Tea time with Le Gouffre

Interview with Vincent Le Port, director of Le gouffre

[The Abyss]

Why did you choose to present your main character as a stranger in the village where she lives?

She is not a stranger since the campground she works in is owned by her uncle, and she seems to know just about every one of the villagers.

Let’s say that what interested me was to have a journeying, uprooted character with no ties, whose wanderings correspond somewhat to Nadir’s. Someone whose relations with others are fleeting and could seem sort of like a “ghost” to the people who’ve met her.

After that, the connection to the abyss and to the legends around it is necessarily stronger for someone on the outside than for someone who’s been familiar with the place since their childhood. In that sense, Céleste’s character is in a somewhat similar position to the viewer who is discovering the place for the first time.

The place seems more like a transitional space that people pass through, to get to the campground for one thing, rather than a place they stay. Why did you want to evoke that feeling and why did you want to situate your film in such a setting?

Roberto Bolaño wrote that “A campground should be the closest thing to Purgatory”, and I think that’s doubly true for an empty campground. The idea of “purgatory” is interesting: it’s not heaven, it’s not hell either, it’s a kind of fluid, temporary place that necessarily leads us somewhere else, even though me may not know where or towards what exactly.

So my idea was to position Céleste and the viewer in a sort of nagging place and setting, which you call transitional. I wanted us to be waiting for something unexpected and new.

How did you create the film’s aesthetic, and why did you choose black and white film?

I wanted the viewer to have the feeling of being in a bad dream: not an oneiric film, and not a nightmare either, but something floating, in between. The use of the 1.50 aspect ratio is an example of that: it’s a hybrid format, which is not perfectly square like 1.33, nor panoramic like 1.77 or 1.85. In this format, landscapes and scenery exist, but they’re a bit shaved off, as if the off-screen elements were still there, but a bit fuzzy. It’s actually the format of many of Edward Hopper’s paintings. Hopper also worked on ideas of solitude, expectation and emptiness.

With the sound, too, we wanted to confuse things by mixing contemporary and electronic music with more “traditional” pieces. This mix of ancestral and modern reaches its apogee in the scene where Céleste returns to the abyss at night: the idea was to compare a myth from the past with the reality of the present, creating a feeling similar to a fusion of hard tech and the Hammer films.

The black and white is something that came to me during editing. I realized that you pay more attention to details, scenery, costumes, accessories in color than in black and white. Now, as the editing progressed, I realized that I wasn’t really interested in all of those details, even though I’d scripted every one of them. I was more interested in focusing on the faces, the landscapes and the lighting than on the details, the accessories and the colors which anchor the film too firmly in a contemporary world that, for this film, I was not particularly interested in. I also thought it was a better way of finding the mysterious atmosphere and temporal flux the script called for. Basically, it reinforced the “legend” angle that I wanted to give the film.

As you were writing and shooting the film, how did you create the element of “uncertainty” that the images convey?

I’d say that the element of “uncertainty” was essentially created during editing as we tried playing with false tempo – sort of strange durations – and using dissolves that cloud the geography and the certainty of dealing with clear blocks of time that are defined and limited. The lack of any shot taken with a hand-held camera also adds a slight distance, a slight derealization which likely contributes to that element of uncertainty.

There is also a sentence by Manoel de Oliveira that guided me: he says that what he likes in films “is the clarity of signs combined with their deep ambiguity, a saturation of wonderful signs that bathe in the light of their absence of explanation”. I don’t claim that Le gouffre is overflowing with wonderful signs, but while writing and shooting, I did want to establish recurring motifs that did not necessarily have a clear symbolism.

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How did you work on the light effects before and during filming, but also during editing?

My idea was always to use natural lighting, but heightening it a bit. For the night scenes, that meant accentuating the effect of the moon or of a fire in order to get something realistic, but at the same time slightly artificial.

The most complicated things were definitely the underground scenes where the character walks around with only a headlamp on. So we had to respect that single light source and then accentuate it, which required very precise coordination between the actress and the image team, and that was not always easy, even if, in the end, I do find the result very successful.

After that, we worked very hard on grading and special effects. All the fog was added in post-production. We similarly accentuated the “hazy” quality of the images.

Is the shot of your character trying to connect to the internet there to situate the film in the recent past, or to show how terribly isolated she is from the village where the story if unfolding, or both? How does one come up with that type of micro-element when writing a film?

The first drafts of the script firmly anchored the story in the 90s. And the set designers went all out in trying to find accessories from the 90s, even if all of that is barely visible for a first-time viewer of the film. At the other extreme, there are some things that stand right out, such as the internet connection, and I actually liked the idea that we don’t know whether it’s a sort of isolated village or if it’s because everything is happening some ten years ago. It’s the same for the absence of cellphones.

All of this is by and large part of the “uncertainty” you were taking about, as well as the “legend” aspect I already mentioned. We don’t know quite when the story is taking place.

