Interview With "The Animal Kingdom" Director/Writer Thomas Cailley

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[00:00:31] Next Best Picture Podcast and this is Dan Bears interview with the writer and director for

[00:00:36] Beyond More Kingdom. Tomah Kelly.

[00:01:06] Welcome everyone to the next best picture podcast we are speaking with Tomah Kieh,

[00:01:34] the director and co-writer of the new French film The Animal Kingdom Tomah. Thank you so much

[00:01:41] for joining us today and we have a new one. Thank you very much.

[00:01:48] I wanted to start by asking when it was that you first read a Poline Runez original version

[00:01:57] of this script and what about it intrigued you enough to want to make the film.

[00:02:02] I read it totally by the way. The script that Poline was writing in 2019 at the beginning of 2019,

[00:02:13] the story was quite different from the one I read absolutely by chance Poline's first screenplay

[00:02:23] early in 2019 when she was still writing it and it was quite a different story from what Animal Kingdom

[00:02:30] eventually became but there was already this idea of human animal hybridization and what I

[00:02:36] liked about it was that this metaphor seemed very simple and universal in a way that it could

[00:02:43] feed several layers of a bigger story so it enabled us to work for instance on the very intimate

[00:02:50] private question of the body and how the body changes but also question of a social order,

[00:02:56] how social interactions change and even how an entire society changes.

[00:03:02] And as fate would have it as you were working on developing the film,

[00:03:07] society did change quite rapidly with the COVID-19 pandemic. Did your experiences

[00:03:14] and what you saw happening around the world during 2020 affect the development of the film at all?

[00:03:22] Yes, it was very strange because at the beginning of the crisis of COVID,

[00:03:33] we had almost the impression that reality would be a trap and fiction.

[00:03:36] It was really very strange at the very beginning of the COVID crisis,

[00:03:41] we had the impression that reality was catching up with fiction and we nearly stopped writing

[00:03:46] because what was going on outside seemed more embodied, more important than what we were writing.

[00:03:54] It became very interesting a few months later when people started talking about being back to

[00:04:01] normal, when in fact everything in society had changed and we were just pretending that we had

[00:04:06] gone back to normal and that was basically the same as what we were writing because our point of

[00:04:13] view is we don't start with the beginning of the anomaly, the transformations. We're not

[00:04:19] saying what happens to patient zero. Our story starts two years after when society thinks it has

[00:04:27] had time to digest this existential change but in fact it's being caught out by shifts and events.

[00:04:36] And I love just how everything that happened in the world sort of dovetailed really nicely

[00:04:42] with the themes of this movie because between working on your last film and this film,

[00:04:50] you also became a father and this is a story that is very much about the relationship between

[00:04:57] a father and son in which the father tries to impose his worldview on his son,

[00:05:05] leading him to, leading him in some ways to lose him. And I'm wondering how did working on this film

[00:05:13] affect your view of your own fatherhood or was it the opposite that your own fatherhood influenced

[00:05:21] the story you were telling? I think it's both. Nearly the most important question for me was

[00:05:34] this big question of what happens in the transmission between a parent and child. How children live

[00:05:42] with what we try to pass down to them and also how they change up. I mean that's obviously very

[00:05:49] central to Ponceaux and Emil. Emil naturally evolves in the film but so does Ponceaux, his father. In fact,

[00:05:58] Ponceaux evolves nearly as much, if not more than his son. He's going to have to learn

[00:06:07] to make his actions fit with his words. At the beginning of the film he's a character who's

[00:06:13] full of certainties but who comes a long time, who takes a long time to have the courage of his

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[00:06:51] When he finally does, it's a really beautiful moment at the end but I wanted to move on to talk

[00:06:58] a little bit about because you have such wonderful shooting locations in this film. But you're

[00:07:04] shooting in dense forest with lots of trees and the lines and all sorts of dangerous things that

[00:07:15] one would imagine would impede the filmmaking process. So how did you, how are you able to shoot

[00:07:22] in this environment while still being respectful of the natural vegetation that was there and not

[00:07:29] destroying it? We have turned into a forest in the east of the gaspoll, which is in the west

[00:07:38] of France, which is the biggest forest in Europe. And most of the forest is given over to industrial

[00:07:54] foresting. It has a tiny monoculture. The tines are in straight lines and it's a rather sad

[00:08:01] violent forest that doesn't have much light, that doesn't have much diversity. And yet,

[00:08:08] there have remained corners of this forest that are full of biodiversity, that are OACs of

[00:08:15] primal forest. And it's very strange approaching these spaces because you have to pass by hundreds

[00:08:24] and hundreds of meters of these silent fields of trees and then you arrive at this extremely

[00:08:31] different, nearly screaming part of the forest because there's so many animals there. And that's

[00:08:37] actually really the story of animal kingdom because it's a film about a world that's coming alive

[00:08:44] again that's reconciling itself to itself. Of course, we tried to be as respectful as possible

[00:08:52] of where we were filming, which means walking one by one in a long line carrying film equipment,

[00:08:59] which is of course a great loss of time, but it also imposed a silence and a respect for the place

[00:09:07] where we were shooting. And in a way was quite close or brought us quite close to making an

[00:09:14] animal documentary, which is a good thing because that's the weird location of this film in the sense,

[00:09:20] which is that of course there are scenes with actors, but we're also trying to record something vital,

[00:09:26] something wild, something that is uncontrollable. That's really lovely to hear because it

[00:09:31] reflects again the story so so beautifully. I know we're coming up on the end of our time together,

[00:09:38] but I wanted to have one last question because the cinematographer for this film is actually your

[00:09:46] brother David and working on a film that is so much about family. Did that change your working

[00:09:56] relationship at all or what is it like working with your brother on a film like this?

[00:10:02] David was a very moving thing. David and I started working on film at the same time.

[00:10:19] Director, David was the director of photography on my first feature film and now we were making

[00:10:24] the second feature film of mine together but between those two films, David had worked on 10 other

[00:10:31] films. That's the peculiar place of the film directors that ultimately we make very few films.

[00:10:37] You know, we make a film ideally every two, three or four years while technicians make a lot of

[00:10:43] films and so when we started shooting I realized how much David had evolved and I was the first

[00:10:53] spectator of his evolution, his competence and that was very moving for me but you know making this film

[00:11:00] was not just making a film with my brother, it was making a film with my brother in the area where

[00:11:05] we grew up, we shot in our middle school or high school the town we came from so there was a lot

[00:11:10] of meaning attached to this and it was very moving. And that meaning I think comes through in the film

[00:11:16] that feels very personal and very deep into these characters and so thank you for sharing that and

[00:11:25] again thank you for your time with us today and merci pour le film. Thank you,

[00:11:31] thank you Daniel. Hey everyone thank you so much for listening to Dan Bears interview with the

[00:11:36] writer and director for the animal kingdom. Tomake here on the next best picture podcast. The animal

[00:11:42] kingdom will be released in theaters and on VOD from magnet releasing Magnolia Pictures on Friday

[00:11:49] March 15th. You have been listening to the next best picture podcast we are proud to be part of

[00:11:54] the evergreen podcast network and you can subscribe to us anywhere where you subscribe to podcasts.

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[00:12:16] Thank you all so much for listening as always and we will see you all next time.

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