David Cailley, AFC, talks about Amélie Bonnin’s "Partir un jour" ("Leave One Day")

David Cailley : I met director Amélie Bonnin in 2021 to shoot her short film Partir un jour, from which the feature film is adapted. Amélie comes from a documentary background, so there was the idea of looking for long shots, shot handheld or static, and there was also this idea of a film look, which remained for the transition to feature length. It was quite unique to be able to use the previous film to make the next one, as all the groundwork had already been done, a bit like we had already done some preparation by making the short film. Everything was simpler, we knew much more quickly than with the short film what we wanted and where we wanted to go. I felt like we were constantly moving forward, whereas sometimes things can stall a bit because you ask yourself questions. Here, I really felt like we were moving forward very quickly at every stage.
However, very quickly we stopped talking much about the short film we were preparing. The short film was done, we knew how we’d got there, what we liked, what we would probably do differently today, and we didn’t discuss it much. There are a few references that remained common in the images we Shared, the films we talked about, but even those references had evolved or been replaced by new ones. The idea of the documentary remained, Raymond Depardon, certain things that were already there, but in any case, the short film was no longer really a reference for us ; it’s another film, something else.

Amélie sent me her first draft of the script almost a year before shooting, she wanted me to give her some feedback, it was a first opportunity to discuss the film. Then there were several versions of the script and we talked about it more and more as we got closer to shooting, but we really started preparing in January 2024 to start shooting in early June. I had Michel Leclerc’s film to shoot just before that, so we decided to start preparing for Partir un jour (Leave One Day) fairly early. We found out in February that we were going to shoot in the Grand Est region, so we were able to go location scouting. Our challenge was to find the truck stop we wanted to lock in well in advance because it involved set design and production, so we tried to find it first. When we visited the truck stop, we all agreed immediately ; it immediately gave us the impression that we were in the film. It posed some major sound issues because it’s right next to a dual carriageway. We had a lot of discussions with Rémi Chanaud, the sound engineer, who thought long and hard about how to make it work and was very open to ideas, looking for solutions such as putting double glazing on the windows.
The ice rink set was easier because there are very few ice rinks that fit the film, i.e. that had to be built before the 2000s, and we found this incredible rink in Colmar that was exactly what we had imagined for the film, even more than we had imagined.

When preparing the short film, I suggested shooting it in 16mm. It didn’t happen due to budget constraints, but I brought up the idea of shooting on film again for the feature film, in 35mm with two perforations. When Amélie and I discussed it, we decided we wanted a slightly more modern image, something between film and digital. The 16mm was a bit too raw, and in the end she was comfortable with the idea of shooting digitally. Once that decision was made, I immediately asked for the Alexa 35 because it’s a camera I’ve been using since it came out. I find it incredible in terms of its dynamics, colors and ergonomic, so it was pretty obvious. We did some lens tests, trying out the P-Vintage, Zeiss GO and Cooke S3, and Amélie and I agreed that we preferred the look of the Zeiss GO. I also did some tests in 16mm to get some references for grain, image texture and color for the LUT, without sticking completely to the 16 mm look because we were looking for something more hybrid between 16mm, 35mm and digital. With Laurent Ripoll, the colorist I’ve been working with for a few films, we looked for the right image, first during the 16mm tests and then again during the camera tests we did later. We started with two LUTs, but in the end I only used one. I really wanted a soft image, with grain, but without the grain being too pronounced. It had to be there without being obvious. I wanted an image that vibrates, that is sensitive, that is grainy, that is on the edge of film and digital, that retains its modernity while also evoking the idea of what the film is about. its relationship with memory and the 2000s. It’s a film that evokes a lot of nostalgia for those years while still being very modern.

In terms of lighting, there was a move back to HMI and tungsten lighting, particularly for lighting faces and interiors. For example, we had a small Joker Bug 400 HMI indoors that hit the ceiling like we would have done ten years ago, which we hardly ever do anymore with Antoine Roux, the gaffer, because it’s so practical to send any LED projector to the ceiling, because it’s easy to adjust, you can change the color, etc. But I don’t like the effect on skin ; you end up with gaps in the spectrum, green or magenta hues. So I was quite nostalgic for this lighting, tungsten lights with blue filters when it’s night-time, for example, like in Juliette’s bedroom where we used a small 500W tungsten Fresnel with a full CTB hitting the ceiling, which gives a certain warmth to the faces that you don’t get with LED projectors. It may take a little longer to set up and it also depends on the configuration. If you change sets often, it’s more complicated to do this. In this case, we were working on a film with few sub-sets. That helped us to adopt this lighting philosophy.

