Tea time with Le taxi de Sun City

Interview with Thomas Trichet, director of Le taxi de Sun City [The Sun City Taxi]

How did you come up with the main character’s repressed desires? Did you do research into psychological disturbances?
The obsessing and ruminating of Charles, the main character, is based on a mental illness called the “phobia of committing impulsive acts”, which is a fear of giving in to your impulses, be they criminal or ordinary. People who have the phobia do not necessarily (and in fact almost never) act on them, but the idea that one day they might give in affects their daily life, which for some of them can completely prevent them from living normally. The film’s other co-directors, Martin Maire and Théo Jollet, and I researched the illness in order to know how to populate Charles’ recurring obsessions, which are often connected to death or sexuality and are almost always reprehensible or taboo. We also based them on some of our own drives because we realized that the disturbance has echoes in all of us. Who’s never been tempted to jump into an abyss for no reason or to drag someone else with us? That universal character also appealed to us.

What animation technique did you use?
We made the film entirely in 3D, or more precisely using 3D scans. The technique allows you to capture real objects (bodies, furniture, scenery, and so on) and import them into a 3D program. Using those elements, which are each scanned separately, you can build the scenes, manage the lighting, the movement of the camera, etc. So in fact with only a few exceptions, all of the models in the film come from the real world: the actors, the objects and the sets.

How did you go about writing the voice-over? How did you develop the character’s progress through his voice?
I knew from the beginning that we’d make the film from 3D scans but that the characters would not necessarily talk on screen, and that the subject I wanted to talk about was introspective. So the voice-over as a narrative tool became self-evident. When we began writing, we jotted down tons of ideas and situations involving a variety of different impulses. We ended up with a lot of material that we had to sift through in order to find a thread. We weren’t necessarily looking for chronological development, we were trying to show a progression, a line of thought that goes more and more off course as the character is steadily alienated from his friends and family, his context and eventually himself, losing his hold on reality. That’s what guided us in building the character’s journey and the order of the chapters.

Are you particularly interested in the question of delirium, of losing a hold on reality? Do you have other projects on the issue?
I’m currently working on a 2D animation series about a character who comes from a parallel world, as well as a live-action film (I’m not sure yet whether a short of a feature) that depicts two characters in close quarters coming to grips with eternity. I guess I do see a recurring connection to a form of unreality or the supernatural even though that isn’t something particularly intentional. I think I like projects (mine or other people’s) where reality is not exactly what we think.

Have you discovered any advantages that the short film form offers?
Yes, to begin with I don’t think this film would have worked in another format, or at any rate not as it currently is, since the almost constant voice-over is hard to take for long periods. I realize that the viewer’s attention would have been put severely to the test in a longer format. The film’s animation technique was also very time-consuming (especially without having a large technical crew), so it would have been very difficult to set that up for a longer format. The second point is that this was a completely independent project (which is difficult to achieve in other formats such as feature films and television series which need a support structure). That independence allowed us to be totally free in thinking up and writing scenes that might be considered subversive or nonconformist, dealing with topics that examine ethics, since Charles is forever oscillating between his dark thoughts and what convention expects of him.

Which works did you draw from?
The work that undoubtedly had the greatest influence on Le taxi de Sun City is Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée, with regard to the strict use of still images accompanied only by a voice-over. For a long time I described the film’s narrative system as functioning in the same way as La Jetée’s: a series of still images, with the difference that 3D allowed us to move around in the fixed scenes. Another big difference is that our film is made up of numerous animated images though not bodily movement, and the voice-over is not provided by an external narrator. The writing for the voice-over was inspired by Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone, although our idea was to get away from that film and make it less violent and harsh, and also Henri Laborit’s essay Éloge de la fuite [In Honor of Taking Flight] for the way it almost thematically builds the character’s anxieties. I also watched many scenes from films that used the bullet time technique, especially Martti Helde’s In the Crosswind, but that was after I wrote the film. In fact, that made me imagine we could create an almost entirely still film without boring the viewer. A short time ago, I discovered Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. I’m surprised no one told me about it earlier because it has many of the tools that make up Le taxi de Sun City, and there’s no question that if I’d known about it sooner, I would have drawn from it.

Le taxi de Sun City [The Sun City Taxi] is part of Lab Competition L1.