Antoine Cormier talks about the filming of "Garance", directed by Jeanne Herry

Garance is a young actress struggling with alcoholism. Eight years of a journey marked by moves, work, encounters, parties and anxieties, joys and setbacks… But also a personal, friendship-based and sexual revolution, a chaos reminiscent of a ‘big playground’ where love and destruction mingle in equal measure.

Shot over 50 days between September and December 2025, Jeanne Herry’s new film is told entirely from the main character’s perspective.
“Adèle Exarchopoulos was in every scene,” explains Antoine Cormier. “It was impossible to imagine a week of filming without her... she was in almost every shot...”
Initially, when I read the script, I immediately thought of The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2023). Both for its form—this chronicle of a woman in her thirties navigating different periods of her life—and for its visual style. There was something in the way Julie’s face was filmed—that sense of intimacy, of naturalness, of life captured in the moment—that echoed what Jeanne was seeking for the film. The different chapters in Jeanne’s original script also reinforced this connection.
Even though, by the end of the editing process, this sense of time was no longer as explicitly signalled, there remain fade-outs to black that mark the transitions between the different parts of the narrative. Another important reference was Claude Chabrol’s Betty, photographed by Bernard Zitzermann, in which Marie Trintignant also played a woman struggling with alcohol.
Jeanne also thought of Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991) very early on, particularly for the contrast that Adrian Biddle had managed to create, with his very deep blacks in the image, notably in the bar scene at the start of the film, which was a source of inspiration for our bar at Le Boucan.”

Faced with a huge number of sets (around fifty at the count), the team started a meticulous preparation to tackle this chronicle of a woman’s life.
“The entire summer leading up to filming was devoted to location scouting and storyboarding. Jeanne really enjoys shooting with two cameras, and above all finding the most authentic settings possible, without cheating with the space or the real-world constraints. So we sometimes found ourselves in places so cramped that I honestly wondered how we were going to manage to film in them. Whether it was the first flat Garance shares with her partner, Pauline’s country house or even the Bar du Boucan, these are all real locations, which we explored at length during pre-production.
At the same time, we also worked on test shots, particularly focusing on the rendering of faces.
Jeanne wanted something very candid, almost documentary-style. An organic image with very natural-looking skin, capable of subtly conveying the effects of alcohol on Garance’s face as the story unfolds. Several stages were defined according to the progression of the addiction and the narrative, and Hélène Fabre, the assistant director, was very careful to preserve this continuity despite the sometimes fragmented order of scenes within a single day. From an optical point of view, we chose Canon K35s, which I really like for their balance : good contrast, very accurate colours, but also a slight softness on faces and skin. During pre-production, I also developed a LUT with colourist Arthur Paux based on film photographs taken on set, as well as 16mm test shots filmed with Adèle.

The idea wasn’t to artificially reproduce a film texture, but rather to recapture certain colours and certain sensations. It’s a method I stuck with throughout the film, regularly taking 250D prints on set, with the actresses lit under the same conditions as the film. These images guided us throughout the colour grading process, both to find the right contrast for certain sequences and to establish an accurate and vibrant reference for skin tones, which remain for me among the most beautiful in film.”

While the film opens with tracking shots following the protagonist, one is quickly struck by the recurrence of three-quarter rear camera angles…
“Those were really our "Betty shots’ !" explains Antoine Cormier. “It’s something that had made a big impression on us in Chabrol’s film, and which quite naturally inspired us throughout production. I filmed Adèle With a slight high-angle shot, just above the shoulder, especially at the start of the story, or whenever it made emotional sense.
It’s an observing camera , but with a real sense of closeness… without being voyeuristic or spying. We really liked this slightly strange, evasive point of view, where the character never really looks at us. As if she weren’t fully facing up to what’s happening to her. Then, as the film progresses, particularly after her meeting with Pauline, the camera becomes more frontal. We. begin to meet her gaze more directly. But that evasion is never entirely gone. There’s for example that car scene with her mother, in the second half of the film, where we deliberately decided never to shoot a single shot from the front. For us, it was almost the perfect sequence to take this Betty-inspired visual language to its logical conclusion.”

The first sequence where Garance’s character asserts herself—and where we enter her private world —is the break-up with her partner in front of the lift. A scene that marks the end of a first chapter and a realisation in her life. Antoine Cormier recalls : “It’s a sequence that evolved as we prepared it. A scene with movement, pauses, and two characters circling around something before finally speaking to each other properly, eye to eye. We racked our brains a bit to make it look simple and fluid on screen.
Originally, this scene was supposed to take place outdoors at night, on the street leading to the building. But the street we had on location was far too linear and didn’t quite suit the rhythm of the scene. It was by filming it in the entrance hall, with these different moments, then the lift they’re waiting for, that we found the right timing. Two Steadicam long takes allowed us to capture the scene, creating a sense of a small, intimate bubble within this very impersonal building lobby. And a slightly harsher, flood-like light that highlights the faces and accompanies this rather abrupt break.”

