“The Diver”: a literary success from here brought to the screen by filmmaker Francis Leclerc

After portraying the whimsical world of Fred Pellerin in The time grabberthe filmmaker Francis Leclerc changes register to bring to the screen The plungera best-selling novel by author Stéphane Larue that captivated thousands of readers when it was released in 2016. The film opens the 41^e edition of Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma, Wednesday evening.

Anyone who has read The plunger was marked by the raw and sharp style of its author, Stéphane Larue. An initiatory tale set in the Montreal nightlife of the early 2000s, the novel tells the story of a graphic design student – ​​portrayed in the film by actor Henri Picard – who, to repay his gambling debts, accepts a job in a trendy restaurant in Montreal, as the holiday season approaches.

Like many, Francis Leclerc fell in love with this brick of 569 pages, shortly after its publication, in 2016.

“It was my girlfriend who read it and said to me: ‘read it quickly, I think you’re going to freak out and I think there’s a film to be made with it'”, confides the filmmaker, interviewed at Log. I read it in 48 hours and it was a big crush.

Francis Leclerc was not, however, the only filmmaker to have fallen for The plunger. In the months following the release of the book, several producers approached Stéphane Larue and his publisher (Le Quartanier) to try to acquire the rights. Leclerc succeeded in convincing the author by writing him a two-page letter in which he explained how he saw his work.

“He flipped over what I wanted to do with his novel, relates the filmmaker who co-scripted the adaptation of the book with Eric K. Boulianne (viking, Before we explode).

“What’s fun is that Stéphane let us adapt his book as we wanted. He’s a cinephile himself, so he wanted us to create another work and do our Diver ours.”

Scorsese-style

The realization of Diver allowed Francis Leclerc to move away from the classic style of some of his previous films such as Barefoot in the dawn (an adaptation of the novel by his famous father, Félix Leclerc) and The time grabber, inspired by the tales of Fred Pellerin. The world of dirty kitchens and smoky bars in Montreal gave him the opportunity to explore another type of visual craftsmanship.

“I wanted to have a 1970s aesthetic,” he explains. I said to Steve Asselin, my director of photography: think of any film with Al Pacino in the 1970s. It’s a cinema that still speaks to me so much today. When I see all the young people tripping on the series EuphoriaI say to them: “Look Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese. It’s the same camera movements.”

The filming of Diver also allowed Francis Leclerc to immerse himself in his own youth, when he landed in Montreal to work as a music video director in the late 1990s.

“The apartment where we see Henri Picard and Jade Charbonneau in the film was my apartment when I first moved to Montreal,” the filmmaker laughs. Nothing has changed in the apartment. Only the roommates have changed. I really liked revisiting the Montreal nightlife of that time. There was something nostalgic for me in this approach.

The plunger hits theaters across Quebec on Friday.