By Becky Day
The French filmmaking duo have crossed the channel and travelled to London for the Renault French Film Festival where Close-Up Film managed to snag them for a quick chat about their new film. Cockles and Muscles is a film about a family who go on holiday for a relaxing break and all end up discovering secrets and more about their own sexuality. It’s a comedy filled with dancing, singing and a light hearted look towards the heart of serious issues that writer director team Jacque and Olivier wanted to tackle.
What was the feeling you wanted your audience to walk out with?
Jacques: “Happiness.”
How does your partnership work? Is one of you more concerned with writing and the other directing?
Olivier: “You’re right, they are separated. I mean Jacque is more comfortable with the writing and I am more the one who runs the set, but we work together on each step of the process.”
Do you ever step on each others creative toes?
Jacque and Olivier: “No, no.”
Jacques: “We try to understand the other person’s point of view. You know, normally it’s very easy to find a solution that both of us agree on. If Olivier tells me something about my scriptwriting and if I get upset or feel bad it means I’m not totally sure about what I wrote. It’s a weak point of my work and so the conflict would be absent. However, if I’m totally convinced and I don’t feel upset at all, then I will say really openly and in a very calm way why I think this is a good scene. For example right now we are re writing our next project and there is a scene in which Olivier insisted I should cut. I’m sure he’s right and I can recognise something that is not good, but I don’t know to do it better right now. So I will just keep calm and wait till I find the solution.”
Why did you choose to focus on homosexuality?
Olivier: “It’s a theme we’re interested in. We really wanted to continue some theme from film to film. It’s true for example that all the teenager relationships are continued from our previous film ‘Ma Vie.’ We didn’t want to give another sad look to this type of relationship.”
Jacques: “It’s still an important issue and there are not so many people making… lets not say ‘gay movies’ but movies with gay characters in it. I think it’s important that we do that.”
How are the French audiences reacting to this film? Is it positive?
Olivier: “Yes, yes. We had a very positive response from both the critics and the audience. Of course you can always find people who….”
Jacques: “…Hate it.”
Olivier: “We think it’s interesting to do a comedy with a serious theme. Of course there were a few people telling us that it would have been much more interesting for them if we had treated it as a drama. But we didn’t decide to do a comedy on a dramatic subject you know..”
How did the young actors feel about the scenes they had to do, as some of them were quite risqué?
Olivier: “They are young actors in this, and it was my first experience with them but I should say that they are really professional. It’s funny because for us it was like young actors playing characters, even if there are some elements of the characters in them. And I think they are a little bit more different than what they are conscious of, especially Roman. For example when we were presenting the film in France, in January, Roman was very modestly saying that you know ‘They chose me because I’m very close to the character.’ And we were always saying ‘No Roman, really we chose you because you are a good actor and we knew you could play comedy scenes and do very long scenes’. He’s very nice, because he’s very young and he’s not very confident in himself, but he saw that we chose him for his long hair and his nice face and not because he’s a good actor.”
Jacques: “He didn’t understand that being a good movie actor is to really project yourself on to screen and it’s not easy only a few people can do that in front of the camera.”
Of all the actors on set did anyone particular stand out you? That brought something new to your film?
Olivier: “Do you mean is there one actor we prefer? It’s very difficult to chose, it’s like asking your mother to choose one child in the family. But it’s true that we were very, very happy to work with Valeria. Valeria arrived very late on in the project and it was like more than a good surprise to work with her. It’s not a question of her being professional but it’s that she’s so generous. It’s generosity on the set that impresses me the most.”
Jacques: “I knew that the female character was the most important in the movie. But I think a lot of people read the script were so frightened by the gay characters that they didn’t see that the most important part was the woman. Valaria she’s such a deep actress” (miming grabbing breasts)
Olivier (now laughing): “Don’t say deep actress” (miming grabbing breasts) “It’s vulgar”.
In an intimate comedy such as this there are bound to be mishaps, what was your funniest outtake that you recall? I can imagine the masturbating shower scenes going wrong.
Olivier: “Oh yes, the bathroom was tiny and we had to shoot in a mirror to manipulate the distance between the camera and the shower… oh it was very complicated because we had this small mirror and it would steam up so we had to keep stopping. We had to be so technical with the wanking scene because we have to make sure it wasn’t going to be a porno movie.
One other hitch was that the house we shot in was the take off and landing route for Marseilles airport. Every time we had to wait for the planes to pass and it was so stressful because we just couldn’t shoot. We literally were running our shooting schedule around the Marseille Airport’s flight plan and the actors were laughing “Who decided on this set?!”
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