Parallel interviews of Pierre Mazoyer and Marine Atlan, co-cinematographers of "La Gradiva", directed by Marine Atlan

A small group of French high school students embarks on a school trip to Pompeii to explore its ruins and the bodies petrified by Vesuvius in 79 AD. In this ghost town, they are suddenly overwhelmed by a dizzying sensation. One by one, James, Toni, Suzanne, and their Latin teacher, Mrs. Mercier, succumb to desire, anger, and despair—completely surrendering to them and losing everything.
With Colas Quignard, Suzanne Gerin, Mitia Capellier, Antonia Buresi.

Pierre Mazoyer : I remember I had just finished at Louis-Lumière School, Marine was still at La Fémis, we had never met, and I was asked to check her DCP because she couldn’t do it herself. It was Fabien Dao’s film, The Caiman of Boromo. I remember being in a courtyard, talking to her while she was upstairs. She said to me : "So, how is it ?"
- "It’s good. Aren’t the blacks... I found them a little lifted. Is that normal ?"
- "Yes, yes."
- "Otherwise, it’s perfect."
This was over ten years ago. Since then, we’ve color-graded a lot of short films together at my workstation, and then feature films, for which I support Marine from the tests and LUT creation stages. Before La Gradiva, we’d only been on set together once. In pre-production, I think it’s a bit like a regula director-cinematographer collaboration, but with a director who is extremely skilled visually, who already has her entire vision in mind, and who knows how to anticipate technical constraints. In each sequence, she knows what she wants, what she’s looking for, so we work together. We’ve shotlisted the whole film in prep.

On set, things flowed quite smoothly : initially, we had the idea that I would focus more on the lighting and that we would divide up camera operating according to our preferences. But sometimes it didn’t necessarily look like what she expected, and she would take the lead on the lighting with Manon Corone, the gaffer, with whom she has worked for a long time. What we had theoretically established at the beginning was adapted according to the scenes and throughout the film. I would mostly operate the camera at the beginning, then, little by little, especially for certain major sequences, Marine took over the camera and spent the day with it. She wanted to explore things with the actors that, for me, was sometimes a bit difficult, because she has a very precise vision of what she wants. During those days when she’s with the camera, I’m there with the monitor and I watch everything, I tell her everything I think, I support her if she has any doubts. At other times, I’m the one holding the camera, she is focused on the actors and we frame the shot together.

There are several important and lengthy group scenes filmed with two cameras : one on Mount Vesuvius, one against the fresco, the party at the restaurant, and a scene with three characters on the train at the beginning. This was for time-saving reasons, but mainly because we wanted to capture as much as possible and tell the story of what happened at that moment between the teenagers, in the improvisations and in quiet moments. Joséphine Drouin-Viallard, director of photography and a long-time first AC of Marine’s, also operated the second camera.

Marine Atlan : We were constantly redefining the method, which was sometimes difficult, since the information gets diluted. We didn’t really have any examples, so we had to invent things. Anyway, we did very thorough preparation, meaning we talked a lot about the shot list, images, and references. On set, Pierre was the main liaison with the crew. As filming progressed, I increasingly needed to frame the shots, and Pierre completely gave me that room. For certain narrative beats, I really needed to be in direct contact with the actors, and at other times, I was very happy to see Pierre take the camera while I watched the monitor. We had to communicate a lot, and talking with Pierre allowed me to name certain things, to make them real. I also realized the materiality of a gaze. It’s very concrete. During prep, Pierre joined us to film a day of rehearsal, which she filmed, whereas it was usually me who filmed..

Pierre Mazoyer : We started looking for frames and things. That evening, she watched the footage and texted me : "It’s amazing how the gaze is something so concrete". As if she were discovering how I was looking at things she herself had already filmed, but not at all like that. I had positioned myself in places she would never have gone.

Marine Atlan : Because I’m used to being in that position, I know my own perspective, but having a different operator made me realize it was about density, height, even movement, placement. It was fascinating to grasp that, and it comes through, since the idea was to make a film of layers, additions, collages, because the landscape demands it. There are multiple perspectives, because there are also multiple elements : documentary, fiction.

Layers
Marine Atlan : It’s Pompeii first and foremost, the obsession with plaster casts, like the character in Wilhelm Jensen’s novela Gradiva, who is obsessed with a bas-relief of a walking woman. Gianfranco Rosi says that Pompeii is "a vast off-screen space." That’s what attracted me. It’s the same principle as photography, which freezes a moment. And I come from a photography background ; in my adolescence, I was obsessed with archives, I looked at my family photos on a loop, and Pompeii is the same. It’s the trace. Moreover, the plaster casts of Pompeii have something transgressive about them because they freeze the moment of death, something we can never see.

