This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
I had the idea of a man on a desert island, a theme that has since then become somewhat recurrent on television, but I liked this archetypal idea. I didn’t want to tell the story of how he survives, as this has been done so many times. I needed more than that. So I spent some time on one of the small Seychelles islands – a name which evokes luxury vacations. But I made a simpler choice, living with locals for ten days. I would go for walks alone, observing everything and taking thousands of photos. The idea was to avoid the ‘holiday brochure’ aesthetic. My castaway couldn’t love the location – he wants to return home at all costs, as the island is not so welcoming. There are dangers, extreme solitude, rain and insects …
Then I made a classic mistake: my script was too detailed. The film would have been too long. But the basis of the story was strong. The next step was the animatic, which is a very simplified version of the film, drawn with fixed, static images. I discovered that it was sometimes tricky to translate the story into a cinematographic language. There were kinks that I couldn’t smooth out. Pascal Caucheteux, my producer at Why Not Productions, suggested I meet Pascale Ferran. We saw each other regularly over the following months. We had in-depth discussions about the film as a whole, as we were unable to change isolated elements without affecting all the rest. She helped me to identify problems and to make the narrative clearer and more powerful. She also loved the idea that in animation films, the editing is so well thought out before the shots are made – she made some valuable contributions to this process.