Dinner with Plot [Cone]
Interview with Sébastien Auger, director of Plot [Cone]
What interested you in the music world and in the relationship to the musical?
Music is a daily passion that nourishes a good part of my imagination. For example, I always listen to music while writing and often a piece helps me find the right tone or the right color for a sequence. So, from the first drafts Cone was already a musical film and it’s through the Sofilm de genre call for projects that it really became a musical. Personally, I’m rather a fan of musicals but to write one is a different story. Very quickly, when writing, my relationship with this genre became conflictual which rubs off on Michel, the main character of the film, who little by little starts to hate musicals and becomes their punching bag. Nothing was truly calculated but what I wanted to do in Cone was to twist the musical genre, examine it by taking it apart from an intimate and personal point of view. And moreover, making a musical was an opportunity to work with Stéphane Laport again and to take our previous experiences a step further.
To what extent was the romantic encounter important in your writing, shooting and editing?
During the writing, the female character played by Fleur Geffrier was much more important but all in all the scenario was 35 pages long. I needed to contract many aspects and make some sacrifices in order to keep the film down to 20 minutes and still maintain the essence of Michel’s trip with the cone. Even if their romantic encounter is brief, it is essential in the character’s course because it’s a hint of the future Michel when he will have resolved his story with the cone (and his traumas.) The romantic story didn’t change much from the finished scenario, to shooting, to editing; at any rate I was lucky to be able to keep it and I didn’t have to sacrifice much during shooting which meant I didn’t have to completely reconstruct the film during editing.
Were you more interested in the atmosphere created, the sense of confusion and absurdity it triggered, or by your character’s quest for meaning as he goes through different emotional states due to the arrival of the cone in his life?
A mix of both but let’s say that my character’s quest for meaning enabled me to create a path through the different feelings that I wanted the spectator to experience. I like it too when a film slips away from me in terms of ambiance and absurdity. Many feelings were developed intuitively by adding different colors, by the music, the actors, the sets. It’s an unsteady process but when it works, it’s magic. Just putting a cone in an actor’s hands sets the grounds for something preposterous. Afterwards, it’s Michel’s route that enabled us to find the right “tone” for the film.
Where did you get the inspiration for the sequence in the administrative building?
There’s a Kafkaesque side in Michel’s story with his cone. He had to stumble confronting norms and the administration in order to find his way. And a film can also be rewritten during the site scout and because of financial restraints. The administrative building set (or factory) was initially supposed to resemble an airport terminal but I had to change the set at the last moment for financial reasons. The set you see in the film was shown to us shortly before shooting and it turned out to be more inspiring and less cliché that what I originally had in mind.
Why are you interested in the sea?
It’s the Viking ceremony that has always interested me. So, from the very first drafts of the scenario, the ending was to be accompanied musically by a piece by Moondog (the blind Viking), and the sea was naturally a part of it. The sea or the ocean is an opening towards an elsewhere, like a sort of infinite, reassuring horizon. It was also a good excuse to shoot in Normandy and to make the entire team suffer on a stony beach and also of course to test the wind resistance of Valentin Clarke’s steadycam.
Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
I haven’t yet made a feature length, so I don’t know if the short format has brought me any liberties. Then again, I have the impression that I fell through the cracks with Cone, that people had confidence in me, they financed my absurd story, it’s a bit baffling. You can say that my producers Pascal and Deborah at A Travers le Miroir were courageous, borderline reckless just like Pascale Faure and Brigitte Pardo from Canal+, and Thierry Lounas at Sofilm. The short format should always be seen like that, like a punk zone where you can test things, let yourself go, where you steer clear of conventions and formulas.
Plot [Cone] is being shown in the National Competition F9.
