It’s with the drama Rosette by the Dardenne brothers in 1999 that the public discovered Émilie Dequenne, a bubbly, hesitant, but completely inhabited little Belgian actress and that the industry also spotted by awarding her the prize for best actress. She was 17 years old. Will follow The Pact of the Wolves by Christophe Gans (2001), A maid with Jean-Pierre Bacri by Claude Berri (2002), The girl from the RER by André Téchiné (2009), or even Things we say, things we do by Emmanuel Mouret, crowned with the César for best supporting actress in 2020. When you look closely, you realize that she is a born actress. Her beginnings date back to 1993 when, at the age of 12, she studied at the Academy’s theater workshop before joining an amateur troupe, La Relève by Ladeuze.
Since Wednesday June 19, she is showing in the film Survive by Frédéric Jardin. It’s a thriller, the story of a family. Tom and Julia are sailing on their boat with their two children, Ben and Cassie, when their compass starts to go wrong. The storm rises, the poles reverse and the sea literally recedes, leaving this family with what man has sown, thrown away, buried for thousands of years.
franceinfo: I have the impression that Survive is first of all a tête-à-tête with what we ourselves are, men.
Emilie Dequenne: I admit that this brings us back to our condition as a small thing in the face of the immensity of nature. So it remains a real entertainment, action, genre film, realistic and sometimes a little surreal. It’s cinema. However, there is this slight thread which is to say to oneself that indeed, when nature goes wrong, we are really very little things.
Indeed, there too, we have a bit of a Thomas Hobbes side, that is to say that man is a wolf to man, individualistic and even violent.
There is a sequence in the film where we see it very clearly, in fact. There are a few survivors and Julia and her family go to get help and boom, the doors close and there is no one left. The man is indeed a wolf for the man and the character of Julia for me is a mother wolf so the circle is closed.
When you look closely, this film looks like you. You have always been very close to your family. You grew up in the countryside in Belgium, not far from the coal mines in Borinage. We feel that this family has always been a foundation, just like for this mother that you play in the film, her children are her life.
Yes, and it continued. Once I left my family in Belgium, I had a daughter very early. I did things in reverse, I had a child first, the husband later, but it doesn’t matter! I met my husband who has two boys and we created a sort of blended family that turned out to be a very functioning family. The three children truly consider each other brothers and sisters. I consider boys as my sons, so there is really that in me, this mother side. And that’s why I went there without fear… It was unconscious.
“At the time when I was offered the script, I really believed that there was a casting error because I imagined the character of Julia, already physically winning, as a sort of Tomb Raider, well , this thing that I am not at all.”
Emilie Dequenneat franceinfo
And finally, I realize that what works is that she is close to others, to all women, to the majority of women, in any case to the majority of mothers who want to save their child, and that , I have it in me.
There is also transmission in this film. This father and mother want to pass it on to their children, they want to allow them to find their way, this kind of path where they will find themselves, flourish. This is a bit like what happened in your childhood. You danced and sang very early, but above all your father took you to see the backstage of the theater. Was it a revelation for you?
My father and my mother. My parents, both. So I sang by myself because I always loved singing. I danced mainly thanks to my father. He tends to say that I danced before I walked. In any case, my first steps were to go from the armchair to the HiFi system to turn up the sound on the song Go to the beach. I was born in 1981. Then acting, finally theater, my parents took me to see an amateur theater troupe called “La Relève” and seeing its actors play… I remember, I was coming home at home and I had this desire to reproduce the emotion, well any emotion, to recreate something that was not me. It really made me want it. I went backstage at theaters to meet the actors. I didn’t have a movie-loving childhood, nor a movie-loving adolescence, and these amateur actors were my idols.
You will be spotted very quickly. Did you realize quickly that this was where you wanted to be?
I always wanted to play. We don’t express when we are children that we want to be an actor, but we know that we want to act.
“I have always wanted to play and still want to play today. Playing is what I want above all else. To tell myself that I earn my living thanks to the fact that I play, but what a luxury, what a privilege!”
Emilie Dequenneat franceinfo
In this film Survive. What strikes you first is the verb “survive”. Isn’t the goal simply to live better?
There, obviously, it’s a survival film, but for me, in my own life, what interests me is to live, it’s not to survive. Obviously, survival is not a life. Being a survivor is good, but from the moment when after survival, we turn the page and we can live, that’s what’s interesting.
Watch this interview on video: