Bertrand Mandico

Working with your obsessions

French director Bertrand Mandico is not a newcomer to cinema – far from it. Yet in spite of a long experience in film, this year Mandico is arriving at the Cannes film festival with his first feature film in development. His screenplay, The Man Who Hides the Forest, had already been selected for festivals in Turin and Rotterdam, and now it’s Cannes’ turn, where it is participating in L’Atelier.

Mandico proposed to meet in a bar in the north of Paris, but not just any bar : “Several filmmakers have already made films in this place. Tarantino shot a whole scene of Inglorious Basterds here”, he explains. There’s no doubt : he’s come to talk cinema. As he presents himself, a very calm and shy tone of voice contrasts with the portrait he outlines of his work : “I like working with my obsessions”, he affirms. Soon, he would be throwing out words such as scatology, surrealism, baroque, trash ; a whole group of references that could make it hard, at first, to understand the personality of this director.

Going to extremes

It all becomes clear, though, when Mandico starts explaining his tastes in cinema. His website had already given an idea of what to expect : it presents a portfolio crossing all kinds of aesthetics, genres and formats ; in which stop-motion animations are side-to-side with western black-and-white dramas, experiments with silent films and funny, surrealistic publicity campaigns. His learning of the cinematic language was a lot more conventional, though. He studied in an animation school, because of the “solitary aspect of it that fits me well” and the possibility to work with both cinema and visual arts. Soon however he would experiment with more collaborative working styles, such as for a short narrative film co-directed with a friend (“which I’ll never do again ; co-direction is such a decoy !”), publicity campaigns for products ranging from medication to insurance and music videos for artists such as Tété and Pink Martini. Will he keep on working with the same diversity ? Not really, he confesses. The advertising business found his work too “radical” (watching some of the campaigns, it’s easy to understand why), and music videos present him with a limitation in terms of content. As The Man Who Hides the Forest announces, he’s now more focused on medium and feature narrative films.

When in Rome…

For this screenplay, Mandico wants to work with contradictions. Inspired by directors such as Werner Herzog and Alejandro Jodorowsky, he intends to bring from these peculiar personalities a baroque aesthetic, and apply it to a story that suits most of it’s author’s “obsessions” : the conflict between cinema and visual arts and the possibility to “push the grotesque to its paroxysm”, in his words. The protagonist he chose is a decadent film director who is hired to show a famous French painting to the poor natives in Siberia – and shoot their reaction. The anthropological experience doesn’t excite him at all ; his real interest lies in the chance of doing one last film. In order to have the project accepted by his producer, one condition was imposed : Mandico would have to go to the Siberian forest himself, get in touch with the real natives and feel the environment he intended to describe. Despite some reticence at first, his answer was positive. Mandico affirms having experienced things he would have never imagined, and having been pushed to his limits. “The result”, he says with a smile, “is that some of these stories really got into the screenplay…”

Just the beginning

You can expect any director to be really excited about going to Cannes, but Mandico admits feeling nothing but nervousness : “I can’t be relaxed, the film isn’t done yet !” Indeed. He will be going to Cannes thinking about the shooting of The Man Who Hides the Forest, but also about a medium-length western project he’s looking to direct, as well as a sitcom for French television. The festival might be a great opportunity for Mandico, but he’s not the type of director to rest on his laurels. His ambitions go way beyond that.

Bruno Carmelo