Interviews with Jeanne Lapoirie, AFC, and Guillaume Ader (gaffer) on the film “Planète B”, by Aude Léa Rapin

France, 2039. One night, activists hunted down by the state disappear without a trace.
Julia Bombarth is among them. When she wakes up, she finds herself trapped in a totally unknown world : “Planet B”.

Shot on location between the Côte d’Azur and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, and starring a pair of young female leads (Adèle Exarchopoulos and Souheila Yacoub), Aude Léa Rapin’s new film is a truly anticipatory tale of a dark future in which new technologies gradually take precedence over human beings. Jeanne Lapoirie describes her initial reception of the project : “I was immediately captivated by the concept, and the opportunity to embark on a film set in the near future. This is of course not very common in French cinema, and the idea of getting to work on two universes in parallel was very exciting. As I’m not an expert in virtual reality, I had to ask my son, who knows the world of video games much better than I do. By immersing myself a bit with him in some of his games like Minecraft, and others that are much more realistic and try to reproduce cinematographic images, I went in search of ideas, images that I could use to convey on screen this prison world that is both real and yet completely virtual that Aude Léa had imagined. At the same time, the description of these prison scenes wasn’t very visually precise when I read it. And in preproduction, it was mainly once we’d found the location for the hotel in Saint-Raphaël that we were able to get down to work on the art direction for this important part of the film.


Shot over an eight-and-a-half-week period, half on location at the seaside hotel and the other half between Grenoble and Lyon for the "real" scenes of the military base and the town, the team soon found themselves faced with a paradoxical challenge : the raw reality of a daytime exterior on a beach to portray a virtual universe, and the greater flexibility of an entirely recreated futuristic set for the real part of the story...

Guillaume Ader observes : “We almost ended up making two completely different films, with the first part of the shoot devoted to the virtual prison, outdoors by the sea in full sunlight, and the second part dedicated to all the sequences taking place in the futuristic real world. Not least in terms of the crew. For example, the set of the secret base into which Souheila’s character enters required two weeks of pre-lighting, with five electricians and four grips to install 80 lights, all managed via Wi-Fi. The challenge was to vary the light, like breath, and sometimes to vary the colors too. A university building in the Lyon region (the former Rhône-Alpes regional government building on the region’s digital campus) was entirely made of glass and we had, for example, to completely block it out... a huge set-up, very different from the methods we used for the hotel in Saint-Raphaël”. 


This paradox between reality and the virtual was one of the challenges for the cinematographer : “I must admit that when I discovered the location of the hotel and the beach, I asked myself quite a few questions at first. The initial atmosphere was so realistic that I thought it would be complicated to manage the image to convey the notion of a 3D universe. Fortunately, the decision to set the future in a period close to our own, with the evocation of a society in decline rather than an ultra-modern one, helped. In the end, starting with a decadent art direction, combined with a series of modern elements (drones, VR headsets) enabled us, for example, to better convey in parallel the very realistic and raw side of the virtual part."

To achieve the image of these prison scenes, another semantic question arose for the DoP : “It’s true that when you read the script, the question of point of view is raised directly from the moment you establish that the characters are entering a parallel universe using virtual reality goggles. From a purely factual point of view, this device would require the characters to maintain very strict, almost subjective points of view. This was a question that arose at the outset, which we quickly decided to set aside, given the number of characters in the virtual universe, and the comings and goings via the headset stolen by Nour (Souheila Yacoub) in reality. And I think we accept this convention, because the device is explained very quickly and clearly to the viewer. The visual gap between the sun-drenched beach scenes and the rest of the film almost works on its own terms. For me, the real challenge was to make the seaside sun shots look a little artificial. At the outset, many of the shots were intended to be processed in VFX, creating little bugs in the image, or rather obvious loops of birds flying in the background, but in the end, due to a lack of resources, it was the shooting and color grading that really came into play. To this end, we carried out quite a few tests on location, in order to develop a daytime LUT that would alter the Alexa 35’s very realistic rendering. For example, on the skies, where turquoise blue was added, sometimes with additional gradations during color grading. Or on the reds, which we increased in the shadows, while trying to keep the faces acceptable. We also used a function to add reds to the contours, reminiscent of the flaws we sometimes had in 35 mm.

