Interview ǀ “It’s about love” – Friday

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In shimmering sunny images, François Ozon tells the story in Summer 85 about the bittersweet first love of two boys who spent some exciting weeks together in Normandy in the 1980s. Ozone fulfilled a childhood dream with the adaptation of the novel. A conversation about great feelings, the power of memory and artistic creation as therapy.

Friday: Your feature film “Summer 85” is based on the youth novel “Tanz auf mein Grab” by Aidan Chambers. You yourself read the novel when you were 17, so you were about the same age as the two protagonists. What impression did the story make on you back then?

François Ozon: I remember being very impressed with how openly the novel told of the love between two boys. Back then, gay stories were mostly full of shame and guilt, while our own, just beginning life was overshadowed by AIDS. The book was there like a ray of sunshine, it was funny and touching. And I liked that it wasn’t about homosexuality as a topic, but that it was just a love story, just between two boys. Even then I imagined making my first film out of it …

How much did your memory of the novel differ from the reread over three decades later?

I had even written a script for it when I was about 18, at that time I told the whole story in strict chronological order, left out many scenes with the parents and the teachers and concentrated entirely on the romance. It wasn’t until I read it again three years ago that I realized how well the structure of the novel worked. It’s built like a puzzle and you only gradually understand what happened. And I liked that it was told from the perspective of Alex, the younger of the two.

At the same time it is a drama with thriller elements, the film is about first love as well as loss and grief, often with grand gestures. Not an easy balancing act, is it?

I was guided by one thought: I wanted to make exactly the film that I would have wanted to see myself when I was 17. That may be irritating, but that’s how it is in youth: one moment great drama, the next one laughs again. And so every scene has a different tone of voice, I wasn’t afraid of extremes, it felt quite natural to me. Even as a teenager, one day you feel like you’re in a Spielberg spectacle and the next day like you’re in a Fassbinder melodrama.

Photo: E-Press Photo.com/IMAGO

Francois Ozon, Born in 1967, grew up in Paris, studied directing at the La Femis film school there. After his debut Sitcom In 1998 he was featured with award-winning films such as 8 women, The time that remains and Frantz to one of the most internationally successful directors in France.

Alex cannot talk about what he has experienced for a long time and is encouraged by his teacher to write about it. Do you see yourself a little way in this figure? Is filmmaking your way of processing what you’ve experienced?

Art can be like therapy. Alex becomes a writer through the experiences. But I also like that we get told everything from him. Is that the reality? Or his imagination? The youth is the moment when a lot turns out to be an illusion and one realizes that the dream prince does not even exist. But I didn’t see that when I read the novel. I needed the distance, had to grow up a bit to tell the story.

Alex ends up saying it’s important to escape your story.

It is also the last sentence in the novel and it is very ambivalent. For me it has a lot to do with origins. Alex comes from the working class, but through the difficult experiences Alex discovers his talent for writing and his sexuality. So the film is also about the freedom to find yourself and your own path. Even if it is tedious and painful.

The film was made before the pandemic, was supposed to be shown a year ago at the Cannes Film Festival, which was then canceled, and is now starting after a long lockdown. It now appears in a double sense as from another era.

There is a certain nostalgia, as if the eighties were paradisiacal conditions. They weren’t at all. Even then we were affected by a pandemic, by AIDS, and although the novel was written before that, it became a cult in the gay community because it was understood as an allegory with its discussion of love, sexuality and death. I shot on real 16mm film and not digitally to relive the sensuality of this bygone era. It was very unusual because it’s grainier, not as razor-sharp as digital images. The colors are different too, but that’s why it works so well in my eyes.

How did you experience the last year?

It was a forced pause that did me good. But I shot again last August, the new film is now premiering in Cannes. I really can’t complain.

Large parts of the cultural sector have suffered badly from the lockdown. Are you worried about the cinema?

Of course, I wonder if we are losing the younger generations to streaming platforms, but in France cinema has great resilience and reaches a lot of people. I am not doing cinematography for cinephiles, but for a wide audience, and I will keep making films for the big screen as long as I can.

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