while everyone else will have a good time regardless, they’ll have fun. I think it’s a good way of reaching wider audiences, of talking about political and serious subjects without necessarily making an arthouse film, which wouldn’t suit me at all.

How do you choose and work with your actors?
It was pretty easy working with my cast, which is composed of actors I’d selected from the outset and whose potential I was already aware of, and others I’d discovered during auditions. We all belong to the same generation, we speak the same language, express ourselves in the same way and have the same film references. They’re first and foremost human beings who I wanted to share this adventure with. I chose the same technical teams for my first feature film as I’d used for my short films: twenty or so people who I’ve been working with for ten years or so. My actors invested themselves physically and mentally, they ran and yelled, they felt the cold and sweated with the determination to make a brilliant film. The atmosphere was amazing, we were lucky. I think this cohesion can be felt in the film. I was really open to the actors making suggestions; substance is what matters to me, rather than form. Before we started shooting, I was lucky enough to be given advice by Alexandre Aja, the biggest French horror film director. Aja said: "if an actor confesses that something isn’t right, you have to listen to them, they’re bound to be right". From an aesthetic viewpoint, the film was shot very naturally, almost like a documentary. I left my actors alone to go where they wanted, while I tried to capture whatever I could.

You’ve taken a pretty “atypical” route, in that you didn’t go to film school, make a few short films and then make a feature film. Is this a strength?
I get the impression that by spending more time making films than studying them, I’ve found myself as a director, I’ve honed my style. But at the minute, I’m doing the opposite, in the sense that I’m watching lots of films to "fill" a few theoretical gaps, I’m learning a lot from the masters.

(Translated from French)