28/02/2023 - The filmmaker sheds light on his political and psychological thriller telling the true and edifying story of a whistleblower walking the corridors of power within the nuclear sector

Discovered in the Venice Film Festival, The Sitting Duck [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jean-Paul Salomé
film profile] is the 9th feature film by Jean-Paul Salomé, who’s linking back up with Isabelle Huppert for a second consecutive film after Mama Weed [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. This French-German co-production based on real events and revolving around a whistleblower working in the nuclear sector who’s forced to pay a high price for her social engagement, will be released in French cinemas on 1 March via Le Pacte.

Cineuropa: How did you come across the true story of The Sitting Duck?
Jean-Paul Salomé: Through a tweet announcing the publication of Caroline Michel-Aguirre’s book. It intrigued me and led to me calling the author. I read the book and thought “Wow, there’s a good film in that and a story to tell”.

What interested you the most: the whistleblowing side of things or being ground down by the system?
Both. This was far more than a traditional whistleblower story. All whistleblowers have problems, it’s not a road strewn with roses, but the path walked by Maureen Kearney was especially thorny. I’d rarely seen such a brutal “way of the cross”, which resulted in an extremely violent attack, both physically and psychologically. It was different and, from a film perspective, it meant the film would have to branch off at a certain point. It starts out along the lines of a political thriller and then, on account of an attack which is so violent it totally shocks the character and turns her life upside down, the film becomes a psychological thriller and a portrait of this woman. I thought it was an interesting and pretty unique film shift.

The nuclear sector is quite a sensitive field, intertwined with state affairs. Were you put under any pressure?
We knew from the outset that we weren’t going to film in French power stations and that we wouldn’t be supported by EDF in telling this story, given the role the company plays in the real story. We shot in coal power plants in Germany which we re-digitized so as to make them wholly nuclear. Yes, there was pressure, especially in terms of the regional funding I usually had, but which I didn’t have this time round. Not from a single region! That’s quite a rare thing; it’s important not to be paranoid but it is a bit strange. The political heads on the committees probably didn’t want to get mixed up in this story. But we got by with other means. Bertrand Faivre (Le Bureau) found a co-production partner in Germany, which allowed us to bridge the financing gap. It’s not the end of the world, the main thing is that the film exists, but clearly, the subject-matter upsets people.

The feminist side of things is important because the whistleblower is under even greater pressure for the fact that she’s a woman in a world of male power.
She goes through all that she does because she’s a woman, but it’s also because there’s a difference in social background. She was moving forwards in the midst of all these men in power who’d mostly been to the same schools (ENA, Polytechnique, Les Mines, etc.), but she wasn’t part of that world. Maureen Kearney thought she was one of them because they all worked together, because social harmony was important at Areva at the time, and she thought she could manage it, and because nuclear power had to work. But the day she went too far, that environment reminded her that she wasn’t part of their world. I think that at a certain point, she must have felt untouchable. She paid a really high price for it. I thought that was interesting: someone close to power who didn’t have a scrap of power herself, but who thought, in her own way, that she was untouchable. But she wasn’t, because of social differences and the fact that she was a woman in a man’s world.

The political thriller-feel of the film which we might associate with the American tradition, at first glance, also existed in French film at a certain point.
Yes, there were Costa-Gavras’ andYves Boisset’s films. But it all disappeared. American film has always perpetuated that tradition, recently via Spotlight, for example, but in French film recent examples are far rarer. I think there’s a nervousness, and funding issues too: people want comedies, and we tell ourselves that French people want them too. It’s a bit of a shame. So when this story came along, I felt quite excited about walking in the footsteps of some illustrious predecessors.

(Translated from French)