Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘Incurable’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?
I have made several short films before Incurable (2024), like Migraine (2020), The Burned Man (2019), Tonn & Monn (2020), etc. All were made on the same basis: photo-tales turned into movies. Except Tonn & Monn, which was, at the beginning, a kind of comics (with drawings made by myself) and for this reason is labelled as an animation movie. I am a storyteller who like telling, be it by ways of drawings, words or photographs. The idea of making movies started with my wish to see my pictures moving and be « mooded » by music. So I turned to Adobe Premiere and started learning how to edit. I always work with little or no budget, and casting no one but myself. Once yet, I asked Elisabeth, my daughter, to play a key role. She appears in The Burned Man and did it very well.
Tell us about ‘Incurable’. How do you describe it?
It is a very dark tale about suicide. Let me reassure you right away: I am not personally concerned with suicide. It was rather, for me, a way to work on a dark theme, without at the same time reusing the worn-out subjects of the noir films. I love noir films and their dark moods. I like the way B&W pictures were shot in Hollywood in the Forties and the Fifties. Filmmakers of that time made matchless movies that couldn’t be made again, even if we tried. Nevertheless, I attempted this with Incurable, but I had to find another kind of story than a detective one, for I had neither the time to develop it in a short movie, nor had I the wish to do it. I was looking for something more psychological, darker and at the same time well suited to the kind of dark pictures I wanted to make.
Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.
Films like Orson Welles’ The Stranger and A Touch of Evil are topnotch for me. I love Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies, like Solaris or Stalker. I find Solaris deeply moving. It is a story of eternal love that transcends the bounds of space, time and even death. I have never seen a movie as beautiful as Solaris. It is much more achieved, I believe, than Lem’s book it was adapted from. But Chris Marker’s La Jetée, for its use of still photographs, is indeed a benchmark for me.
If you were given a good budget, what would be your ideal project?
I would hire actors to work with. I would try to make a medium-length film. But basically I wouldn’t change a bit my way of working. Low budget films are not only a way of working due to limited means, they are also a spirit, a value that has proved to be fruitful. Chris Marker’s La Jetée, for instance, was made on a shoestring and yet has become a milestone of cinema.
Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?
Working with low budget or no budget at all, I am my own producer. Making films for the sake of making them only, I have no schedule whatsoever.
What was the hardest part of making ‘Incurable’.
Digitalizing the film photographs printed on paper. I spent a lot of time removing from the digitalized files all the stains, micro hairs, dust spots, scratches etc that covered the pictures all over. At the same time, I wanted to keep some level of scratches, in order to make the pictures « sound » as if they came from old B&W movies. To find a good balance between keeping and removing scratches was quite a challenge.
If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?
I would like to make a SF film with a low budget and without any special effect. Words are very powerful, so much so that you can make believe things with words that would otherwise need special effects. Words are free, they are the special effects of the low budget filmmakers.
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