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Dedales
English translation from the original French press kit
René Manzor (Interview)
How did you come to take an interest in the theme of "multiple personality disorder" ?
I heard about it for the first time during a dinner party. And my attitude was immediately a sceptical one. I didn’t believe in it. Then the friend who had spoken to me about it came back to see me one evening with a tape. On that tape, there was a patient who suffered from the disorder. And the first thing that struck me was that he wasn’t faking it. In working constantly with actors, a director is perhaps more tuned in to someone who fakes something. In this case, the thing that struck me was the lack of performance : the real, raw side to what I was seeing. The patient wasn’t putting on an act. He wasn’t even aware that he was being filmed. There was no notion of performance. The only thing that could possibly be compared to what I was seeing was demonic possession. He seemed to be possessed by several entities that took control of his body in turn, without him being aware of what was happening. For me, being put in contact with this was a brutal shock. Like everyone else, I had a vague idea of what schizophrenia and split personalities were, if only from the cinema or books. The "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" side is easy to imagine. But if you add an extra personality to Dr Jekyll, that calls a large number of things into question. And when you reach 7 people living in a single body, each with their tastes, allergies or specific susceptibilities and when the patient passes easily from one to the other, several months apart, without making the least mistake, then you’re forced to admit that the illness exists.
In your writing, you don’t give in to the temptation to use any of the stylistic effects often found in this kind of film ?
You always have to trust the first impressions that you have of things or people. Reflection, more often than not, tends to censor us. The patient that I had seen on tape wasn’t performing. He was sincere. It was a strange blend of clinical reality and hallucination. Therefore, for the psychiatric side of the story, I had to abandon all stylistic effects and distance myself from the spectacular cinematic aspects in order to create a much rawer, much more realistic film. On the other hand, for the police investigation, which is the hallucinatory side for me, nothing was off limits. We had to surf on all the clichés that people have concerning thrillers, give them the impression at times that they were getting ahead of us, only to let them fall into their own trap at the end.
It’s obvious that the film’s form has been determined by the analysis of this pathology. However, what suggested the mythological reference to you ?
When I write, once I have found the structure for my story, I always try to figure out what myth is hidden behind it. Because all we ever do is "retell" things. Since the dawn of time, all the world’s cultures tell the same ten great myths. The myth of the monster imprisoned in the labyrinth is one of them. It immediately imposed itself on me. In Dédales, the labyrinth is the individual with its corridors that all look alike, that distance us from or bring us closer to what we are really, with the contradictions that we can lose ourselves in. The imprisoned monster is our difference. We catch a glimpse of it from time to time in the mirror. We are often ashamed of it. We free it occasionally. Ariadne, the monster’s sister, is the seductive side of us. Like her, we hold the key that opens all our doors. Like her, we are ready to betray ourselves for the love of a stranger. We owe everything to Dedalus, that architect who has shaped our personality and who can justify everything, even our most unlikely deeds. All these personalities are there, in each one of us. Sooner or later, we’ll have to meet them.
We can tell that every element of your film contributes to creating a special atmosphere. For instance, the soundtrack...
I feel that directors don’t use sound enough for the narrative powers that it has. It is used just for its illustrative faculty. This story is made up of fragments of memory, of recurring motifs. The patients don’t only have visual obsessions. They hear particular sounds linked to the origin of their trauma, a sort of aural déjà-vu. In the film, I have tried to get this across by filling the soundtrack with specific sounds linked to the development of the plot... The flashbacks have an aural narrative much richer than their visual one. Here too, we don’t understand the meaning of these sounds until the end of the film. It’s exactly the same with our phobias. Their cause doesn’t lie in the present but in the past.
How did you go about choosing your actors ?
Apart from the talent required to bring to life such difficult characters, there was one primordial condition : finding actors and actresses for whom the film would be indispensable. It couldn’t be just one more movie for them. With the agreement of Sylvie, Lambert, Frédéric and Michel, it became possible to film the screenplay, on an acting level that is. Whatever the difficulty that lay ahead, we could envisage it. Without their exceptional talent and support, this screenplay would probably have become a novel.
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