“The torments of the world also overwhelm me, but I try to resist with humor”

Every day, a personality invites itself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Wednesday June 5, 2024: the director and actor, Bruno Podalydès. He is releasing a new film, “La Petite Vadrouille” with Sandrine Kiberlain, Daniel Auteuil, but also his brother Denis.

Bruno Podalydès forms with his brother one of the best-known siblings in French cinema. It must be said that it is no coincidence that he became a screenwriter, director and actor. His father, a pharmacist, made westerns in their living room. From these improvised achievements, he will remember that conviction is the most beautiful weapon, if we associate it with passion. He made this transmission a profession and a way to stay with his brother all the time, despite everything. His first movie, Versailles Rive-Gauchein 1992, was very noticed, as was his short film Soin 1994, selected at the Venice Film Festival and then there was the production ofFarewell Berthe, grandma’s funeral (2012) which was a huge success. Today he is back with The Little Mop with Sandrine Kiberlain, Daniel Auteuil, but also his brother Denis Podalydès.

franceinfo: The Little Mop makes us think of Gérard Oury and Louis de Funès. Humor seems to be the basis of your existence and what you want to highlight?

Bruno Podalydès: Humor always there to accompany us through this difficult journey that is life. With Denis, what united us very early on was the show. It’s the dark side first, people moving around, selling tickets, the red curtain, the decor. And in the cinema, it continues. In The Little Mopthere is still a very theatrical side that Denis and I really like.

We talk about the couple, we talk about the family, we also talk about the importance of trust. What did you want to tell with The Little Mop ?

I feel like if I laugh at something and or share a laugh, we understand that thing quite deeply, quite instinctively and that’s enough.

“If I make cinema, it’s more to show than to say.”

Bruno Podalydès

at franceinfo

In 2003, the film was almost born since that’s when you started taking small family trips, river trips and realizing that you could go from one place to another quite easily by piloting small barges. It’s the starting point ?

Yes, the choice of setting, the fact of sailing in a boat imposes an absolutely accepted pace of slowness on you. We don’t exceed five knots and then there are locks to go through all the time. At the beginning, we say to ourselves: “It had to be a poem” and finally it is one, but in the good sense of the term. We learn to progress, to look at a canal. In each landscape, in each reach, as they say, between two dams, in a slightly new way, we take advantage.

There is inevitably poetry in this film. It’s a group of friends. There is a couple in the middle who needs to make money and they are going to suggest to an investor to organize a romantic trip for him because he wants to seduce a woman. I have the impression that there is a real symbiosis even on the filming location. How did you direct your actors, of which you are also a part?

I drive them like I drive a barge, that is to say gently. This good atmosphere is conducive to playing in the good sense of the term.

“My goal is for the actors to be comfortable so as not to hesitate to dare, to do too much. I don’t really want to be satisfied with being fair. I want it to be a little more intense, as a comedy should be.”

Bruno Podalydès

at franceinfo

I am a good child. We also have this whole French song that I use in each film, especially thinking of my mother, an English teacher who continues to sing a lot. And in terms of imitating films, what we did with our father, these first cinema gestures, was to actually run around the apartment as if it were a western on the big screen.

Poetry is also one of the ingredients of what you offer. There is always a slightly clownish side, the red nose, the white clown too at times. Is that an essential ingredient?

We believe we are clever and original, but we often fall back on old comedy patterns or burlesque. I understood in the middle of filming that the fact that I was a captain all in white, I was the white clown and I was surrounded by Auguste.

Versailles Rive-Gauche, only God sees me (1998) and Public benches (2008) were born from your education. We feel that it, first of all, made you want to bite into humans. You still remain intrinsically human, caring about what is happening in our lives.

I humbly tell myself that reality has more imagination than us screenwriters. And so I draw… For example, if we wanted to sketch the radio, television in the cinema, I find that we quickly become a caricature. If I come to your studio, I will try to look at the little details that make this place exist with its singularity and the comic side or its hidden side, finally, what makes us feel that life passes through there.

When I finished watching The Little MopI wondered at times if you were serious or not.

The torments of the world also overwhelm me, but I try to resist with humor. Obviously, even when I say that, I’m already too serious.