Tag: Conann

Where exactly does the Conann project come from? Is it a film, a play, or a hybrid piece of work?

I used theatre’s soil to make it grow. I had been circling the subject for a while. When I say the subject, it’s mostly the succubi, the demonic pacts – I had amassed a lot of notes about them, trying to give them shape. At the same time, Philippe Quesne, who was directing the Théâtre des Amandiers, suggested that I put on a show linked to cinema. And it came about like that, by spontaneously answering him, “If I do a project for the theatre, it will be a female-led Conan the Barbarian!” He was amused, and invited me to come and work at the theatre to start developing the project, to build the story. In my mind, this show was to be the genesis of She Is Conann. It included projections, a double director, trying to edit the film – it was a “preparatory show”. The Conann antechamber.

But the show didn’t happen?

No, it was due for production in 2020, in the midst of COVID restrictions, after which Philippe Quesne left the theatre. I still went through with the show, as we had imagined it, and I “filmed” it at the Amandiers. It’s a film that already has its title, La Deviante, which I will show later. There are also two other short films, excrescences of She Is Conann – We Barbarians, a virtual reality film about the damnation of actresses, and Rainer, a Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley.

So She Is Connan isn’t a documentation from Les Amandiers?

No, indeed, it’s a film imagined for the cinema, nourished by the reflection of the preparatory show. I wrote the script in parallel with the experience at Les Amandiers, and shot it in Luxembourg in an old steel factory that was being dismantled. A really inspiring place, where metal was made (fittingly, for Conann), a huge territory (crossing it takes over an hour), with a capacity to accommodate incredible scenery. Each plot presented an imaginary of the film. I could contain all the sets I needed to make – here, my vision of 1998 New York, there, the outrageously large temple, elsewhere, the battlefields with a surreal checkerboard or the small lake of another world. The sunken bunker was also present – the field of possibilities was infinite. At the Amandiers, we had built fake mountains. I had them brought to Luxembourg to complete the picture.

Nevertheless, do you think She Is Conann still keeps, at least in its very first part, a trace of this theatre experience?

The Hell part, indeed, has kept a theatricality, with the chrome lodge – a representation of the underworld inherited from the opera and the studio. And the character played by Françoise Brion, a dead woman who arrives in this other world, condemned to recover her memory and relive the atrocities she committed. That is her damnation, to remember the barbarian she was – the cruellest show there is, that of the mirror of the soul. The dead woman is confronted with her doppelgänger, the barbarian queen, on her throne. And if the introduction evokes the theatre, it mainly refers to a forgotten part of French cinema, where the Faustian pact, the devilishness were represented in an omnipresent way, whether with René Clair’s Beauty and the Devil, Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du Soir or, of course, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. I wanted to revisit a neglected yet captivating genre.

The film has something operatic about it.

At the very beginning, I wrote songs for the play, something along the lines of a rock or pop opera, similar to what I had done with Apocalypse After. For the film, I asked Pierre Desprats, the music composer on all my films, to forget everything we’d previously done. This time, I was looking for percussion-based sounds, a drier general tone, with bold deliberate choices to differentiate the eras. I gave him references ranging from the introductory music of Bergman’s Persona, to Bernard Hermann’s scores for Hitchcock, Nino Rota’s ethnic collages for Satyricon, Wu Tang Clan-type rap for the Bronx, Plastikman for the warlike coldness, or more classically Purcell revisited by Michael Nyman in his minimalist period, up to the Paul Anka-style song that Barbara Carlotti interprets. For Pierre, it was a rather destabilising mess. But this choice gives a singular and intense result.

It’s clear you didn’t start from John Milius’ film.

