Lunch avec Et ta prostate, ça va ? [So, How’s the Prostate?]

Interview with Jeanne Paturle and Cécile Rousset, directors of Et ta prostate, ça va ? (So, How’s the Prostate?)

 How did you go about getting the audio for the film? Is there a documentary dimension, or was that a script read by actors?
It’s all documentary! (Well, almost.) We wanted to write a script about family communication / talking about your sexuality / conversations among girlfriends. And since we don’t know how to write anything that doesn’t start from a documentary source, we asked our friend Cécile Mille to help us find a topic. (She’s a filmmaker who’s used to staging her life and therefore to talking freely about herself.) So, the Sunday night we all got together, she was just getting out of a long day with the family, and she told me the story, just as it is, thinking about recording it with her phone. The conversation lasted two minutes and forty seconds. And we had our topic. Later we rerecorded it to get a cleaner sound, but we ended up using the original version.

 The film brings up private relations and the ability to talk about these private relations with one’s parents. How did you come up with that question and why did you want to put it on film?
Both of us, I should say all three of us, are interested in the question, because like many people, we have a hard time talking to our parents about a whole lot of things and we wish we didn’t.
It’s actually a question that we’ve often asked ourselves: How can you talk about private things with those you’re close to, especially family members? It’s often delicate, even taboo. Sometimes we’d like to be able to do it more often, and yet still hold on to our inner sanctum.

 How did you develop the animation, and why did you choose the connection to water?
We did all the animation ourselves, by hand, with pencils and brushes on paper. The swimming pool immediately appealed to us – creating a visual world that’s very far from the one that the two girls who are talking are part of. The presence of the water, of barely clothed bodies, seemed like a good way of expressing organic, poetic things, for talking about fantasies and dreams.

 Does your animation always create that soft effect, or was that something you worked on particularly for this film?
Choosing painting as a technique accentuates the softness of the animation. This time, we wanted a lighter quality, something more watery and less real. Our choice of technique (with its consequent softness) comes from the subject and the length of the film.
In our previous film (Le C.O.D et le coquelicot [The Direct Object Pronoun and the Poppy], a twenty-four minute film that was selected for the National Competition in 2015), we used a lot of paper cutouts which are still combined with paintings, and the effect is more direct, more tied to the world of schools and childhood.

 And what interested you in the character’s connection to homosexuality?
We’re very pleased with the character’s ambiguity, which brings to mind both homosexual fantasies and his romantic breakup with a man. That’s a theme that speaks to us, the fact that some fantasies or dreams lead us into modes of sexuality that are different from the ones we normally experience… Blurring the line between the labels that we put on sexuality.

 Any cinematic coups de cœur in the past year you’d like to tell us about?
The Young Girl Without Hands and Brooklyn Village!

 If you’ve already been to Clermont-Ferrand, could you share with us an anecdote from the festival? If not, what are your expectations for this year?
We’ll pass on the anecdote. It’s been too long since we were here!
We’ve come several times, but in recent years it’s been a bit too rushed. It’s always a chance for us to think about the subject of our next film. We really like the Cinépiscine screenings! And we won’t be there this year, but we hope the audience laughs during our film and talks about sex at dinner.

Et ta prostate, ça va ? is being shown in National Competition F10.