Quentin Dupieux - Conversation with Mubi

Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts, April 5th, 2024

Yannick (Quentin Dupieux, 2023).

Ever since he dogged a sentient tire on a killing spree in Rubber (2010), musician-turned-filmmaker Quentin Dupieux has been distilling a singular form of gonzo. The films he’s crafted—a body of work swelling at the speed of Hong Sang-soo, with six features released since 2019—all belie their modest means. Rarely stretching longer than eighty minutes, they’ve followed a number of deranged characters, which have recently included a man reprogrammed as a killing machine by his leather jacket (Deerskin, 2019); a pig-sized fly and the two bums who try to make a pet out of it (Mandibles, 2020); a gang of Power Rangers–type avengers armed with tobacco smoke’s chemical constituents (Smoking Causes Coughing, 2022), and a middle-aged couple who discovers a time-travel portal in their basement (Incredible but True, 2022).

Dupieux—who routinely writes, shoots, directs, and edits his own films—likes to work with a washed-out palette and predominantly static shots, a minimalist approach that makes for a curious friction with his supernatural tales. But what unites his projects isn’t a shared aesthetic so much as self-reflexivity. Yes, when all is said and done, Rubber really just is the story of a tire that blows up stuff and people with its telekinetic powers. Yet it’s also an indictment of passive audiences, interspersed as it is with shots of tourists watching the tire’s adventures from afar. If there’s any motif to the oeuvre of a filmmaker who’s chased after outsized flies, homicidal jackets, and an Oscar-worthy groan (Reality, 2014), that’d be our relationship with what’s shown on screen—the porous contract that binds those who create images with those who consume them.

Virtually all of Dupieux’s films can be said to probe that theme, which isn’t to say they’re heavy-handed or didactic. They never forsake genre thrills to peddle some big statement about our zeitgeist; if you take them seriously, Dupieux has stated elsewhere, that means he’s failed. Still, to peg them as hollow doodles or one-note jokes, as some of his critics have, is to miss the point. Even the most unassuming still bursts with more ideas than you might expect from films of such size and budget; whether or not their deadpan humor and over-the-top performances are your thing, Dupieux’s cinema is nothing short of original. Indeed, the self-reflexive vein seems to have grown stronger with each new project. Yannick, one of two released just last year, centers on its titular thirtysomething (Raphaël Quenard), a hapless parking lot attendant who, midway through a third-tier boulevard play in a half-empty Parisian theater, stands up to demand an explanation for what he sees as an irreparable affront. "You’re adding to my problems instead of making me forget mine!" he scolds the three-person cast, which he then holds hostage (at gunpoint) and forces to star in a new play he’ll write live on stage before a dumbfounded audience. It’s a twist designed to challenge the kind of abduction we willingly submit to anytime we enter a cinema—a critique Dupieux has unpacked further in his latest, Daaaaaalí! (2023), an homage to an artist who seems to have haunted the filmmaker’s oeuvre from the very start.

A traditional biopic Daaaaaalí! is most definitely not; as befits its maker and subject both, the film unfolds as a loopy, digressive, and hopelessly incomplete portrait of a man who doesn’t want one made of him in the first place. This isn’t a film about Dalí, strictly speaking, but one that’s more concerned with the several people trying, and failing, to "capture" and decipher him, no one more determinedly than Judith (Anaïs Demoustier), a journalist whose interview with the painter, in a dramatic structure modeled off Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), keeps getting derailed by all sorts of diversions. To complicate matters further, Dalí is played by five actors—Edouard Baer, Gilles Lellouche, Jonathan Cohen, Pio Marmaï, and Didier Flamand—different in age and physique but committed to the same flamboyant and wildly theatrical impersonations. It’s all of a piece with Dupieux’s grand design, which isn’t to spoon-feed us trivia about the man’s life but to interrogate and frustrate our expectations around what should count as biography—especially when the person at its center was himself so eager to blur the line between fact and fiction. In the end, Dupieux isn’t any more in control of his mustachioed, cape-clad hero than is Demoustier’s Judith, whose quest, once the film starts hopscotching across different dreams and timelines, becomes impossibly slippery. Early on, Dupieux (teaming up again with his regular production designer and wife, Joan Le Boru) restages some of Dalí’s iconic paintings as tableaux vivants, suggesting the man didn’t paint from his mind but fashioned real versions of his surreal visions before copying them onto canvas. It’s one of Daaaaaalí!’s most inspired sight gags, and a beautiful summation of the film’s ongoing tug of war between dreams and reality.

