11/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: The French director spoke to us about his debut feature film, which was adapted from a vampire novella written by Russian author Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy

The Vourdalak [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Adrien Beau
film profile], which is competing in the 80th Venice Film Festival’s International Critics’ Week, relates the misadventures of a family grappling with a blood-thirsty being. With its asserted artisanal aspect and thoroughly modern ambiguity, Adrien Beau’s movie feels incredibly personal.

Cineuropa: How does the film differ from Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s novella, which it’s based upon?
Adrien Beau: In the novella, the hero is far more present, he’s very traditional, he’s very courageous and is more intelligent than the countryfolk around him. Sdenka is different too: in the novella she’s very much a secondary character, the typical country woman you find in literature of the time; she’s beautiful and innocent with an ample bust and lovely long hair. She’s convinced her father isn’t a vampire and she behaves very naively. The novella is pretty dated, so in order to modernise it and remove all those elements which irritated us, notably cliches from the time, we changed the characters. Kacey Mottet-Klein’s character is more stupid and boastful, for example, he’s more afraid of Sdenka than the Vourdalaks, and it’s because of her and her personality that he goes to pieces. The film’s co-author Hadrien Bouvier and I were most interested in the love story, the relationship between these two characters.

Horror is depicted very poetically, almost in an artisanal way in your film. How did you achieve this effect?
It’s a brave choice in film terms: you have to accept the set-up if you want to believe in the story. Personally, I wanted the artisanal side to come out, and that’s also why we decided to make the film in Super 16. The way in which the digital cameras which are used in current films capture reality is almost too precise, and the effects created by computers detract from the old-school side of fantasy that I like so much. It’s a very minimalist film; we didn’t have a lot of money and we only had seven actors. I also trained as a sculptor, so I’m used to working with my hands. I was actually the one who made the Vourdalak puppet.

Your film unfolds like a piece of choreography where the actors express more through their bodies than with words. Why this approach?
Ariane Labed, who plays Svenska, is also a dancer, that’s one of the reasons I chose her. It’s true that there’s a theatrical side to my film that I emphasise. The actors’ body movements really speak to me. When Svenska talks, she talks to a cliff, she has hallucinations, and she adopts totally absurd poses, like a statue. I’m not all that interested in realism, I didn’t want to make a period film with costumes and artificial decor. I really like the gap between reality and fiction. Super 16 helped us to turn the film into a ghost among ghosts, as if everyone had been dead for some time. I was really attached to that theatrical side. I love films from the ‘60s and ’70s, ones which reveal the artisanal side of the seventh art, I’m notably thinking of Fellini’s Casanova.

What kind of relationship do you have with genre film?
I love monsters. I create lots of sculptures, especially of animals, and in my films I also look to create my own creatures. It’s not really horror or violence that I like and that I look for in genre films, it’s bodily transformations, monstruous creatures. I wanted to create a vampire who exudes an artisanal and childlike air. I like the gap between cruelty and naivety, it allows me to explore the dark side of the world, a bit like in fairy tales.

Your characters’ costumes are immaculate, both beautiful and decadent. What role do they play in the film?
For Svenska, we were probably inspired by the incredible dresses worn by Pasolini’s Medea. My costumer director Anne Blanchard and I decided to dress her a bit like a bride, covered in jewellery, as if she’d always been waiting in the woods for her lover; that’s why she’s covered in leaves. Her characteristic green tones remind us of her ruinous state, as if she were rotting from the inside and this state were manifesting itself externally through her clothes.

(Translated from French)