Breakfast with L’ours noir
Interview with Méryl Fortunat Rossi, co-director of L’ours noir
[Black Bear]
How did you come up with the idea to write L’ours noir ?
(Co-director) Xavier Seron’s sister came back from a trip to Quebec with a visitor’s guide from Forillon National Park, a park where you can see black bears. There really are strict rules to follow in this guide. The instructions from the film are genuine and the bear spray really exists!
Are you particularly fond of the absurd and of dark humor? Do you have a preference between the two?
It’s true that these are two notions that we particularly like, and we always try to think outside the box when it comes to making people laugh.
Our first film (Mauvaise Lune [Bad Moon]) as a duo was a fake documentary, an ode to dark humor about an alcoholic who is convinced he is a werewolf. That film is a bit in the style of C’est arrivé près de chez vous [Man Bites Dog].
To come back to L’ours noir, we delved more into our Anglo-Saxon influences. The best reference would be Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We are here in an absurd universe. We wanted to mix comedy and gore as well. There is a cobbled together feeling in the film, a kind of tribute to films like Bad Taste by Peter Jackson. We chose not to make the special effects believable, but instead comical with a homemade charm.
Why did you choose a Canadian voice-over?
The Quebecois voice comes from the original idea which was to make a fake instructional prevention film, like a corporate film… The action is supposed to take place in Quebec, so it had to be a Quebecois voice. We kept the voice even though the storyline changed. In the end, we kept that educational side, but the voice-over has fun with the visitors by not giving them the good advice at the right moment. Our characters are like school children who are going to be punished for not having read the guide before entering the forest. The Canadian voice-over, it was a way for us, the directors, to have some fun with Quebecois and Belgian accents…
Why did you place from the beginning your characters in exaggeration and hence create a sense of detachment?
It is exaggeration, but not that much so. It’s true that it borders on caricature, but that is so we can better make fun of ourselves, us, the city folk who visit Nature like we visit Disneyland. Us, who know brand-name logos better than the leaves of trees….
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And why gay marriage as a starting point?
At the time we had finally decided to write the script, there were demonstrations against gay marriage happening around us. That controversial topic in France left a mark on us because in Belgium, there weren’t any problems when the law was passed, nor in other countries where it had already been accepted.
The outline of the script, the profiles of the five hikers were written in one afternoon and we wanted to anchor the film in the present, as a sort of nod to current events. And humor, laughter is all the more delectable when it addresses something real, when we criticize society even just a little bit. All you have to do is watch films by Chaplin, Billy Wilder… If all the black bear did was just tear off limbs, it wouldn’t work as well.
Are you interested in the theme of Nature and its relation with Humanity?
It quite a recurring theme for me and Xavier, yes. We wonder about the animal that sleeps within us. In fact, we film our actors in a fairly coarse way, with a pronounced animality (this is very true of our first short film Mauvaise Lune as well as of our next film, Le Plombier). We are all animals, but man has lost his instinctive side. This is another of the bear’s underlying critiques.
When we wrote the character who dies while taking a selfie, it was just a joke, but then later we learned that there were American parks that really had to close because of that! Last year, there were more people who died taking selfies than being bitten by sharks.
To choose a giant teddy bear as the main character was a way to say that we often see nature through our childhood eyes, like in the Herta or Cajoline advertisements… it is very caricatural, yet these stories about selfies makes us think that many hikers first see the innocent cuddly teddy bear before seeing a predatory animal. It seems we aren’t exaggerating that much after all.
Are you interested in the question of a tamed, controlled Nature, a forest without bears, wolves or snakes… a Nature made for Man?
Yes, indeed. Today, everything has to be cute, attractive and inoffensive. We eat cellophane-wrapped steaks and the idea of killing the animal disgusts us.
Personally, I eat meat, I go fishing, but I need to know the implications of my acts. Xavier and I have also been intrigued by those people who pay to see the penguins in Antarctica… They go on ferries, it’s senseless mass tourism. They go out into the “wild”, with postcard landscapes that make us think of the adventures seen in the movies or in books, a day trip where they spend a couple of hours, take pictures, then leave.
In fact, to answer one of your questions, I speak of all that, of Nature and Man, as if we had some grand IDEAS (or even worse, a message to send) but the film is first and foremost a farce… it is more caricatural than critical.
Do you know a lot about bears?
No, not at all. We just read through the guide from the park. That said, if we found ourselves in a park with a bear, we wouldn’t be much better off than our characters. In the film, we only used some rules that were easy to remember, but in reality, they were much more complex. When the voice-over in the film advises you to climb a tree, it is advice from the guide, but the guide also says that bears climb trees… and it’s like that throughout the manual: incomprehensible… the bear moves its ear, it’s your friend, he wiggles his snout, don’t move, he shows his teeth… you run.
Why did you include a dog in the story? What did the rapport we have with pets change or add to the film?
A dog is always funny, especially when he runs about with an arm attached to his leash, or when it gets smashed against your windshield. In the beginning, the character played by François Neycken was supposed to have had to bring his mother’s pug along. We wanted it to be a real apartment dog in order to highlight the difference with a wild bear! His granny’s little dog didn’t give a damn about the great outdoors or the long walks. In fact, that’s why in the beginning of the film, Radish refuses to budge. Afterwards, for the dog training, we had to change to a different race of dog. It’s not quite the caricature we had imagined, without wanting to offend Radish who was a wonderful actress.
Do you think short films are effective in questioning the meaning of family and of “macro” social units?
I haven’t asked myself that question. We make short films in order to learn the trade but also to have a blast. A short film, even when it is a success, remains visible to a limited public. Instead, I would say that we can observe the “short film” from a sociological perspective. The selectors are aware of this. Every year, we see themes from each country. For example, The Spanish, who are big fans of genre films, extensively addressed the economic crisis through the apocalyptic film. We could also say that the short film more quickly absorbs the national mood than a feature-length film, simply because it is generally quicker to make, which allows us to observe trends.
L’ours noir was either produced, co-produced or self-financed with French funds. Did you write the film with this “French” aspect in mind: in building the film’s context or in questioning certain notions?
It is a Franco-Belgian co-production, Xavier is Belgian and I am French, living in Belgium. Even with its absurd story, L’ours noir is a very expensive film to produce. This is why co-production is needed. This is how Origine Films got involved in this adventure. They even accomplished the amazing feat of selling our tourist-decapitating teddy bear story to ARTE! We also have support from the Champagne-Ardennes region where we shot the film (in Monthermé) and the Rhône-Alpes region where we completed the post-production of the film.
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L’ours noir can be seen in the National Competition F9 programme.