I have this scopophilic urge ; I love to look. During the writing process, I went to Naples alone, with my co-writer Anne Brouillet, or with the sound engineer Paul Guilloteau. There were several encounters with the place. I wandered around, I scouted, over three years. This place resonated with me because I have Mediterranean roots, because I have a connection to exile, to leaving, to fantasizing about a country. This territory evoked something I know very well, something very dense, a vibrant chaos, something very poetic. It’s a city that presents all the layers of history, simply in its architecture, the fact that all eras coexist. It’s a very cinematic city : the colors of the buildings, the strong shadows against the harsh light. There was an aesthetic affinity. I found everything beautiful. I remember, I kept saying to Pierre : "Look, it’s beautiful, how beautiful it is". I had a real appetite for that place, I found it magnificent.

Pierre Mazoyer : We weren’t able to go there together before location scouting in January 2025. However, the previous June, I was filming a documentary on the island of Ischia, which is opposite Naples and Torre del Greco, where we were going to spend most of our time. I took advantage of the opportunity and spent three days there on my own. Experiencing the place alone, with everything Marine had told me about it, was very interesting. It was great to picture myself there, with her and the film in my mind ; I was happy to have my own experience of the place in my own way.

Marine Atlan : A month before filming with the actors, we went with a documentary camera (an FX6), which allowed us to experiment : where to position ourselves, how to film, what the good spots were, trying things out, failing. Every time I went, I had either a still camera or a video camera. I took the three black and white film photographs that open the film during location scouting two years before shooting. They were taken just for me, to help me observe, and I felt that the film needed to open with them.

The momentum of the walking woman
Marine Atlan : For me, it’s Gradiva who guides the film, with all the layers of intellectual references she evokes. She’s a feminine figure, she could be the film’s grandmother, and above all, for me, she’s like a fantasy, an allegory of destiny. There aren’t a lot of camera movements, but when they’re there, those tracking shots, they’re there. It was Marie-Anouke Cougnon-Vilain, the chief production manager with whom I have made many films, who worked with us on the film. Otherwise, I liked that we were in motion because we’re in moving objects—the train, the bus, the scooter—and that we, ourselves, take on that movement with the characters. There are two moments with the camera handheld that mark the escape, the wandering, in a territory where that kind of movement is necessary. Otherwise, we’re on a tripod : I love panoramic shots, but above all, what I like is that we position ourselves in a specific place, we define the distance from which to observe this face and this body, and it’s not random. It is not theorized either, it is intuitive, but it is a decision.

On the other hand, yes, I love the zoom. There was more of it in the shot list… I think it really comes from De Palma’s 1970s vision : it’s about the scopic drive, I can’t help but think of De Palma and Hitchcock ! So, this language of the zoom is also linked to a lineage.

Pierre Mazoyer : For these group scenes, Cassavetes was one of our references, for the camera angles, but we knew very well that at some point, Marine would zoom in and look for closer shots. We filmed using shot-reverse-shot, but we didn’t move, we zoomed in, always with the idea of sensing the presence of the others in the foreground. She mostly filmed these tight close-ups of faces herself, because she knows how she wants to look at them, and us to look at them. We had Sony Burano cameras : I framed mostly through the viewfinder and she used a small monitor, but she had a second monitor next to her with the B camera’s feed. I couldn’t necessarily see what she was doing, or I would ask my assistant to stand nearby. Sometimes I imagine I would have framed differently if I had seen her framing, trying to make it match more, but in the end, it’s interesting that the trace of our two perspectives remains in the film, even in those moments.

Marine Atlan : It was also about embracing the two-camera set up as a way to give the camera operators freedom. Obviously, there are scenes to film, but these were long takes, sometimes 20-25 minutes. You have to be attentive to what’s going to be said : we have a script structure, written with Anne Brouillet, the co-writer, then rewritten with improvisations, with lines that are like meeting points. Nevertheless, the actors are free to add their own lines if they want. It creates a tension that I think comes through in the shot, in the sound.

You can miss things, and if you do, you describe them off-camera, it’s not a big deal. But everyone is watching, not knowing exactly what’s going to happen. That’s been my real lesson in framing my whole life. There are things that are physically and rhythmically difficult to do, but if you watch what you’re filming, you’ll be fine. You have to watch and not be afraid of being late or early, just be an observer. I think that yes, we’ve reintroduced that observer’s perspective into our framing.

