Acid: What “crazy” drug did Guillaume Canet choose?

What is it about? 15-year-old Selma grows up between two separated parents, Mikal and Elisa. Acid and destructive rain clouds are coming to France. In a world that is about to collapse, this fractured family must come together to overcome this climatic disaster and try to escape it.

Guillaume Canet’s choice (and his “crazy” preparation!)

If it’s just that Philippot thought of Laetitia Doshi as Ellis too quickly, she didn’t know who to ask for the male lead. It was the actor’s agent, Cecil Felsenberg, who is also Guillaume Canet’s agent, who suggested the actor’s name to the director. “I haven’t seen Guillaume in a movie for a long time, but looking back, I had no doubts. He had all the difficulty to convey the violence of the character. It seems he was not afraid of the darkness of the story”Just Philippot recalls and continues:

“From the first meeting it was confirmed and I liked it. From then on it was a pleasure. Guillaume leaves nothing to chance. He prepares a lot, works well in advance for his role. Physically he gained weight. He sculpted. A very athletic body, although extremely fragile. He has this ability that few actors want to be very precise from the first take. I am very grateful to him. He never doubted the adventure I offered him, he was never afraid. A film I put between Alfonso Cuarón and David Dufresne to write quickly.

In an interview with Madame Figaro, Guillaume Canet spoke about his physical training: “If I was in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion, I put myself in such a position: I slept very little and screamed a lot until my voice broke. My roommates at the hotel drove me crazy. Moreover, originally my daughter was supposed to be 8 years old, she was replaced by a 14-year-old teenager, however, I have to carry a lot on my shoulders in the mud, in the fields… It was a little more athletic than expected!”

The birth of the project

Acid is primarily a short film directed by Just Philippot in 2018. In 2013, the director moved from Paris to Tour, where he received a lot of image education with a young audience, with whom he filmed a lot. At the same time, he developed several completely different projects, of which Gildas has something to say, an intimate documentary about his multi-talented brother. Based on this relationship with the cultural institutions of the Val de Loire region of the Center, it simply joined the Genre Cinema Residency, which was partially funded by Ciclic, a film agency in the Center region. It was there that he wrote the short film Acid. He recalls:

“A wonderful effect or a stroke of luck, I arrived at a time when French cinema, undoubtedly inspired by the success of serials and the upheaval associated with the arrival of platforms, was looking for new creations, more hybrid, more equally accessible to all. Audience types Thanks to the success of the short film, I moved on to feature films Ღrubeli, a project from the same residence. I made this first film with the desire to distance myself as much as possible from American cinema, to offer a unique climate that can transport the audience to a troubled, unstable danger zone, but always extremely realistic.

“Thanks to the company Bonne Pioche Cinéma, which I got to know very quickly, I was able to develop the feature film Acid in parallel. La Nuée, my first feature film, was a fantastic first experience and allowed me to reveal new ambitions for Acid. .”

A scenario inspired by recent crises

It’s just that Philipotti and his co-author Yassin Baddei are immersed in Covid, the war in Ukraine and the yellow vest movement. Acid rain allowed them to face all of these crises without explicitly mentioning them: “We did not want to find a rational explanation for the phenomenon of acid rain. On the contrary, we had to be as ‘naturally irrational’ as today’s crises. We had to feel that a cloud in South America could quickly turn into a disaster. Europe.”

“We must relate the state of the world to a new catastrophe, connected not with mistakes in history, but with a combination of delays. Our time has fed us ‘unfortunately’. It has allowed us to be as realistic as possible while avoiding protecting the audience with the help of discourse or rational explanation. Today what What is appalling is that we have become helpless spectators to the natural upheavals of our world.The director explains.

Guillaume Canet Faces the End of the World: Why Acid Is One of the Preschool Cinema Events

Finding shelter

A father and his family find a dubious shelter in a house where a woman and her son live. Simply Philippot and his team designed this residence as a boat on the beach, with the basement created as a base where it is possible to protect oneself. “Cut off from the land, my heroes do not know that the boat has left. They will soon be completely lost in the open sea. There will be no way around them.”specified by the director.

Revision tricks

As originally described, the film was very expensive. It’s just that Philippot chose his production designer Gwendal Bescond and Yasin BaddayRe-examining the progression of the effects of acid rain to avoid a scale of destruction that cannot be sustained: “We had many common references with Pierre Dejon, especially the photographer Saul Leiter. We were inspired by his numerous photographs of materials, water drops on windows or his metallic textures…”

“And then we quickly talked about the desire for black and white, more precisely the desire to make a film that could lose its colors… All the visual tricks were done directly on the set. The patina effects were created by Gwendal and his team. With him I wanted to recreate a new nature : Nature created by acid rain In the house where they take refuge, I wanted the acid water to penetrate the roots like new vegetation.the film director recalls.