We sit down with French husband-and-wife filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani to talk about their Competition selected film ‘Reflection In A Dead Diamond’ – a bold, sensual, trippy and gory merging of James Bond and ‘Death In Venice’.
How best to describe Reflet dans un diamant mort (Reflection In A Dead Diamond), one of the most kinetic, sensual and bizarre films in this year’s Berlinale Competition?
Imagine the fever dream of a dying James Bond who looks back at his career in espionage, skipping through his memories of violence, sex, leather-clad assassins and shiny things, while Peter Strickland and Quentin Tarantino shorts tighten with delight.
That’s one way to sell to French directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s inventive and cine-kaleidoscopic valentine to everything from the Italian pulp comics Diabolik to Philippe de Broca’s Le Magnifique via 1967’s Bond spoof Casino Royale.
But Reflection In A Dead Diamond goes beyond homage or pastiche – it’s about memory and the possibilities of cinema as an artform.
After expressing their love for Italian giallo and Spagetti Westerns in The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears and Let The Corpses Tan, the directing duo are now in Competition (a bold move on the part of the Berlinale), and we’d be very surprised if it went home empty-handed.
Best Director(s)? Best Cinematography? Who knows – but it is one of our standouts in this year’s line-up.
Euronews Culture sat down with Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani to talk about their most ambitious work to date, the inspirations behind their freely associative ideas, and what has to happen in order to create a “cinematic orgasm”.
Euronews Culture: Your previous films saw the you two tackle the giallo genre as well as the Spaghetti Western, and this time it’s the 60s-70s Euro Spy genre. There are references to Diabolik, OSS 117 and obviously James Bond. But what is it about this genre that fascinates you?
Bruno Forzani: These movies were done in the 60s and were copycat James Bond movies. They were done with no money. Nowadays, when you approach those kinds of movies, it’s more fun – like OSS 117, Kingsman, Argylle… But for us, we wanted to approach the genre from the first degree, so to speak.
Hélène Cattet: These low budget films had to compete in the cinemas against the real James Bond films, so they had to get really creative. It’s inspiring, really. Also, through the Euro Spy films showed a fun world, a limitless world with luxury, pop… We wanted to hark back to that and by making our film, we also wanted to talk about the actual world by contrast.
BF: And these films created this fake reality in which the hero was violent but it was in a fun, kitschy way.
HC: Yes, and in our film, it’s all there. Except our hero didn’t get to save the world!
BF: What I’m about to say is a bit clichéd, but we live in a very violent world and even if we’re not in conflict areas, we are constantly confronted with news. And I think that our film and the way we use violence is a cathartic way to evacuate that. Much like Tarantino. I love Tarantino but we don’t want to copy him. But the way he approached violence in his last movie, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, is similar to the way we were approaching it when we were writing the script. But we don’t want to be Tarantino, and we also don’t see our movies like homages – we use the language of these Euro Spy movies to tell our own story, but it’s just a starting point.
HC: The aim is not to make quotations as cinephiles. It’s to take the audience on a ride and bring them into our universe. A strange, sensual ride!
It worked, because a lot of people I’ve recommended the film to and got back to me afterwards were usually using sexual descriptives to convey their experience of the film… I can’t deny the word ‘orgasmic’ sprung to mind when I saw it.
HC: Good! We wanted to create a cinematic orgasm! (Laughs) We wanted to talk not only to the brain but to the body. We wanted to be visceral. First, a lot of sensations. Then you can think. But first we want it to be a rollercoaster.
Your film titles are usually very expressive and unusual – how did you land on Reflection In A Dead Diamond?
BF: We wanted the word ‘diamond’ in it because we have constructed the film like a diamond. When you look at a diamond, you have several facets, and when you watch the movie, you can see different layers and different meanings. And it links to a James Bond title – Diamonds Are Forever. But when we wrote the script, the first title for the film was Diamonds Are Not Forever. Because for us, it was the story of a hero couldn’t save the world.
The title definitely mirrors the film’s hyper fragmented form, and while the film is first and foremost incredibly sensorial, one layer that struck me was how much the film harks back to Death In Venice and addresses the loss of memory. The lead character feels like he’s losing his mind on a deathbed and the film plays out like a needle that scratches over a record…
HC: That’s exactly it. We thought a lot about Sunset Boulevard and when we saw The Father, with Anthony Hopkins, we both looked at each other and said: “Wow, this reminds us of our script!” And yes, the film is this old man looking at all his life for the last time.
