09/07/2025 - We met up with the directors behind the playful mockumentary revolving around a real/fake Raphaël Quenard: a young actor who rides high, all the way to Peru

(© Jérémy Adonis)

This Wednesday 9 July will see I Love Peru [+see also:
interview: Hugo David and Raphaël Quen…
film profile] released in France (Le Pacte) and Belgium (Case Départ Distribution), a fiction feature film with all the airs of a documentary which is directed by filmmaker Hugo David and actor and filmmaker Raphaël Quenard and which was unveiled in Cannes’ Cannes Classics section back in May. The film charts the rise of a determined young actor who hurtles up the stairway to success at lightening speed and claims a César award before crashing and burning. His fall, paired with an unhappy romantic relationship, results in him travelling to Peru to find meaning, accompanied by his faithful friend and biographer who films him at all times of day and night. Conceived of and shot in league with Hugo David (who met Raphaël Quenard while the latter was filming Junkyard Dog [+see also:
trailer
film profile] of which David was shooting a making of movie), the film takes the form of a factual documentary whilst basing itself on Neruda’s quote: "The truth is that there isn’t any truth".

Cineuropa: How did your initial documentary material (Raphaël Quenard’s life story) turn into fictional material?
Raphaël Quenard: We wanted to make a mockumentary from the outset, to ridicule what we were shooting. Initially, we wanted to make a film called Sur la route d’un hypothétique César [Trans. En Route to a Hypothetical César], telling the story of an awards-obsessed actor who moves within film industry circles but who doesn’t understand its codes, and who clumsily stumbles his way towards the success he craves.

Hugo David: The idea was to draw on Raphaël’s real life experiences; he was making more and more films at the time, which gave us access to that material. It was a micro-plan, because it only involved two people, Raphaël and myself. What it cost us was time: our own, as a matter of fact.

RQ: We clocked up a huge number of hours for that initial part of the film. Out of the 200 hours of rushes we compiled, we had 190 on film shoots, which only account for the first 25 minutes of the film! For the second part, in Peru, we had a screenplay, it was more structured.

And how did that second part of the film come about, where Raphaël invites Hugo to come with him on the Peru holiday that he was originally supposed to go on with his ex-girlfriend?
RQ: From the fact that we genuinely had one too many plane tickets… and from a genuine disappointment with the screenplay. We’d been encouraged to write a screenplay after the hours of rushes we’d made on film sets. But that screenplay proved far too expensive to produce, and the great freedom we’d enjoyed was also hard to reproduce. So we set off to Peru with the aim of doing something totally different, making a film about the loss of a romantic relationship, though still from a comical angle and on a mockumentary basis.

HD: When we returned home and showed it to the producer of the first part of the film, he said: "the two parts work well together". In the editing phase, we realised that the link between the two was the story of our friendship.

One question in the film asks whether a person in the public eye, an actor in this case, can ever be anything other than a character?
RQ: [The French word for character] “personnage”, comes from “persona”, a mask. We’re afraid when we’re in front of an audience because it’s a room full of strangers, and our reptilian brain translates that as: "they’re enemies who might kill us". It’s our prehistoric legacy. Inevitably, a career of that kind does limit the extent of our privacy. Although, to be honest, the times when there’s a camera following me only account for a tiny proportion of my life, but people fantasise over that part.

Did filming as a small team also give you an essential freedom within this project?
RQ: As an actor, the fact I’m only filming with Hugo, a friend who I’m not awkward around at all, allows me to venture into intense emotional territory without feeling judged. Whereas, in a more conventional setting, with a big team, a text, a given mise-en-scène approach, barriers are created between the situation you’re exploring and a kind of credibility. The downside is that you can’t aestheticise the film. The other freedom was that we didn’t have all the intermediaries we’d usually have in a traditional film, telling you "you can’t go in that direction". The number of intermediaries in our film was so small, it’s probably the most authentic film I’ve ever made, despite the fact it’s fiction. It reduces the distance between the artist and the audience too.

(Translated from French)