For a long time I was worried that this hazy time orientation would be a distraction, that the viewer would get lost asking questions that actually very important, especially with the internet connection, when my intention was to create a distanced atmosphere, something disconcerting, a gap.

Do you like “singular” dwellings, like the ones your characters have: a trailer and a boat? Why couldn’t they have lived in houses?

Generally speaking, yes, I like accommodations that are out of the ordinary. The main character in my last film lives on the round-about in a shopping district. But in this film, aside from Nadir’s boat and the underground passage, there aren’t really any singular dwellings. The fact that Céleste lives in a trailer and Xavier lives in his workshop is not by chance, it’s actually quite normal if you consider their respective situations.

At the same time, my idea was to have all these dwellings dialogue with each other and grow until they sort of fuse together in the abyss.

It was also important not to isolate Céleste, not to make her a romantic character who was set against the others, but to create a world that fit her, to make everything slightly off-kilter. Céleste is not “alone and different” with respect to a uniform, normalized mass. Things are mixed and not separated.

In Le gouffre, you question our relationship to difference. Difference does in fact lead to jokes and rejection, even aggressive behavior. Do you think escape is a better solution than taking a stand?

Le gouffre is a film about the other, our relationship to the other, but where the other is seen as a mirror, however inaccurate, rather than as an adversary. If the main character is wandering, and therefore perpetually on the run, then it’s more because she’s running from herself and from what ties her to others, than from fear of rejection or aggression. That said, the film does also tackle the question of monstrosities, which are a form of “extreme” difference, and I think that the end of the film answers your question a bit… but it’s better not to include any spoilers!

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How did you work on the film’s pacing? What interested you about juxtaposing the day to day which is almost in slow-motion with events that required greater immediacy?

That is the pacing of departures, long goodbyes, hangovers, the last days at work, when there’s not much left to do. So, basically something that feels like it’s in slow-motion, sort of nagging, hazy, cottony.

At the same time, I wrote the film with the main actress in mind (who in fact isn’t an actress, but a filmmaker), and I wanted to adapt to her natural nonchalance rather than try to erase that.

Generally speaking, I abhor hysteria, both in real life and the movies, so perhaps that is also a natural way of creating things that are “set back” like that, holding back rather than going overboard.

We talk a lot about the fear of the unknown. Do you think there’s also something like the fear of isolation? Is that as frightening as the unknown?

That’s a very big question, so I’ll address it as it relates to the film. In Le gouffre, unlike what I myself was able to put on paper before filming began, I don’t think there is any fear of the unknown. Any fear there might be is justified, it’s not “metaphysical fear”. I think that what the film develops, and what concerns Céleste, is more like a feeling of being crushed, a feeling of being very small, useless even, in the face of nature, the vastness of the universe, but also in the face of others’ complexity, their feelings, their experiences. The feeling of being fleeting, left behind and powerless.

I don’t know if the fear of isolation is stronger than the fear of the unknown, but I know I’ve always been fascinated by hermits and cases of “extreme” isolation. For example, I did base the film ever so slightly on the life of the Spanish photographer David Nebreda who lived almost his entire life holed up in his apartment making self-portraits. There is something harrowing and dizzying about forced isolation or ostracism, like exacerbated solitude or rejection that we all experience at one time or other in our lives.

Do you think short films are effective in questioning the meaning of human relations and of “macro” social units?

A film’s length doesn’t not really interest me. I don’t make much difference between a short film, a medium-length film or a feature film, in the sense that you can question human relations, society, the world, whatever, in films of three minutes or nine hours. Just watch Jean Rouche’s The Mad Masters and you’ll see what I mean! A year or two ago I saw a French short, Riolette Autopsie by Rémi Gendarme which is one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen on friendship, and therefore on human relations.

Le gouffre was either produced, co-produced or self-financed with French funds. Did you write the film with this “French” aspect in mind: making movie references, building a specific context (in a particular region, for example) or inserting characteristically French notions?

Although I don’t know if you can really classify it as a French film, Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie was always an important source of inspiration for the film. There are other French film influences: Bernard Queysanne’s The Man Who Sleeps, Bruno Dumont’s Outside Satan, some of Jean Epstein’s Breton films, and even Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake. That said, I didn’t consciously try to make use of any references in the film in the sense that I never said, “We’re going to frame this shot like So-and-So did in this or that film.”

The main influences probably come most directly from Breton tales and legends, where the film was shot. For instance, I’ve always loved Anatole Le Braz’s La Légende de la Mort. There’s a wonderful expression that turns up often in that collection: “murky night” which no doubt matches the tone and the aesthetic of my film a bit.

It seems important to me today to be proud of and to foster regional folklore, not to leave it in the hands of reactionaries and conservatives. And with Le gouffre, I might also have wanted to use film to add a new legend, a new myth to “Breton folklore”: “the legend of Céleste” if you will.

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Le gouffre is being shown in National Competition F1.