Why did you want to play with the question of forbidden acts: theft, trafficking, manipulation and so on?
The initial idea for the character Doug that came out of my discussions with my long-standing collaborators Martin Maire and Thomas Trichet (together we form the trio JTM) was to come up with a young man, a small-time crook, by focusing on his problems, his connections, his friendships and his personality more than on the staging or his actions. So his connection to theft and the forbidden came out of that desire to create a new figure for petty crime (although he was based on characters like Tony in the Pusher trilogy), relocated to Paris and characterized by tools from our generation (social media, internet memes, rap, etc.). Subsequently rap became an obvious choice for Doug’s world, in the sense that its proponents have a strong connection to auto-fiction and to an “egotrip” idea that emphasizes illicit activities. The stories of those hoodlums, which are sometimes real, quasi-documentaries, and sometimes made up, show the ambiguity that surrounds these figures’ genuine sensitivity, highlighting their lies and fears, which they try to conceal behind the mythology.

Are you particularly interested in the energy and ambitions of the young people you depict in the film and do you see yourself making other films with young characters?
The energy of these young people, whether they’re artists or not, is at the very heart of the film. Our original motivation was to highlight their cleverness, their humor and their eloquence, as shown through song lyrics and their slang, their improvisations, but also through scenes based on internet memes indicative of a larger community. So it’s clear we’ll work on those young people’s memes more than once. We casted the film through connections but also through social media. The young guys in the film mostly aren’t actors but that’s the type of truth and spontaneity that we’re looking for in each film.

Why did you situate the character in a rural environment?
Being originally from Tours and that area, I grew up in little villages around the city, between the country and industrial areas. I also played club soccer for almost fifteen years. So I moved around in the same types of places as those depicted in the film. Obviously, the film has a mystical, dreamlike dimension that exaggerates the settings, but my musical and internet inspirations are joined to memories of groups of young people that I was a part of gravitating around the local stadium and the motorbike rodeos, or around the local bar where we all met up after the game to have a few drinks. The idea behind the film, but also behind many other projects I’ve been involved in with Thomas and Martin, is to talk about the places that are dear to our hearts and their often surprising yet underrepresented characters while also giving them the dreamlike dimension that we like to tackle in our stories. Actually, that mystical dimension is not at all foreign to the setting where vernacular tales are a huge source of inspiration for us and will be the subject of a future project.

How did you go about making the soundtrack?
The sound process was the fruit of a very free and organic collaboration. OGRask first sent me an assortment of musical samples. The artists reviewed the samples and wrote their lyrics on the pieces we kept. I initially wanted to push them to make their lyrics reflect the story as much as possible, like in a pure musical, but I quickly realized that absolute freedom was the compromise I had to make to maintain the energy I wanted to get on film. Once the pieces were recorded, the sound engineer Paul Kusnierek and I tried our best to maintain a balance between the direct sound and live sound so we could genuinely insert the music into the story. So we used all of the locations to filter the music, by recording through the reverberation of the huge festival hall for the “blue” scene, for example, or the pieces recorded by the car radio in the car scenes. We combined the music with sound recordings we made on location and altered the atmosphere (for example night sounds on day scenes) in order to give the film a refined touch.

Is there a particular short film that has made a strong impression on you?
When I joined ENSAD in Paris, we screened Baptiste Penetticobra’s short film Entertainment Capital Of The World and I remember being deeply moved by its originality. I actually had difficulty imagining completing a complex treatment in a short time, and that film showed me at the time that there were other exciting possibilities of expression using the short form to channel my ideas (fake documentaries, interviews, reenactments, etc.). A few months later, Baptiste was looking for an assistant for his next film and I was able to learn a lot of what I now know by working alongside him.

What’s your definition of a good film?
To me, a good film must above all demonstrate its creator’s honesty. For me there’s nothing better than a film where each fold contains evidence of its author’s desire, their aspirations and obsessions and why not, also their own history. When I go see a film, I want to be shoved around by the creator’s personality until I end up joining worlds that I might initially have been less attracted to. For me that’s a genuine tour de force. Writing is also an essential element for me. The choice of language and words is paramount, whether that comes through in the acting, improvisation, energy or through a scrupulously prepared text. As for my reference points, I’m a huge fan of the Cohen brothers’ work, and their films also have something absolute for me because they manage to attain a form of universality by bringing together all the elements I mentioned above.

Le Boug Doug [Meet Doug] is being shown as part of Lab Competition L5.