Sébastien Buchmann, AFC, discusses the shooting of "Ari", by Léonor Serraille

Ari, a 27-year-old teaching intern, collapses during a classroom inspection. His father, very upset at seeing him collapse, urges him to take a break. In a very sensitive condition, alone in the city, he unwillingly embarks on a round of reunions with his old friends. As memories of the last few months come flooding back, he discovers that the others aren’t doing as well as he’d imagined, and that something is sleeping inside him.

The film could almost be called Young Man? In any case, it’s reminiscent of that first film, in a masculine version.

Sébastien Buchmann: It’s funny, because this was one of the first titles Leonor had in mind. So there are certainly links between the two. For me, Ari is above all a woman’s perspective on a young man. It’s a film about gentleness, which might be at odds with virility. A theme that touched me and that I found fascinating to explore in the context of this film commissioned by Arte.

Tell me about the background to this order...

SB: This film is the third in a series (after À l’abordage, by Guillaume Brac, and Sages femmes, by Léa Fehner). The channel asks young directors to shoot with student actors who have just graduated from the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in Paris. So it was from among these actors that she had to choose all her young performers. Funnily enough, I knew almost all of them, having shot Valérie Donzelli’s documentary Rue du Conservatoire with them. The television channel then imposed a fairly tight schedule, whether for writing the script, which had to be done in the year preceding the shoot, or for the length of the shoot and the 25 days allotted by the network to the shooting schedule. A real challenge when you consider the large number of locations in the film, and the few complicated sequences such as the party in the middle of the film, or the rather short sequence at the end of the film, shot in the Nausicaa marine aquarium in Boulogne-sur-Mer.

How did you prepare things?

SB: I joined the project rather late, because it was originally Hélène Louvart who was going to do it. For scheduling reasons, I think she was no longer free, and that’s when I took over. 
When I arrived, a number of decisions had already been made, including that of shooting in film, in Super 16 to be precise. It was a decision that Léonor had made—after shooting her first two films digitally, she wanted to return to film for this one (her first medium-length film Body, in 2016, had been shot in Super 16), both for reasons of image rendering and for the changes on-set it imposes. Personally, I fully supported this choice, as I still love to shoot on film, and as our discussions progressed, this choice seemed most pertinent.

What were her requests for the image?

SB: Leonor didn’t try to give me precise references, quite the opposite in fact. As a matter of habit, I insisted at first that she give me a few to guide me in my work. But very quickly, after mentioning Cassavetes (Faces, in particular for the way it was filmed rather than the look of the image), the hand-held camera and long focal lengths, Léonor told me she preferred to trust me on this point. She felt it was more important to approach each scene in detail, or for me to attend and film the many rehearsals she had done in preparation with the actors. In addition, the film’s production required a reduced crew: no HMC, no grip equipment, and locations had to be found "turnkey", i.e. without any changes from the production design department. All this, of course, in agreement with Léonor, who was rediscovering some of the energy of her first film, Jeune femme, with a light, highly mobile crew. For me, all this meant a light approach to lighting, based on natural light, without any interventionism: color choices were made in function of the locations and the costumes. Finally, but it seems to me that this came about gradually during location scouting, was Leonor’s desire to associate Ari with blue, the blue of the sea, the blue of his eyes of course... Hence the flashback sequence with the father, at night, where Ari is lit all in blue in a rather strange or unnatural way. Having arrived on the production as a replacement myself, I really appreciated Leonor’s immediate trust in me, giving me a lot of freedom on the set, mainly using the natural winter light of January and February 2024, the months in which the film was shot.

How does she work?

