Simon Beaufils looks back on the filming of Julia Kowalski’s "Que ma volonté soit faite" ("May My Will Be Done")

Young Nawojka, who lives with her father and brothers on the family farm, hides a terrible secret : a monstrous power, which she believes she inherited from her mother, awakens whenever she feels desire. When Sandra, a free-spirited and seductive woman, returns to the village, her powers manifest themselves and she is unable to control them.
Starring Maria Wróbel (Nawojka), Roxane Mesquida (Sandra), Wojciech Skibiński (Henryk), Kuba Dyniewicz (Bogdan), Przemysław Przestrzelski (Tomek), Raphaël Thiéry (Badel), Jean-Baptiste Durand (Franck), and Eva Lallier Juan (Alice).

How did the preparation for Let My Will Be Done go ?

Simon Beaufils : It was a unique experience because I was quite involved in the writing, at the director’s request. I started by saying that I didn’t know how to do it, that it wasn’t my job ! But then, as I got into it, I realized that it was quite similar to being a director of photography, just in a different place, because the goal was to understand what Julia had in mind and try to put it into words. It was both unsettling and exciting to put into words what I usually translate into images. The difference is the time it takes, because it’s measured in years ! And in fact, at the end, I suggested giving up writing so I could do the film as director of photography. I needed to take a step back because I felt like I’d already shot the film ten times ! Obviously, on set, I was fed by all these stages, I knew where the scenes should go.

What were your sources of inspiration for this genre film ?

SB : There’s a film that haunted Julia Kowalski and me a bit during the preparation, it’s Wake in Fright, by Australian director Ted Kotcheff. It’s a completely crazy film with a kangaroo hunt scene that goes on for way too long. The hunters hunt at night and kill an incredible number of kangaroos. And after killing a lot of them with guns, one of them decides to take on a kangaroo with his bare hands, to kill it with his hands. They drink way too much, there’s enormous tension, a sense of heat and sweat. It’s a very disturbing film.

So how did you imagine the images ? Was there a desire to go for something stylized ?

SB : The initial idea was to go for something natural, reminiscent of a documentary, with bursts of horror that would shake up reality and create a kind of offbeat realism. Like shifting a melody by a semitone. In any case, we needed to be in the mud, the grime, the matter, hence the Super 16, which is quite grainy with Panavision Super Speed lenses, which I really like. We were looking for fragility, imperfection, too much black and the over saturation of the irreversible, a lack of definition at times, flare crossing the frame. An image that is both natural and complicated, blurred, poorly balanced—a human image, in fact ! In any case, we wanted to move away from the naturalism we’ve become accustomed to, with very defined, super-precise images where you can see everything down to the pores of the skin.

The mud, rain, fire, sweat, did you capture all that during filming, or did you use special effects ?

SB : It was a really muddy shoot, even dung-covered, because the film is set on a dairy farm. So there was dung, and since we were shooting in November, we had our fair share of rain and mud. In short, we didn’t take off our boots for five weeks !

Film is perfectly suited to capturing the texture and presence of the elements. For the sequences with fire, everything was done live, except for three shots that required VFX, notably the final shot when the house is burning and the shot where Maria Wróbel is surrounded by fire. The day we shot that scene, there was a big rainstorm with strong winds. It was too dangerous to turn the flames up to maximum, so they were extended digitally.

Can you explain how you shot that very long shot where she wanders around completely naked, as if she were rising from the ashes that cover her ?

SB : We shot in a village that was completely blocked off so that we could be alone with Maria, as it was quite complicated for her. Fortunately, she had a relationship of trust with the director and the crew. We installed 40 meters of rails to accompany her on her walk, and the shoot was very simple. This slow, long walk is indeed symbolic, like a rebirth.

So we wonder if this film is autobiographical ?

SB : In this symbolic dimension, it’s a bit like Julia’s story, that is, how to find one’s place ? Perhaps by escaping from one’s family, perhaps by not allowing oneself to be trapped in a so-called monstrosity ? Because obviously, as she is a woman searching for herself, she is prevented from living her life. This monstrosity is also linked to her ancestors. Julia’s parents are both Polish, so she is caught between two cultures ; she doesn’t really feel at home in France, but she doesn’t really feel at home in Poland either. There is something complicated about finding your place. That’s really what the film is about : how to live with the problems that come from your own family and your country of origin and manage, as best you can, to build a life for yourself and break free to live your own life.

Let’s talk about the wedding scene, which has a very strong cinematic feel with some subtle exchanges between the characters.

