"TITANE" Director Julia Ducournau Adding humor is a mixture [Director's Interview Vol.197]

Director Julia Ducournau showed off her extraordinary cinematic sense in her debut feature film Raw (2016), which was about cannibalism and sexual awakening. Her second film Titan (2021) depicts a woman who has a titanium plate embedded in her skull after a traffic accident and develops an abnormal obsession with cars. What's more, this film won the Palme d'Or (the highest award) at the Cannes Film Festival. Having reached the pinnacle of her craft with just two films, Ducournau makes the mistake of assuming she is a genius, but her words reveal a steady and honest approach to filmmaking.

Index

• The secret is to get close to the person
• Learning from the gaze of serial killers
• Adding humor is a mix

The secret is to get close to the person

Q: In your previous work, "Raw," you dealt with cannibalism and sexual awakening, while in this work you deal with the titanium plates implanted in your body and an obsession with cars. How did you come up with these original ideas?

Ducournau: Hmm, I don't know. I wonder how they come to me (laughs). It's probably a process of accumulating. I spend months thinking about the story, and when interesting elements come to mind, I connect them well. From there, I think of various ideas, such as symbolic content, storytelling, my favorite scenes, the overall rhythm, and so on, and gradually construct the story. The process of thinking up a story itself may be the source of ideas.

"TITANE" ©KAZAK PRODUCTIONS - FRAKAS PRODUCTIONS - ARTE FRANCE CINEMA - VOO 2020

Q: The obsession with titanium plates and cars is quite "disturbing," but there are also more "disturbing" characters who make you forget the disturbance for a while. The story seems to be out of control at first glance, but the storytelling never falls apart. How did the director control the whole thing?

Ducournau: As you say, it's a pretty insane story (laughs). How did you control that kind of chaos? I think the secret is to get close to the characters. The encounter between these two unsettling people who were never meant to meet increases tension. What emerges from this is the absolute love between the two. That is the heart of this story, and also its great unexpectedness. I carried out all of my work with that in mind. I never forgot that when I was writing the script, filming, or editing. Thanks to that, I think I was able to control the whole thing without letting the story fall apart.

Learning from the gaze of serial killers