SB: Léonor has her own way of working. First, she rehearses with her actors, working completely alone with them on the set. Only after these initial rehearsals do I come in with the assistant director and sound engineer: we then look over the scene in its entirety and Léonor tells me what shots or angles she would like to use, we discuss them and then the set-up begins. Each time, I asked her to leave me a small blind spot in the set to install what was often my only light source. It’s a real challenge every time, because even though we’re often working in close-up, each shot covers the entire scene. And you have to be ready for the camera to follow the characters in almost any direction. It’s a little unsettling at first, but you get used to it. In fact, it creates a kind of movement on the scale of the scene, which can very easily shift things in one direction or another, and completely change the original breakdown.
And it’s a film with a lot of talking: the main character goes out and talks with others, to hear what they have to say... On paper, this intuitively called for a lot of shot-reverse-shot, a form that Léonor wanted to avoid (at least in its classic form). That’s why, in the middle of the takes, with a close-up on one of the actors, she would suddenly ask me to pan to the other. But without any advance notice. With a sometimes very difficult angle: a profile shot or with 3/4 lost… and these partial shots, which could be considered amateurish by traditional standards, were included in the final cut. 
While shooting a take, Léonor is always almost in contact with the actors, under the camera, in a small corner that allows her to watch them in real time: if she has to choose between having video feedback or seeing the actors live, she will always choose the latter. Incidentally, we didn’t have a big screen, but a 9’ was fitted with a recorder to review the takes. What I like about this system (and shooting on film in general) is that the screen stops being a tuning fork for all of us. Each of us imagines the film and the shots in his or her own mind, and seeing the dailies is always something of a surprise, even a source of wonderment (and sometimes disappointment too, of course).

Shooting every take for the entire scene... That’s quite a bit of footage, isn’t it?

SB: We shot around 75 minutes of dailies a day (850 meters, or around 7 cans), which I think is quite reasonable for one camera. It’s worth noting that Léonor confided to me that she had long gone back and forth about shooting her prior film, Petit frère, on film, before finally opting for digital for fear of finding herself short on film. With hindsight, and the sheer quantity of dailies on her previous film, she decided this time to deliberately reduce the amount footage. To choose a much rougher option, which de facto limits the choices at the editing stage. I believe this decision had a lot to do with the style of the project, and at least as much as the Super 16’s distinctive rendering style.

You mentioned the sequence at the oceanographic museum at the end of the film...

SB: This sequence in the aquarium was originally much longer. There was a long dialogue between our protagonist and a former student of his whom he met again in the museum. It was a real challenge, as we had only been granted a five-person permit for this location, which was still open to the public during our day of shooting: I had to work without my gaffer (Marianne Lamour), who prepared a small backpack for me to use for lighting: drapes, Cinefoil and two small Dash lights as my only source, which I asked any of other crew members present and available at the time to act as my tripods (we didn’t have any actual tripods). The available light from the aquarium was used as our main level, and it was very low indeed. For this sequence, I decided to push the Kodak 500T one stop in development, and to exceptionally equip the camera with a Zeiss wide-aperture series, replacing the Ultra Prime used on the rest of the film. Still, I was very surprised by the Super 16’s ability to cope in these conditions. In fact, on this location, I spent more time putting little bits of Cinefoil on the little ambient lights, lit emergency exit signs, and dealing with reflections than actually lighting!

A word about the workflow?

SB: Whenever I shoot in film, for the last few years I’ve opted to work with a modern scanner, the Scanity, which has the particularity of working in real time (so I can scan dailies in 2 or 4K directly). On this film, as I arrived late, I had to adapt to a process that had already been approved. So, we developed the negatives at Silverway, the dailies were produced on Cintel telecine with pre-grading, then after editing, the film was scanned in 2K on Northlight at Cosmodigital. This scanner, which is highly reputed, seems to have the particularity of delivering a slightly rounder image than the Scanity, undoubtedly sublimating the film image somewhat. But it’s a workflow that forced us to go back to the drawing board in conformation, as there was no exchange between the edit lists and the adjustments made to the dailies... 
Even so, color-grading went very quickly with Mathilde Delacroix, even under these conditions. It has to be said that she and I have been working together for almost ten years, and there’s a real sense of complicity in the color-grading room. And the color rendering of film is also so much kinder to faces... Especially when you don’t have an HMC as on this film. The red noses, the winter chill on the skin, finally come through without even having to tinker with any effects on the console. For me, this remains the great advantage of film, even in Super 16, because when in conformity you discover the material, colors and contrasts, you really realize that you don’t need to edit the image much on the big screen...

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