Spectator - Catharsis
Marine Atlan : The further the tragic trajectory progresses, the more distance we gain, because we become aware of the system’s inevitability—the weight of determinism and predetermined paths. As the film progressed, I wanted to use cinematic tools—colors, movement, music—to guide the audience and prevent it from being sordid or miserabilist. I wanted to give the trajectory a sense of stature and grandeur, not because it’s noble, but because it’s human. The cinematic tools had to serve to atone for things, to make them a little more bearable. To create catharsis : to recount the worst, by talking about a system, about politics. It’s an individual trajectory, but one underpinned by a collective one. Telling the absurd story, that was truly what it was about. It was painful and burdensome for me, both in terms of responsibility and doing this to characters I love. Every shot had to find its accuracy. I often called upon myself as a spectator during the film. Frequently. When it was difficult, I tried to find myself again in my relationship with cinema.

Cinema tools for imperfection
Pierre Mazoyer : Aside from the Canon K35 25-120mm zoom and the Super 35 Kowas that Marine was familiar with, we brought along some tools we’d never used before : the Burano camera, a set of Kowa Full Frame lenses, and a Panavision Lightweight Zoom 27-68mm. Not forgetting an FX6 for all the "documentary" shots (which we were familiar with). We fell in love with a test shot with the Burano underexposed at almost -2, using the Kowa Full Frame lenses : a color palette emerged around -1.5, -2. Something resonated with us in the grain and colors. The double ISO could also help us at night, and above all, it was a full frame sensor. This stemmed from the location scouting photos Marine had taken on film. She talked about the... not the definition, but the precision of those images. There was a volume to them that interested her.

Marine Atlan : The Burano brought a very organic feel and a wide range of color nuances to our actors, who have complexions with many imperfections. Reds, oranges. Even in managing the rushes, it was practical in many ways. Plus, we could easily have two (Thanks to Panavision and Nicolas Bouchard for their tremendous support for the film). As for the Kowa, which I love in Super 35, we had to understand them in Full Frame.

Pierre Mazoyer : Marine has a real knack for putting things in the foreground ; what it conveys, what it evokes. Probably because, in a way, it materializes the gaze. When we did our tests, the foreground blur was incredibly important, and the foreground blur on Kowa Full Frame lenses is insane. I could die in that blur. It was love at first sight. We were shooting between T4 and 5.6, or even more closed up.

Marine loved the K-35 zoom lens, that much was clear, and I could see that its aberrations would complement the lyricism and baroque elements that gradually emerged in the film. As for the Lightweight Zoom, it was full-frame, it also had aberrations at its widest aperture, but it was very lightweight, so we were going to be able to use it for documentary-style shooting – ultimately, it was also used extensively for the narrative scenes. It had a softness, a richness, and aberrations that were just right for the film. Agathe Dercourt, the first assistant camera, helped us manage all these setups.

The variations in grain and noise are mainly due to the fact that we were switching frequently between Full Frame and Super 35… and we realized two-thirds of the way through shooting that the 3.8K format we were using was actually smaller than Super 35. As a result, there’s a magnifying effect on the noise. I remember color grading the rushes in the evenings and not understanding why some shots had noise while others didn’t, even at the same levels of underexposure. We also used a lot of very pronounced LUTs with varying exposures. And at the same time, I could see that what we were doing was great. Perhaps also because it was imperfect.

And then, during pre-production and at the beginning of color grading, we spent a lot of time wondering how to maintain image consistency with all these different image styles, due to the multiple textures of lenses, cameras, exposures, and different perspectives. We had thought about adding aberrations, breaking certain definitions, etc. We did it a little, but in the end, the strength of the story, the mise-en-scène, and the work we did on the color grading with Gadiel Bendelac were enough to make all these stories into a single film.

Realistic Baroque
Marine Atlan : For the colors, I used the Quattrocento as a reference, for the saturation and the color palette, which we worked on with Anna Le Mouël, the set designer : purples, pinks, but also orange. Certain paintings inspired the costumes and sets, with this idea of ​​mixing the sacred and the profane, faux marble and real marble…

That’s what Naples is, a blend of Maradona and the Renaissance, and we were willing to embrace all of that. I liked mixing eras and references like that, and I talked a lot about "realistic baroque". For example, with the lighting, we drew a lot of inspiration from things I filmed when I went on a school trip to inform the writing, which I filmed with a DV camera. Pierre and I watched the rushes : the group of young people were in a courtyard, smoking e-cigarettes, with very close, somewhat harsh spotlights. A courtyard lit in real life. We observed that and wondered how to reproduce and enhance it. For example, for the party scene, Pierre and Manon did the lighting while I framed the shots. They recreated what I had filmed during the school trip, but made it more composed, more transcendent. The exercise was to ask ourselves : what do we have in front of us ? How does light pre-exist and how can it be revealed ? I didn’t want blue nights at all ; I wanted to be realistic. Light always had to exist from somewhere.

