During the 79th Cannes Film Festival, we sat down with the French filmmaker Bruno Dumont to talk about his latest film, “Red Rocks”, which was presented at the Directors’ Fortnight as a special event, followed by a masterclass. This time, the director, always highly recognisable despite the fact that his films may seem wildly different from one another – we owe him, amongst other works, “The Life of Jesus”, “Camille Claudel, 1915”, “Slack Bay”, “Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc” as well as “France” and “The Empire”, not to mention the series “Li’l Quinquin” – embarks on a new experiment and heads to the French Riviera to film very young children, aiming to show ‘not children per se, but childhood itself’, and through that, to evoke once again ‘human nature’, as he always does.

On the love rivalry which ends up tainting the pure and innocent world of these children: ‘It’s the same trio as in “The Life of Jesus”, that is to say two people who love the same person, and that is the primordial conflict of desire. […] Whenever two people desire someone at the same time, it generates violence. It’s the ‘mimetic rivalry’ René Girard was writing about.’

What Bruno Dumont tries to do with every film, he says, is to ‘put the viewer into situations of life which culture need to address. We have to respond to that. Here, I am just showing the human nature, both in its grace and in its violence, without moralising – without saying this is good, this is bad –, in order to give the viewer the possibility of having a cinematic and artistic experience [akin to] catharsis. That’s what catharsis is: confronting our own demons. I can do it through humour, I can do it through drama… but the subjects I tackle are serious.’

On the contrast between the candour of very early childhood and this pure, almost primitive, slightly unreal universe, and the adult behaviours the kids gradually take on: ‘There is something very unsettling for the viewer in seeing such tiny beings on the verge of doing typically grown-up things, and I think that this unsettling feeling is very interesting, because I think it’s actually the adult viewer who is projecting […]. I think they remember their own childhood, but also see the whole germination of what they have become, namely the desire to love and, at the same time, the desire to kill.’

On the very peripheral presence of adults in the world we see on screen: ‘Adults make very brief appearances here, and most of them are quite odd. The idea here was to show both the strangeness of the real adult world and the power of childhood, of carefreeness, of that kind of total freedom in a world I find a bit ferocious, which is in fact our present.’

His approach, Bruno Dumont explains, is ‘not at all nostalgic. It’s about filming that light up above. I rather feel like I’m filming the world of tomorrow, where children will be free, without helmets, without rules, without bans, all that… [What I’m imagining here is] a kind of freedom which seems like a completely wild idea, but that is what we want. We don’t want rules, we don’t want impositions, we don’t want to be overprotected from everything: we want freedom.’

The filmmaker also explains how he went about working with five- and six-year-olds, and stresses that it took ‘a lot of constraints, to create an impression of total freedom: you have to keep them in the frame, their acting has to be precise, their expressions have to be just right… There are cinematographic requirements. This isn’t a wildlife documentary shot with a surveillance camera: it’s real work, and they are real actors.’

Asked about the fact that “Red Rocks” found ‘extraordinary coproducers’ in Spain, Bruno Dumont does not hesitate to say he is weary of the French film ‘industry’, which he finds arrogant, sanctimonious, moronic even, compared to the broad-minded people he worked with on this film.

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