A few months back, when Daaaaaalí! premiered at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, I sat down with Dupieux to discuss the film’s genesis, his creative partnership with its composer, Thomas Bangalter—one half of the now-defunct electronic duo Daft Punk—and the reasons behind his recent creative prolificacy.

Daaaaaalí! (Quentin Dupieux, 2023).

NOTEBOOK: When I read that you were going to tackle Dalí, the match felt just perfect—there’s something about your mutual proclivity for the absurd that makes you kindred spirits. I was curious as to when and where the idea first came up.

QUENTIN DUPIEUX: Honestly, the idea of making a movie about Dalí started as a kind of joke with my producers. I guess I was trying to impersonate him or something. We had some drawings, as well, some photos of him at home. But it still took us about three years, once we decided to make the movie, to find the right way to capture the character. And it’s not like I had some kind of passion for Dalí. It’s more like—I remember as a child there were so many interviews with him on TV, and they were always so weird and crazy and interesting that I kept them with me.

The trick I followed when working on the script was to avoid real events from his life; otherwise we’d have to deal with way too many things. I mean, when you pick up a book about Dalí, the guy lived a pretty full life so there are all kinds of events and stories and periods that you’d have to account for. And I knew that just wasn’t my thing, this study-of-his-life approach. So I decided on another entry point, which is someone trying to make a movie about Dalí—me, basically. In the film Anaïs [Demoustier] plays a journalist, but she’s really a stand-in; it’s me trying to make a film about him. That’s how I see it. And of course, that’s just impossible. You keep running after Dalí, like Anaïs does throughout, because the movie will never be made. And that’s how I feel about myself. It’s like the movie in the end wasn’t made, you know what I mean? We just tried.

NOTEBOOK: Did you always know you were going to recruit multiple actors to play Dalí?

DUPIEUX: No, not at all. When we started preparing for the movie I had one big actor attached to the part. But the film at the time was just not clicking in my head. It usually does. You have your actors, you have the script, you have your locations—everything you need. And then it clicks, and suddenly you feel as if you know everything. And once you read the script, images will pop up in your mind. This time, though, something wasn’t working. This actor, whose name I’d rather not mention, was calling me. He was trying some Dalí impersonations, trying out his voice. He was good, actually. But I knew it was not enough. And then all of a sudden I had this idea of bringing in different actors…

NOTEBOOK: I’m curious as to what you think each brought to the role. What were your criteria as you started casting for your Dalís?

DUPIEUX: I feel like I could have asked anyone, honestly. It’s hard to explain, but… even the best actor in the world, if you ask them to "play" Dalí, they’ll only be able to give you their one version of him. That’s it. It’s impossible to create different impressions of the man; it’s complex enough to create one! The actors I worked with here, they all did their best, and my job was just to help them craft their best impressions. Nothing more. And I could have done it with lots of others, too, because in the end that’s what was most interesting to me: to push your actors to find out what’s available, what they can cling onto to pretend to be Dalí.

Daaaaaalí! (Quentin Dupieux, 2023).

NOTEBOOK: Over-the-top performances are a staple of your filmography, and Daaaaaalí! in this regard is no different. How do you bring out that quality in your actors?

DUPIEUX: Well, everything was in the dialogues. I worked a lot on Dalí’s words, though I don’t know if this is something you notice when you watch the film with subtitles. But the words we chose in French—they’re very special. I tried to reproduce the way Dalí would speak in French, and it’s a completely different way of associating words. Like, he’d never just say "I’m thirsty." It’d always be something much longer and complicated. So this was the first part of the job, to nail and write these very complicated lines.

NOTEBOOK: You had to Dalí-fy the dialogue.

DUPIEUX: Exactly! But because his words were often almost impossible to say, the actors really had to push themselves. And I think that’s what triggers that over-the-top quality you felt.

NOTEBOOK: Did you ever rehearse with all five in the same place? Did they ever meet?

DUPIEUX: No. I didn’t want to create any competition between them. I must confess they were all… well, not scared, but anxious about the project. And I get it. It can be scary, to pretend to be this figure we all know so much about. That said, I did one thing to promote some competition…. [Laughs.] Basically, the first actor I worked with during the shoot was Édouard [Baer], the actor who plays Dalí in the very first scenes. And I decided to show some clips of his performance to the others. Like, "Look at what Édouard did!" This before they would start, to excite and push them.

NOTEBOOK: I don’t know if this is a function of the stories you tell, but anytime I watch your films I imagine the atmosphere on set must be just as playful and electrifying.

