What he did for love
Director’s commitment to filmmaking awash in his own blood, sweat and tears
It’s rare to find a director who won’t say he cried, sweated and even bled to make his film. But for Quebec’s Patrick Bouchard, the lone Canadian in competition this year at the 71st annual Cannes Film Festival, that’s neither an exaggeration nor a figure of speech.
Bouchard’s 10-minute short Le Sujet (The Subject) is screening in the Directors’ Fortnight section. In the film, an animator dissects a duplicate of his own body, freeing it of symbolic weight in the process. And when the subject leaks fluids under the knife: “I used my own blood, my own saliva in the film,” says Bouchard. “Yes, it’s me. This is a true introspection.”
I’m talking to Bouchard at the Quebec pavilion in the festival’s International Village behind the looming Palais des Festivals. He’s easy to spot — I’ve just seen that body and face on the screen — and he’s accompanied by his producer and impromptu translator, Julie Roy. “It was not written or storyboarded,” she says of the film. “It was an improvisational process. The process was as interesting and as important as the result.” Roy has worked with Bouchard before. “I was confident he could do something even if we didn’t know at first what it would be.” Bouchard began with the image in his mind of a face looking down on its double. And so he spent four months with sculptor Dany Boivin — just one member of a vital creative team — creating a life-size model of himself out of plastiline, a substance somewhere between wax and clay in consistency. But he found it difficult to make the first cut in the model.
“I wasn’t able to open up myself,” he says, again literally.
Says Roy: “At some point I told Patrick, I think you should start shooting. I think you’re there.” And so the animator in the film draws a knife along the foot of his double, revealing a nail that is just one of a number of images drawn from religion, science and Bouchard’s own background. (Any references to Frankenstein in its bicentennial year are, he adds, is coincidental.) This is Bouchard’s first trip to Cannes. “I’m really excited,” he said. “It’s a beautiful place. People have been really good to me.” As to being the lone flag-bearer for our nation at a festival that has often feted Denis Villeneuve, Xavier Dolan, Atom Egoyan and others, “It’s a shame for Canada but for us it’s pretty nice. We’ve had very good press coverage.” He and Roy are also looking forward to meeting fellow filmmakers and especially animators — three of the 10 shorts in the Directors’ Fortnight program are animated. “The human experience is so rich, to share those high emotions with other filmmakers.”
That’s not all there is to share on a film like this.
After the making of a life-size double, Roy says, “he did his face in chocolate for my birthday. It was a bit strange, but the chocolate was really good.”