‘ET was a primitive glimpse of my queerness’: Lola Quivoron on aliens, motocross and nonbinary cinema
‘She was riding in the middle of 50 bikers, pulling a super-aggressive gangster face.” Lola Quivoron is talking about the real-life inspiration for their urban motocross film Rodeo. “I think in order to front up enough to get through it. Because everyone was looking at her. Some people were laughing because she had a smaller motorbike than everyone else. Some people found her odd, others beautiful. But I was very impressed by the risks she was taking and by her strength.”
Quivoron had been hanging out with Dirty Riderz Crew, a group of bikers from the Val-de-Marne département south-east of Paris, for a while before this transgressive apparition rode past. In the milieu of cross-bitume (urban motocross), where people pull gnarly stunts while engaged in Mad Max-style rallies, female riders were virtually non-existent. Already fascinated by this engine-revving, hydrocarbonfugged scene, this was the first time Quivoron had actually identified with a rider: “She was my double – who I could’ve been.”
This wild card galvanised the script for a debut feature the director had been working on, vacillating between a man and a woman for the protagonist. They – Quivoron identifies as non-binary (“but it changes so much from day to day”) – suddenly realised unclassifiability was the whole point. “There’s a gap in the history of cinema of women characters who escape all forms of classification,” they say, highcheeked and fresh-faced over Zoom from a London hotel. “Not trying to seduce, or be seduced, not sexualised. A body that escapes gender categorisations that can fit into different ways of being, whether drawn from male or female codes of representation.”
So was born the character of Julia, the scowling, androgynous, mixed-race, bike-stealing tearaway who flouts the macho customs of the B-More crew in Rodeo. As much about gender as it is about motorbikes, it is as raw, unfettered and out on the margins as Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (though Quivoron prefers the word “surnaturalisme” – hyper-naturalism – for her more emphatic style). Played by Julie Ledru, she is an instant irritant for most of the men around her – and totally unapologetic. The film occasionally over-throttles in its bid to outrun societal norms. But that’s the way Quivoron wanted it. As they specified to their cameraman for the opening bike sequence: “I asked him to stay umbilically linked to her. But at the same time I asked Julia to be at such a level of intensity and speed and release that it’s as if she’s even escaping from the bounds of cinema. We can’t keep up with her.”
Quivoron talks in long, exploratory answers that are – pardon the categorisation, packed very Gallicly with theory. But also with levels of feeling that indicate the 33-year-old’s heavy personal investment in their filmmaking. Non-binarity seems to be key to their core conception of fiction; a chance to break out of established notions of the self and identify beyond frontiers. “For me, fiction is this disordering of things, of the gaze, a decentring,” they say. “All of a sudden, when you look at the world by stepping out of yourself, there’s a richness in that discovery.” Aliens were one early means cinema supplied for Quivoron: “ET, for example, for me was a kind of primitive glimpse of the queerness of who I was.” Sometimes this rupture with norms provoke violence, as in Julia’s case, or with Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, another dark lodestone for creating Quivoron’s “female thug”. “I identified with that character a lot, even though he’s very problematic. I wanted to develop Julia in the same way, exploring that opacity and not explaining his actions.”
This professional interest in the other has practical ramifications on set, with Quivoron intensively workshopping all of her characters Mike Leigh-style for extended periods. It stems from a collective ethos that is important to them, especially working with so many non-professional actors, such as Ledru (another real-life biker, whom Quivoron found on Instagram monikered as “L’Inconnue du 93” – “Unknown of 93” [the iconic Parisian banlieue]). “Cinema puts you in such a position of power. It’s an industry with a lot of money, it’s very pyramidal. It’s too easy for cinema to take an interest in people not from the industry, with a power of gaze that is enormous. It can be a dangerous form of predation.”
Quivoron decides what happens on their sets, of course, but the wider industry is another matter. The New French Extremity movement was perhaps more interested in violence than radical, subcutaneous explorations of sexual identity. Older directors such as Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas and Leos Carax have touched on this territory, but only recently are the likes of Céline Sciamma and, most brashly, Julia Ducournau’s Cannes winner Titane (which shares Rodeo’s petrolhead addiction) making more committed inroads. But society isn’t necessarily hostile, thinks Quivoron. “It’s not that it’s not accepted. It’s all a question of what you’re used to. We have to make audiences work to get them used to these new forms of multiple and hybrid representation that never try to arrange things in a single way of seeing the world. Cinema is still young and we can still reinvent a lot of things. ”
While Quivoron is waiting, with their experience out on the asphalt, who better to direct the next Fast and Furious? They ponder: “It’s an American film, which means it would be American methods of production. Honestly, it might really be fun, if I could break the established codes, had the freedom to tear everything down to rebuild it.” Finally we might get to see that Vin Diesel-the-Rock-Jason Statham human centipede.
• Rodeo is released in UK cinemas on 28 April.