– The French filmmaker recounts the journey of an ensemble film that began as an alternative experiment in filmmaking and genre blending
Released in French theaters on July 15 by Dulac Distribution, Comète is Élie Wajeman’s fourth feature film.
Cineuropa: How did this story featuring 18 characters come about?
Élie Wajeman: I was offered the chance to run a workshop with actors and actresses of my choice and to follow it up by making a film. I agreed to take on this challenge on a shoestring budget. When you have to write for 18 people, there are two options. Either you bring them together in the countryside, at a funeral, a wedding or a gathering of friends, as in Patrice Chéreau’s Hôtel de France or Arnaud Desplechin’s medium-length film The Life of the Dead. The other option is to have characters whose paths cross, each with their own destinies – an ensemble film – and that’s what I chose, out of a desire to encompass as many destinies as possible, but also as many genres as possible.
How did you structure the screenplay?
What we expect from an ensemble film is intertwining. There are various possible ways of achieving this. In Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, for example, the characters brush past one another; in Iñárritu’s Love’s a Bitch, a single event links all their fates, and the figure of the dog runs through all the stories. There are other, more elaborate examples where a character unravels the situations. As I love scripts that are solid from a dramatic point of view, I wanted genuine encounters, not just poetic brushstrokes. I worked on this during the writing stage; I established the relationships and connections. Then I wrote snippets of dialogue which were rewritten during filming. I didn’t have the time, so I didn’t write a script where everything is interwoven: each story has its own script. The interweaving happened during editing. It was a major challenge not to lose our way, to keep the audience engaged. We know that editing is part of the script, but to this extent, it was quite extreme.
Is the existentialist perspective the central theme of the film?
All my films explore how we cope with life. I was guided by the idea that the beating heart of the film, apart from that comet in the sky, is the staging of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which deals with how we cope with life. The themes of Three Sisters permeate and unfold throughout the film’s various stories, even those not directly linked to the theatre.
These different stories reflect a difficult era.
The film captures scenes set in a rather unique space-time, with this comet casting a soft light that is somewhat magical yet at the same time unsettling. But I also wanted to portray an era and a generation for whom life is hard. So I explore real issues of emotion and society. And as I’m used to making films that are quite radically dark, with the theme of life and death running through the genre, I wanted death to loom large and intensify the relationships.
You also paint a portrait of a particular part of Paris.
I work on the premise that I’m moving through spaces. That’s how my ideas come to me. For the last few films, I’ve wanted to tell the story of Paris, but also to save it from a sort of bourgeois prettiness that stifles the city a little and strips it of its rough edges. Paris is still vibrant, dangerous, moving and violent. It’s as if I were standing at a window in a suburb, wondering: what’s going on here? What are people’s lives like? What are they thinking? That’s what thrills me: I watch, I imagine and I write.
The film also explores the craft of acting.
I’m passionate about the theatre, and I’m deeply moved by the actors I love to direct; I enjoy telling the stories of actors’ lives because I believe they are there to represent human beings – which is an essential task, but also quite a crazy, unique one, as we can see, for example, in Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, where theatre suddenly bursts into the everyday lives of the actors in New York.
Is Comète a sort of stylistic exercise?
A bit. It’s a gesture, a film between two films, but even though it’s an interlude, it becomes a film in its own right, and I think it stands on its own. I opened up my creative well and poured a lot of things that move me into this film: it resembles me enormously. It’s as if I had a whole host of short stories that I wanted to weave together with a thread so that it’s still one and the same story. And I was very keen to explore other genres, particularly to experiment with comedy-drama. I hope to blend this in future with the film noir genre, which I’m very fond of: combining comic elements with a sense of danger.
(Translated from French)
