Lunch with Sécheur

An interview with Scott Noblet, director of Sécheur

 What inspired you to make Sécheur? Is it based on real events?

The film is freely inspired by a short story by James Joyce, from his collection Dubliners, that I reworked in telling the story of two old friends who find themselves stuck together in the space of a day. Without being based on real events, the film is conceived through experiences that I had during childhood: wandering, and the decay of certain relationships…

 Why did you decide to shoot this film in a rural setting? Could your characters have been from the city?

Having grown up in a city myself, I could have easily told this story in an urban setting. That being said, I was set on shooting it in a rural environment because I wanted the story to take place in an environment more expressive, wild and mysterious than what I would have found in the city. I wanted the story to have a fairy tale dimension to it, a bit symbolic and timeless, especially during the sequence at the river.

 In Sécheur, your two young boys play with their virility and their ability to be autonomous. Did you imagine Sécheur as a stage in the emancipation of the young teenage boy? Are you sensitive to that theme?

I imagined the film as an “initiatory tale” (or at least as an initiation) where a teenager leaves the closed environment of his school to confront the outside world, claim his freedom, and search to step out of himself. I don’t know if we ever free ourselves from the codes of virility, but a very typical feature of childhood is aggressive competition. I wanted to tell the story of this kind of interaction with others, and of the moment where we realize that others exist, where we become less immature.

Therefore, the focus of the staging was to have the viewer feel the confinement of childhood (for example, the classroom at the beginning of the film was shot like a mental space, impossible to define, without a wider shot to define the location). This is why we decided with the head cameraman to shoot in 1:33, a format which induces a strong tension with the off-camera. I wanted to adopt Hichem’s obtuse perspective and a gradual opening toward the exterior.

 Sécheur ends before revealing the consequences of the two young boys’ actions. Why this choice?

I didn’t want to show the consequences of skipping school, or the “explanations” given to the parents or the school, because this was not the subject of the film. During a first scenario, we had planned on including the parents, but I quickly came to realize that their presence is superfluous. It’s not a question of finding out if the two boys get caught like in The 400 Blows, but to know if they are capable of communicating with each other.

That said, the end of the film is not an open ending (even if it may appear that way to the viewer): the story ends when the two boys return to their own worlds.

 In Sécheur, your hero meets a young, shady adult. How did you come up with this idea, and how did you work with this sequence during the shooting and during editing?

The character is inspired from the short story but we made him younger in the film. I wrote the dialogue in trying to impart a sense of danger, but also a certain eccentricity so that the adult’s motivations remain uncertain. Is he dangerous? Is he playing a game? Or is he just an outsider who is looking to make a friend in a very strange way? Children sometimes attract inoffensive eccentrics. What is sure is that this encounter has a realistic side, yet a symbolic message: discovering the world also means the possibility of encountering evil.

During the shooting, we shot the sequence in the simplest way possible, partly so that the actors didn’t feel hindered by an overly dense scene, and partly because it seemed that a tight shot reverse shot technique would be enough to cause a feeling of claustrophobia and the impossibility of escape for the main character.

We thoroughly enjoyed the editing because we were able to work down to the millimeter with the acting finesse of Mohamed Serhane and Thibault Lacroix. They were extremely generous, offering us many different variations that the editor and I were able to work from to create this floating between tension and curious humor. Strangely enough, during both the shooting and the editing, we laughed a lot while working on this sequence, even though the result is not exactly comical…

 Your film is almost 100% masculine. Why this choice?

We didn’t really consider this, but perhaps it was intuitive, probably linked to the fact that most of my friendships have always been more often with men!

 In Sécheur, there is a football sequence. You focus on the players’ feet and we can see the brands of their shoes. In your opinion, what makes teenagers attach more importance to their choice of shoes than to their opinions?

I don’t entirely agree with that, at least that was not my experience growing up as a teenager (and it was not at all the intention of the sequence you are referring to, which has more to do with the idea of a certain momentum, of the vigor of youth).

However, it is true that teenagers live in a world halfway between childhood and adulthood, and are a bit anxious about the image they reflect. That relationship with one’s image is indeed one of the subjects of this film, but I don’t believe that teenagers attach no importance to their opinions!

 How did you conceive and build the sound environment in Sécheur? And why the choice of classical music?

For the most part, we worked with the sound editor and the mixer on the sensory aspect of the film, because the story addresses the relationship between the interior and the exterior. For example, we created a muffled ambiance in the classroom at the beginning of the film to make the school feel like a closed vessel, like an aquarium in a way. Next, when the perspective opens up on the outside, we worked on seasonal atmospheres in order to enlarge the space and give a feeling of summer.

The importance of the music was a consideration I had early in planning, but was unable to come to a decision about until after having seen the first edit. From the first version, we wanted to surround the story by a “dreamlike” beginning and end. Ariane, our sound editor, and I tried different options, sometimes absurd: jazz, rap, country… the classical pieces we chose worked perfectly in the spirit of what we were looking for: a sense of dramaturgy, but also something a bit timeless. Contemporary music fell completely flat because the film is refined and not at all pop.

 Sécheur was produced in France. In your opinion, what does French short film production have that the others don’t?

I don’t know foreign production well enough to make comparisons, but with regard to France, we benefit as directors from numerous sources of financial aid which allow us to produce very different short films. I also had the opportunity to make this film thanks to the aid and support of GREC (and also of course volunteer technicians) which was vital in the completion of this project due to the complex constraints: the length of the film, the travel costs to the shooting site, the technical requirements…

 Programme for viewing Sécheur: National Competition F12.