The idea was to make a rather naturalistic musical. We wanted to find simplicity in the song sequences and keep them on the same level as the rest of the film, without making them too spectacular. We also wanted to find things that were unique to each of these sequences. For example, the father singing in the kitchen is a very simple shot : we’re filming over the shoulder, we move towards him, we circle around him a little, there’s a reverse shot of Juliette, and that’s it. We stabilized this shot a little in post-production on Da Vinci. The new stabilisation tool is very impressive. When we added it at the beginning, it really felt like a Steadicam, but in the end it was too much, so we had to reduce the stabilisation to about 5%. The Alexa 35’s Open Gate is 4.6K, so I had a fairly substantial 10% reserve, which also allowed us to stay in 4K and have a slightly smaller sensor with the idea of getting a little closer to the 16mm ratio, to be somewhere in between.
There was always the idea, a bit like in the documentary, to take what reality gave us, play with it and try to make it work in our narrative. Shooting on stage would have been the opposite approach. The interior of the truck stop, for example, was naturally very colorful, with yellow walls and pink window frames already in place, and the set design team painted a mural that blended harmoniously into the decor. Chloé Cambournac, the production designer, also suggested putting a red neon sign outside the truck stop to complement the red lettering that was already there. It was always a conversation between her, Amélie and me, to decide whether what was there or what we wanted to add would be credible in our world, and what interested me immediately when Chloé suggested this was that the neon sign would also be visible from inside Juliette’s bedroom. It allowed me to light it differently. At dawn, we have this red light that mixes with blue, and at night it becomes really red, yet the colors remain natural, as they are already in the decor, and we just reworked them to harmonise with the location.
We have a sequence that was shot with a VHS camcorder. William Oger, the Steadicam and B camera operator, shot these. We did some tests during the camera tests. It’s not necessarily easy to get hold of a VHS camcorder, we bought one but it didn’t work, so we ended up renting one from Loca Images. Once these images had been shot, we played it through a cathode ray tube television and shoot the monitor with the Alexa. It was still part of this image-memory approach, an image that is directly linked to Juliette’s memories at that moment, and I wanted, in addition to the texture of the VHS, to capture the texture of the television because the image-memory of those years in which I also grew up, like Amélie, is what we watched on cathode ray tube TVs. As soon as we did the tests, we all agreed that we wanted to bring back that material.
The ice rink sequence also has this idea of a memory image, an image of a return to the 1990s, and we wondered how to treat it. I thought about shooting it in 16 mm, but I felt it would be too deliberate and take us out of the film. So we looked at the color grading to see what we could do, and in the end we decided to treat it in a slightly more modern way. It’s really very subtle, I think, most people sense it without seeing it. The main idea was that it should remain in the film and retain a certain simplicity. In the ice rink, we also set up a rather complex system for turning the lights on and off. For the lighting, we used a combination of different black duvetine (which descend in front of the bay window, a curtain that pulls back, a flag in front of a window) coupled with fluorescent lights : we shoot during the day, making it look like night by covering the bay window and the windows with blacks, that we pulled to discover that it’s daytime. To turn off the lights, we shoot at night, making it look like it’s daytime thanks to a dozen Vortexes positioned on the roofs and other LED projectors that shine on the ceiling of the ice rink or on screens (Evoke, Luxed, etc.). Antoine dims all these projectors until we achieve a night-time atmosphere.

The nightclub scene is very different, quite humorous, with a camera gaze. There’s something very self-aware, a little meta about this scene ; the viewer is really confronted with the device. It’s also one of the most choreographed sequences, so we shot the whole scene with a Steadicam to accompany this slightly more spectacular effect. What interested Amélie about this sequence was introducing something different and new in the middle of the film.

For the rolling scenes, I wanted to keep things very simple because we rarely had much time to shoot them. But for the last sequence where Bastien joins Juliette on her motorbike, while discussing the shot list with Amélie and then with Erwan Becquelin, the Key Grip, we realized that we needed an arm on a car with a 3D head. This setup allowed us to do the lateral shots of Bastien in several sizes with a zoom and adjusting the camera to his eye line, and the shot where we track back between the truck and the motorbike by using the offset to stay away from the road. It was the easiest system for shooting the entire sequence in half a day, in addition to the reverse shot on Juliette, which we did with a car mount on the door because we wanted to be closer to her.

For the forest cabin set, there was a slightly heavier electrical installation, with a cherry picker, 4kW, 1,600W Jokers, M18s and Vortexes. And of course, that was the night the generator broke ! I had exactly the same situation on Le Règne animal (The Animal Kingdom), during the biggest chase scene at night, in the forest, but the genrator operator finally managed to get the generator started again. On Leave One Day, however, it didn’t. Fortunately, we had already shot some stuff, we still needed some wide shots, and tighter shots. We managed to get two tight shots with the light we could connect on the location generator and a small mobile unit. The important thing in situations like this is not to panic, so Antoine and I sat down and thought about how to proceed. We had a few LEDs, so thanks to this technology, we were able to light the backgrounds with a few Vortex lights, making some concessions compared to what we would have done if we’d had the generator. There was a good half-hour break while Antoine and his teams re-lit everything, then it started raining, everything short-circuited and we had another half-hour break ! But we still managed to get those two shots ! The camera dolly got stuck too... But everyone remained fairly calm, which was the dynamic of this shoot. It was very supportive, and it was very important to have that energy in order to make the right decisions, otherwise we would have quickly panicked and made the wrong choices.

(Interview conducted by Margot Cavret for the AFC)