Thomas Bidegain has fun with Suddenly alone
For his second feature film, Alone at the Commands, he directed a segment selfie -, After The Cowboysproposes Thomas Bidegain Suddenly alone a very high level, isolating survival a couple at the end of the world, a man and a woman faced with a hostile nature and with themselves. A story of double survival: stay alive and remain, or not, as a couple.
The screenwriter, a great collaborator of Jacques Audiard, who became a successful director, entrusted the interpretation of his story to Gilles Lellouche and Mélanie Thierry who, illuminated by Nicolas Loir’s magnificent photography, offer surprising performances.
We met Thomas Bidegain for this second feature, written together with Valentine Monteil. The questions he wanted to put at the center Suddenly alonethe filming in Iceland and its actors, the American “false start” of the film… He tells us about it.
Suddenly alone intimately connects a love drama and to survival. Was this your ambition from the beginning?
Thomas Bidegain : I really like making genre films, because I believe they allow me to tell very intimate stories. For Suddenly alone, so the idea was to create a very intimate and at the same time very broad story. Having this feeling of adventure, despite being very close to these characters, and therefore having this double survival: personal survival and that of the couple. The survival of the couple is what we always had at heart, during the writing, during the filming, we had to constantly worry about the couple.
There are many dating movies where people who don’t know each other get involved in a relationship and at the end of the second act they kiss, etc. In this case, the fact that the couple pre-exists the film is important, as it allows for more mature questions: “Can we get back on track? How can we reinvent ourselves?” These questions interested me and I wanted to include them in a spectacular film.
Reinventing yourself involves getting naked and Suddenly alone he chooses an extreme way to “undress” his characters and this couple.
Thomas Bidegain : With Valentine Monteil, the co-writer, we thought a lot about this question: what does it mean to be “alone”? At the beginning they are on their boat, they are already alone, but they still have the internet, a screen, a phone, an iPad, and they will have to “peel” them, like peeling an onion, strip them of everything that makes civilization.
When we are in a relationship, we can live with inertia. We go to work, we come home, we go to dinner with friends, we go to the cinema, we frequent the internet… But there, no more cinema, no more work, no more friends, no more anything.
What interested us was the naked couple, face to face. We started writing to each other before the birth, and during the birth I looked at many blogs, all the phrases that couples could say to each other, because there was this forced face-to-face meeting. And when we are in a relationship, we often do almost everything to avoid this face-to-face meeting…
It’s the drama of Suddenly alone also explores, through his physical and psychological conditions and through the end of a couple, the theme of the end of the world?
Thomas Bidegain : There’s always this question when we make films: how do we talk about the world? Today the world is faced with its survival, we are going through this moment, and at the same time the balance between men and women is questioned. A balance that has existed for centuries and which is suddenly upset. I realized it late, but that’s also what history says Suddenly alone. There may be a “may the best win” faction, and the “best” may not be the strongest…
Hence this ideal casting to illustrate this upheaval, Mélanie Thierry and Gilles Lellouche?
Thomas Bidegain : It was wonderful to shoot with Gilles and Mélanie, who are first and foremost marvelous actors, but also because of their size: the imposing side of Gilles, and the fragile side of Mélanie, and at the same time all the determination he brings to the table, which doesn’t let’s see it coming, it’s fantastic.
Were these two actors your first choices?
The film had a complicated history. I first wrote it in English and started an American production (with Jake Gyllenhaal and Vanessa Kirby, ed), and then I realized it wasn’t working. Because American actors want to take power, because we didn’t want to tell the same story… And everything collapsed.
Then I was told: “you’ll see, things happen for a reason”, and it’s not wrong (laughs). Because I met Mélanie and Gilles and we decided to make exactly the same film. There weren’t many of us doing it Suddenly alonewe needed a mobile and close-knit team, just two actors… And it was fantastic.
How did the filming go?
Thomas Bidegain : I looked for very mineral places, in the northern hemisphere, places where there is not a single tree, not even a bush. I found this in Iceland. We shot there for eight weeks, in sometimes hostile conditions.
A film is always the story of the shooting, so for an adventure film it’s not bad if the shooting itself is. I wanted settings in which, every morning, the actors would be amazed.
We built the ruins of a whaling base, so many things, it was an adventure! Gilles and Mélanie were struck by these environments and said to themselves that they now had to be able to live in them. For this film we really needed the best! (laughs). In reality, we had a great make-up artist and the director of photography Nicolas Loir, without much equipment, managed to use this polar light. This is always what we try to do in cinema, produce images that we haven’t already seen.
You worked a lot with Jacques Audiard, whose first film was titled Watch the men fall. And his subsequent films, including the ones you wrote about, continue this exploration of a broken male identity. Is this also the case for Ben, Gilles Lellouche’s character?
Thomas Bidegain : Watch the men fall, could actually be the title of most of Jacques’ films! But yes, of course there is Suddenly alone this exploration of the human soul and masculinity.
That’s one of the reasons why it was great to have Gilles. He is at the height of his glory, he is the most popular French actor, people love him and I wanted to tell the story of a fall. And the higher he falls, the better he is! If he had said no, I wouldn’t have had many fallback options. He has great generosity, he comes with his acting, his popularity, his finesse, and gives the film to Mélanie.
Source: Cine Serie
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