Soaring with "L'Envolée" - Interview with Eva Riley, director
Entretien avec Eva Riley, réalisatrice de "L'Envolée"
Entretien avec Eva Riley, réalisatrice de L’Envolée.
Depuis la mort de sa mère, Leigh, gymnaste de 14 ans, ne parvient plus à s’entraîner. Jusqu’au jour où Joe, un demi-frère qu’elle n’a jamais connu, fait son apparition dans sa vie. Actuellement en salle, L’Envolée est l’exploration délicate d’un lien fraternel tout neuf, à la fois étranger et complice. Entretien avec la réalisatrice, Eva Riley, dont ce film est le premier long-métrage.
Vocable: Can you describe your film in a few words? Eva: I wanted to make a film about a brother and a sister. It's something that I hadn't seen much in films before. Especially about a brother and a sister who get to know each other. That was the original idea. But during the course of researching the film, I learnt a lot about gymnastics, so I decided to make her a gymnast. I also started to learn more about motorbike crime – which happens a lot in England and Scotland. When I spoke to young people who did gymnastics and young people who rode motorbikes, they talked about them in similar ways: the freedom of gymnastics, and the freedom of being on the road. So I developed it around that.
2. Vocable: Why have you decided to make a coming-of-age film? Eva: I really like films about young people. I didn't make L'Envolée as a teenage film – I think a lot of adults can come and watch it. Being a teenager is such an interesting time for everyone. I think a lot of people have very strong memories of it – and I certainly do.
3. Vocable : The sibling relationship you chose to portray brings a lot of happiness in your main character's life, but also new and risky situations. Eva: It is something which evolved as I was writing. Originally, it was very simple: it was just about her having fun with her brother. And then I realised that for a girl like her, who is alone at the beginning of the film and is grieving, because of the death of her mother - having this young boy, of a similar age, who comes into her life, who she doesn't really accept as a brother at the beginning, that she sees more as a friend - it was natural that it would become a bit more complicated than it would seem at first. I wanted to look at it in a simple way and say: sometimes, people can have very complicated feelings about people in their life; and that's ok.
4. Vocable: The movie opens on Leigh being unable to perform her gymnastics routine. What are the things that she can't "soar above"? Eva: For me, it's about her lack of confidence. When you do a floor routine, in gymnastics, it's about the technical side of things but also about this artistic, emotional side. So if you just do the moves, it doesn't look very good. You have to connect with it emotionally. But
Leigh shut down her emotions, because she's lost her Mum. She needs that confidence back – and she does get it back at some point in the film. There's a class part to it as well. Leigh is from a slightly different class from all the other girls. There's a real competition between them, and a lot of pressure.
5. Vocable: What did you do to research the world of gymnastics? Eva: I just started by watching a lot of YouTube videos! I found a lot of these floor routines, especially of this very famous gymnast called Nadia Comaneci – watching it made me quite emotional. At the time, I knew nothing about gymnastics. So I started to go to a lot of different clubs, watched the classes, then interviewed lots of young girls for them to tell me about their experiences. A lot of them talked about that feeling of finding it
very hard to perform when things were going badly in their life. They got a block.
6. Vocable: What about Joe, Leigh's brother? Eva: I was very interested in motorbike crimes. People, the media, would talk about these kids like they were stupid and awful, saying they should go to jail, when really, it's just down to the economic situation in the UK, young people not being able to go to youth clubs... These are just individual people. They have their own stories, and people would just portray them in the same way. So I wanted to look at Joe's character as one of these young boys who is just a bit lost. The thing that's available to him is motorbikes. If I was in Joe's situation, I'd probably steal motorbikes as well. I meant to look at that and humanise it. I interviewed a lot of young boys who were involved in motorbike crimes. All of them were really soft.
7. Vocable: Your actors had never been in a film before, and this is your first long feature. How was working together and handling this brand new situation? Eva: It was brilliant! I have worked with first time actors before for short films. I met the actors for Leigh and Joe eight months beforehand. I auditioned them lots and lots of time, so I knew they were really good. I also let them improvise a lot. Sometimes, the dialogue on the page is different from the dialogue they say. I just said to them : "Learn what the scene is about, and then just improvise with each other", so they could use their own slang and use their own ways of saying things. A lot of my favourite lines in the film are things they say and that I haven't written. Now, I let actors improvise
"When I spoke to young people who did gymnastics and young people who rode motorbikes, they talked about them in similar ways. They talked about feeling free."
all the time. In real life, we don't walk around thinking about what we are going to say next. With actors, it's the same. It's more realistic.
8. Vocable: Any British movie you'd recommend to our readers? Eva: It's so hard – there are so many! But if we are talking about social cinema, there's a lot of black and white film from the 60's, especially one called : The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner. I saw it when I was seventeen and I thought it was incredible.