Marine Atlan reflects on her pictorial direction of Alexis Langlois’s "Queens of Drama"

You started working with Alexis Langlois before this film.

Marine Atlan: They were already writing this film when we met for their short film Les Démons de Dorothy. We quickly realized that we shared a common cinephilia and a love of mise-en-scène. We went on to make two music videos together, and Queens of Drama, which took five weeks to shoot last summer.

That’s a very short time!

MA: We had to think in terms of budget and make some radical choices, such as shooting almost entirely in a studio. This had been Alexis’s idea from the writing stage, but it also allowed us to tighten things up. It was in Brussels, in an old printing works that the production design team arranged as a "black box". This five-week shoot was also made possible by a close collaboration between the production design team -Barnabé d’Hauteville and Anna le Moël as co-production designers- and the image crew.

The artificial aspect of the studio is part of the film’s aesthetic.

MA: Alexis trusts viewers: "It’s all fake, it’s all for show", as is repeated in the film, but that doesn’t preclude emotions, and the studio is part of that. The paradox is that the only part shot on location is the "official" music video for Mimi’s first hit, which is the most fabricated of Mimi/Louiza Aura’s performances. For a while, we were still thinking of shooting the nights on location, but given the film’s economy, Alexis instigated the decision to shoot everything in the studio, in a fake street.

Does Alexis accompany her script with visual references right from the start of your work?

MA: They have a lot of imagery involved, of course. Their writing is also very imaginative and baroque, especially rhythmically. There’s a very clear consistency between their writing and mise-en-scène.We had been informally preparing the film for a long time, and more intensely, I’d say, three months before shooting. The two of us started by making the shotlist in the chronological order of the screenplay. We had a lot of fun drawing on our shared references, from classic American cinema, through the golden age of the musical, to the popular cultural references we both have as children of the 1990s. We also share emotional references that we grew up with, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the short film. This helps us to get to the heart of the matter.

The film is constantly referencing and commenting, and the 3^rd degree is constant, which is exhilarating but also a little dizzying.

MA: The film is very dense, yes, as were Alexis’s short films, and we asked ourselves how we could squeeze all that into two hours, and create quieter moments that leave room for emotions. The set-up takes this into account, and we know at which moments the staging needs as much technology as possible, and when we can have a simpler shot - reverse shot type coverage.

The five songs are the moments when the filming is most "spectacular", but the look remains very homogeneous all the same.

MA: Yes, it’s always the same lenses and the same camera, except for the very last song where we multiplied the filming supports. We had a RED Gemini, with a TechnoZeiss set supplied by TSF, a 135mm Elite T1.3, and a 25-250mm Angénieux zoom with an anamorphic attachment, which Guillaume Gry, the first AC, tuned with a home-made accessory to give a cat’s-eye look to the bokeh, which is very present in the film.
The vision guiding our technical choices is to make a "Technicolor of the 2000s", involving both modernity and this nostalgic imagination. Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story was in the background - even if we didn’t have his resources, and the aesthetics of the film have nothing to do with it! We tried to maintain continuity in terms of saturation, and even the effect that over-saturation can have on film.

With "solarized" areas?...

MA: This is achieved by choosing optics, filters (there’s always a ½ glimmer on the camera, a Pancro Mitchell B, vaseline in variable doses, and occasionally a streak filter) and creating LUTs with Pierre Mazoyer, with whom I grade all my films. We had a lot of them: it’s all about experimentation, sometimes you have to readapt... We ended up using five or six LUTs. In addition to Minelli’s and Sirk’s Technicolor, our main references for the parties in the club were Cassavetes’ Murder of a Chinese Bookmaker, for its grain and texture. De Palma was another important inspiration for thinking about ellipses, sequences that interweave with cross-fades...

And the split-diopter!

MA: Yes, Alexis loves it. Phantom of Paradise was an important reference. And we had to insert the TV talent shows of the 2000s into all of this. I rewatched episodes from the Star Academy era to see how they were lit. It was interesting to see the bridges between classic cinema and TV, which has taken on codes such as the cross-fades and three-point lighting. These different image regimes responded quite easily to each other, even if there was a real difference in the way they were covered. In the club, the camera with its zoom lens is a spectator in the audience looking for shots at the same time as the show is taking place (with Alexis shouting directions at me during the takes, and the music blasting), and we see the stage lights in the frame. On TV sets, everything is more controlled, with very long, choreographed tracking shots.
The song "Damnée d’amour" is closer to Lynch and more experimental cinema, while the video for "Pas Touche" is a tribute to Britney Spears’ "Sometimes"! We have a lot of fun adding cinema into it, using the codes of musical (with low frontal framing, a symmetrical composition like in a Gene Kelly film), and including the narrative that continues in the background of the song. I’m thinking of the "Tu peux toucher" oner, which was technically the most complicated, on the set of the TV show set in 2015. Mimi’s dancing, then we pan to LED screens in front of which we discover the hosts, the camera pulls back and Mimi enters the frame.

... And we understand that she was singing live on that TV set.

