Lunch with Le petit (The Little Guy)

Interview with Lorenzo Bianchi, director of Le petit (The Little Guy)

 Your hero, Luka, is a twelve-year-old boy. Why did you decide to base your film around a child?
Initially, I wanted to make a film based on Georges Bataille’s childhood. Not a biopic, but a narrative framework and a world that I felt close to and that would have allowed me to talk about an area that particularly interests me, the relationship between childhood and death. During the writing process however – which was long and complex – the references to Bataille became less explicit, and my experience of childhood became the real impetus behind the work.

 What drew you to this particular child, who has a strong character? Is he the real “little guy”?
I met Luka in 2014, one year before we began filming, during our first casting session in Riom-ès-Montagnes. The choice was obvious, but one that only becomes obvious in hindsight. What struck me about him was the great contrast between his physical appearance of a curly-haired blond angel and a hardness and fragility that didn’t belong to his age. He seemed like he didn’t care about the camera, or even about making a film. I felt like he was there as a challenge, and I liked that. It took a long time for me to realize that he was carrying the film. He was meant to play the part of the best friend until a month before filming began. My hesitation was due to considerations that had no real merit. I was thinking about things like his physical resemblance to the actors who were going to play his parents, and I was also reticent about his body’s great expressiveness. I was afraid the effect we’d get on screen would be excessive. When in fact I just needed to recognize that as a gift and stop thinking about the part and see what I had in front of me. A character, even the most scripted one, does not exist; it’s an abstraction. But a person exists, and you have to see the person when you’re casting. That is one of the most important things I learned making this film. So, to answer the question, Luka was not “the little guy”, “the little guy” was Luka. I rewrote the script for him when I chose him to play the lead.

 Did you envision his father’s vulgarity to be an unfortunate consequence of his infirmity, or was that a character trait that you had imagined for him in a possible “backstory”?
It’s definitely the former. I never think about a film’s backstory. What I’m interested in is what’s inside, and in this case that meant an ailing body that has not resigned itself to dying and that still feels desire. Feelings desires when you’re stuck in bed and someone has to change your diaper, that’s something that interests me. The humanity that there might be in such a condition, a complete humanity that isn’t idealized, but desperate and terrifying to live, especially for those who love you all the same. The desire that’s there when it shouldn’t be, that was meant to be the film’s narrative drive. With Ilias el Faris, who co-wrote the last version of the script with me, I tried to come up with a story where no one was guilty in the end, where we’d simply understand the consequences of an initial situation that coincides with the destiny that awaits us all – illness and death. It is because we die that this story exists. We die despite ourselves.

 What led you to probe into the mother-child bond?
That bond is one of the consequences of the initial situation where the person who is meant to be the man in the house is stuck in bed, and where the mother’s lack of emotional support is filled by the child. The son becomes a little bit of a father, and the father a son. We wanted to begin the film by showing this affective network as it is reconfigured by the illness, its precarious balance that can only exist as long as it be spared from the world, that no one from the outside come to disturb it. While the child embraces the situation without questioning it, as a child would, the mother can sense that it won’t hold up. She also feels desire and is not resigned to their destiny. Neither hers nor Luka’s. The tension between the mother and child is a result of that state of affairs.

 What interested you about Luka’s relations with the other children?
It was important for me to show that Luka is a child like all the others, who has friends and has fun with them. His situation is not really that exceptional, since death is not exceptional. I’ve always found daily life to be more interesting than adventure. I’m moved by the difficulty of seeing, recognizing, accepting what is in front of us every day.

 Any cinematic coups de cœur in the past year you’d like to tell us about?
Short films. Soufiane Adel’s Vincent V, Cilaos by Camilo Restrepo, Thibault Le Texier’s films (all of them). They are rare films because they are genuinely political.

 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?
I’ve been here several times as a viewer. This will be the first time for me as a participant. I have no particular anecdotes to share, aside perhaps from my memory of discovering the Festival a few years ago with my friends, who have become my cinematic family. We dreamed about coming here one day, and here we are. What moves me most is that we made this film together. It’s our family film, and it’s a happy family.

Le petit is being shown in National Competition F9.