‘It’s unheard of, it’s never been done’: Is Vincent Lyndon really running the race?

In 2014, Steven Knight’s Locke joined Gustav Müller’s The Buried and Joel Schumacher’s The Game of Telephone on the list of films that focus on just one character and one location, leaving the rest on sounds and extras. Ten years after that feature film, sitting next to Tom Hardy in his car, Gilles Bourdos does the same with Vincent Lyndon in The Choice.

If there are minor differences in the adaptation (the role of Joseph Cross’s wife, played by Emmanuelle DeVos, has been somewhat expanded), the concept remains the same. And, with the exception of a few outside shots that serve as breathing space, we never leave the passenger compartment of the car driven by Vincent Lyndon. We emphasize this last term because the choice runs counter to one of the tricks of the cinema.

“Generally, in a movie theater, we put the toy car, the actor, on some kind of platform that is towed.”Gilles Bourdos explains. “It’s not there: it’s not towed or attached. Vincent drives it. We’re ahead of him because we know we’ve been changing the camera rig for every take, but that makes the exercise extremely dangerous in terms of the route. , the technique and the game, but that’s the Which made it possible for tension to give this route credibility and travel challenge.

“I couldn’t play any other way”

“I couldn’t play any other way”adds Vincent Lyndon. “I’m in the car most of the time, and we went into the studio on little things that were otherwise unfixable: a shot that starts on the phone, goes to my face, and then goes out of the car through the window and back. Going through the second it wasn’t so much impossible as forbidden, we couldn’t let the team do that on Highway 130.

“But the rest of the time I’m the one driving the car. And all the better because it gives the project incredible precision and keeps my mind busy, but we never do things as well where we have to concentrate like when someone else is driving you. Driving gives me It keeps me focused and makes me real when I’m on my phone. If I wasn’t actually driving, I could be on the road for a very long time.”

“There, when the headlights flash, I look in the rearview mirror. When I want to overtake, I have to set the indicator. It’s all a cover-up that gives reality to the project, the truth to the car, to the actors, and I want to say that these are the crutches on which I lean to be able to give myself completely to what I’m experiencing.”

In one sentence, the actor reveals that the shooting lasted for six days. But how did they happen? Could the story be filmed in chronological order, which is very rare in cinema? Or according to the interlocutors of Joseph Cross in the film sequence?

“We shot large blocks, but not in exact chronological order. Gilles Bourdos explains. “I worked more according to the characters. There was a chronological order, like the characters. And each actor interacted live with Vincent: either on the phone in front of the car, with me or from home. He played them all. Time lives with the partners and the voice you hear is the engineer’s filmed by, hidden in the back of the car and which received feedback sound on Bluetooth speakers.

“Obviously it was very difficult (laughs) the Chinese puzzle, because obviously Vincent didn’t understand. So to fix it together, we had to stop on the side of the highway to go over it again. When I was on the phone with the other actors, I needed actors that I had a lot of involvement with. , who are all wonderful actors, they helped me a lot.”

“I told myself I wasn’t going to make it, I was never going to make it”

If the situations are fair and natural, the choice is a matter of precision. Even in his text: “It was very scripted, very premeditated”– says Gilles Burdos. “But with Vincent Lyndon himself, there was a lot of work on preparing the text, rehearsing it, making it his own, changing the sentence to the right, to the left… So there’s a feeling. Great spontaneity.”

“But this spontaneity that we see on screen works very well because if you leave the actors to improvise, you have, as we speak in real life, a lot of garbage, repetition, junk, and cinema is not that. Cinema is an illusion of reality, therefore a condensation of reality, and to achieve this illusion of reality, you have to work a lot above.

“Yes, I had stage fright.”Vincent Lyndon says in conclusion. “I told myself that I was not going to succeed, that I would never succeed, that it was too difficult for me, that the text was too long to learn, that I was going to do too much. You were too closed off. But, you know, if I had to do it again, I wouldn’t do it, but that’s the way things are in life.

“And this film is a prototype. It’s unheard of. It’s never been done: it’s a film that has never been made about what everyone is doing. It’s very interesting. Especially since the cinema is sometimes often made, but no one. So here it is exactly the opposite. “ The result can be seen in theaters from November 20.

Comments collected by Maximilien Pierret in Paris on November 12, 2024