Presented in the Un Certain Regard line-up at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, Meteors [+lee también:
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entrevista: Hubert Charuel y Claude Le…
ficha de la película] is Hubert Charuel’s second feature film (after Bloody Milk [+lee también:
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entrevista: Hubert Charuel
ficha de la película], revealed in 2017’s Critics’ Week and awarded multiple trophies at the 2018 Césars) whose screenplay he wrote with Claude Le Pape.

Cineuropa: Where did the idea for the film come from? The region where it’s set or the story about friendship?
Hubert Charuel: Both. And we had to strike a balance between these two aspects, which are interlinked by the fact that the land and its inhabitants intoxicate themselves in order to survive.

Claude Le Pape: That region is the epitome of the “empty diagonal”: a deserted town losing more and more inhabitants, year in, year out, and where there’s not much besides subsidies for this "nuclear dumpster." Hubert was inspired by Saint-Dizier, when he lived there 15 years ago.

HC: Even though that town gave me access to the cinema and to culture, as someone who lived on my parents’ farm, Saint-Dizier’s still the kind of town you want to leave when you grow up. You realise it’s not necessarily the kind of place you want to spend your time.

C Le P: We also wanted to focus on a duo, or even a trio of really close friends who are practically brothers, and on that connection between friendship, fraternal love and straight-up love.

How did you lend the story dynamism in that "empty diagonal" region?
C Le P: Both the characters of Mika (Paul Kircher) and Dan (Idir Azougli) are motivated to get away from the risks they’re running with the law, and a very clear life and death motivation for Dan. In Bloody Milk, it was a case of "I want to save my cows", whereas here, it’s Mika, because it’s mostly his viewpoint we see things from, and he wants to save his friend from potential death. But can he be saved? That’s the question which drives the story forwards.

What about the question of storing nuclear waste? To what extent were you looking to convey an ecological message?
C Le P: Dan gets high to survive and the region of Haute-Marne does the same in order to survive, economically speaking. Their friend Tony (Salif Cissé) creates "dumpsters" for nuclear waste, because it’s the only sector where there’s construction work. There’s a parallel with alcohol which ruins people’s lives without them necessarily seeing it: we cover "nuclear dumpsters" with concreate, telling ourselves we’ll deal with them later. For Mika, there’s a realisation over what we see and what we don’t see. These "dumpsters" are also a metaphor for Dan’s addiction, which is steadily getting worse. Are we capable of pulling ourselves back up when we’ve sunk so far below ground? There’s a political message in the film, but it’s also a narrative device.

HC: There’s the question of addiction and the question of denial. I grew up in the two "nuclear dumpsters" in this region. It was once I moved to Paris that I said to myself: "wow, there’s nuclear waste in there!" It’s happening in that region because it’s the only one that agreed to it. Our message is more about reflecting on the fact that all of our nuclear waste is stored in that one region. And that’s not all of it, because Der Lake, which we mention in the film, was created to avoid floods in Paris, and they needed to bulldoze three villages in order to build it. It’s a complicated region, and whenever there’s anything delicate that needs disposing of, it’s always there that people move things, because it won’t cause too much of a commotion.

Is this a film about the end of youth and the transition to adulthood?
C Le P: What we noticed was that everyone mucks around and drinks beer at bowling alleys, but at a certain point in time, some people become alcoholics and others don’t. And then it’s not funny anymore. They’re not young high school kids anymore, who steal cats; they’re adults, so they run the risk of far more serious and more real legal repercussions. These two characters who are full of naivety and kindness become aware of the seriousness of the situation.

HC: We wanted to explore a subject and examine characters which don’t often get talked about, but we also wanted to borrow certain genre film codes, starting out with a "buddy movie" and a bit of comedy before edging towards social drama and a little melodrama. There’s also a bit of a crime film aspect to it, and science-fiction with the "nuclear dumpsters". But we had to maintain focus on the three friends.