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Director's Statement
desire and solitude
Above all, and I must insist, HIGH LIFE is not a science fiction film even if there are healthy doses of fiction - and science thanks to the precious participation of the astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau, specialist in astroparticle physics and black holes. The film takes place in space but it’s very grounded.
men and women without a past
We made a point of not “over-fictionalising” the characters: they have all probably committed terrible crimes, but we don’t pursue it. Their history, collective or individual, takes place in the present and – who knows? – in the future, even if for most of them the future will take the form of a cemetery under the stars. I see them all as a contemporary community, utopians, hippies of a special sort, who have gone from juvenile detention centres to prisons and who do not want to live in any society other than their own.
set design
My instructions were very simple. It is a prison, a sort of squat house, drab, dirty, poorly lit. There is a main corridor and cells on both sides. On the floor below are a medical lab, a morgue and a greenhouse garden. I was dead set on having that garden. How can you keep up the hope of return if earth isn’t part of the voyage? That earth is their Earth, the only thing that reminds them that they are earthlings, men and women of the earth. In fact I wanted to avoid the hell of special effects. The same goes for weightlessness. There is no need for weightlessness because the spaceship is accelerating close to the speed of light. Terrestrial gravity – gravity in every sense of the word – re-establishes itself, because gravity is the effect of acceleration. If I had to film actors hanging from cables against a green screen, I’d never have made the movie. And with it’s near absence of special effects. I hope the film will still have a special effect on viewers.