No, not at all (laughs). Conan, in Milius’s version, is an emblem of virility, of testosterone. I went to the antipodes of that. I summoned a small part of Robert E Howard’s stories, a writer close to Lovecraft, who created Conan in 1932 before his premature death. In his work, Conan was a slender character, who climbed and slithered, which is far from the image associated with the character in the film. But I didn’t adapt the books, I re-read them, kept the original trauma of the killed mother and the idea of the barbarian slave’s revenge. Through my research, I was able to go back to the original Conann, the one from Celtic mythology, written with “NN”, the spelling I kept for the film. He is a conqueror who spent time with fantastic creatures called Fomorians, described as demons, or rather cynocephalic demigods, with dog or hyena heads. Now, I already had a demon with a dog’s head in my notes, so the connection troubled me a lot. It validated me in making this adventurous choice of a total reappropriation, of a multiple, polymorphic Conann crossing times. The re-inscription of the “NN” spelling to this iconic name is also part of the idea of femininity and multiples.

What did you hope to achieve, in completely unexpectedly revising this figure?

The desire to take stock of barbarism, culminating in what I believe to be the height of barbarism – old age killing its own youth.

Is the film shot on film?

Yes, it’s 35mm. We use half the frame, a thrifty scope, the one used in Italian westerns. And there are no special effects post-film-processing – everything is created during the shoot, on the spot, with the lights, the constructions and some transparencies. This is my shortest shoot – five weeks – so I had to think of the cut in an even more concise way than I usually do. I chose to shoot almost everything with a crane. I put a dolly track in one place and that conditioned everything we were going to shoot during the night. Because everything was done entirely at night, it was impossible to create darkness in this huge space, which in parts was open to the wind and rain. It was very tiring, with all the physical ordeals that this can pose, for the actresses and technicians, a total investment, without a net. I understand now that I could never have made She Is Conann like that if it had been my first feature film.

Because of the insecurity of the staging process and the virtuosity that it required?

In the sense that the only solutions to solve the problems were radical, and that I had to assume them with all the risks that this entails for each sequence – synthesise the staging as accurately as possible and make editing choices during the shoot, by betting on the tempo of the actresses’ performances. For example, when the 35-year-old Conann, played by Sandra Parfait, walks through the streets of the Bronx with Rainer (Elina Löwensohn). This scene took up four pages of dialogue in the script. I decided to do it in one shot – a walk back-and-forth through the humid streets. I knew that the actresses knew their lines, we had worked for a long time on the characters at the theatre, we knew each other well, we could take the most extensive sequences head-on, while doing very few takes.

Was this your first time using the crane? What did you discover in this process that made you want to come back to it again? It’s not just a system of elegance, you’re creating a floating effect.

I used it at the end of the shooting of After Blue, in the studio for the World of the Dead, with a decentering lens that breaks the balance between blur and sharpness. Here, I extended this principle over the length of the film with the same type of optics. Sometimes, I took the camera on the shoulder or on a dolly, but 80% of the film was shot sitting on the crane. As I like to impose on myself constraints that define style, it became a game, that of making the shooting time cohabit with the narrative ambition of the film. With this set-up, we think of the movements in the space by making the most of the heavy daily installation. I was perched on the crane and almost in telepathy with the grip and the crew. The most difficult thing was my vertigo, I never took my eye off the viewfinder, I clung to the camera to see only the film and forget the void. Perhaps the crane gives the vision that the dead have on the world. A fluid, floating vision, without ever being able to touch the ground. This formal approach makes sense for She Is Conann, in the way it accompanies the characters, always in perpetual mutation, moving from one world to another. We cross six stages, six ages, six periods, the film summons the history of cinema but also the great History. I had to make each chapter stand out while keeping a global coherence. This style, the staging, the use of black and white created unity in the rupture.

How do you manage to present an entirely feminised version of this figure, when working from a mythological figure, widely popularised in heroic fantasy literature and in cinema?

The 25-year-old Conann, played by Christa Théret, is non-gendered, completely they. I thought it was important to shake up the genres, to offer actors/actresses the possibility of playing a character originally anchored in virility. My desire was to take root in the original myth to better transcend it. The crossing of eras accompanies the very idea of ageing and the inner journey of this multiple character. To talk about this viral barbarism, I only saw a “monstrous” film, sharp, “ambitious” and yet always focused on intimate moments. I wanted to explore new areas of cinema and storytelling, culminating in old age killing youth.