SB : It’s a key scene that provides a kind of subtext to the action itself. It’s a 30-minute bubble where the stakes are highlighted by exchanges of glances. We can understand the relationships between all the characters as we discover most of them. We understand all the unspoken words, the tensions that have existed in this village, who resents whom, who slept with whom... It was a long stage in the script, a long stage in the editing to get it right, because the idea was to bring out an underlying emotion without resorting to dialogue. Beyond understanding, we had to feel what was going to blow up the village and the film. 
We had in mind a film that was very important to me, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, in which there is a wedding just before the characters leave for war. It’s a masterpiece of "casual" directing. And since I’ve been doing this job, I’ve been constantly searching for that "casualness", where you don’t pay attention to the shot, the lighting, the staging. That scene in the film is truly magnificent, with the tragedy building up "without seeming to". They’re going off to war, we know that some of them are likely to die, but it’s very joyful, there’s a lot of drinking, dancing, and exchanged glances, glances that avoid each other.
As shoots are getting shorter and shorter, we often have to strive for a certain narrative efficiency. If you want narrative efficiency, this wedding could be cut from 30 minutes to 5 minutes in the editing. Yet I think it’s perhaps the beating heart of the film. What interests me in cinema is seeing and filming scenes that, at first glance, have no narrative place and yet are the essence of cinema. 
As a viewer, it’s rarely the film as a whole that I remember, but rather moments that I might call moments of aesthetic emotion, which are not technical or artistic, but are real powerful moments that cinema gives us and that no other art form could give us. It’s often an exchange of glances, a quiver, a brush, a nothingness that stays with me and accompanies me for a long time.

How did you shoot this dance scene, did you use two cameras ?

SB : We only had one camera, which we set up on a long tracking rail, allowing me to get different angles on different people. The circle is a clever staging device because the characters are all turning together, which means you can pan across lots of faces while creating transitions. It was very precise ; you had to know which look you needed at which moment. For example, for the relationship she begins to have with Frank, the veterinarian, he had to stay outside the circle so that we could feel that he was looking at her, that she could see that he was looking at her, and that she was playing with that. We knew that at that moment we needed a connection between Nawojka and her brothers in order to understand the end of the film. We also needed to understand that they’re pretty rough around the edges, but that they actually love each other, that they’re a family and that it’s complicated. The goal was to convey a certain complexity, so that they weren’t just horrible characters. It’s not that simple ; everyone has their own flaws. That’s what we try to capture on film.

With your experience in Argentina and in digital, do you think it’s possible to compare the two formats positively ?

SB : Actually, you can’t say that digital is better or worse than film. The difference comes from the way you work on set. Shooting on film is capturing a moment in time. There’s a real connection with that moment in time, the present moment, the concrete existence of the scene, the flesh, the human material, as if the film magically freezes a moment of life for eternity. When I shoot with Justine Triet, she exploits digital technology at its best, multiplying takes and creating a new space-time. A longer time, in which the takes are enriched, collide with each other, as if they were adding to each other to create a new moment, something other than a snapshot of reality. It’s hard to explain, but it’s something I feel very strongly on set ! 
Often it’s aesthetic considerations that make us choose film or digital, but I think it’s much more than that, it’s almost metaphysical, it’s as if they were two different arts. It’s like comparing two painting techniques, a painting done in oil and a wall painted with spray paint. Both are very beautiful. It’s just not the same thing.

You worked with a small team, which must have been a big constraint for five weeks of shooting, right ?

SB : My team consisted of the first assistant camera, Marie-Sophie Daniel, the gaffer, Manon Corone, the grip, Léo Stritt, and Colin Lefebvre, who juggled camera, script and lighting ! There must have been about a dozen of us on set, whereas I’d just come off a shoot where there were between 100 and 120 people on set. There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to both situations, but it was quite fun to switch between the two. 
The small team works very well with close collaborators who can say to you, “That big projector over there, at the end, do you want to do something different ?” We discuss it and finally decide together whether we can do something else or whether we need that big projector. They’re more than just colleagues, they’re valuable allies, and they were fully committed throughout the film, even when they were on their own setting up a long tracking shot in the mud. We shot a lot at night, and the conditions weren’t easy... In cases like that, it’s vital to be with people who have a sense of humor ! 
It’s a completely different way of working. You have to anticipate and free up Manon or Léo so they can prepare the complicated shots in advance while we shoot the simpler ones. As the film was really well planned in advance, it was possible.

It’s also these constraints that build a film. When I was at school, Yorgos Arvanitis and Bruno Nuyten, in two different exercises, gave us this challenge : “If you had a sequence shot to do at night with a moving camera and two characters who are also moving, and you only had one spotlight, where would you place it ? From the camera ?” The idea behind this was to teach us that lighting is directing.

(Interview by Brigitte Barbier for the AFC)