Jonathan Ricquebourg, AFC, talks about the filming of "L’Aventura", by Sophie Letourneur

Summer vacation. Sardinia, Italy. A family road trip. Claudine, soon to be 13, recounts their adventures as they happen. When her 3-year-old brother Raoul doesn’t stop her...
Starring Sophie Letourneur, Philippe Katerine, Bérénice Vernet, and Esteban Melero..

L’Aventura  is always on the border between fiction and documentary, to such an extent that when you know nothing about the film, you wonder if this family is a real family.

Jonathan Ricquebourg: It’s true that L’Aventura aims to keep the viewer guessing, to stay on the border between reality and fiction. It’s actually a work of fiction built entirely on reality. A kind of filmed reality [laughs]. During her vacation, Sophie Letourneur recorded a kind of logbook, which she then put together (this is what we see in the film, when her daughter records not only what is happening but also when they talk about what happened—so there is already fiction, since everyone is telling their own story). It’s both a work on narrative, real and imaginary, but also and above all a work on memory.
Then Sophie returns to the locations with her edited soundtracks and rewrites them in the form of a script, which she uses to make a first cut. Then we went together with Laetitia Goffi (co-writer and script supervisor) and François Labarthe (assistant director) to redo the storyboard and film all the sequences with a cell phone. Sophie then edited a rough cut of all the rushes, which lasted 3.5 hours. The result is the film with the four characters, who are real actors playing a fake family!

So you set off with actors and a script, a three-year-old child and a 13-year-old teenager. How did you actually film it to achieve this realistic effect?

JR: Since we had shot the mock-up without the actors, we could be very precise on set. In addition, the actors had earpieces and the script in their ears at all times, because Sophie was very particular about the script being read exactly as written, with a very specific tone, which is the tone of the original (the first soundtracks). We had to shoot very quickly, the whole film in 16 days, so I had very little time to set up the lighting and the shots. We shot with two cameras with Cyrille Hubert, without an electrician or a gaffer. The approach was to start by filming the 3-year-old boy, usually with his mother wearing a wig and the same dress as Sophie, who fed her lines to her son. Then we partially reconstructed the scene based on what the little boy had done, and shot it again with Philippe and Sophie, sometimes with the little boy if he agreed... which he didn’t always!
It was quite a challenge, a real game of Tetris to get the shots to line up! Sophie made this decision because she knew that the little boy would never be as spontaneous as he was with his mother. So we had to get the exact wording of the soundtracks right, and the actions as accurate as possible. With the occasional adaptation to suit the child, but in the end his behavior was very close to what we had hoped for. The film is extremely tight and well-framed, there is no improvisation.

Was your equipment as light as your team?

JR: Yes, pretty much! I had an Astera suitcase, a Helios suitcase, some DMG Dash. And maybe some Filex, I’m not sure. The challenge was to be able to do everything while keeping it light. Everyone did everything. Driving the cars, organizing the days together. We set up the cameras, did the backups, managed the high points and the low points... The schedule was obviously way too full, we were moving around a lot, and on top of that, we had to get to the right place at the right time... to film the sunset! We really had to feel like we were on vacation, with that sense of time expanding, the time it takes for the sun to set and the environment to gradually disappear. Those are the breathing spaces in the film.

Were the scenes with the public, particularly on the train, on the boat, and in the restaurants, shot as fiction with extras?

JR : Nothing was privatized, but honestly, it went very well. We had an agreement in principle for each location. We were such a small team: two people on camera, two on sound, and the actors. Everything went like a documentary. We were able to construct the sequences each time. The trick was not to try to “look professional”, while still being completely serious and precise. We had to blend in and shoot quickly. But that also allowed for shots that I love: on the beaches, hundreds and hundreds of people with a disconcerting naturalness.

There’s a night scene with Francesco, the owner of the house, where you can sense a bond and a more peaceful relationship. How did you set that up?

