Posted yesterday at 8:00 a.m.
The bottom of the air deals with a subject very present in the news, but from a very singular angle. How did the project come about?
In the last few years, I’ve been interested in climate change, astrophysics, things like that. I started reading about it and I found the situation staggering with all these figures on the disappearance of species, the biomass of individuals, diversity. I was flabbergasted to see humans destroying their own living environment, despite everything that has been written on the subject. I then said to myself: but why are we continuing? Why do we continue!
Many documentaries have addressed the issue. What did you want to bring that was different?
I said to myself that I would make a film which is close to the video game and whose subjective camera is without peripheral vision. With this type of camera, the world around you does not exist. So the characters are isolated. Everyone then lives in their bubble and society is atomized, fragmented.
It’s not an easy movie. It is obviously made to plunge us head first into the threat of climate change?
it’s a bug, a UFO, an exploration film! Above all, it is a film designed for the theatre. We play on the immersive feeling, with the twinkling, the retinal relevance. It also happens in terms of sound. We worked a lot on the low frequencies and that gives the impression, in the hall, that the sound crushes us. In fact, this film is built like a merry-go-round.
Outre le sujet, vous aviez un grand désir de liberté formelle ?
Tout à fait ! C’est une évolution naturelle. Avec les films sur Lemoyne et Godin, j’étais dans une forme plus classique. Avec Miron, j’étais déjà dans quelque chose de plus éclaté. Dans Le fond de l’air, je me suis questionné, avec la productrice de l’ONF [Nathalie Cloutier], on how to transcribe into cinematographic language the feeling that inhabited us. In other words, we reflected on the encounter between substance and form. It is a luxury to choose this formal freedom. But we take risks. For some people, this can be very destabilizing. But the result looks like what we wanted to do.
The film takes place in several places in the world on a recurring scenario: metro-work-sleep in a climate of information overload. But the silent narrator, who films everything, comes across a ghostly pursuer. Is it his conscience?
There is a childish, adolescent side that I really like in the film. Otherwise, the film would be too stuck. Yes, it can be consciousness, but it can be something else too. This character clearly embodies a threat. Is it consciousness? The negotiation ? The plot of the film is very simple: people wake up and their electronic devices tell them the end of the world. One of our models is Christinaby Stephen King, where the radio turns on by itself and the car becomes almost alive.
The film denounces a situation, but does not seek to provide answers?
No. I wanted to convey a feeling. It’s like listening to music or looking at a painting without being in a didactic perspective or waiting for an answer. I just wanted to place the viewer at the heart of an experience that would make him feel a feeling similar to those he experiences on a daily basis in relation to the climate threat and information overload. For me, the cinema is better to bring a good question than a bad answer.