Without Waves: “His Big Brother Threatens Me”… The true story of this movie with Francois Civil

What is it about? Julien is a college professor. Young and determined, she tries to bond with her class by taking several students under her wing, including the shy Leslie. This preferential treatment is poorly received by some comrades who attribute to the professor ulterior motives. Julien is accused of harassment. The rumor is spreading. The teacher and his student will find themselves in one spiral. But in front of the college, which threatens the fire, there is only one word: no waves…

true story

No Waves is inspired by the ordeal Teddy Lucy-Modeste went through a few years ago. At the college where he was a teacher, the chief education adviser once handed him a letter written by one of his students accusing him of watching her touch his belt: “He’s 13. Things are getting out of hand. One of his older brothers is threatening to kill me.”

“Someone else is taking me to file a complaint against me. I refuse to be arrested because I think it’s stupid to plead guilty. Every day I leave school and worry about someone breaking my legs. I live in fear and shame – also a crime: I don’t want colleagues who take me to the subway to be attacked because of me.” .The director recalls.

Why François Civil?

Teddy Lucy-Modeste wanted Julien to play a young man with a sincere smile, whose teenage years we could still perceive at a glance: “Francis There is an actor who never ceases to impress me on the set. He was more than an actor who came to play his part: he was, in fact, so invested and generous that I believe he created the character as much as I did.”

“Before filming, he was isolated to study his text, and when he came back, he became Julien. Something changed in his gestures, in his speech, in his being. The paradox with Francois is that he is a very identifiable star, but we can project all possible worlds onto him.– says the film director.

false colors

As for the image of the film, Teddy Lucy-Modeste wanted to work on false tones – these changes in light in the frame itself, which cause strangeness: “Since the classroom lets in these streams of light from its windows, which can suddenly dry up at the whim of a cloud, I wanted to radicalize this process, as if time were going crazy and it was carrying the emotions of the characters. “

“I wanted to bring the shot to life by setting up moving lights and multiple characters. The idea was to multiply, in the shot, the number of looks that don’t agree with each other. In other words: he always had to hurry in the plan.”he specifies.

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Find college students

At first, casting director Judith Challier interviewed the teenagers she accepted and gradually led them to the film’s theme. He then asked them to improvise on a small stage. Teddy Lucy-Modeste recalls: “The ones we saw again during The Call had a prep scene. Then we had to create a class and make the teenagers work together because I knew we had to both believe in their individual performance as well as their collective performance.”

“In my experience as a teacher, I realized that each class has its own energy, hopes and taboos. These work sessions made it possible to build a relationship of trust between everyone.”

freedom of speech

The college principal is shown as a character who does not want to make any waves. By choosing this title, Teddy Lucey-Modeste tried to turn his film into a movement to liberate teachers’ speech: “We must remember the shock of these images from 2018, when we see a student holding a fake gun to a teacher sitting in front of a computer. #PasDeVagues then resurfaced on social media.”

“The suffering has been too great for years. The teachers needed to denounce the violence they suffered every day and the silence of their hierarchy in the face of this pain. Reading the press, we realize that teachers are little or poorly protected. Their institution, which has paradoxically built its own weakness over the years… Today teachers are speaking and it is important to listen to them”he says.