Another key moment is the encounter with Blanche and the kiss by the canal.
“For this first kiss, we’re down by the water’s , on the Canal de l’Ourcq. The shifting lights in the background evoke the Boucan club from the previous sequence, and the world of nightlife associated with it, to which Garance is beginning to open up. This backlighting, and above all this profile shot, echo the sequence later in the film of the kiss with Pauline, in that small, very narrow dressing room. Exactly the same profile shot, this time with sunlight striking the background. A glimmer of hope that already foreshadows Garance’s gradual need to face up to her addiction and stop running away.”

On the difficulty of a project so heavily reliant on the actors, Antoine Cormier explains : “The most complicated thing for me was shooting more than half the film with two cameras whilst trying to ensure it was as imperceptible as possible on screen. When you find yourself in this situation as a director of photography, you’re always tempted to position the actors at a 90° angle to a window to make your job easier, and to achieve a pleasing light direction for both actors in shot/reverse shot. But sometimes, you have to be willing to step outside that and adapt. Having one shot almost front-lit, and the other almost backlit, without cluttering the set with equipment. Especially when shooting in natural, life-size settings, with no way to cheat with off-screen space or move the walls. Ultimately, it’s often in these kinds of very simple situations that you start to move away from certain habitual reflexes and find other ways of filming and lighting.
And then 50 days of filming is a long time. You have to manage to stay on track, remain true to what we’d decided at the outset, even when fatigue or constraints start to set in. But we were incredibly lucky, because we could rely on a truly wonderful team. Beyond being incredible people, each individual was also extremely talented in their field. I sincerely believe the film came together thanks to that collective trust and shared desire to move in the same direction.

I particularly remember one of the most challenging sequences for me in terms of lighting : thelunch where Garance is dismissed by her theatre troupe. A scene shot with two cameras in a set filled with floor-to-ceiling windows opening onto the outside, but where the light suddenly dropped, transforming that somewhat stormy October day into a veritable twilight… right in the middle of the sequence.
But despite that, we carried on filming, against the odds, because there was something really powerful happening in the scene. My gaffer, Thibault Danjou, actually managed to bounce back with great precision, allowing us to extend that day which was slipping away before our very eyes. We tried to stay true to the original concept of the shot list, without calling everything into question, almost ploughing ahead headlong and trusting one another. And a few days later, when Laurence Briaud, the editor, gave us her feedback on that scene, that’s when we realised we wereprobably on the right track for the rest of the film.”

Another challenge was the changing seasons, as filming spanned from late summer right into the depths of winter... Antoine Cormier recalls : “We often had to fake summery atmospheres as naturally as possible, so that they could blend in with the genuine moments captured a few weeks earlier. We relied mainly on tungsten sources, notably several 12-lamp units, to recapture that Indian summer feel and the mix of colours produced by tungsten with little or no correction outdoors. It’s actually the only raw light that strikes me as truly natural, and which we often chose to use directly, without any filtering… I remember scenes where the real sun decided to take off right in the middle of a scene, and where the takeover by the 12 lamps became almost imperceptible. This was particularly the case in the drawing sequence under Garance’s mother’s pergola.”

When asked about a scene that stands out in particular, the director of photography replies : “Perhaps another kiss, the one in the hall of Montparnasse station.
One of the initial inspirations for this sequence came from Katell Quillévéré’s *Suzanne*. There’s that magnificent shot, so perfectly captured, of this couple who can’t bring themselves to part, filmed from a distance, from a building, like a moment stolen from reality.
That feeling had made a deep impression on us. The idea was to recreate something along those lines with Adèle Exarchopoulos and Sara Giraudeau, but in the middle of the crowd at Montparnasse station... So, paradoxically, a sequence that was quite a challenge to set up : a huge number of extras, staging issues, a proper organisation of a major scene… yet with the desire that, on screen, everything should look as though the camera had simply stumbled upon that moment. In the end, the shot was filmed quite simply, with a long focal length, from the upper floor of the station.
And I think that sums up our approach to the film quite well : never trying to distort reality, but rather trying to go with the flow, and to capture what it produces naturally.”

(Interview by François Reumont pour for the AFC)