In 2021, Olivier Pairoux delivered his debut feature, SpaceBoy, a sun-drenched story inspired by the great American adventure movies of his childhood, from Spielberg’s classics to The Goonies. With the antihero tale Vigilante, screened at the Brussels International Film Festival (BRIFF), he explores a much darker genre. We met the Belgian filmmaker to discuss his new feature and his passion for genre films.

Cineuropa : What made you want to look into the subject of vigilantism?
Olivier Pairoux : I discovered the phenomenon of paedophile hunters through a Vice Magazine documentary on a Canadian guy we see reaching out to predators online and arranging to meet them in a car park, at two in the morning, armed with a camera in order to catch them. My first reaction was to think he was like a vigilante, a modern-day Batman, but the more I dug into the subject, the more I uncovered the problematic aspects of this way of taking action, which led me to see things in a different, more nuanced way. Still, the topic of vigilantism, which has increased a lot in the internet age, seemed utterly fascinating to me. It raises the question of how far we are prepared to go to take justice into our own hands, in a world where things sometimes slip beyond our control. Also, is this really the kind of justice we want?

How did you create the character of Morville, your vigilante?
He is a tormented guy with a complicated past who leads a solitary life – although he does have a close bond with his niece as well as his two best friends, Xavier and Steve, who are also vigilantes. Each of them has different reasons for being a vigilante; I wanted to explore that too. One is driven by his family history whereas another is partly looking to make a bit of money there – which also allowed me to show the business that has developed around this activity, with ransom demands, etc. What sets Morville’s investigation in motion is an assault committed against his friend Steve one night, as he was trying to catch a paedophile. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Morville genuinely wants to do the right thing – he wants to save his friends, and the world, even –, but he is sometimes wide of the mark. He does not read situations so well and repeatedly makes mistakes, even if what motivates his actions is always love and a desire to fix things. This points to the fact that today, a camera and the internet can be extremely powerful weapons, and that they are not always used wisely.

The investigations conducted by Morville and his friends, but also by the character of Rebecca, a journalist who is in turn investigating Morville, are meant to make up for a failing institutional system.
The internet has become a huge playground, a kind of public court where people express themselves, say what they like and don’t like, sometimes even cancel other people, passing judgement before justice itself does. The internet is used by everyone: by child sex offenders to meet their victims, by vigilantes to hunt them, by the police who watch it all from above and try to dismantle whole networks of offenders. And then there are the journalists, who go online looking for information, sometimes using similar stratagems. It’s a shell game which represents part of what the internet is: people concealing their reality to appear as someone else.  

This is a pure genre film. Was this your intention from the get-go?
I’ve always loved genre films and through my work, I have always tried to explore different genres. My first short, Puzzle, was a sci-fi comedy, and SpaceBoy was a family adventure. Here, we have a detective story with an investigator who isn’t actually a detective. Genre films allow you to explore new environments in a dynamic way. What I like about detective stories is that they are based on encounters with various people through whom you get an idea of this world, whilst making progress with the investigation.

Why did you cast Eddy De Pretto – for whom this is his first major screen role – as Morville?
From the outset, I wanted Morville to be distinctive, so I needed to find an actor who would take this character somewhere else. And I like the idea of creating a contrast between the actor and the role. I could have chosen someone very beefy, but instead, I favoured Eddy De Pretto’s more delicate appearance so as to turn it into something else. I also like working with artists who already have their own universe and co-creating the character together, and I could sense that Eddy wanted that too. We talked a great deal about the script, about the character. I think he liked that I was trying to take him somewhere different when he wanted to go elsewhere. He showed incredible creative flexibility.