Manoël Dupont, a director but also an actor, made his name with the short film Oil Oil Oil, which was selected in Clermont-Ferrand and which also did the rounds in a number of other festivals, notably Namur’s FIFF where it earned Mara Taquin and Baptiste Leclère an award for Best Acting Performance. Dupont has reunited with the latter to make his first fiction feature film, Before/After [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Manoël Dupont
ficha de la película], which was presented in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima line-up.

Cineuropa: How did this project come about?
Manoël Dupont: To begin with, I wanted to explore a loose relationship between two people, which was fairly clear in my mind, without the characters even having a face or a gender. It was a relationship that was waiting to be brought to life, and then I crossed paths with Baptiste and Jérémy Lamblot, friends who I do some theatre work with, who I know really well but who surprised me one day by talking about this particular operation which they were considering. I realised that that was the context in which this relationship should come to life. So I asked them if I could go with them on their journey and, since they’re actors, I suggested we turn it into something a little more than simply documenting their experience.

How would you describe their relationship?
I’m fascinated by relationships which can’t be put into words. Cinema is a wonderful place to explore all that. The fact that their relationship is uneven and operates on different levels, interests me. They’re two characters who are floating through life, it’s like they’re aquaplaning. They seem to be struggling to find themselves, that’s probably what brings them together, even more so than the fact they’re both bald and want an operation. They’re both very lonely, that’s also what moved me.

Once you’d found the bodies and characters to embody that relationship, how did the project come together?
Baptiste and Jérémy had given me a year to find the resources to follow them. I hesitated between documentary and fiction, and then I came across the call for lightweight productions. It was perfect, and everything went very quickly from then on. We advanced by trial and error, everything we did helped us move towards something else. We’d set ourselves guiding lines and had a few compulsory scenes, but we developed most of the film as we went along. For this to happen, we had to establish the most precise framework as possible, to then have the freedom to go with the flow, to allow accidents to happen and to welcome new encounters.

How did you strike the balance between fiction and documentary?
That’s the challenge, how do you fictionalise documentary material, and how do you "documentarise" actors who come from the fiction world? We knew we’d only have one opportunity to shoot in the clinic and that it would be tight. We shot a lot of the documentary material in sequence shots and, ultimately, we did that for the fictional side too. The actors had to tread a tightrope without really knowing where the performance began and ended, whether they had to act or just “be”.

Losing hair is also a really delicate time in a man’s life. There’s a sense of insecurity and ultimate fragility, but it’s also a sign of time going by.
It’s super taboo, but it’s also something we really laugh about. I think there are lots of funny, light-hearted moments because it comes with the territory, but we didn’t go too heavy on the comedy. We wanted the film to be very literal. It wasn’t easy never being cynical. I didn’t want to give an opinion on that kind of surgery. My two actors are very good at taking things with a pinch of salt, they accepted making the film, after all! They’re really funny in real life and could see real potential for comedy in the subject-matter, and I almost had to ban them from making jokes. I had to ask them not to create distance between themselves and their characters. Ultimately, it was their hair that was at the centre of the story! And obviously we put a lot of the film together in the editing phase. We wanted to draw out a gentleness, for a context that isn’t really that gentle.

What was the biggest challenge you faced?
Editing the film. We didn’t use a clapperboard and barely had a screenplay. We rarely reshot scenes. The range of possible outcomes was immense. It wasn’t easy to find the right balance and I learned a lot from my editor. We shot the film very instinctively, then edited it very thoughtfully.