Claude Schmitz presented the world premiere of Conrad & Crab – Idiotic Gems [+lee también:
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entrevista: Claude Schmitz
ficha de la película] at IFFR, a sort of sequel or spin-off of his previous film, The Other Laurens [+lee también:
crítica
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entrevista: Claude Schmitz
ficha de la película], screened in 2023 at the Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight. The Belgian filmmaker reunited with agents Crab and Conrad, provincial police officers whom he relocated from the south of France to the heart of Alsace.

Cineuropa : Quelles sont les origines de ce projet ?
Claude Schmitz: In The Other Laurens, Francis and Rodolphe played secondary characters; but I really enjoyed watching them develop, and their chemistry delighted me. Very quickly, I wanted to develop their characters further and take them elsewhere, to create a kind of spin-off. During the edit, Rodolphe invited me to his small town of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, his native stronghold, where he has lived most of his life and where he has his recording studio in an old converted farmhouse. It was during an event, the mineral fair, which takes place there every year and is the second largest event of its kind in the world! Suddenly, hundreds of people descend on this small town to sell and buy minerals. Of course, there are often thefts, and I thought it would be great to transport these two characters into this environment. Little by little, the idea was born to make a film that would be both a portrait of these two characters and of a town; starting from an environment without really knowing it, in order to reflect a local reality within the framework of a fictional story.

And to play on this tension, this friction between reality and fiction?
Yes, the idea was to settle somewhere and try to understand how to portray a region without taking a folkloric approach; ensuring that it is told through the people who live there, that this is the driving force, rather than a scripted argument that would caricature a place. I didn't organise castings, but rather meetings. I had no preconceived ideas about who the other characters would be. We put small ads in the local newspapers and set up a little HQ in a bar, where anyone who wanted to could come and introduce themselves. I started to draw up characters based on these meetings, writing about the people I met, the town's pastor, the restaurant owner. Real people, who more or less play themselves, but within the framework of a fictional story. Border areas are something that interest me a lot. It's an investigative film, but in the script, the investigation is a bit of a pretext for telling the story of a region and the people who live there. It makes for something quite open, with lots of digressions. The idea is to remain surprised by what might happen. We have quite a few scenes that leave room for improvisation, or rather, for the unexpected, with the idea of bringing a kind of freshness to the whole thing.

What aesthetic choices were made to accommodate this unexpected development?
This valley is a bit unusual because it has undergone deindustrialisation. On the other side is Colmar, the wine country, wealthier areas. It's almost reminiscent of places like Twin Peaks. My director of photography and I were thinking about the type of framing we wanted to use. We knew there would probably be fewer cuts than in most films, because the idea was to give people time to exist within the frame and allow the unexpected to happen. We set up fairly fixed frames and let the action unfold. What interests me deeply in this kind of project is finding that fine line between moments when we're in a sort of holiday mode and moments that are more action-packed; with the idea of creating this provincial crime film, we're more in the holiday, walking mode rather than in the action.

Music is treated in a very special way; it drives the action forward, sometimes providing a counterpoint, and in the end, it concludes the narrative.
We worked in a rather unusual way. I suggested to Thomas Turine, my composer, that he use Rodolphe Burger's studio during filming to compose the music on site using instruments from the farm. Every evening, we listened to his demos. The music had to be melancholic at times, rockier at others, to provide a counterpoint to the scenes; either by hammering out a rhythm that wasn't suited to the scene or by stretching it out to give it a melancholic tone. The idea was to end with this last scene, in the studio, as if raising the curtain at the end of the show.