An old man played by the Italian film legend Fabio Testi, who looks a lot like Sean Connery in his later years…
BF: That was the main departure point. We saw Fabio Testi in a movie in 2010, and it had been a long time since we’d seen him in a movie, and he reminded us Sean Connery. He was dressed in a white suit with a white Panama hat. It reminded us of Death In Venice, as you pointed out, and so we said: “We should try to mix the two – Death In Venice and James Bond.” The two are cinematically antithetical but we wanted to see what would happen.
How did the collaboration with the great Testi go?
BF: It was very funny!
HC: We had written the script for him. It always had to be him playing the role.
BF: We finished the script during the pandemic and we asked an Italian friend whether he knew Fabio Testi. He said yes, and he gave us his mobile phone! We wanted his email, because we didn’t know him and didn’t want to scare him by calling directly! (Laughs) So we called, I introduced myself and he answered: “Who are you and how did you get my mobile phone??” We explained and said we had written a script for him, and he said “I don’t read scripts, come to my home!” (Laughs)
HC: But it was the pandemic and one week later, the Italian border closed!
BF: So we took the car and made a one-way trip. And when we arrived at his home, he was a bit surprised. He invited but he didn’t think we’d actually show up! He was so nice. It was the first time we met a glory of the Italian B-movies we love and it was wonderful watching his eyes that we’d seen so many times in close-ups on the big screen.
HC: He was also excited because we told him we would be shooting on film.
BF: Yes, he was surprised that some people continue to shoot on film. His immediate reaction was: “Wow! I would love to shoot on film again!”
HC: What I loved when shooting was that Fabio was always happy to be there, always with an incredible energy. He loves life and you can feel it so much!
Can you tell me more about the process of making a film like this, which is puzzle-like and sensorial rather than narratively linear?
HC: It’s difficult because we are working with intuitive ideas and sometimes It’s difficult to communicate to the other person some of the ideas. It’s all about trusting each other and in general we’re on the same wavelength. And lucky for us, because without that, we’d crash! (Laughs)
But it feels like a stream of consciousness which can inherently feel at odds with something meticulously constructed.
BF: Yes, but it is all about meticulous construction. We approached the writing of the film like the Japanese director Satoshi Kon, who created a kind of 3D narrative. So, there are several layers of interpretation of the movie and we wrote with colours the different layers of narration. After you have the architecture of the story, only then do you see how it’s balanced.
HC: Those layers have to interweave and to respond to each other in order to create those meanings and those interpretations.
BF: It’s a bit like David Lynch’s writing, but David Lynch was more with dreams. Here it’s technical. When we were teenagers and we discovered the cinema of David Lynch, it made us discover a new way to tell a story. Because 95 per cent of storytelling in cinema is linear, and there is another way to tell stories – the kind when you don’t have all the keys when you’ve watched the movie for the first time, but you get haunted by the movie.
HC: We like this approach because it’s playful! It’s like a game! For me it’s like one of those kids games – this stereogram with geometric shapes.
Magic eye games! I miss them…
HC: Me too. And that’s it – you look at them and you see nothing. And suddenly there’s a 3D image that appears and it’s really fun.
There are a number of villains in the film, all Diabolik-like. But the most dangerous one is Kinetic, who makes people imagine they’re inside a film…
BF: He’s one of the keys of the movie. The relationship between memories and reality, and cinema as illusion. I don’t want to say anymore about that, because it would give too much away, but the fact you noted Kinetic was the most powerful shows you get it!
Finally, you have your animation film coming up, Darling, but is there another kind of cinematic genre that you’d really like to sink your teeth into?
HC: Oh, yes! (Pause)
Stop toying with me…
HC: Peplum!
As in sword and sandles?
HC: (Laughs) Yes!
BF: But a special peplum. Definitely not one you’d expect…
Reflection In A Dead Diamond premiers in Competition at the 75th Berlinale. Shudder have bought the distribution rights of the US, UK, Ireland, and Australia and it will be released this year.
