13/08/2024 - The French filmmaker explains his fascinating work which is anchored in the timeless modernity of Monaco, and clarifies his rather unique approach to fiction

(© Shellac)

Virgil Vernier won great acclaim for his feature debut, Mercuriales [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (screened in Cannes’ ACID selection in 2014 and nominated for the Louis-Delluc Best First Film Prize). After the mesmerising movie Sophia Antipolis [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Virgil Vernier
film profile], unveiled in the Locarno Film Festival’s Cineasti del Presente line-up, the director is making his return to the Swiss festival, this time participating in the main competition with 100,000,000,000,000 [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Virgil Vernier
film profile].

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Cineuropa: Your films always gravitate around one particular place. Why Monaco this time around in 100,000,000,000,000?
Virgil Vernier: After Sophia Antipolis, where I started to explore this specific side of the French Riviera, which is totally fixated with the idea of success and the capitalist dream, I wanted to go a little bit further with a city, the country-state of Monaco, which is the ultimate pinnacle of that idea. I also wanted to question why we all want to participate in this luxury world. I noticed that in rap videos, for example, and in the really popular culture of social housing estates, for example, that Monaco was a dream they often mentioned. The more difficult our lives are, the more we aspire to that kind of material comfort. And that’s what Monaco represents, especially for marginalised people who have to do odd jobs, or "bullshit jobs" as they’ve been described in the USA.

Out of these anonymous workers, you chose an escort as your main character.
I met quite a few sex workers, and they were all light years away from the caricatures we tend to attach to them. They do their job without any kind of drama. Some sociologists might describe it as the "uberisation of escorting". These are very young people who started selling their bodies by totally disassociating themselves from what they were doing. It doesn’t mean they don’t suffer psychological fallout from it or that it’s not incredibly complicated for them. I was inspired by them, and some of them play themselves in Afine’s gang. They actually work in this profession, which is very common in Monaco where there’s high demand for beautiful young people whose bodies are available and for whom the line between sex work and escorting someone to parties is pretty blurred.

The film depicts a pre-apocalyptic world, but without ever over-dramatising things.
I’m fascinated by the project to extend the city of Monaco, which is about to begin. It’s a titanic, "Dubaiesque" project: Monaco reaching out to the sea. The starting point for the screenplay was a little girl whose parents were billionaires. I was researching the people overseeing the extension project and I thought it would be brilliant if these people who have everything had a child they didn’t take care of, because they’re so preoccupied with work. It dovetailed perfectly with the character of Afine, who’s on the other end of the social ladder, but who’s equally lonely. As for the film’s apocalyptic side, I wanted to suggest this using the very modest and minimalist means of a nigh-on documentarian approach, simply by shooting the building site at night-time as well as in the daytime, and by exploring these very real stories involving the destruction of the sea and the triumph of concrete. There’s was no need to lay it on thick: it’s something that impacts all of us.

Once again, you’re using non-professional actors. Is this an unwavering guiding line of yours?
I don’t have any rules, but I am interested in unearthing people, certain individuals’ real lives and faces we don’t see elsewhere. I think it’s invaluable that films can open a window onto something unknown. Zakaria Bouti, for example, I met at 6am in a nightclub in Marseille, and it was a revelation: he was unique, exactly how I’d imagined my character to be. I held a lot of auditions with professional actors, but they didn’t have the same grace or innocence. My producer, Jean de Forêts, is hugely supportive of me and doesn’t pressure me at all for the fact that I don’t help him make the film easy to market in terms of its cast or its story, etc. Without him, I wouldn’t have managed to make this film. But you also need to know which rules you’re going to play along with if you want to try out something new. I had a tendency to reject lots of rules, but, little by little, I’m accepting some of them, and there’s no reason to think I won’t try working with a known actor in my next film.

(Translated from French)