How did you come up with the idea of the encounter between Marie and Karim? Marie is a character very freely based on a young girl I know. It is here where she encounters Karim, a lover, who is also a bit different in his own way. Why did you choose marginal characters? For you, do they have a particular magic about them? Thus, their encounter has an explosive quality, borderline monstrous but powerfully alive. Yes, they are quite magical โ describing them, having them speak to each other, the first shots with the actors, were joyful moments.
Bloody Marie deals with the question of appearances, how we relate to those appearances and how heavily those appearances weigh upon our lives. Why were you interested in this question? This is basically a story about liberation, about accepting oneself in order to live in freedom.
Marie is someone who can only be candid and sincere. I believe she is a big middle finger to the superficiality of our modern world, but without really knowing it. How did you create the music in Bloody Marie? I sent the script to a musician whose work really moved me, Antoine Mermet. I gave him carte blanche for the first proposal, and I immediately liked what I heard. From there, we truly found a place for the music during the editing of the film.
In the end, this collaboration brought something powerful to the hovering strangeness in this film. What interested you in the question of the mother-daughter relationship? It is something that has been dealt with thousands of times in cinema. What interested me more were the small touches used to evoke this context of confinement and to offer reasons why Marie had no other choice than to seek elsewhereโฆ at all costs. Bloody Marie describes a journey consisting of unfolding events and choices made by the characters.
Did you imagine this string of events as mere chance, or was she taking her own future in her hands? A bit of bothโฆ the film describes the defining moment when she decides that nothing will stop her, but she meets Karim by chance.
