"Insyriated"

Virginie Surdej, by Philippe Van Leeuw, AFC
One cinematographer chooses another. This isn’t something that happens every day. Indeed, I believe it happens quite rarely, and yet it’s a crucial situation. I feel that the only real pitfall I encounter when I’m directing, the one that is calling out to me, is the idea that I might be able to be both the director and the cinematographer. I’m convinced that I must avoid thinking about the film’s image in the way a cinematographer would, I’ve got to give someone else that responsibility, I’ve got to let it go, and even refuse to take part in it.

Cinematography was my first profession, it’s what I know how to do, and I’m afraid I’ll go back to it despite myself, that this familiar way of thinking about thinks will take the upper hand without my realizing it, and that my work as a director will take the backseat. The form mustn’t take priority over the substance, that’s not what I’m there for.

So, I’ve got to find someone that I can ask anything of and who will do everything the way I would, or even better than I would. Someone whom I also leave to his or her own fate, that I refuse to help, someone who projects confidence. Marc Koninckx was the cinematographer on The Day God Walked Away, but he wasn’t free for Insyriated. It was really a shame because we’d already worked together, I could take all that for granted, and the images that he provided for my film were magnificent and perfect.

So I began my search again, which wasn’t an easy task because the production requirements kept changing. I must have ruffled the feathers of a couple of people that I met and I’m sorry for that. But then I was introduced to Virginie Surdej who had just completed Nabil Ayouch’s Much Loved, and I immediately wanted to work with her. Not so much because she was a woman to work on a women’s film as for her eye, her simplicity, and her joie de vivre.

I didn’t have anything specific in mind for the film’s images. I wanted shadow ; I wanted a bit of a “dirty” image that would nonetheless sparkle. I don’t like hard contrasts, I want to see the faces, but I don’t want it to show. I like naturalist lighting ; I like the image to disappear, for it to not be noticed. I wanted the film to become documentary-like, I wanted the feeling of authenticity to be reinforced by the image. I didn’t want it to take too much time, I wanted it to be humble. I didn’t have reference images to show Virginie, I only had words and the screenplay, but we immediately understood one another. I knew she had seen the film in her mind’s eye while reading the screenplay and so we began working.

The film wasn’t rich. We worked on location, in a fifth-floor apartment with 3-metre-high ceilings and 25 days of shooting. But Virginie was courageous, imaginative, inventive, and an always-magnanimous and impassioned presence with a great work ethic. I think that in the beginning, she was worried that I might not understand everything she was doing, but she quickly got over it. We did what we could with what we had on hand, and what we had ended up being quite enough for our film. A camera on the shoulder, a pretty standard format, and long takes that run through the apartment for minutes at a time.

I found it remarkable how she would naturally place herself at the right place, especially during the long takes from the shoulder, which were especially hard to choreograph because the action was all over the place. She rose to the occasion and was always very attentive to my directing, leaving me space and reinforcing what I wanted, and we worked on the same register from the beginning to the end in perfect harmony.

All of us, actors and technicians, got along marvellously well throughout the entire period we made this film. There was passion and unbridled involvement, it was strong, and in Virginie I found an ideal collaborator.

- Cinematographer : Virginie Surdej
- Production designer : Kathy Lebrun
- Sound recordist : Chadi Roukoz, Paul Heymans, Alek Goosse
- Editor : Gladys Joujou
- Original soundtrack : Jean-Luc Fafchamps
- Producers : Guillaume Malandrin, Serge Zeitoun, Pierre Sarraf.

• Read an article in which Virgine Surdej discusses her work on this film.

Translated from French by Alexander Baron-Raiffe for the AFC