DUPIEUX: Actually, because of the limited budgets we work with and the time constraints we face, we always end up shooting a lot. Which I fear means we don’t have that much time to just, you know, enjoy ourselves on set. But we do love shooting, so in that sense yes, my sets tend to be very happy and relaxed. But we can’t afford not to be focused; it’s not like we get to work on big productions where you can have more leeway and flexibility. Sometimes I have just a few hours in a given location, as was the case in Daaaaaalí!, which is very little time to craft a big and successful comedy scene.

NOTEBOOK: Do you tend to stick to your scripts or do you give your actors space to improvise, too?

DUPIEUX: There’s no real room for that, no. We just don’t have enough time, so we have to respect what’s on the paper. The only improvisation I allow for is in the way I shoot. By which I mean, before I arrive on set all I have is a few photos of what the location will look like, but I don’t know where exactly I’ll shoot. I don’t know the angles, or the light, or how I’ll end up framing a certain scene. And these are all decisions I make on site. This, to me, is the closest we can come to a kind of improvisation. As for what concerns the actors, no—they all have a precise script and lines they need to follow. Otherwise it’d be a nightmare.

Rubber (Quentin Dupieux, 2010).

NOTEBOOK: You’ve served as your own director of photography since Rubber; I was hoping you could speak about your predilection for desaturated colors. Daaaaaalí! in this sense is no outlier: the film has the same washed-out palette of its predecessors. How do you account for this visual uniformity?

DUPIEUX: Well, I like [that palette] because, basically, I’m a bit scared of digital colors. I probably wouldn’t feel the same if I were shooting on film, but yeah, my experience dealing with digital colors hasn’t been that great.

NOTEBOOK: Why is that?

DUPIEUX: They just don’t look real. I think there’s something weird about digital cameras; some, of course, not all of them. But they can often capture the light in a weird way, because, well, in the end all they give you is a digital impression of a signal. That’s why, never mind how many different things we may try in the color correction stage, I always end up choosing the same palette.

NOTEBOOK: Which is interesting to think about in the context of your filmography: all your films seem to exist at the intersection of the real and the surreal, but you want your visuals to retain a kind of realism.

DUPIEUX: Yeah, it’s true. But the same applies to the acting, too. Okay, maybe Dalí is the worst example because he was this crazy person, but in my movies, that’s often what I do. I tend to lower my actors, if you know what I mean—I always try to get something realistic out of them, even if they say the weirdest things. I love dialogues, especially when the exchanges sound realistic. Same goes with colors, I guess.

NOTEBOOK: Do you usually go through several rehearsals, or table readings?

DUPIEUX: Oh no—that I hate. Everything happens on set. When you have your costume on, when you feel the tension, when you don’t have time to question yourself—that’s the best moment for one to create. When you’re sitting in an office planning something you’ll be shooting three months later, there’s just no challenge there. It’s basically a big, "Well, we’ll see!" Once it’s time to shoot, that’s when everybody is focused, and when you get the best out of an actor. As for Daaaaaalí, we did rehearsals with everyone, but it was mostly to reassure the actors that they could all do it. I must confess it was very different on set, once they put on their costumes and make-up. An actor needs a camera to deliver.

Deerskin (Quentin Dupieux, 2019).

NOTEBOOK: You’re recently churning out a film or two a year. How do you explain that?

DUPIEUX: It’s just my pace! And it’s the way I like working. I would hate to be working on the same project for five years. A bigger project, a bigger budget, blah blah blah. I’d hate it. Five years on the same story? [Winces.] I just think I found my rhythm. I like it like that. Like when a movie is done and we go on [to] postproduction, I’m still in love with it. And then once we get to the premiere, I’m still in love with it, usually, but I can feel myself starting to get bored. And once we hit the second screening I’m like, okay, I’m done. Now the film’s out there, and it’s for people to enjoy. I don’t want to be attached to my movies. When it’s done, it’s done. That’s why I find it easy to switch to another project.

NOTEBOOK: How do you know when an idea is deranged enough that it’s worth pursuing?

DUPIEUX: I’m not looking for deranged ideas, necessarily. It’s more like—I’m excited by an idea that pops out of nowhere. Usually when I think too much over something it’s not good material.

NOTEBOOK: I guess what I’m trying to ask is whether you have a routine that allows you to put yourself in a situation where these stimuli can arise. David Lynch has spoken of his own approach as akin to fishing for big ideas swimming deep inside one’s self.

