Night cap with Champ de bosses [Bumpy Field]

An interview with Anne Brouillet, director of Champ de bosses [Bumpy Field]

What interested you in setting your film in a rural environment?
The place where the film takes place wasn’t chosen because it’s rural but simply because of my own past: it’s the village I where spent vacation when I was young. It’s surrounded by forests which I credited with all sorts of tales and monsters throughout the years: they are the inspiration for the film.

Why did you choose to dress Camille in red when she goes to the forest?
To me, this is the forest of Little Red Riding Hood – and the wolf, our course. It was only naturel to dress Camille in red, in a somewhat old-fashion coat, rather ridiculous for her age. And red stands out particularly well against the blue-green fir trees of the Vosges.

Are you particularly interested in the theme of pre-adolescence and do you plan to make more films on this subject?
Pre-adolescence is a theme that interests me because I’ve been through it, of course, and it affected me. I also worked on the script of several films set in this age of life. But for my next projects, I am going to work on the beginning of adulthood, maybe because I’m getting older….

What interested you in the relationship to the body and in particular the nose?
It just so happens that I broke my nose, and nobody noticed but me until I had an x-ray. But luckily that’s not the only reason I made this film! I’ve always been fascinated by the strange shapes that a body or body parts can take when you look at them very closely or from an unusual angle, for example. The body is the most familiar thing we have, but it can become something totally alien in certain circumstances and become a source of great anxiety, for me at least. It’s this paradox that interests me, the “alien familiar.”  The variety of shapes of noses is a terrific area to explore…

To what degree are you interested in the first romantic experience in this film and in your creative process in general?
I don’t know anyone who wasn’t affected by the first romantic experience, but it’s not love that I wanted to explore. The experience that I examine in this film, which is fictional, and that I was interested in, was how it obliged the heroine to question herself, to deal with the shape of her own body compared to the shape of other people’s bodies, her fear of death, because passing from one age to the next  brings you closer to death. Fortunately, meeting Fabio, who is a cheerful character, provides elegance and hope in this dark landscape, or so I hope!

Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
I think that making a film with such a trivial storyline, something as minor as a little girl falling on her nose and ending up terrified would be impossible in the financial circuits of a feature length film. The short format enabled me to explore that theme with no one telling me to “keep up the suspense” which is a constant demand in a feature length film.

What are your works of reference?
For this film, and my next one, I thought a lot about Polanski’s films: Rosemary’s Baby, Repulsion and The Tenant. It’s difficult to ignore him when you are interested in the feeling of ‘alien familiar.’ For Bumpy Field other references were films by Bruno Dumont for the casting, and Under the Skin by Jonathan Glazer for the sets. And many more!

Champ de bosses [Bumpy Field] is being shown in the National Competition F10.