Guillaume Deffontaines : The Laughing Man

He still has that Leica R6. Pampered, polished, yet, shall we say, somewhat ignored. But now, as he holds it, a sudden "yen for silver" urges him to use it again, as if the camera could magically take him back to the past.

It all began as he watched his father, an architect, making small 8mm films. "Amateur films", as they used to say. Guillaume Deffontaines soon realized that his father’s films had a specific outlook, an exciting originality and an undeniable poetry. "He was trying to show what others don’t see."
Under his camera’s sensitive gaze, blocks of ice in the mountains became birds about to take flight. Living right next door on the same floor, his uncle, a scientist at the French National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA), was also making 16mm films. He used a Paillard Bolex, but focused on completely different topics, such as mountain pastures.

Considering that dual heritage — poetic and scientific — Guillaume Deffontaines decided to enroll in the famous Louis-Lumière school. As a student, he was average. Yet, pushed by a formidable desire to succeed — and after three attempts — he finally got in. Shortly after he got his degree, his uncle’s Paillard Bolex suddenly reappeared for an animation film to be shot by students of the Gobelins School of Visual Creation (Gobelins, l’Ecole de l’Image).
On the first day, much to his surprise, a film crew set up on the floor right above, with such an abundance of equipment that he couldn’t resist asking them to lend him at least a small spotlight. The following day, his hands deep in the "changing bag", he was inserting 16mm film stock in the ARRI SRII camera magazine... and was thus quasi promoted to the post of second assistant.

Many careers start that way : being at the right time in the right place, having a unique combination of pluck and sheer luck, then finally meeting that someone whose laser-like gaze one admires, just as "little Guillaume" admired his father’s. That special someone was Christophe Beaucarne whose assistant Guillaume Deffontaines became. Both notoriously "hyper-cool" yet, obviously, far more solid than might appear.
"Christophe Beaucarne made me want to get into films. He taught me everything about ’picture’ and ’imagery’, then, luckily, gave me the opportunity to become a full-fledged cinematographer".

"Luck" is also a word the always-smiling (and often laughing) Guillaume Deffontaines will use when he talks about meeting eminent filmmaker Bruno Dumont — Deffontaines ultimately shot most of the Dumont films that are grouped together as "The Cycle of Laughter". A "cycle" triggered, quite by chance, on the set of Camille Claudel 1915. In a scene that takes place in the very mental health facility to which painter Vincent Van Gogh was committed, Camille Claudel (Juliette Binoche) attends a stage production presented and acted by patients themselves. As they started shooting the scene, actress Binoche had such an uncontrollable fit of laughter that it spread to the whole crew for the entire day - which probably spurred Bruno Dumont to explore that vein much further.
Next came P’tit Quinquin (id), Ma Loute (Slack Bay) and finally Jeannette that Guillaume Deffontaines just finished shooting. Each of them explores a specific facet of laughter, be it "plain" (P’tit Quinquin), "demented" (Ma Loute) or "off-the-wall", as in Jeannette, a children-acted musical tale about Joan of Arc.

"Bruno Dumont staunchly believes the ideas you have on the set are never the right ones. Everything must happen during preparation and pre-production. On the set, he entrusts me with the task of entering his imaginary world and making it real. A dream for a cinematographer."
On Jeannette, as Guillaume Deffontaines tested all sorts of equipment, he was struck by the result when he combined the Summilux-C series with the Alexa camera. He rediscovered "the mystical aspect of the image" that Dumont wished to achieve in rendering childhood’s sacred world.

"Leica’s Summilux-C creates an exceptional look, with a purity, a ’milkiness’ of the skins that was exactly what we were aiming for : being in a ’period’ film while having the feeling one is in the present time."

How far he’s come from that first day on his first film, the "Zero Day" when it all began. For Guillaume Deffontaines, that indelible and crazy day took place some twenty years ago. Called up as a second assistant cameraman, as he was loading the seven Aaton 35 cameras used by Claude Lelouch for his 20th-Century take on Les Misérables, the scenery exploded before his very eyes, the explosion threw the script supervisor across the set (she fainted), then the set itself caught fire and turned into an indescribable mess.

"Talk about baptism of fire," he laughs.

(Translated from French by Henri Béhar)