“I wanted to play with the audience’s perception”: Paula’s meeting with the director

HelloCine: Paula This is your first feature film. Tell us about your background.

Angela Otoba: I have experience in philosophy and ethnology, but during my studies I realized that commenting on reality, analyzing it, was not my job. So I started branching out, first I made a film with my friends, which we produced ourselves. And others followed, producing them. As a result, I learned film by doing, the technicians I worked with explained the rules and methods to me. I was both naive and free to defy certain norms. And I tried to hang on to it, to listen and learn everything I didn’t know, and at the same time to keep a vision, an unformed way of doing things.

Your film starts as a utopia and slowly turns into a nightmare. You like to cover your tracks, as you do with a character played by Ocean, for example.

Yes, I wanted to play with the audience’s perception. First, I slowly floated in a less and less realistic world, I played with colors, proportions, angles of view, sounds, so that we do not know whether we are facing a nightmare, a dreamlike perception or a crazy reality. And I have no answer. The film tells a story that is like a fairy tale, very symbolic, where reality is hidden behind almost unreal characters, figures that border on the grotesque. Like Bill’s character. With Ocean, we had a lot of fun pushing the sliders far. We wanted his character to be terrible, then to become funny, and therefore funny, in order to finally deceive us, unfortunately, in a banal way, his cowardice.

Have you had any leads on Paula? We think of Mosquito Coast (minus the mosquitoes) and The Shining when we see your movie.

I saw a lot of movies while writing and preparing Paula. I’d say if I had to pick just one it would be Thomas Alfredsson’s Morse, about a young vampire child who meets a human child. Paula’s father removes her from the world as a small vampire, and both long to return to the banal and comforting world of other children.

Where does your young hero come from? Aline Hellan-Boudon ?

actor Paula It was super long. I met many little girls who dreamed of making films. What I immediately liked about Aline was her strength and her detachment from all temptation, I knew we would be able to work. The idea was that he never asked me to immerse myself in his character, the acting direction was quite mechanical, almost choreographed, I would talk to him during the shoot and he would play with his babysitter afterwards. The working atmosphere was suddenly quite cheerful, we had a lot of fun with the father character, with Finnegan (Oddlefield) and him, it gave us some distance from the harshness of the scenes and it was good that it happened. It goes like this.

Finnegan Oldfield makes an incredible composition. how did you lead

Likewise, the idea was never to ask him to mentally blend into his character. We used all the tricks of the cinema. Make-up, costumes, lighting, camera angles made it possible to build an increasingly terrifying character. We shot it chronologically and it was great because we were able to develop his character step by step. I chose Finnegan for all that he exhibits, which is very likable. And we said to ourselves, we’re going to portray this image, we’re going to inject poison into the character, but imperceptibly at first, step by step. And this progress also allowed us to push the sliders all the way down as we gradually got used to the audience. It was an exciting piece of composition to behold and accompany.