Nicolas Gaurin, AFC, about the shooting of "Classe moyenne" ("The Party’s Over!"), by Antony Cordier

From a modest background, Mehdi, a recent law graduate and madly in love with Garance, spends the summer with his in-laws. As soon as he arrives, a conflict erupts between Garance’s family and the couple who look after the house, who are employed illegally all year round. As tempers flare, Mehdi thinks he can negotiate between the two sides and bring everyone to their senses. But things escalate until the point of no return...

Does working together since your days at La Fémis and for 20 years make it easier to communicate when making films?

Nicolas Gaurin: I don’t know if you can make a rule out of it, but I would say that what’s interesting when you know a director well is that you understand each other’s strengths and speak the same language. It’s a valuable comfort to be able to work with this complicity, which allows you to be more efficient and faster! You can read the different versions of the script and get a head start on preparing the film. When I read a script, certain films come to mind, so I create a little visual library of images that can help me envision the film to come. Antony Cordier does the same thing, which is perfect for exchanging ideas. It’s always interesting to talk about other films when you’re in preparation, even if you know you won’t be making the same image. Our dialogue is based on concrete examples of images and staging, which saves time.

What films inspired the imagery in The Party’s Over!?

NG: One film in particular inspired us. It’s a remake of Jacques Deray’s La Piscine (1968), directed by Luca Guadagnino—who also directed the beautiful Call Me By Your Name—released in 2015. A Bigger Splash is set on a small Sicilian island, Pantelleria. It’s a closed-door drama in a villa with a swimming pool. There’s the white of the rocks around the Mediterranean, and the strong light reflected off the stone. Yorick Le Saut shot the image, which I really like. We wanted to recreate that luminous atmosphere, especially because the film is shot entirely in the south of France with its strong sun that both burns and caresses the skin. Vacation, heat, yes, but also wind and the cold mistral!

You really get a sense of whiteness, but also of cold, a stark image, a little clinical, not what you’d expect for a comedy.

NG: It’s less baroque and fanciful than Gaspard va au mariage, for example (Antony Cordier’s latest feature film), there’s less lyricism, it’s a more straightforward and stripped-down image, without taking sides on the power struggles that unfold in a holiday setting. This intimate, seemingly relaxed setting gives way to open warfare, where words and gestures become synonymous with latent conflict. We shot to achieve a cold, neutral image for a social commentary in which we observe this microcosm, where the image seeks to analyze and show rather than suggest. I finally toned down this coldness during the color grading because it was taking us too far, forgetting the comedy and the summer vacation film that allows us to enter the story. Adding a little warmth allowed us to achieve more balanced skin tones that were more in keeping with the heat of summer, while maintaining a certain neutrality in the backgrounds, with the whites of the stone and the greens of the vegetation sometimes leaning towards warm tones and sometimes more ashy.

There’s a nice balance between the interior and exterior, with no overexposed windows and clearly defined exteriors. How did you achieve this balance?

NG: It’s a house where you can come and go at any time and easily. I wanted to keep that feeling that there are no boundaries. I stayed in the setting for a week before filming and was able to observe the sun from morning to evening. I saw how the light changed in the house throughout the day and identified the best moments, when the light was with us and not against us. This was an important time for observing the light and exploring the possibilities of the setting, sometimes by taking a step back, for example, when I discovered a path winding along the perimeter wall of the main house, which I hadn’t noticed before and which became a setting in the film. That’s the advantage of being able to search, get lost, and stray from the beaten path laid out in advance by the constraints of filmmaking, so that you can feed into it in a way that is less determined by purely practical considerations.
I didn’t have a lot of big sources because it’s a film with a relatively small budget. To compensate for the outside light, I had 2x9kW and 2x4kW, which were light sources compared to the intensity of the sun...
For the kitchen set, we found a small courtyard with a white wall. This wall was in full sun for half the day, so it was completely overexposed. We tried to shoot these scenes in the afternoon when the sun was on the other side of the wall, except for once when this location was in full sun. I still had some information in the whites (thank you, Alexa 35!), but during color grading, after correcting the overexposure, the image lost its strength, and in the end, I left the overexposure less wise but more interesting... Or how technical self-censorship can sometimes hinder creativity!
The schedule was tight with 25 days of shooting and weather problems. I started some scenes in bright sunlight and finished them with a leaden sky before the storm broke. How do you maintain continuity of light in these conditions when the light is fading and the contrast is changing? Even with all the latest weather apps, sometimes you just have to make do and trust both the fiction and your experience, shooting the shots in the best order for the conditions, and then the colorist’s eye and talent do the rest.

There’s a lot of movement and very fluid character tracking. What tools did you use?

NG: I almost always shoot with the StabOne 2 stabilizer and the G-Link exoskeleton from Flowcine. We also shot with a drone and a crane for the pool and a crane on a pickup truck for the jogging sequences.

Oh, and then there’s the zoom! I really like working with a zoom and making movements with that feeling of losing your sense of space, or simply doing reframing or intentional zooms, sometimes with sliders. For me, it’s a real storytelling tool.

Were the night scenes shot at night?

NG: All the night scenes were shot at night, except for the scene in the garden when the couple of guards come to steal vegetables from the vegetable patch. I really like day for nights for their artificiality, their cinematography. So I shot this scene in the traditional way with the sun shining and the aperture closed. We started at the end of the day and then night fell too quickly before we could finish the scene. So I had to light the last shots of this day for night with a 9 kW light in real night!

The camera angle is often frontal, with fairly tight shots. Why is that?

NG: Antony and I are used to filming bodies because he believes that emotions aren’t conveyed solely through the face. But for this film, with a lot of dialogue and a fairly strong focus on speech, we opted for fairly tight shot/reverse shots without any leads. This frontality also comes from the fact that there is often a confrontation between the actors, a slightly “western” feel, especially towards the end of the film. What I particularly like is when the gaze of the person being filmed is as close as possible to the optical axis to make the shot-reverse shot more intense.

The depth of field is often significant. What motivated this choice?

NG: There are several reasons! One is subjective: I like it when the sets are visible behind the actors, as they play a full part in the fiction. It’s a film with many characters in the frame, so it was necessary to focus on all of them rather than changing the focus. I don’t mind focus shifts as long as they’re meaningful; it’s another way of framing by emphasizing the director’s gaze, but when it’s just utilitarian, it takes me out of the film and breaks the visual flow. Another argument is that the great depth of field accompanies the cold and harsh nature of the relationships. By closing down, we remove the potential softness of the lenses when they are barely open, especially with older lenses, which often have a dual character, soft below 4 and harder above.

Tell us about the lenses!

NG: We shot in 2.35 spherical. We tested the Leica R series (photo lenses rehoussed for cinema) at Transpacam, and it was very conclusive. I love the 1980s Zeiss GO lenses because I like their roughness; they’re not smooth like some modern lenses. The advantage of the Leica R lenses over the Zeiss GO lenses is that they have a warmer look than the Zeiss lenses, which allows for softer skin tones, aided by subtle makeup, while retaining that slightly “raw” character. I sometimes diffused the lenses slightly with Glimmer filters. For the zooms, I used the Angénieux Optimo 24-290mm.

(Interview condusted by Brigitte Barbier for the AFC)