Another challenge of the virtual universe is, of course, the exterior night scenes, which are all shot in day-for-night. Guillaume Ader explains : “The set-up was often very complicated at the camera, with very strong sunlight reflecting off the sea... not ideal conditions for a day-for-night scene, but all the same, the artificial aspect was suddenly perfectly justified. The other narrative element that led us to this solution was the need to be able to switch instantly from day to night, as per the indications in the screenplay." Jeanne Lapoirie adds : “For these instantaneous transitions from day to night, scheduled by the jailers, I often had to make do with a very rapid aperture change during shooting, enhanced by a LUT switch between day and night during color grading. Nights were processed in a very strong blue, which again reinforces the artificial feel of this universe”.


A scene in the first third of the film, in which Nour’s character picks up the virtual reality headset that will enable her to make contact with the inmates, is set in a spectacular waste reprocessing plant that almost looks like something out of Terminator. 
“It’s true that the setting was brilliant,” says Jeanne Lapoirie. "A functioning plant near Grenoble, where we were all dressed in white overalls and protective masks. I remember this perfect location, which was dark, oozing everywhere. Not much light was added, just a little smoke, and we made the most of the atmosphere as we found it. In the end, we shot a lot more than we had planned in the factory, taking several shots that weren’t on the list for this short scene on the scale of the film. When you’re in a place like that, it’s inevitably inspiring in terms of the image, and we tried to make the most of it."


When it comes to cameras and lenses, the cinematographer remains a fervent user of zooms, which she takes with her on each of her films : “On Planet B, the real challenge was the anamorphic lens. We opted for anamorphic to give the image more substance, especially in the backgrounds of these virtual sequences. But we weren’t really sure we would be able to meet the challenge of the second part of the shoot, which was much more nocturnal, both on the base and in the location of the Ernestore café, where Nour tries to get the money she needs to go into exile abroad. In the end, I managed to shoot just about everything with my usual Angénieux zooms, configured in an anamorphic version. The base set was sufficiently well-lit, however. The real pleasure for me was to be able to light in a much less realistic way than usual, of course, with moving, colored light. My usual context doesn’t often allow me to do this... As far as the camera is concerned, Aude Léa is not someone who works on the basis of a very structured breakdown. She usually worked almost entirely alone on her previous short films, handling both framing and lighting. On Planet B, I often opted for a simple tracking shot set up diagonally across the set, with a bazooka that I pushed myself, like a huge slider. This allowed me to film at 360 degrees or thereabouts, to vary the frame in each shot if necessary, to improvise as if I were shooting handheld in sequences where I would decide myself during the take who I was going to film. A great deal of freedom in the frame, made possible by the ingenious installations of Eric Fontenelle, my key grip.

Asked about the results and experience of such a project, Jeanne Lapoirie replies :
” I think that futuristic films, like period films, lay the same trap for the crew. Devote too much time or energy to fine-tuning the reconstruction, and you can easily miss out on the film with the actors. For example, I vividly remember Les Roseaux sauvages, my first feature film as director of photography, where André Téchiné constantly insisted that this period film should not really look like a period film ! I’ve often been inspired by this approach, particularly for Planet B, where I think we were careful to give small futuristic touches, such as with the colors and moving lights on the base, but without necessarily seeking to immerse ourselves in an ultra-believable reconstruction. While a few stills from Blade Runner or Alien were exchanged in pre-production, notably for the base location, I remember that Aude-Léa introduced me to films like Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, in which Tim Robbins plays a Vietnam veteran who seems haunted by nightmares from his time on the front line, or Night Shyamalan’s Old, which is set on a beach and in which the protagonists begin to age at breakneck speed. ... films that have connections with our own, but are ultimately quite far removed from the futuristic visual stakes we might have expected at our first reading...”.

(Interview by François Reumont, and translated from French by A. Baron Raiffe for The AFC)