CANNES 2026 Directors’ Fortnight
Sarah Arnold • Director of Too Many Beasts
"It’s a film about everything that overflows and overwhelms us"
- CANNES 2026: The director shares the adventure of making her highly unique and funny first feature film, involving wild boars, hunters, farmers, a police officer and a psychologist
The star attraction of the 79th Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight, toplined by Alexis Maneti and Ella Rumpf, Too Many Beasts is Italian-Swedish director Sarah Arnold’s debut feature film.
Cineuropa: What gave you the idea for the film’s setting: the Ardennes and the war between the hunters and the farmers?
Sarah Arnold: I’d read an article in Libération entitled "Campagne à feu et à sanglier" [“Countryside besieged by fire and wild boars”] which was all about farmers’ anger over baiting and the explosion in the wild boar population. It was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, with the two sides getting at each other by setting fire to cars and killing wild boars. They took things further, to the point the ministry was worried it would escalate into a social-rural clash. I found it fascinating; it’s like a mafia film on rural ground. And it had the metaphorical potential to speak to the profit enjoyed by a privileged minority at the expense of a more modest majority. It was like a class-struggle chessboard. My producer and I met with the Les Robins Des Champs association who were furious and who were killing wild boars left, right and centre. I also went on a hunt. I’m not actually against hunting – I’ve met some brilliant hunters who know a lot about the natural world. And I also spent time in a police station.
Essentially, the film is a rather outlandish investigation.
I love Hal Hartley, the US director from the ‘90s, and in Simple Men, there’s a hopelessly depressed police officer who sits down on the ground after a lengthy tirade and asks "fuck, why do women exist?" I thought an officer floored by a relationship crisis and therefore disarmed by love would make a brilliant character: a representative of order who’s actually in a state of disorder. I also wanted to make a detective film because that’s what I like. And I decided on a dual investigation: a police investigation and a psychoanalytic investigation. I wanted the police officer to solve the police investigation without meaning to, through his own personal self-analysis and through semantic bridges linked to parallels and coincidences. I wanted a hero who was good at feeling intuitively, rather than thinking.
The police officer and the psychologist come from somewhere else, they’re not from this region.
Yes, they’re foreigners. That was important because that’s how I always feel. I was born in Italy, my father is Swiss, I have Swiss and Italian nationalities, but I grew up in France. I lived on a boat when I was small and then I moved to the Marne, which was a hostile area where I felt like a foreigner. The two protagonists in the film are ill-suited to the area, and they have inappropriate reactions to things as a result of their emotional sensitivity which they’re unable to contain. Because it’s a film about everything that overflows and overwhelms us.
What about the film’s satirical tone?
It comes from the fact that I really like clear-cut dialogue. I’m yet to work with actors on realism or let them improvise. That’s what gives the film a slightly theatrical tone. Acting becomes a bit like a pantomime. As for its gross-out humour, the society we live in does make us want to brush things aside quite brutally, don’t you think? So it’s a brutal comedy with some occasionally lewd jokes, because that’s how men speak.
What were your main intentions for the film’s mise en scène?
I wanted to avoid handheld cameras and to lean into a fairly classic American film language. And to have fun with this film set in the Meuse region, which is desperate to be American. So we were a little influenced by Fargo by the Coen brothers, Inherent Vice by Paul Thomas Anderson, and True Detective by Hal Hartley. But with the intention of filming police officers in blue (laughter).
The film’s music is also pretty remarkable.
I wanted to work with a bass clarinet. Because they make a fairly ridiculous sound. And it’s the same sound a wild boar makes. In fact, they blend together very nicely. I listened to the FUR trio a lot with Hélène Duret playing the clarinet, and with guitar and drums. And Florencia Di Concilio did a lot of work on the film’s sound because I was worried about the melody and the different layers.
(Translated from French)
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