It all started with a meeting between a French filmmaker in search of meaning and a man on the brink of all abyss, polydrug addict, wanderer, touching, aspiring to light: François Créton, the father of his own girlfriend at the time. “He was in rehab, on methadone. »
Maxime Roy made a short film with him in 2018: Beautiful Loser, which has toured festivals and garnered several awards. By entering his world, by attending meetings of alcoholics, by going to detox centers, by cohabiting with him as well, the French filmmaker learned to discover the fragility, but also the strength, of the people who testified. “This battle for everyone to hold out 24 hours at a time overwhelmed me,” he explained from Paris.
However, one day, this astonishing stepfather showed him seven hours of video of his own father at the end of his life, who had filmed himself with his rages, his harshness. “It was also a declaration of love to a son he had never managed to love and whom he had brought up violently. I saw a link there with François, who had just had a son at 53 without really getting down to it. You have to accept your father to become one in turn, ”says Maxime Roy.
From this and encounters with François Créton through a fictional framework woven with reality was born his first feature film: The heroics, a wonderful film about resilience, falling, hope, fatherhood and the quest for wisdom in the midst of a difficult journey. The 50-year-old character, an immature man, likes motorcycling, hangs out with his friends, speaks verlan, wears a jacket on the back of which is written the word “ Loser “, is struggling to take care of his youngest child, and his whole being bears the wounds of existence, but he wants to get out of it. “It’s all fiction, but it’s so much his life…”
By writing the script with his interpreter, directing the scene with four hands, framing the images, Maxime Roy managed to achieve an authenticity sublimated by the charisma of François Créton in the skin of his alter ego Michel. The actor was chosen for the César in 2022 among the 32 French revelations of the year.
There was total trust between us. François had been a young actor and threw himself into it with generosity, in search of constant truth, suddenly stopping to consume. He is old enough to be my father. Sometimes it’s more like me who’s his. He rolled his bump.
“The trust was total between us, specifies the filmmaker. François had been a young actor and threw himself into it with generosity, in search of constant truth, suddenly stopping to consume. He is old enough to be my father. Sometimes it’s more like me who’s his. He rolled his bump. Me, I had washed dishes in a restaurant, worked in the kitchen. When I was 18, at a party where a friend’s father was a projectionist, I fell in love with cinema. Before filming life, I will have spent some time observing people. »
“A difficult subject”
Without the success of his short film Beautiful Loser (in reference to the title of a novel by Leonard Cohen), The heroics would probably never have been funded. “It’s a difficult subject, which arouses prejudice. This environment is poorly represented in the cinema. But the producers believed in it. »
The tribulations of this man, between his victories and his falls, in his family and with his child, among his companions in the fight against drug addiction and his friends in partyincluding his eldest son, are captured as close as possible to the bodies and the breaths.
Maxime Roy affirms that François Créton and he headed together. “The camera follows him in an almost documentary fashion. Looking for the right light, the right distance, I instinctively frame where my eye takes me. I had to find the place where I didn’t exist, where I was completely with them, glued to François above all. »
The filmmaker offered the role of Michel’s father to Richard Bohringer, written for him. “He has empathy for the character, with his past, his experience. After his meeting with François Créton, they took three quarters of an hour before saying a word to each other, smelling each other, then adopting each other. Romane Bohringer, reunited with her father, and Ariane Ascaride are also part of this distribution mixing professionals and non-professionals, with accents of social cinema à la Ken Loach, three fingers of humor, a lot of solidarity, and without gloomy.
Everything is a matter of filiation, since Roméo Créton embodies the eldest son of the music-mad antihero. “Romeo comes with his light, his naivety, his generosity. He emancipated himself through the role. Both father and son became actors while performing.
The heroics was noticed in France and appreciated by critics. Maxime Roy’s next project is underway. This is a social comedy adaptation of the comic book my reverence by Wilfrid Lupano, on the friendship of a thirty-year-old and a sixty-year-old who improvise as robbers to give meaning to their lives.
The heroics hits theaters July 22.