Night cap with Sous le cartilage des côtes [Under the Rib Cage]

Interview with Bruno Tondeur, director of Sous le cartilage des côtes [Under the Rib Cage]

What made you want to make a film about hypochondria?
One day, I was diagnosed with an advanced stage of hepatitis C. I was young, I was immortal, and then all of a sudden, BOOM, the bad news. I met a psychologist, I wrote letters to all my loved ones and then I became very weak. Big fevers and hallucinations, bed-ridden. People cried around me. I was going to die. Well, I didn’t die. The hospital made a mistake with my blood tests. The lab had switched my samples with someone else’s. After that, I became completely paranoid about viruses and diseases. I always told myself that I would do something about it. I just didn’t know what form it would take. It wasn’t until last year when I met Take Five that I thought more seriously about the project.

What interested you about the visual representation of internal organs and germs?
When I was little, I was a fan of Il était une fois la vie (Once Upon a Time… Life). It was a series where we followed white blood cells, red blood cells, etc. (In fact the virus looked just like Sarkozy. I swear it! Go watch.) I thought that was great to represent the inside of the human body like a city where living autonomous beings work together towards the well-being of the town. I thought it would be interesting to show the wasting away of organs from the inside. Moreover, the stop-motion counterbalances the smooth side of 2D. I wanted the disease to become real for the viewer. I wanted to give rhythm to Pierrot’s cartoonesque story with a cold, harsh reality.

How did you work with the colors?
I imposed a constraint upon myself. I only wanted colors that couldn’t be printed on paper. Moreover, a choice limited to only 5 colors pushes you to find clever graphical ways to represent things. I knew that I wanted green to have a strong presence. In the history of art, green is associated with disease and the film had to sweat and ooze. The pink and fuschia colors mixed with the green bring to mind human tissues.

What interested you in your character’s isolation?
A hypochondriac is often very alone. Social contact is somewhat complicated, especially if, like Pierrot, the disease is associated with tics and anxiety. Pierrot can only interact with others after consuming drugs and/or large amounts of alcohol. Disease is very isolating, but he sometimes manages to forget about it with his “medication”. His medicine, we don’t really know what it is, which raises doubts on his medication.

Do you foresee making other short films that address the subject of disease or other physical or mental illnesses?
Maybe, if I find a reason to do so, but not as a goal in itself.

Are there any particular freedoms that the short film format allows you?
At Studio TABASS co., which we created with four friends (Margot Reumont, Gwendoline Gamboa, Ornella Macchia and Hippolyte Cupillard), we all had the same training as directors. When one of us has a project, we present it to the others and it’s around discussions with coffees/beers that we end up together with some cool projects. For this particular project, the short film format seemed ideal. Not only to keep it fresh for the length of the film, but also to prevent eye fatigue. I chose very pure colors, and to look at that intense fuchsia for 90 minutes is enough to make your eyes bleed! There is also more directing freedom with the short format than with the feature-length format. Finally, with Take Five and Autour De Minuit/Schmuby, it’s the first time we’ve worked together in a producer-director relationship. It was also a test to see if we work well together before tackling a feature-length film or a 10-season series.

Sous le cartilage des côtes is being shown in Lab Competition L2.