For example, we bring color into the second part because there are stained glass windows. Otherwise, we wouldn’t use colored lighting.

Pierre Mazoyer : Speaking of natural light, the way the sun plays across James and Angela making love on the train at the beginning was in the script. We spent quite a bit of time scouting different possible train routes, each of us on one side of the train in one direction and then the other with Sun Surveyor, noting where the sun was, what time it was, and how many trees there were for the play of light… Ultimately, filming was postponed ; we weren’t sure about the routes anymore, and so all our scouting went to waste. We finally gave up and decided : we’ll see. And when we were filming that scene, in the fall, on loops in the French countryside, I was at the front of the train with the B camera, shooting the track shots that were used at the beginning, while Marine was filming that intimacy sequence. I could see while filming that the sun was coming from the left, that it was low and that there were trees, but that it is not blocked

So, I knew we were getting exactly what she dreamed of. I was very moved and grateful. In prep she didn’t want to give up the idea of being able to control everything, even knowing that it might be a gray day. It’s beautiful to think : It wasn’t all for nothing, since we sent molecules into the air and they thought, "Let’s give back a little sunshine at the right time, on the right side". We just needed a little faith. We had it, and it worked. But it’s also to show that Marine tries harder to control things, while I sometimes allow for more randomness, and the film is the sum of both : sometimes it’s very controlled, sometimes less so, and some of these mistakes contribute to creating the vibrancy of the film’s imagery.

Workflow – Four hands with Gadiel Bendelac
Pierre Mazoyer : Marine and I have worked together for a long time, with our own preferences and color grading routines, but I also know that I don’t look at an image the same way if I’m the cinematographer or the colorist, and it was important for me to have an extra pair of eyes. Marine liked this idea of a collaborative color grading process ; I had already worked with Gadiel Bendelac, who graded Marine’s previous short film, *Daniel fait face*, and we found the color grading of Pacifiction very interesting : he was the right person to work with to find the colors, contrasts, and textures for La Gradiva. Gadiel was with us during pre-production when we created the LUTs for the shoot. During filming, I pre-graded the dailies every evening and had Marine approve them before sending them to Micro Climats Studio to create the proxies.
During editing, Marine told me she felt the color space was limited and that there was a "warm wash" throughout the film. We needed to start a new color grading approach, completely giving up on what we had done up to that point. She suggested working with kinescope, and the idea arose to kinescope excerpts from the film, to try and recreate what film would look like from the digital rushes, and then color grade based on this new aesthetic. We first established our kinescope workflow (do we start with the original rushes, the graded dailies, with or without the show LUTs ?) and tried several different film stocks. Based on the results, we decided to go back to the original rushes, as the color space of the dailies was too restrictive. We then created a montage of a few minutes, each composed of one second of 150 shots, sent it to kinescoping, at Cosmodigital, and spent two days color grading the result to find things. Gadiel used the Diachromie plug-in to create a LUT that brought us closer to the kinescoped stills. This became our foundation for the final color grading, allowing us to rediscover the colors, contrasts, and textures we had lost, sometimes sadly (but also sometimes joyfully !). But the idea wasn’t to forget everything we had done in pre-grading each night of the shoot. I often wanted to blend the LUTs, without quite knowing the technique, and it was Gadiel who showed me a very simple method : blending our Diachromie with the proxy color grading. This produced some incredibly interesting results, very accurate in relation to what we were intuitively looking for. Sometimes, as a third "ingredient", we used a color grading from another film. The result is a blend of these three renderings. Sometimes the proxy color grading was dominant, other times the Diachromie was just right and precise, giving us more direct access to the image and the characters. Not only did we keep our initial idea while regaining breadth in the colors and skin tones, but it was also literally a blend of Gadiel’s work and mine, which really corresponded to the idea of a four-handed color grading, and was very beautiful

During color grading, I asked Marine, "Does the film look like what you had envisioned, imagined ?" And she said : "Yes, obviously, things aren’t always where I thought they were at the time, but in terms of momentum, energy, and visual sensations, yes, that’s what I imagined."

(Interview conducted and edited by Hélène de Roux for the AFC)

La Gradiva
Production : Les Films du Poisson, Bibi Films
Direction : Marine Atlan
Direction of photography : Pierre Mazoyer and Marine Atlan
Production design : Anna Le Mouël
Sound : Paul Guilloteau
Editing : Guillaume Lillo
Makeup and hair design : Marjolaine Vialle