Noé Bach, AFC, accompanies the image on Agathe Riedinge’s "Wild Diamond"

Liane is a daring, incandescent 19-year-old who lives with her mother and little sister. She feels confined in this life and is obsessed with beauty and the need to be loved. She sees reality TV as an opportunity for recognition.
Starring Malou Khebizi, Idir Azougli, Andréa Bescond

It’s a very surprising, hard-hitting film and your visuals reflect that energy. Let’s talk about the choice of format !

Noé Bach : It’s perhaps the only aesthetic aspect of the film that I really questioned in pre-production with the director. It’s a very daring choice, and I wanted to be sure it truly served the film’s purpose. Liane, the heroine, feels that her life is too small for her ; she desires something grandiose, majestic. Agathe, the director, wanted the audience to feel this lack of space in Liane’s life. Another argument for this choice is that Liane is constantly filming herself with her phone, she sublimates herself through this image, which is vertical, so there was this desire to move towards the format she identifies with.
As a viewer, I could have some reservations about this format ; I could be a bit wary of it. As the director of photography on this project, I have to admit that it creates an oppressive atmosphere in the film, which is very effective.

Your images also have an enormous personality, with an almost painterly texture. What equipment did you use for filming ?

NB : It’s a rather unusual set-up : although we shot in a 1.33 format, we used anamorphic lenses, whose primary purpose is to create a Scope, an elongated image with a 2.39 ratio. So we cropped a lot to get to 1.33. This has an impact on the resolution, especially on the Alexa Mini, a camera that’s not very defined, but we really liked the result with Agathe. Then, we did a lot of colour grading with Elie Akoka to add texture, grain, body and filters, being particularly attentive to the edges.
In terms of lenses, I opted for recent anamorphic lenses, the Orion SE (Sliver Edition) from Atlas. They have the particularity of causing a lot of flare and defects at full aperture. I used them to achieve a very soft, slightly brushed image. Anamorphic lenses have a very elongated, very fluid bokeh, which reinforces this pictorial aspect. And there’s a verticality in the blur movement that produces an effect that’s quite unique with the 1.33 format.
70% of the film were shot with these lenses, but I also used a Zeiss GO spherical series. The Orion are so stylised, they make the lights drool a lot ; it’s amazing, but sometimes it’s too much ! This highly expressive pictorial quality couldn’t accompany every scene.
I used the Zeiss, for example, for the night scenes on the construction site, because those had to be calmer, more intimate ; the image wasn’t meant to be explosive.
It’s the first time I’ve switched from anamorphic to spherical lenses from one scene to the next in such an uninhibited way, and as a matter of fact, after the colour-grading work, I couldn’t remember what had been shot with what...

But this desire for a dramatic visual is more than just an aesthetic ; it goes hand in hand with the subject of the film, which is very much about appearance.

NB : Finding a style and a visual identity for this script was very stimulating. I’d like to salute the work of Astrid Tonnellier on set design and Rachèle Raoult on costumes. The setting is filled with fake nails, fake eyelashes, bleached hair and fake lips. It’s superficial on the surface ; at first glance it’s hard to like this character. We judge her as impressionable, fragile, malleable, bordering on vulgarity to mask a lack of confidence ; but it’s just a facade. The whole challenge during pre-production was to find the counterpoint to this smooth appearance, which can leave one indifferent. We wanted the image (among other things) to showcase Liane’s invisible side, beyond this stereotyped appearance. In order to convey this very tormented, very deep inner life, this desire for a greater life, we needed a bubbling, uneven image. The challenge of the very assertive texture and the choice of mostly hand-held camera became obvious.

What’s also striking about the image is the power of the highlights, which constantly draws us in.

NB : Exploding highlights have always appealed to me ; I think they take me back to photography. With digital, we fear overexposure, and as a result, we risk creating a flat visual. My shooting LUT does just about the opposite of what we try to do digitally : instead of increasing the dynamic range, it reduces it a lot. Between the shadows and the highlights, there’s maybe 5 stops. For Diamant Brut, the highlights are incandescent, all-consuming, like the character’s energy.
It’s a film that has a connection with the sacred, the belief in something greater than ourselves. To reference to certain religious pictorial representations, we sometimes looked for upward gazes and facial angles. These highlights, which burn the image a little, contribute to this connection to the sacred.
Liane’s bedroom and bathroom are her domain, her kingdom ; in there, she had to be illuminated by this light, by the sunlight. It’s her space for freedom.

It’s also the colour, almost always present, that gives the film its great energy.

NB : We wanted to push everything to the limit, not control it, no “colour palette”, just let it explode in all directions to accompany Liane’s turmoil. But there are a few key scenes where we did try to control things, notably the final evening in the fancy villa. Unlike the rest of the film, we wanted to extinguish all the colours, giving the sensation of a kind of oppressive cave. The set is all grey, and I lit it monochromatically, in warm tones. I find that this choice is all the more important narratively because the rest of the film is chaotic.

The camera almost always accompanies the actress, which gives her an even greater, more vivid dynamic. You can literally feel that she wants to be more alive !

NB : I love movement, and filming movement. It’s funny because when the selection was announced, Rosetta, by the Dardenne brothers, was mentioned as a sort of relative to our film. What I like about their film is that it seems easy, spontaneous, as if they’d just picked up the camera and went off, but in fact, it’s very well thought out, very prepared, choreographed.
Preparation that’s very well thought out, very much upstream, is the method I appreciate the most. I like it to be so prepared that it seems unplanned ! We spent a lot of time with Agathe reading the script together and then breaking it down on the sets. When the situations in the script were static, we tried to add movement. For example, the sequence of the bailiff’s letter, everything was choreographed : she leaves from one place, she hears her mother, she leaves again, she goes to get the letter, she hides, etc. Ultimately, when you follow these movements and actions, they seem natural. You don’t feel the work behind it, and that’s very rewarding !

(Interview conducted by Brigitte Barbier for the AFC, and translated from French by Chloé Finch)