LE RÈGNE ANIMAL © 2023 Nord-Ouest Films, Studiocanal, France 2 Cinéma, Artémis Productions
Le Règne animal: Thomas Cailley’s fantastic hypothesis
For the opening of Un Certain Regard, the Festival de Cannes 2023 welcomed Thomas Cailley with Le Règne animal. In this film, the director stages a world in which some humans gradually mutate into animals. These “creatures” are supervised in special centres until one day, after an accident involving a convoy, some of them escape into the countryside. Among them, a woman. Her husband and son will do everything to save her. A fantastic quest carried by Romain Duris and Paul Kircher, to be discovered in French theatres from October 4.
Tell us about how your film came about.
I was taking part in a jury in 2019, when I read a scrip written by Pauline Munier, in which some humans were transformed, endowed with animal characteristics. The idea spoke to me straight away, it was at the intersection of all the things I wanted to write, a film which was a fantasy and at the same time totally rooted in our time. It is also about bodies and urges, about desire and disorder, about our wild side. I immediately suggested to Pauline that we write together.
What was the atmosphere on the set?
The shoot was meant to take 11 weeks, but in the end it lasted 5 months, because of the giant fires which ravaged the south-west of France during the summer of 2022. The fires literally surrounded us, to the point where we had to put the film on hold and scout for new locations to replace the settings which had unfortunately been burned. In the final weeks of the shoot before we were forced to stop, there was a very particular atmosphere, on top of the summer light, which you can sense in the film, due to the dryness and the clouds of ash which covered the sky on some days. It gave rise to improbable, strange and threatening lighting effects.
“Through this hypothetical fantasy, the story talks about passing things on, about worlds that we would like to bequeath, about those that we inherit, those we destroy, and those which may yet remain to be invented.”
What can you tell us about your actors?
At the heart of the film is a father-son duo. François, the father, is a complete character. There is something absolute, something romantic about him. It is also a very physical role. These are also the qualities of Romain Duris, who I wanted to meet for a long time. Romain gave him a quickness, a precision, a very pure physicality.
It is rare for a young man like Paul Kircher (who plays the son) to be in almost every shot in a film, which includes action scenes and emotional ones, day and night, for more than 60 days… Paul worked extremely hard, and very conscientiously. He worked for a long time before the shoot with a choreographer to explore his body language, his movements and his perception of the world around him. He has unexpected depths. There is something simmering inside him, an indomitable energy, a wild side.
What did you learn during the course of making this film?
I place a lot of importance on the period of preparation before the shoot. For Le Règne animal, the preparation took more than ten months, because of the complexity of the challenges involved in directing it. As well as the “creatures”, the story by its nature combines intimate scenes with spectacular ones, which needed a lot of preparation work. This meant the preparation was a particularly collective experience. Learning to discuss things with so many teams of different professionals (designers, sculptors, storyboarders, make-up artists, animatronic specialists, etc) was a totally new experience for me and it turned out to be fascinating.
