1/2/2024 0 Comments Julia ducournau servantIt’s not like some biblical illumination falling on you.” It’s like everything: You have to work to be good. “I didn’t know if I could do more than what I had already done. “The element of monstrosity in teenage years is incredibly enduring and real.” When she was 16, a French publishing house caught wind of her poetry and asked her to write a full book. “You always feel like a monster when you’re a teenager. She read too, Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley, and watched David Cronenberg and David Lynch, reveling in their characters - the monsters. When Ducournau wasn’t calmly watching cannibals chainsaw people to death, she was writing poetry and prose and short stories. “I didn’t have a clue what was happening,” she says. Once, at a dinner party when she was 6, her cinephile parents plopped her in front of the TV, and she found herself watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. “I remember I was in my bath at age 5 and I realized I was going to die,” she says. She grew up in an apartment next to the Moulin Rouge with a dermatologist father and a gynecologist mother who casually talked about their patients at the dinner table, sparking her lifelong fascination with the human body: its grossness, its ability to morph and change, its inevitable decay. You can’t help being afraid that if you don’t give the people what they want, then they’re not going to like it.ĭucournau has been driven by an obsessive intensity of focus for as long as she can remember. “The only way was to try.” People wanted Raw 2 - like Raw but more gory. “There is no way I can actually enjoy my life if I think I’ll never be able to do something ever again,” she says. “I knew I was not going to yield to them, and at the same time, you can’t help being afraid that if you don’t give the people what they want, then they’re not going to like it.” When I ask her why she didn’t take a break, she looks at me like I have seven heads, something she does often as we stroll through the museum. “People wanted Raw 2 - like Raw but more gory,” she says, rolling her eyes. Ducournau tells me several times that she hates when people reduce her films, which she sees as complex, genre-hopping creatures, to mere body horror. “It’s a year, every morning, you wake up, you take a shower, you dress, and you sit in front of your computer all day and nothing comes.” On the rare occasion that she did write a sentence, she immediately deleted it, disgusted. “When I say a year, it’s not like a year and I’m going on holidays,” she says. Every single day for an entire year, she woke up, sat down in front of her computer, and wrote absolutely nothing. After the surprising success of Raw - a coming-of-age film that made some people faint when it screened in Toronto - she was determined to write an even better feature, smarter and weirder than her first. Unlike her horrifying, cathartic, and wickedly hilarious films - watching them is like plunging your brain into an ice bath, then strapping it into a race car and driving it off a cliff - this particular story is about Ducournau herself. “But I like smoking.”īack to the scary story, which is not about an adolescent whose skin starts shedding like a snake’s (that would be the plot of her 2011 debut short, Junior), a bloodthirsty young cannibal making her way in veterinary school (her 2016 movie, Raw), or a female serial killer with a metal plate in her head who has sex with cars (that’s Titane). I don’t give a shit about that,” she says. “It’s not because I like fresh air or anything. She warns me that she can’t stay inside the museum chatting for too long without a break. She’s five-foot-nine but gives off the distinct impression that she is six-foot-nine. and flown here from a film festival in Texas, Ducournau, 37, looks soigné: pleated black Prada skirt, black leather Chanel jacket, iridescent-purple Issey Miyake tote bag, matched with scuffed white Adidas sneakers and the remnants of a late-summer tan. The two of us are walking through MoMA on a crisp fall Friday afternoon, in part because it’s one of the Parisian writer-director’s favorite spots to visit when she comes to New York City and in part because the museum happens to be putting on an exhibit called “Automania,” which could be an alternate title for her Cannes Palme d’Or–winning, paradigm-smashing, car-fucking second feature, Titane. Julia Ducournau is telling me a horror story. “My films are layers,” Titane writer-director Julia Ducournau says, “that I leave behind to get to the next skin.”
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