JR : We did a pre-lighting in about fifteen minutes. When you’re alone, it’s still a lot of work to set everything up, you’re running around like crazy. In those 15 minutes, you have to check the camera, set up the frame, install and check the lights. 
For the lighting, we wanted to keep it realistic while adding a touch of mystery, because something intimate is happening, with a kind of fantasy about each other. You can sense that he’s the only person who cares about her. 
To create this physical closeness, the light sources are mainly placed behind, and I kept the lighting slightly warm. In the shot before this scene, Sophie is picking up laundry on the terrace with a strong white light created with several Astera lights to give a slightly ghostly nighttime atmosphere. I wanted to open this parenthesis with something more fictional to segue into this very important scene. In fact, it sums up the deeper meaning of the film. Francesco reads what is written on a small piece of paper he takes out of his pocket: “Love life more than its logic. Only then will you understand its deeper meaning.” I realize now that this could also be a mantra for the images in this film. If we can achieve that, it will be wonderful.

What cameras and lenses did you use for this very small crew shoot?

JR : I opted for a Sony Burano camera, which I really like for its color and sensitivity. It has the same sensor as the Venice 2 but it’s restricted. You can only shoot in RAW LT. I chose a slightly compressed signal because otherwise we would never have had time to do all the backups in addition to shooting in a single day. But it wasn’t very important to me because shooting with a very light camera and a battery that lasts a long time really simplified the shoot. We shot maybe two cards a day and had an ultra-fast tower to save time on backups. For a film like this, you sometimes have to take a very pragmatic approach to production. It’s not just about color texture or finesse, but about survival [laughs].
For the lenses, I chose Leica Summilux lenses, which render faces very well. For each camera, we had two 35mm, two 50mm, and two 75mm lenses. I think 80% of the film was shot on 35mm. We also had two Angénieux 28-76mm zoom lenses, mainly for the shots on the beach.

There’s very little movement in the film except for one very long tracking shot. How did you shoot it?

JR: It’s a three-minute tracking shot of Philippe Katerine, which I really like because, for me, it conveys the loneliness of this man at that moment. A kind of suspended time. A thread connecting him to his wife and children. He is in the world and at the same time he is not quite there. There is something very moving in this shot, something very poetic. For me, it’s a beautiful moment in cinema.
It was filmed from a car in which I was alone with Sophie, who had a small monitor. In fact, I was driving while focusing and framing the shot. It’s a small miracle because we were really driving at walking pace and the people who aren’t extras and who are in the frame all did a little something, a bit like in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. It was shot at the end of the day, and I exposed a little over to get some substance in the shadows.

The back and forth between the present of the film, the sound recordings, and the scenes that belong to the past are barely noticeable, which creates a kind of temporal intertwining. Did you consider using image processing to separate these two temporalities?

JR : That was a real issue during color grading! We wondered whether to intervene on the image to separate the present from the past, but in fact the film is so intertwined that it would have been necessary to make a very clear distinction, using black and white or sepia for the past, for example. Or else one part saturated and another desaturated would not have been tangible enough. But I didn’t want to be radical, because that would have risked making the film a little too didactic. We worked on the sound to create a slight difference between the present and the past.

What can you say about this second collaboration with Sophie Letourneur, and why do you refer to them as a "theater troupe"?

JR : Voyage en Italie, the first film we made together, is the first film in a trilogy that describes family life, which continues with L’Aventura, which tells the story of what happens to a couple when they have children and when love begins to fade, and the third film will be about divorce... It’s really a way of using small anecdotal details to say big things about life. Sophie is an important filmmaker in contemporary cinema. She’s the only one who tries to question things that seem anecdotal but are actually very profound. It’s a kind of cinema like Andrée Chédid or Prévert’s poetry. I’m very happy to be able to work with her, and I’m not the only one. These two films brought together exactly the same technicians and, despite the financial constraints, the time constraints and the very small team, we all accepted these conditions. This way of embarking on an adventure and shooting so quickly, changing locations every day, driving around, calling restaurants to make reservations, doing everything—or almost everything—is, for me, similar to the experience of a theater troupe on tour. It’s a very collective approach to filmmaking.

(Interview by Brigitte Barbier for the AFC)