Tea time with Les méduses de Gouville [The Jellyfish of Gouville]

Interview with Paul Nouhet, director of Les méduses de Gouville [The Jellyfish of Gouville]

Tell us a little bit about how Les méduses de Gouville came to be.
At the very beginning, I met with Tristan Vaslot, the film’s producer. We’d met in our first year of film school at La Fémis and we immediately got along. Tristan brought me for a weekend out to Gouville-sur-Mer, to his grandparents’. He spent all of his childhood holidays in Normandy but I didn’t know the area at all. And I loved it! He showed me the cabins that the town is famous for. There are seventy of them, made of wood with multicolored roofs that form a line on the dunes above the beach. I found them very cinematographic – they reminded me of Jacques Tati’s film Mr Hulot’s Holiday. Since the summer holidays were approaching, we thought it would be great to take advantage of our free time to make a film in Gouville. We knew the school would lend us some material, which allowed us to produce the film at lower cost. I wrote a first draft of the script pretty quickly, we brought together a crew of other friends – from the school and elsewhere – and that’s how it all started.

You seemed to have fun putting Antoine, the outlandish character who’s always out of sync, in situations that he won’t be able to handle. Is that how you’d envisioned the script?
It’s true Antoine is a little wacky. I’d sketched the character out already in a previous short film I made at school. That guy was called Maxime. In this film, I wanted to give him a more poetic, melancholic quality. He’s created his own little world, where he fishes for jellyfish and Tutti Candies and where he’s very much at home, but also a little lonely. Jeanne (Dorothée Levesque), his brother (Victor Boyer)’s girlfriend, is the character who comes and upsets his habits. She awakens emotions in him that he’s never felt before, and that he actually can’t handle. But in reality, I wrote the script with scenes here and there, without worrying about an overarching story. What mattered was whether I found the dialogue funny. When I had enough scenes, I looked for a way of bringing them together in a story and tweaked them accordingly. I worked on the script with all of my artistic collaborators, men and women alike, during both filming and editing.

Would you like to continue working in front of and behind the camera in the future?
I’m actually in post-production right now on a short film with the character Maxime, the “Parisian” version of Antoine. So I play the part of Maxime, and Edouard Rerolle is Maxime’s best friend Florent. After that, I’ll see depending on the stories I come up with, but it’s not by any means a necessity, it depends on the characters.

Which works did you draw from?
There are many. My tastes in film are actually very broad, and my favorite films often have nothing to do with Les méduses. But, well, when I was writing the script, I discovered the films of Sophie Sophie Letourneur, Guillaume Brac, Sébastien Betbeder, Thomas Salvador, and Emmanuel Mouret. They’re all contemporary filmmakers whose comedy is very melancholy, which I find very moving. And then of course there are comic books. I read a good number of comic books and some authors are important to me, with respect both to directing and writing dialogue. Bastien Vives, Morgan Navarro and Anouk Ricard, for example, write and draw comics that I think are great.

Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
I haven’t worked on a film over thirty minutes yet so I have nothing really to compare with respect to the length of a film. But I’d say that for this film, what gave us the most freedom was filming outside in settings that were all nearby, with a very small crew, natural light and not a lot of material. That allowed us to be very flexible with how we worked: we decided the night before what we were going to shoot the next day, sometimes the same day. One peculiarity of Normandy is that the weather is very fickle and unpredictable. It wasn’t rare for us to shoot a scene with a character in bright sunlight and then, after we’d set up the reverse angle, have it rain cats and dogs. The tide also rises extremely quickly on Gouville’s beaches. It’s very surprising. One day we almost got stuck in the middle of the oyster park with the camera. Our equipment was so light though that were able to adapt very quickly in those situations.

Les méduses de Gouville [The Jellyfish of Gouville] is part of National Competition F11.