Insights: Why hasn’t Diane Kruger acted in a French film in 6 years?

What is it about? An experienced airline pilot, Estelle leads a perfect life between two long flights with Guillaume, her loving and protective husband. One day, by chance, in the corridor of the airport, he crosses paths again with Anna, the photographer with whom he had a passionate affair twenty years ago. Estelle is far from imagining that this union will lead her into a nightmarish spiral and turn her life into an irrational…

Return to France

Visions marks Diane Kruger’s return to French film, with her last appearance in a French production dating back to 2017’s All Things Apart. Estrangement over family life with her partner, actor Norman Reedus: “In recent years with covid, incarceration and family life that has become richer, I have been shocked and affected by this slowdown. As a young mother, I didn’t want to be separated from my daughter, and I didn’t want to be separated from my father.”

Genesis

Ian Gozlan wanted to explore the themes of control and violation, a duality that fascinates him. “I am convinced that, despite everything, we remain beneath the surface, creatures driven by impulses. However much we may want to reason and present ourselves as civilized human beings, the animal part of us is always there, ready to blow away the currents of who we were. Designed to keep our instincts… ”

At the same time, he often talked with one of the co-authors, Michelle Fessler, about prophetic dreams. It was the latter who offered her, shortly before shooting “The Perfect Man”, the story of a woman obsessed with a dream that fulfilled reality. The director concludes: “Then I decided to combine my initial desire for control with the beginning of this story, which interested me in premonitions.”

Documentation

The director does a lot of research before writing. He became interested in the profession of a pilot and met several people. It was necessary to make all scenes in the cockpit as authentic as possible, for credibility, but also because “This realistic anchoring was essential to take the film into a more dreamlike dimension.”

He also immersed himself in reading books dealing with psychoanalysis and the unconscious. One of the reference works that accompanied him throughout the writing was An annoying quirk From Sigmund Freud: “Through this essay, Freud explains that the strange is all the more sad because it is the most familiar to us. Is what we call familiar what we know best? Think about home, intimacy?

Robert Altman’s Shadow

As for the film’s climate, Ian Gozlan had in mind two Robert Altman feature films that he discovered as a teenager and that greatly influenced him: The Pictures and The Trojan Women. “Something particularly strange and charming emerged from these two works. A fascinating play between fantasy and reality.”

to sleep on your feet

During the making of the film, Ian Gozlan interviewed pilots who told them about their sleep problems and the need to take a powerful sleeping pill called Stilnox to help them sleep. The director was not allowed to use this name and had to invent the name “Nyxstill”.