Unveiled in a special screening in Critics' Week at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Flesh and Fuel is the debut feature film of French filmmaker Pierre Le Gall.

Cineuropa: Where did the idea of a “love story” set in the world of lorry drivers come from?
Pierre Le Gall: The idea of filming the world of long-haul lorry drivers came to me during the pandemic. We were all stuck at home, but many professions were still out on the road, and lorry drivers were among them. There were lots of news reports about them, and I was deeply moved by these men and women who were putting their personal lives — their relationships with family, friends, and even romantic partners — on hold for the sake of this demanding profession. I was also in a long-distance relationship at the time, which I became fully aware of, so I wanted to explore the themes of long-distance love, loneliness and the ache of missing a loved one. I was also drawn to the trucking world because it is one of the few working-class sectors in France where people still work with great passion that is passed down from generation to generation. I really liked the idea of filming a working-class community that is rarely portrayed in cinema, and which could bring together two themes I love in films: time and love.

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To what extent have you studied this community?
I started with fairly standard documentary research, notably Jean-Claude Raspiengeas’ Routiers, les forçats du bitume. Then I spent a lot of time on the road with Jean-Sébastien, a friend who’s a lorry driver, travelling through England, Switzerland and Italy. The idea was to experience the road itself, the sense of time it evokes, and how time seems to stretch endlessly on those long journeys. At the same time, there’s the internal clock ticking, hoping to arrive on time for delivery or unloading. And daily life: the cramped conditions of the cab, the bunk, washing up at service stations and motorway restaurants. I took copious notes. I already had a dramatic outline and was writing my screenplay in parallel, feeding it with everything I discovered along the way. Then, I had to turn this documentary aspect into fiction, using certain gestures and elements specific to the profession, and try to make the film as gripping and exciting as possible whilst remaining as accurate as possible to this environment.

How would you describe Étienne’s character?
He embodies a rather universal vision of contemporary loneliness, a form of melancholy. I wanted the actor playing him to be like a mysterious territory, which is why I chose Alexis Manenti. With his very enigmatic face, somewhere between adolescence and manhood, it’s often hard to tell what he’s thinking. As a result, we can project our own fears and anxieties about loneliness onto him. A connection with the character was therefore established quite easily. And whilst there are two main characters who form the couple, Étienne also has many brief encounters: colleagues, online friends, former colleagues, and so on. But emotionally, he feels that his job potentially prevents him, as a gay lorry driver, from finding love. That’s what I wanted to explore, because I believe there are many people today who still don’t allow themselves to be themselves and to live the life or experience the love they’d like to. The character thus became quite emblematic and symbolic for all those people.

How far did you want to go with the explicit scenes whilst still appealing to a mainstream audience?
I’ve always wanted to film sex scenes in a straightforward way, just as one films work. It was important to be accurate in this portrayal, and I didn’t want to sugar-coat it at all. But there was also never any question of homoeroticising the trucking world, which wouldn’t have been fair. I wanted these sex scenes to be humorous in a certain way, and I drew inspiration from the American director Ira Sachs, particularly from a scene in Passages where Franz Rogowski and Adèle Exarchopoulos lose their balance during intercourse and laugh, and the audience does too. This idea permeated the writing of the film, which became more of a quest for tenderness. In the second half of the film, we discover that, in fact, what Etienne’s character dreams of most is a simple embrace. And this quest for tenderness means he is prepared to set off on a different path to find that love.