Interview with Julia Mingo, AFC, about Avril Besson’s film "Les Matins merveilleux"

De vieux vinyles disco dans le coffre de sa Twingo, à peine remise de la mort de sa grand-mère, Charlie roule. Elle ne sait pas encore que ces disques ressusciteront les pas de danse de sa mère dans les yeux humides de Titou, caviste rêveur, ni qu’une plage méditerranéenne désertée sera le théâtre de sa rencontre avec Marina, qui rêve de liberté dans la pizzeria du village. Pour l’instant elle roule.
Avec India Hair, Raya Martigny, Eric Cantona.

Julia Mingo : Avril and I met at La Fémis. I was the cinematographer on her graduation film. She had been planning to make this feature film for a very long time. The starting point was to shoot in Cavalière, the village where she spends her holidays every summer at her family home. She was also very keen on her two actresses, for whom the film was written. As funding was taking a while to come through, we shot the short film Queen Size in the spirit of the feature film : same cast, same characters. The film was a great success at festivals (Canal+ Award at the Clermont-Ferrand Festival, Unifrance Award at the Off-Courts Festival, Audience Award at the Silhouette Festival, etc.) and was nominated for the 2025 César Award for Best Short Film. We were only three shooting it, quickly and spontaneously : Avril, Tristan Pontécaille the sound operator, and me on camera with a GH5. As well as confirming the cast, this short film above all allowed Avril to follow her intuition for the feature film : a shoot with a small crew, with locations close to one another, allowing for a certain logistical flexibility.

The crew did expand a little for the feature film : I had a camera assistant, a second assistant who also handled the proxies, a gaffer, a electrician and a grip. As there was no video assistant, there was no video monitor, just a small monitor for Avril. No script supervisor, just one assistant director. The sound operator and I had spent several holidays at Avril’s family home : those stays served as our location scouting sessions.

What I remember from the shooting of Queen Size is the pleasure of filming these two actresses. For the feature film, I wanted the camera to be more steady, to take more time to watch them. In Queen Size, the camera followed the characters in action. It glided from one face to another, mirroring the momentum of an encounter that unfolded in motion. Here, their encounter stems from a more internal movement, a moment of observation, of recognition. I no longer wanted to connect the characters hand-helded, but to observe their growing closeness within the frame.
We chose the scope format to support the story’s novelistic dimension and to accommodate the film’s hybrid tone : it is a melancholic comedy. The themes of death, loss and absence are very important in Les Matins merveilleux. But this gravity is intertwined with genuine humour, driven in particular by the character of Charlie, played by India Hair, whose energy lends the film a tone that is at times almost burlesque.
In this quest for a balance between humour and sadness, I proposed a palette of soft colours : pink, turquoise, gold. Shades that harmonise well with the greys of an off-season seaside resort. We also wanted a winter sun, low and cold. We had that during location scouting with stormy skies. Unfortunately, despite filming in late February and early March, the light turned out to be warmer than expected.

The film had a very small budget. It was made solely with the support of the region, but we received a great deal of assistance from TSF, from whom we hired the RED Gemini. Its dual ISO allowed me to shoot at night, and I particularly appreciate how skin tones look on the RED cameras. This was a priority, as it is above all a film about faces. I’d shot my first feature film (Libre Garance ! by Lisa Diaz) with this camera, so I know it very well in the colour grading stage. I used Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses, which strike a good balance between sharpness and softness, without a "vintage" effect. They’re crisp without being harsh ; they suited our desire for a simple, understated image. I wanted the image to focus on the actresses’ faces without too many effects, such as diffusion. I was worried that the image might overshadow the film, as the scope format can easily result in an overly stylised look.

The film is inspired by real places and people. There really is a wine merchant in Cavalière who’s a disco dancer called Titou, and it was in his cellar that we filmed. We also filmed in the pizzeria where a waitress who inspired Marina worked, and at the beach restaurant owned by the real Matthieu. Avril was keen to film these places she knows, without changing a thing. It’s not easy to work in settings not suited for filming : the cellar was very small, the pizzeria had all-white walls, and so on… but it carried an emotional weight. With the gaffer, Thomas Coulomb, we made extensive use of Lightbridge’s CLRS. These mirrors allow us to streamline the lighting set-ups indoors and outdoors, and to create a sense of distance from the light source. It’s quite incredible, especially in our industry. What’s more, Thomas, with whom I’ve shot several films, knows that I prefer to light the entire set rather than work along camera axes, in order to give the actors and actresses freedom of movement. We adopted the same method on Nicolas Pariser’s film Un peu avant minuit, shot last October.

The set that required the most lighting work was Marina’s flat, our main interior set. It was a holiday let that we were able to use for the four weeks of filming, which allowed us to leave the lighting set-up in place. We made use of the balcony running along the living room to create a blackout area and transform this room into a studio. The natural light sources were entirely recreated, mainly using two Evoke 1200B. Avril wanted to try as far as possible to shoot the sequences in the order they appear in the film. There were few sets, and they were all very close to one another. Within these budget constraints and with a small crew, we ultimately managed to achieve a form of absolute luxury : being able to adapt the shooting schedule, day by day, to the weather and the director’s creative vision.
The other sequence where we really got creative was the nightclub scene. We had a bit of fun adding moving lights in the frame, warm, golden colours, to capture that disco vibe. It’s a scene with much more optical diffusion than in the rest of the film. There’s also a lot more camera movement.

It was a truly DIY shooting. For the party footage that Titou’s character shows on an old VHS, we asked the locals if they’d be willing to come and take part in a mock national day celebration right in the middle of January. It was during location scouting before filming, and I was alone with a mini DV in one hand and a small lamp in the other to provide lighting. We were given a great deal of help by the town hall, who came to set up tables and chairs for the scene, and by the villagers who responded to our advert and played along. We edited these shots together with real archive footage of Avril and her family, filmed during holidays in the 2000s. Then, to make India’s reflection appear on the TV screen, I lit the flat very brightly and then adjusted the transparency during colour grading.

I hadn’t created a LUT, but I pre-coloured the rushes every evening after filming. The 2^d AC made proxies from them and Avril edited the film as we went along, every Saturday. Every Saturday, we screened what had been filmed during the week. Being able to watch the rushes regularly allowed us to adapt the film’s script and dialogue as we went along. We didn’t make a shot list in advance because that isn’t Avril’s method. So we decided on the fly. This freedom afforded to the direction obviously has its downside : it’s more difficult for the technical crew.

Avril edited the film on her own, and I colour-graded it myself at Studio Luxe, which kindly lent us a beautiful colour-grading suite. We started from scratch, in principle, but in the end the images are very close to the pre-colour grading I’d done during filming. I was looking for a palette that was both soft and colourful, in keeping with the film’s tone. We emphasised the pink, which dominates the film—a shade we’d found on Queen Size. Unlike in the pre-colour grading, I pushed the saturation of certain colours to highlight the comedy.

I would like to thank India Hair and Raya Martigny for their trust during filming. My team : Arthur Patain, Christine Reymond-Laruinaz and Lily Grizard on camera, Thomas Coulomb and Lilia Merckle-Detrez on lighting, and Amira Bensaada on rigging. As well as Feriel Benouarka at TSF and the team at Lux Studios ; these two service providers played a major part in making the film possible.

(Interview conducted and edited by Margot Cavret for the AFC)