Conann is then played by actresses of different ages, with very distinct personalities and characters. They embody the stages of a life in a brilliant way.

I don’t see constancy in being an individual, but distinct periods, changes as one gets older, the tragedy of which is self-betrayal. This is the driving force of the film – how one can betray one’s convictions, one’s ideals, one’s desires, how one hardens as one ages.

The other driving force of the film is more romantic – it is impossible love.

Conann’s first betrayal will be to transform her desire for revenge into love for her natural enemy. She betrays her desire for revenge. Revenge, this old rusty cinema mechanism, we must lay to rest. It is a narrative given, never contested, when it is actually a form of barbarism. Besides, I believe that this reassessment of revenge is found in all my films, be it in The Wild Boys or in After Blue. Conann, therefore, takes an unexpected route in the genre – she doesn’t take revenge, she betrays herself, after which she becomes a monster by diverting her convictions, by transforming herself into a frighteningly manipulative being, who becomes darker over time, even going viral.

Conann is “the barbarian”, but which barbarism(s) is the film about?

Cruelty, killing one’s ideals. Opportunism. Cynical capitalism and corruption. The last Connan, in “a refinement” of barbarism, perverts artists.

They will ingest her.

She becomes a parasite. We think we are devouring her, but it is she who devours us.

The segment on “old Europe” is very impressive. The dialectics between horror and fascination in spite of everything is captured in one dialogue: “Europe is beautiful, it has style,” “Don’t talk nonsense, will you?”

There’s a symbolic imagery and a very head-on speech in that moment. I represent Europe with a French can-can dancer on a battlefield. There’s also the presence of the “masked capitalists”, taking a blood bath and the 45-year old Conann, who, whilst serving them soup, will end up slaughtering them. Their blood will feed the pool, because a new generation is coming and must soak its power. This is the first time I’m confronted with such a directly political form, condensed within a scene that synthesises a vision with no detours.

It is a film that travels through metamorphoses and worlds but in which there is no off-screen.

Yes, in the same way that we never see the sky. We are stuck with Conann and her compartmentalised memory. The camera surrounds the characters like a dragon, most often through a bird’s-eye view, a very oppressive way of dealing with space, with the night as an escape route.

Who is Rainer, the dog-faced character played by Elina Löwensohn, the common thread in each episode?

To explain, I have to mention an important reference for the film – Max Ophuls’s Lola Montès. Lola Montès tells her story in a circus that has become her hell, reliving her whole life from her trapeze, before the big jump. This is the structure I used to build my story. Rainer is the equivalent of Peter Ustinov’s Mr Loyal in Ophuls’ film. His character is at the same time the most touching, the spurned lover, but also the one who pulls the strings of the decline, the most cruel. My Rainer is a little different. He is a demon who photographs death and bodies, half-Helmut Newton, half-Gerda Taro. But the first reference, engraved in his leather, is Fassbinder and his black romanticism. Rainer sniffs around corners to corrupt the characters, he speaks like a Shakespearean hero, his sentences echo like ironic oracles. He is a aspect of the devil, the arm of death, but most of all he is the one who humanises himself as Conann dehumanises herself. This crossing and this impossible love constitute a counterpoint to barbarism.

For Rainer, L’Atelier 69 made a prosthesis of a peeled dog’s head. And why the dog’s head, anyway?

Because in all mythologies, the dog is the one who makes you pass into the other world. The prosthesis had to be able to reproduce all of Elina’s expressiveness, she wore it like a second skin. We had to change it every two days (the prostheses get damaged quickly and can’t be glued again after 48 hours). Elina would eat alone in front of a mirror, in her corner, because we couldn’t remove this second skin. Because of the fitting time, she arrived and left after everyone else. Many people in the team discovered Elina’s face at the end of the shoot. For five weeks, they only saw her with her dog face. She had become Rainer. She fully inhabited the character, in her body, her voice and her expressions, it was extremely unsettling. Today, I sometimes dream of Rainer, my empathy “for the Devil”.

