“When I got to the top of the mountain, and looked back to see how far I had come, I thought to myself that having known what awaited me when I was down there, I wouldn’t have maybe not take the risk of going up”, laughs Marc-Antoine Lemire talking about his first feature film, space mistrala film that he himself produced and deliberately cobbled together in a marginal way, surrounded by a small team and endowed with a limited budget.
“I could never have done this without the generosity of friends and colleagues who offered their time and expertise, often evenings and weekends, to make my vision a reality. I fed my collaborators with dishes prepared by my mother. Everyone from the cinematographer, to the guy who helped us move equipment, to the actors, was paid the same salary. I call it ‘our little communist film’”.
Met in a bar on Beaubien Street in Montreal, Marc-Antoine Lemire struggles to catch his breath when he talks about space mistral. He’s been waiting for this moment for five years — five years of production, writing, administration, filming and post-production — to finally be able to present his vision to the public.
With this film, I wanted to talk about the quest for the elusive, to film what cannot be filmed — transparency, sound — to offer an experience of abandonment and letting go.
After the success met with the short film Pre Drink (2017), shown in a hundred festivals and winner of prestigious awards, including the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and the Gala Québec Cinéma, the filmmaker could certainly have obtained significant funding for the production of his first feature film. It was without counting on his great thirst for freedom.
“I felt a lot of pressure after Pre Drink, as if people were expecting me to continue in the same intimate line. Me, I needed to go completely elsewhere, to make a super exploded work that could not be compared to my previous ones, and I was a little apprehensive about the feedback from the institutions on this unconventional proposal. Then, I like small films, I like DIY and getting my hands dirty. »
A bold proposal
With space mistral, Marc-Antoine Lemire is indeed very far from the beaten track. We meet Sam, a young man in his twenties who loses consciousness in the middle of the street, in the early morning, after being left by his girlfriend.
While his friends are convinced that he was devastated by his broken heart, Sam quickly believes that he has been the victim of an alien abduction, and that these creatures from distant worlds are now seeking to communicate with him. Anxious, frightened and paranoid, he will have to learn that to move forward, you sometimes have to trust life, and accept the inexplicable.
“With this film, I wanted to talk about the quest for the elusive, to film what cannot be filmed — transparency, sound — to offer an experience of abandonment and letting go. This experience comes in three levels. “There is me, as a filmmaker, who had to trust myself and refuse to be guided by fear to carry out this project. There is the character, who experiences this learning on the screen. Finally, there is the viewer. The more the film progresses, the more I install conventions that force him to surrender to what he sees, to stop trying to understand and analyze everything, to put himself in symbiosis with the protagonist. »
Emotion as a driving force
The spectator’s emotion, through his identification with the main character, is therefore at the heart of all scriptwriting and scenographic decisions. To do this, Marc-Antoine Lemire aims the camera at Sam, focusing on his point of view, his perception of the past and the present, marrying his emotional roller coaster and his fictions. Each act – the film is divided into three parts – and each dramatic arc is supported by an aesthetic choice, whether it comes from a change in lighting, in format or in the filter of the camera.
The first act is thus shot in a 4:3 format which expands in subsequent chapters as Sam frees himself from the constraints and thoughts swirling around in his head.
“I approached the first part as a classic Quebec apartment drama. I wanted us to feel that the character was more withdrawn, caught up in his head. In the second act, when he becomes convinced of the presence of extraterrestrials, I wanted to give more space to the image, and show that his environment becomes a threat. I chose black and white and more expressionist textures to illustrate his confusion and his insomnia, this kind of blurring between day and night. »
In the third act, when Sam finds himself in a rather absurd retreat for adults, the format switches to landscape mode, a reflection of the opening that is taking place in his mind. “The objective was not necessarily for people to analyze these details, but for them to have an impact on the feeling”, specifies the director.
To add to the scale of the challenge, Marc-Antoine Lemire also decided to make his protagonist a being hypersensitive to sounds, who looks at the world and evolves according to what he hears. “I wanted the sound to become a character in itself. I actually treat him like that in the script, so he literally interacts with Sam.”
Everything in space mistral, claims a hard-won freedom, but also a desire to destabilize, to be part of the extraordinary. “Right now, there’s so much content being created, so much watered-down content. I’m not interested in adding business that leaves people indifferent in this atmosphere, ”says the man who says he is inspired by the radicalism and audacity of filmmakers like Claire Denis, Leos Carax and Gus Van Sant. ” And Mean Girls ! I try to put Mean Girls in everything I do, because in this film, each shot has a purpose, each shot tells a story. What to keep an eye open for the future.