THE ASPHALT JUNGLE
Lola Quivoron’s existential female-led biker movie hits top gear…
When Lola Quivoron was young, growing up in the outskirts of Paris, she became a cinematic petrolhead. ‘My father showed me a lot of motorcycle and racing-car movies, because he was really passionate about that,’ she explains to Teasers. She watched them all, from Steve McQueen classics to The Fast and the Furious, although it was a 1972 documentary, Continental Circus, about competitive motorcycle racing, that really stunned her.
‘It was really a shock when I was a teenager. It was about violence, death and obsession.’
After directing her 2016 short Dreaming of Baltimore, which focused on kids riding motocross bikes in the Parisian suburbs, Quivoron has now channeled her love for cross bitumen, as it’s called, into her visceral debut feature, Rodeo. The film follows Julia (Julie Ledru), a rebel misfit who finds her tribe when she joins up with a biker crew. ‘She’s the stranger set apart from the community, trying to get in,’ says Quivoron, who adds that Julia’s quest for acceptance is ‘a fight that we can find in a lot of places: at school, in industry, being a woman in the street’.
Shooting near Bordeaux, Quivoron worked with a biker team known as the Dirty Riderz Crew, the leader of which had featured in her short. ‘Since then, we stayed really, really good friends,’ says the writer-director, who became enchanted not only by this world of hair-raising, stunt-pulling bike-riding, but by what the crew symbolised. ‘It deals with the idea of how we can create alternative families, how we can be together, even if we are not living in the same suburbs.’
‘She’s the stranger set apart, trying to get in’ LOLA QUIVORON
When it came to casting, Quivoron opted for largely non-professionals, including bike enthusiast Ledru, who she discovered on Instagram. ‘Lola never told me that I was necessarily going to be in the film,’ Ledru says. ‘She’d show me different drafts of the script and really wanted to know if I felt it correlated with the reality of the crossbitumen world. Then they really took me like a newborn baby, placed me very delicately on the film set. So the experience felt so natural.’ While it might freak out safety experts, Ledru and her co-stars performed all the bike tricks – often without helmets. ‘All you see in the film is what was actually happening on this asphalt,’ says Ledru. ‘No stuntmen or women!’ Fortunately, stunt coordinator Mathieu Lardot, who worked on Jason Bourne and Spectre, was on hand. ‘He was really attentive to the energy… and the tiredness of the riders,’ says Quivoron.
There were accidents, though. Ledru twisted her ankle early in the shoot. More seriously, one of the stunt riders had a ‘terrible’ fall. ‘He exploded his tibia,’ she reveals. ‘It was really a trauma. Very difficult to accept.’ Thankfully, he lived to ride again.
RODEO OPENS IN CINEMAS AND ON CURZON HOME CINEMA ON 28 APRIL.