Jérémy Clapin
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What is I LOST MY BODY about and what was the initial motivation to make the film? Trust me, I LOST MY BODY is hard to pitch, the film is perceived more as an experience than a classical story. The audience embarks into a new point of view, that of a severed hand trying to find its body throughout the town. While we are experiencing the world with it, feeling vulnerable when it struggles with rats and pigeons, we also travel with flashback into its past, when the hand was connected to its owner. The second part of the story is about the chaotic destiny of a young Moroccan, from a childhood full of promises in Rabat to his present life in Paris as a simple delivery pizza guy without a future, until he meets Gabrielle, a young girl he falls in love with. |
My initial motivation to make the film was that the subject was very unique, weird, challenging, and also very universal. The main character of I LOST MY BODY is a severed hand, at the same time the film is not talking about a severed hand, the film is talking about the missing part, the rest of the body, us. It is about, destiny, loss, memory, it is also a strong hymn to life, to resilience.
How was the experience of adapting the novel by Guillaume Laurant and how did you collaborate with him?
I will always be grateful to Guillaume for having invented this weird and strong concept and to Marc, my producer, for having found me to direct the film. Guillaume is a great storyteller with a very unique sensibility and it was great to have him on my side each time I needed it. At the beginning I was a bit to close to the book, trusting that what worked in the book would also work on film. Marc and Guillaume really encouraged me to stray from the book and to take all the freedom I wanted to bring my own universe, my own vision into it. One summer, I decided to begin with the main concept; a severed hand missing its body, and to construct all the rest from scratch. As I said, it was more about experimenting than telling a story. For all these reasons, you can say that this is a free adaptation.
This is your first feature after several animation shorts. What were the challenges of the long format?
I’m doing short films because as a creator I need to be free, need to be myself. I don’t have to deal with any marketing or mainstream way of thinking. I want to keep my integrity as an artist and a filmmaker and my only purpose is to complete the film artistically.
My biggest challenge was to not loose that when going on to a feature film.
Because the project was unique, because it was not a family with kids film, I had to convince people in the industry to think in a different way. I had to make my team and the production trust in me, even when the film only existed in my head. Finding a new way to do things and having to convince the production to trust me and go for it. Being able to create and manage a common space for me and the industry. Also, for sure, being able to keep focused for a very long time and to wake up very early during three years.
But the most crucial thing was that my producer and I were working in the same direction. Marc was really supporting me and so was the Xilam studio. And I have to say that without this dedicated involvement of the artists and the production, the whole studio really, this film wouldn’t be here today.
How did you develop the style and the kind of animation you used?
I had an ambitious art direction, with realistic characters and backgrounds and a very specific hand-drawn style. I didn’t want to be constrained by any technology, even though the film had a limited budget. As you know, need is the mother of creativity. You have to find new solutions and to be ingenious. First, we built all the characters and the set in a basic CG modeling. We animated all the characters, the camera moves etc… and the last part of the way was made by animators and illustrators, those who gave the film its final pictorial look.
The use of CG and 2D animation was perfect for me because I was able to take the best of these two different techniques without taking their weaknesses. I had the immersive power of the 3D camera, of the real feeling of the characters and the sets. And on top of this I had the strength and the poetry of the hand drawings.
The subjects you explore in the film are quite elaborate. What kind of audience did you have in mind?
For sure it is a multi-layered film. But I think it is comparable to a lot of live action movies. It is just because people expect animation to be only for kids and family, which actually it is’nt.This is a film for curious people, open-minded people who like to be surprised, who like to experiment with new kinds of cinema, people who don’t want their brains to fall asleep on the sofa.
Who do you consider your influences, both in animation and in film in general?
I love the cinema that is not stuck in one single genre, films that can play with different genres at the same time, that break the rules. Those are the films that made me grow up, too. I both like live action and animation film so it would be Kon Satoshi (PERFECT BLUE, MILLENIUM ACTRESS, TOKYO GODFATHERS) for the animation branch but also many directors from the short film territory. And David Lynch, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Denis Villeneuve, Bong Joon Ho, Hirokazu Koreeda, Jacques Audiard, Quentin Dupieux… so many…
What do you think is unique about European animation compared to films from the USA or Japan?
We are trying and searching in different directions. I guess we are taking risks, graphically but also in the object.
