Lunch with Ce magnifique gâteau ! [This Magnificent Cake!]

Interview with Marc James Roels and Emma De Swaef, co-directors of Ce magnifique gâteau ! (This Magnificent Cake!)

 Quelles matières avez-vous utilisées pour vos personnages et pour vos décors ?
Everything you see in the film, including all the walls, trees and water is made out of wool and fabrics. The only exception we make are the eyes, so they are the only ‘shiny’ things in the film and catch your attention immediately. Here are no digital effects, everything you see was animated on set, or -in rare occasions- animated separately and composited in.

 Qu’est-ce qui vous intéressait dans les expressions de violence (directe ou suggérée) et de soumission ?
What drew us to the historical period was more that the setting allowed us to show some very dark aspects of human nature and some very complex characters and behaviours.
The combination of the inhospitable landscape which the explorers had severely underestimated, the lawlessness of the newly founded colony, and the fact that our characters are finding themselves far away from the moral and social context of their home country we thought was a very interesting mix of ingredients, with a lot of room for moral ambiguity. And violence was one of the natural outcomes of this explosive mix.

 Pensez-vous qu’il y ait un romantisme lié à la période coloniale et avez-vous travaillé les situations décrites dans Ce magnifique gâteau ! en contraste avec ce romantisme ?
In many of the books and documents we were reading during the writing phase of our production we certainly felt a pervading sense of romanticism and adventure in these texts. From Stanley discovering ‘magical dwarves’ in the rain forest, Tintin hunting huge quantities of animals in the wild to the delirious thrill of Céline describing himself wasting away in a shack in the jungle. What became clear was that more than being blatantly villainous we sensed that most of the characters instead seemed almost ‘duped’ by the norms and beliefs of their respective times. To a sufficiently absurd degree that it was clear to us as we were writing that the film’s tone should have a dark absurdist quality to it.

 Comment avez-vous construit les cheminements solitaires de vos personnages ?
We were very inspired by the writings of Kafka in this respect. We seem to like our characters -much like his- to be rather passive and easily manipulated. We usually tried to have a character start out in a very banal or familiar setting and from there push them incrementally deeper and deeper towards a surreal end without letting go of the hand -so to speak- of the viewer. The result we hope is that the viewer will follow the path of each character closely, feeling confused when the character does and so forth, but upon reflection not knowing exactly how they ended up where they did.

Ce magnifique gâteau ! [This Magnificent Cake!] is being shown in National Competition F3.