Villa Amalia

Paru le Autres formats

[English] [français]

The title of Benoît Jacquot’s film is also that of Pascal Quignard’s book, from which it is very loosely adapted, indeed an entire section of the novel is absent from the film. Very much like Into the Wild, but from a different culture, it is also the story of a dispossession. The main character, Ann Hidden, is a virtuoso musician who will leave everything, we could say drop everything to find "a place on earth".

There are three movements in film : the beginning in Paris and the French provinces, her departure and wandering through Europe, and the arrival to the place which she will elect as hers.
Benoît would have liked different photochemical and digital media to mark these three movements ; this time around, I was not convinced. The production manager, Marie-Jeanne Pascal, and I proposed to shoot the entire production in 3-perf 35mm with a DI. The presence of Isabelle Huppert also induced this choice.
However we considerably varied the logistics : the French part in a quasi-classical style, the Italian part as an astonishing adventure given the unattainable remote location, and the European part as a road movie with a skeleton crew.

I like the result a lot. I am very grateful to my crew and the support of Eclair (Didier Dekeyser, Philippe Boutal and Gerard Savary in the moments of doubt of the tests : I had thought of a partition where the character slowly arrives into the light, all the way to over-exposure, which Isabelle Huppert absolutely refused) and the regime changes in production. I am obviously grateful to Benoît Jacquot and mostly to Isabelle Huppert who inhabits the film with her enigmatic interior being. For a director of photography, she is, a demanding and exciting model.

Technique

Cameras : Aaton 35 and Moviecam Compact from TSF Camera
Negative : Kodak 5205 and 5219
Print stock : Kodak 5283
Digital Intermediate : Color’Us
Airstar lighting balloons
Lighting equipment : TSF Lumiere
Grip : TSF Grip