“Justine is completely obsessed”: nominated for the Césars and the Oscar for his work on “Anatomy of a Fall”, editor Laurent Sénéchal tells AFP the other side of the making of the film with an extraordinary fate.
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With five nominations, winning the Bafta for best screenplay on Sunday and two Golden Globes in January, Justine Triet has a good chance of winning the Oscars (March 11) with her film and is one of the big favorites for the Césars on Friday .
Among his 11 nominations was for best editing. An award that honors an obscure but important profession to which the producers of “Anatomy of a Fall” dedicated 38 weeks. An exceptionally long time compared to the industry.
“It's a luxury to be able to make a film where editing is so important,” recognizes Laurent Sénéchal. “Justine is completely obsessed, the editing is one of the most important places for the staging” of her film, he smiles.
Eight months of filming in which the director and her editor, both 45 years old, exchange ideas, work together and complement each other.
From the 130 hours of onslaught of a project originally conceived as a series, what remains at the end is a feature film of 2 hours and 32 minutes in length, cleverly structured around a trial and flashbacks into the life of an exploding couple.
“With Justine, this is the third film we have done together. “The more we practice, the more we know ourselves, the more obvious certain things become,” Laurent Sénéchal, who has also worked on all the films of the director's companion and co-author, Arthur Harari, told AFP.
ENTRY FILMS
“We’re going to the market”
When editing, some directors “work from a first draft,” a kind of rough draft that allows an initial idea to be developed. With Justine Triet, however, “everything is about acting. She starts recording and material to see where it takes her.”
“It really freaks her out when she sees something going wrong,” he jokes. “So we walk the whole way together, which takes a lot of time.”
“We go to the market to watch the rushes and we cook in this market,” he explains. “It was a lot of work, a lot of action, but we never lost. It was a pleasure.”
The film, which is as complex as it is fine, examines the power relationships within the couple, gender issues, the functioning of the justice system, the view of society, that of the children… But to recognize also means to give up, explains Laurent Sénéchal.
“We had a lot of additional material,” he admits, such as the role of the media. The plan was for “the press to be like an additional character with journalists filming.” “We really reduced that because it became too complex.”
Laurent Sénéchal is happy that his job is highlighted, but believes that the editor should not leave “his mark” on the film: “It is a task of adaptation, we are storytellers, midwives who accompany the filmmaker.”
Is he afraid of one day being replaced by artificial intelligence? He admits to being amazed by the small sequences that his smartphone automatically generates from his videos and believes that in ten years the tool will be used as an assistant without us being “even more surprised”.
But nothing will replace humans, he hopes: “If we entrust the anatomy raids to a computer, we won’t have the same film!”