DUPIEUX: It’s the same for me—almost the same, I guess. Ten years ago, the idea of writing a script was something that felt, if not exactly scary, at least very important. These days I’m really not as afraid. I have some ideas, I know how to write them, and I know where in my brain I’ll have to fish for them. So the routine, when all is said and done, is very simple. I need a producer to say, "Hey, if you write a new script we might start shooting before the end of the year!" And that will get me excited. At which point all I need is to be in a quiet place with a laptop and dive into my subconscious. Then I just let it go.

NOTEBOOK: So it’s those constraints that ultimately keep you going.

DUPIEUX: Of course. And I’m sure this is very common for many other artists, too. I think the worst for me would be having a producer that goes, "Hey, here’s sixty million, go ahead and make whatever you want." There’d be too many options, you know. I’d just be lost. So yes, it’s a routine. But it gets more interesting with each new film. The more I do it, the more I try to dig into these unconscious ideas, the more stuff I find. Which is interesting.

Mandibles (Quentin Dupieux, 2020).

NOTEBOOK: Can we talk about the music? I think this is one of the very few films of yours for which you recruited a composer. Which makes me think you might not have been as involved in the score as you were in earlier projects.

DUPIEUX: That’s right, I wasn’t. For instance, in Rubber, I’d hired my friend Gaspard [Augé] to compose the score. But I was always there, just to control things a little bit. This time I asked Thomas [Bangalter] to build one piece. That was the idea: having one track that we could use anywhere in the film. My contribution this time was more in the preparation stage: we talked a lot, Thomas and I, before we shot the film, as we shot it, and afterwards, too. I think I spent more time with him than I did with the actors, in all fairness. We had to verbalize what we wanted from the music, we had to write down words for the vibe I was looking for, and we had to be very precise with those. Because Thomas is that kind of brain.

NOTEBOOK: So what words did you end up jotting down for the kind of vibe you were after here?

DUPIEUX: They were mostly impressions. Like, I needed suspense. I needed joy. I needed craziness and a Spanish vibe. Simple, no? But Thomas is a genius; he managed to create a piece of music that contains all these things. If you so much as remove a track, then it’s suddenly a suspenseful piece. If you remove the bassline, suddenly it’s a completely different piece and it triggers a different vibe. So yeah, what Thomas did—he basically made the movie. I think this is the first time that the music did the editing, if you know what I mean; it helped me understand the rhythm of the whole film.

NOTEBOOK: I think the kind of surrealism you evoke is also a result of the odd worlds you create with your production designer and wife, Joan Le Boru. Could you speak of your collaboration, and how you two go about creating these unique universes?

DUPIEUX: Well, in Daaaaaalí! the process was very specific. Joan has always been amazing at turning even the drabbest office into something interesting to film—just by choosing the right colors, say, or the right costumes. But her work on Daaaaaalí was much bigger, because we had to recreate a whole vibe. And we had to be super precise. So she looked for tons of references—photos, paintings. We traveled to his house, in Portlligat, Spain. Every object you see in the movie has been seen somewhere around Dalí. In a photo, a painting, whatever. She did an amazing job putting all these elements together—if you were to strip the house we used as Dalí’s of all the stuff we brought into it, it’d be just a house by the sea. There’s nothing there that would remind you of the guy. We had to create a giant Dalí world from scratch.

Smoking Causes Coughing (Quentin Dupieux, 2022).

NOTEBOOK: How important is the location scouting, then? I’m asking because the landscapes in your films are so odd they often come across as extraterrestrial. Like that igloo-shaped bunker in Smoking Causes Coughing, for instance. Where do you find these places?

DUPIEUX: Well, that bunker we actually built. There’s no such place in the real world! [Laughs.] I just had this vision of a bowl-like place, a round entrance, and we went on to create what’s supposed to be the basement, the structure’s ground level.

NOTEBOOK: Do you think of these places before you start writing?

DUPIEUX: Sometimes. I mean, usually my wife reads the script and then we start talking. But other times I just write, "They’re in an office." And then I move to the dialogues. Only afterwards do we go into more detail—what’s this office like? And then she starts to bring in her ideas: colors, objects, etc. But it’s a long, long process. Because we’re not working in a Wes Anderson mode, to use an easy example, where everything is immaculately crafted and looks beautiful and matches with everything else. We don’t want to go there. We’re always trying to find a middle ground between the realistic and the impossible, which is where these films live.

https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/incredible-but-true-in-conversation-with-quentin-dupieux