After Them, Their Children: How the Book of 2 Million Readers Became a Movie

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August 92. A lost valley in the east, blasted furnaces that no longer burn. Fourteen-year-old Anthony is extremely sad. One hot afternoon by the lake, she meets Stephen. It’s love at first sight that later that evening he secretly borrows his father’s motorcycle to go to a party where he hopes to find her. When he realizes the motorcycle is missing the next morning, his life is turned upside down.

One book, one day

After them in the origin of their children, the film, there is a book, signed by Nicolas Mathieu and winner of the Goncourt prize in 2018. Which, a bit like the film side of the Palme d’Or, offers him more exposure. So, about two million people have already read the story of Anthony, Steph and Hessin to date, which gives a lot of potential for its film adaptation. which was originally supposed to be a series directed by Gilles Lelouch.

“We met with him in 2022 because he wanted us to co-write an adaptation of their children after them to make it a TV series.”Zoran Bucher, one of the two directors, tells us. We were supposed to write and maybe share the production of the episodes, and at the time we hadn’t read Nicholas Matthews’ novel yet, but we reached out and fell in love with his writing and what he had to say at first sight.

“I think a lot of us are bored teenagers in this rural area. We did not grow up in the same France as the characters in the book, because we grew up in the Southwest, but in a social environment. which was very similar to Anthony, and it spoke to us a lot, but Gilles devoted himself to L’Amour ouf, which took up a lot of time, so he had less time after them.

“Giving breath and cinematic environment to these characters”

“With Ludovic, we felt that this story deserved to be on the big screen rather than a series, I believe we wanted to give these characters a breath and a real cinematic environment, and we found that the big screen was a better fit for this story. .”

That Gilles Lelouch was fascinated by this story is not surprising when we see L’Amour ouf. Because two films, very cinematic and recognizable, tell a long-term failed love story and immerse us in the 90s with their characters. But it was Ludovic and Zoran Bucherma who adapted it after their children.

Which, on the face of it, is a big change from the directors of Ted and Year of the Shark, horror comedies that combine amateur and professional actors, dialogue that reeks of native Southwestern accents. But something connects the three feature films, beyond their identification with the characters: the desire to tell the story of youth in cinema.

“Our previous two films were films that had a fantastical and terrifying dimension.”Zoran Bucher answers. “But I think beyond that we were interested in talking about France, where we grew up, we’re particularly attached to the idea of ​​photographing the working classes, because that’s probably who we are, and I know it well, and that’s what we found in Nicolas Mathieu’s novel: precision if How do we view this class?

“For us, their later children represented the continuity of what we started as an approach in these films. Because the idea of ​​putting the genre in France, where we grew up, it was also a formally unrestricted way for us. We grew up in a family that wasn’t particularly fond of cinema, with references that weren’t the right guidelines for us when we went to film school in Paris.

“The Year of Teddy and the Shark was a way to incorporate cinema into our stories as children, but in films that were still, for us, films with social issues.”

“We found a lot of these teenagers who are bored in the countryside”

“And the children after that, we really saw it as a continuation of that, thinking that we’re going to watch a rough story, a class reproduction, that’s the end of the steel industry in the region. So we show how a generation develops without this common horizon, it’s a factory.”

“At the same time, we wanted to look at our own references, which are very American, and say that even if we have this social story, we’re going to give it this cinematic setting and dare to stage it.” It’s a bit American, a continuation of Teddy and the Shark Year for us.

Unlike those two films, where the plot was tighter, Their Children’s story spans from 1992 to 1998. Which was a big challenge to tell the story of the passage of time: “We could have wanted to change the actor, but we preferred to keep the audience glued to the face, even if it meant changing it.”– Ludovic Bucher tells us.

“To give a sense of the passage of time, we played Patrick’s character, which thickens as the film progresses. Paul Kircher I collaborated with a choreographer to work on how we are a bit clumsy at 14, how we smoke cigarettes when we don’t know how to smoke. Then how do we grow up, stand on our feet and find self-confidence. We used to play such trifles to pass the time.”

“I thought a lot about the film French With Alban Lenoir, who I think is very successful with the idea of ​​following a character from the age of 20, showing us how he grows and changes.”explains Paul Kircher, who plays Anthony throughout the film.

“It was interesting to see how Anthony, with this paternal legacy that he has — because he’s always been referred to as a male figure — confronts the person he becomes and how he grows by repeating the same experiences and incorporating them into himself. Someone’s shoes that aren’t, which can be quite funny at times and also quite painful when you see it as an adult.

“Dreams are a little limitless because they don’t confront reality”

“As he grows up, he’s much more grounded in reality than when he was imagined with the other actors, at the beginning of the movie, when he’s a teenager who thinks he’s in a movie a little bit: he’s been built up by the movies that we’ve shown him, from American culture.”

“Because history is marked by pop culture references, from Iron Maiden to Iron Maiden Bruce Lee through Rock And things like that, his inner world is built with that, video games, Mega Drive, 90s stuff, a motorcycle, then his dad, his cousin.

“It gives him the feeling that anything is possible in his head. Because dreams are a little bit off-limits, because they don’t confront reality. And his need to build this inner world, this inner world of a 14-year-old that really is. High.” After High School Boy and Animal Kingdom, the man who won the Best Newcomer prize at the last Venice Film Festival proves his talent in this beautiful, intimate fresco, along with the successful adaptation by Ludovic and Zoran Bucherma.

Comments collected by Maximilien Pierret in Paris on November 21, 2024