French Director Léa Mysius on Second Film The Five Devils – The Hollywood Reporter


Thirty-three-year-old French director Léa Mysius launched onto the international scene with her 2017 debut, Ava, the story of a teenager slowly losing her sight, which won the SACD Award at the Cannes festival’s Critics’ Week and was a hit at the French box office.

Her ambitious follow-up, The Five Devils, moves closer to genre territory with the story of Vicky (Sally Dramé), a young girl with a magical sense of smell who is able to transport herself into the buried memories of her mother (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and her love affair with Vicky’s father’s sister Julia (Swala Emati). Besides directing, Mysius is a busy screenwriter, working with Claire Denis on her Cannes Grand Jury prize winner Stars at Noon, and contributing to Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District, Arnaud Desplechin’s Oh Mercy! and André Téchiné’s Farewell to the NightThe Five Devils, which premiered in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and was a highlight of this year’s Sitges fantasy and horror festival, screens Nov. 5 at AFI Fest in Los Angeles. Wild Bunch International is selling the film worldwide at AFM.

What was the idea that led to this movie? 

The very first thing that I had in mind was an image of fire at night and a young woman screaming in front of the fire. It was that image. Then I had the idea of a little solitary girl with this gift of having this extraordinary sense of smell which somehow connects to memory.

The first image connected to this passionate love I imagined this little girl would have with her mother. I first thought the story would be about the daughter trying to re-create the figure of the mother through the memory her smell would provoke in her. Then I realized, rather than having a mother who’s dead, it was more interesting to have a part of this woman, this living mother, which would be dead, and the daughter, through this gift of bringing memories to life, would re-create or give life again to this part of the mother. Instead of having her own memories, she would enter her mother’s memories, which gave a fantasy twist to the story. 

The Five Devils is very focused on the female characters — Vicky, her mother and Julia. The father, Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue) is very much secondary and peripheral. 

During the development of the script, that was something I heard a couple of times, that Jimmy, the husband, wasn’t developed enough as a character. I found it quite funny because you never hear that about any female character. Maybe I have to work on making my male characters more three-dimensional. (Laughs.) No, of course this was exactly my intension, to have this man be the opposite of the usual male character, to have him step back and withdraw, not just from the main plot of the film but also from the love story. That’s part of his character. 

Where did you find the young girl, Sally Dramé, to play Vicky? She’s incredible. 

She was signed to a child agency, and I don’t normally use those because often it’s the parents of the kids pushing them to be an actor or singer, of whatever. But here, her parents just wanted her to have the experience, more as a hobby. For the casting, we asked maybe 40, 50, 60 girls to make up potions [Vicky creates mixtures of scents to use her power to travel into past memories] and talk to us about them. I immediately spotted Sally because of her incredible face. With those big eyes she has something ageless about her.

Les Cinq Diables

Les Cinq Diables

Courtesy of Trois Brigands Productions

Even though this film doesn’t have a huge budget, it’s incredibly ambitious both in terms of story and also visually, with those huge fire scenes that frame the story. How challenging was the film to shoot as your second movie? 

Everything was difficult, because I decided from the start that for this movie, my second movie, I was going to take all the risks I hadn’t taken with my first. I wanted to confront all the challenges. The first was the budget. We had a small budget and the feedback was the script was too ambitious for the budget. We wanted 40 days of shooting. It was cut down to 36. Our crew wasn’t huge but it was still sizeable. The whole shoot was trying to find this balance while not restraining or restricting the ambitions and expectations I had for the film. 

I’m young and I was surrounded by a very young team, so we had enough energy and enough conviction to to face all these challenges. Every single person in the crew told us that this was the toughest film they ever had to do. There were so many big scenes. The fire scenes of course but even the scenes in the gym with the girls doing gymnastics were really difficult. The editing was an exhausting process. After every day of shooting I was exhausted. I’m still exhausted. 

A central theme of the film is the relationship between the daughter and her mother. But the movie also seems to me to be about the daughter asking herself if her mother would have been happier, would have been able to live the life she wanted to live, have the relationship with Julia, had she, the daughter, never been born. 

That’s interesting because I had never put it This way for myself. For me the question was more an existential one, one that we all ask ourselves: why was I born? Vicky asks herself why am I Vicky Solar and not someone else? As a child, this was something I was obsessed with. If my parents hadn’t met, I never would have been born. Or if I was conceived a second earlier, I wouldn’t be me.

I wanted to put that question at the heart of the film. Then I read a text by Pascal Quignard, a French writer, novelist, and he talks about “the invisible scene,” which he says is a child’s conception of the world before they were conceived, which Quignard says is a scene of chaos, of massacre. That’s how I came up with the scene of the fire, that image of the world before Vicky is conceived. And for Vicky, the question to her mother is not: ‘would you have been happier if I was never born?’ but rather ‘did you love me before I was born?’ Because she has this fear, when she sees her mother and Julia together, that her mother could love someone else and that she might be taken away from her. So Vicky’s journey is towards more maturity, to actually become more independent to be able to let her mother love another person. 

What are your plans right now? Are you working on something?

Yes, I am working on my next project, but it’s really hard for me to find exactly what the real subject matter should be. I think the third film is a very sensitive step in a career. The first felt very organic, it just came out. For this, my second, I had a real desire to put all my desires into the movie, to take every risk. Now I feel there are many doors open to me, but at the same time, it’s very important I choose the right story and the right form, also the right political direction. I want to show people where I stand and in what context I see my career. I also work a lot as a screenwriter, which nourishes my work as a director. Deciding on the next film is quite complex for me and takes some time.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

This story first appeared in The Hollywood Reporter’s Nov. 2 daily issue at the American Film Market.





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