MA: The framing and lighting are complex –plus we have to cast Mimi’s footage to the LED screens, but we don’t have a 2^nd camera to do it live, so it’s actually a take that was shot beforehand, and we have to be in sync with it... We have to conjure up the TV imagery, without the means of TV: the decision to buy these LED screens, for example, was carefully thought out with the set designers. With this oner, the idea is to show both the character’s song, to tell the touching and pathetic aspect of her performance, and to take a step back and have a look at the set-up – this third degree.

When you know you’ve got four hours to shoot it, you’re driven by a great faith in the film, and Alexis has an energy that becomes collective, without which we couldn’t get through it. They call themselves a hype woman (laughs!): they transmit something powerful to us that makes us capable of doing this. The choreography for this shot was thought out very early on, in that black box. Most of the time, they were three on the electrical crew...

You were saying you installed battens?

MA: Yes, in this black box in which we filmed all the TV sets. We built the bedrooms elsewhere and used the rooms upstairs to have daylight entrances. The street exteriors were made in an area of the printing plant where there is exposed piping. In the black box, we worked extensively with tungsten PARs on desks. There were about twenty of them. Apart from that, we had 2 SkyPanels, a 2kW Fresnel bridge and a few SL1s. With Manon Corone, the gaffer, we decided to work as much as possible without LEDs. Favoring tungsten, we wanted to link our aesthetic to the history of the studios. For the bedrooms, it’s quite classic: HMI for the daylight entrances, and tungsten inside, such as Lucioles...

To "degrade the signal" and give it all those layers of time in some way, how did you play with the recording media? Did you refilm shots on TV screens, for example?

MA: We wanted to but couldn’t, so these effects were done in post-production (on Da Vinci). We did something a bit surprising with the RED Gemini, for which Pierre had created LUTs whose saturation and contrast deliberately created noise. My exposure was quite straight, and it was the LUTs that "damaged" the signal. During color grading, Alexis, who is color-blind, didn’t want any more of the RED’s colored noise. So, we removed it (rather than using other LUTs, to keep the saturation that suited us), and this operation resulted in this matter that we found interesting: there’s still RED noise, plus added grain, plus this de-noisestep. I could have proposed a rougher image.

But it gives a flatness to skintone that works well with the subject matter.

MA: The texture of skintones is important. We looked at the "beauty" filters on Snapchat to see what they did to the faces, especially for the part with YouTuber Steevy, played at all ages by Bilal Hassani. It’s the aesthetic of the 2000s, with very smooth, radiant skintones. So, we needed texture, but not just anywhere: there’s more of it in the backgrounds than on the faces. The characters want to go towards the light, towards the spotlight, but it damagesthem.

We worked with followspots that can blind, "burn out", to the point where you can’t see the person but just their ghost. The filtering, foreground lighting and props were all carefully chosen to add sparkle and shine. Vaseline modulated the sharpness of the shimmer. We wanted to work the flamboyance into the tears and sweat. The drama radiates to the very end.

Do you work with a constant T stop?

MA: Pretty constant. I do a lot of testing, during which I look at which aperture I like the lenses most and try not to deviate too much. With the prime lenses, it was T2.8 ½. We insisted on having these lenses, which represented a certain cost, also because Alexis loves the distortions of short focal lengths, a taste that comes as much from Brian De Palma as from YouTube. With the zoom, we go from T5.6 to 8 or even 11 with the anamorphic attachment, plus the cat’s eye on the iris which takes me to T16. So, a lot of light! To "spare my strength", I took a less expensive camera body that I know and like.

What guided the shooting schedule?

MA: We started by shooting the club scenes. Then we alternated between the black box for the TV set scenes and the other locations, to give the set designers time to change the sets. Anaïs Couette, the film’s first assistant director, managed to keep a certain continuity for us, and we ended with the concert in 2055, filmed with the RED, but also in Super 8, Hi-8 (we found a camera and tapes) and an iPhone.
Alexis said that this final sequence is a Frankenstein creature made up of all these periods in the film, which takes place between the 2000s and an imaginary future, but also cites the 50s and 80s. It was about being of all times. For me, the final sequence is moving, because it’s also the film’s political proposition, a queer utopia in the making, right from the set. The camera is multiplied for this last sequence, when I give an iPhone to Esther Bourcereau, the camera trainee, and Anaïs Lesage, the 2^nd camera assistant, also operating... There are four camera operators on the set, and four different gazes.

This mix of media works very well, as you immediately recognize the visual markers and the eras they conjure up.

MA: This timelessness is also one of the film’s ambitions, since the imaginary world is so vast that we’re able to distance ourselves from a discourse on our contemporary times. These references are drawn as much from cinema as from popular culture, and that’s also Alexis’s strength, as they transform things that may have been denigrated for a long time and puts them in the place of cinema. That’s why their work as a filmmaker is in line with their political thinking. And so, we can only accompany the film as best we can. The shoot was just like that, joyful and generous.

(Interview conducted by Hélène de Roux for the AFC)