Should we also see in Rainer a reference to the first Daft Punk music videos, those directed by Spike Jonze?

That’s funny I didn’t think of that, even though it’s a music video I liked a lot in the late ’90s. But I do have a memory of a slightly thick, cartoonish dog face. It’s more the first version of Planet of the Apes that remains my reference, in terms of prosthesis and turmoil over human and animal cross-breeding. I’m utterly convinced that in the future, humans will be drawn to the animal identity, they will become hybrids of dogs, cats, reptiles, using surgery and genes. But it’s funny that you mention that music video. When I summoned the ’90s aesthetics for the Bronx part, I thought of a film that has influenced many music videos, as it happens – Coppola’s Rumble Fish. As well as One from the Heart, for the lyricism of the staging within a studio. And then a cult film in the US, sadly never released in France, Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, produced by Lynch and with Elina Löwensohn, Martin Donovan and Peter Fonda. A vampire film set in New York, made the same year as Ferrara’s The Addiction – another reference for this sequence.

Re-creating New York in Luxembourg?

It’s make or break. I worked with all the more care on the exteriors, interiors and dialogues for this sequence, to make it as real as I could.

When that sequence appears, it gives the film a new rhythm, which will continue to grow until the great final scene – looser, more open. This seems to me to be a new possible direction for your cinema, a breath that creates a space inside the saturation, the accumulation. Is it also a way for you to clarify the message, in a film that is more openly political? Is it a skilful and gentle way of addressing a generation that is less familiar with references but that is directly concerned by this message?

Exactly. The references are there, sometimes in spite of myself – I made them a construction material but not a quotation. There’s also the universal heroic figure. I wanted to be able to play with a kind of ancient superhero and make them cross time. Actually, this idea is rather Marvel-like, but created in the style of an artisan, iconoclastic auteur. It is, above all, a way of saying that we must not leave epic imaginary in the hands of the big studios. The film makes its way through my obsessions, through fantasy, through myth, to eventually arrive at our era and address a contemporary generation head-on. Each segment pushes a new cinematographic process to the limit. The same goes for the narrative, a crescendo, up to the ultimate closed hearing.

Would you agree that it’s an angrier film, or a disillusioned one, or rather a film in response to an era that is disillusioned?

I have a little difficulty using the term disillusioned, which for me implies a form of nonchalance, even cynicism, and that is precisely what I do not want. It’s not a disillusionment either, because I remain optimistic. An anger, yes. I believe that, here, it is present. Against authoritarianism, the thirst for power, the illusion of happiness, this world in which we are trying to lock ourselves. The ambient cynicism, the opportunistic speeches and the violence, which lead to totalitarianism. I am absolutely non-violent. But I use my imagination as a disruptive weapon when I feel that the walls are closing in. I try to offer a counterpoint, to a certain kind of cinema that denounces differently. “What cannot be avoided, one must embrace or bite it”, as Rainer would say.

The last part is terrible, from that point of view – “ingest or die!”

It’s a poison. You think you can make it your own, take your share of the loot without taking the poison, but the opportunism reveals the system in which you are immersed. I am aware that the film differs from my previous features and that it extracts itself from the unbridled dreamlike or imaginary obsession in which they were embedded. But if I used islands, planets…it was already to question us. After Blue tried to imagine a world after the polluted world. The Wild Boys condemned violent boys to become women and change their perception, in the deepest sense. The closed world allowed us to go to the end of the questioning. But reality was already there. She Is Conann is not a closed world in an ocean, but a succession of hatchings in troubled waters.

Interview by Philippe Azoury (Paris, April 25, 2023), published here by kind permission of UFO Distribution

English translation thanks to Meli Gueneau

Weird Weekend present She Is Conann, alongside We Barbarians, on Friday 31st May, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.