Based on the novel by Laurent Petitmangin, What You Need from the Night, Delphine and Muriel Coulin create a family drama that deals with the rise of the extreme right in France and Europe.
Delphine and Muriel are two French sisters who work together as filmmakers. Muriel has always dreamed of working with film. She graduated at the Louis Lumière School and later worked as a camera assistant and cinematographer, specializing in documentaries. Delphine studied literature and political science before finding work at the Arte Group in their documentary production office. She is also a novelist.
In 1995, the two began working together on short movies. In 2011, they directed their first feature film, 17 Girls, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. “When we find something peculiar, we feel the need to investigate it and maybe make a movie out of it”, say the two while discussing their creative process. Their latest investigation has been about radical, violent protesters through the character of Fus, a twenty-year-old who grew up in the East of France with a widower father and a younger brother. The three are the protagonists of The Quiet Son, their third feature film, which has been nominated in the main competition at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
Pierre raises his two sons alone. Louis, the younger one, excels in his studies and progresses easily in life. Fus, the older one, becomes increasingly withdrawn and gradually becomes fascinated by violence and power dynamics, gravitating towards far-right extremist...
The main characters in your earlier movies are women: the seventeen girls in your eponymous feature and young female military staff in The Stopover. In The Quiet Son, instead, the three main characters are male: a widower and his two sons. How did you come about the subject?
We wanted to make a movie on family love, and especially on a very specific question: if my sister or my child did something unspeakable, would I be able to forgive them? We also wanted to work on another common fear, which is about the rise of far-right movements in France and in Europe in general. When we read Laurent Petitmangin’s Ce qu’il faut de nuit, we noticed how it contained all these elements, everything we wanted to talk about. It’s true, I did wonder if I wanted to adapt a book that had no prominent female character. It seemed very different from what I am and from the kind of work my sister and I usually do. We also became aware that turning one of the book’s characters into a woman would have compromised the believability of the story. In far-right circles, males dominate, which means that the character of Fus had to be male. As for the other child, the one who is a good student, placing a girl in his stead would have given her somewhat of an ‘angel-like’ dimension that would have been completely out of scope. If the family had a widowed mother, instead of a father, the circumstances might have been interpreted as those of an overwhelmed, helpless mother, unable to control her eldest child–that’s not the issue at hand at all. We decided to replace only a few minor male characters with women, and to give them roles of ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’: the wise attorney, the university chief officer, who is the Sorbonne’s actual director, and even the mother who, while not physically present, adds strength to the story.
Your movie explores moral duality through the story of a boy who isn’t doing well in his studies, who is drawn to far-right politics, though at the same time, he cares deeply about his father and brother. What do you want to make us question and elaborate upon?
Using Fus’s character, we wanted to add complexity to this story, and avoid any simplistic vision of these protesters as ‘very ugly, very bad’ people. Contempt, rage, and systematic marginalization cannot bring about progress. Certainly, someone on the far-right may come across as nice and kind. What do we do, in that case? Do we interact with them? The change Fus goes through reflects, in some way, what we have been seeing over the last twelve years. In France, a majority elected a leftist president, but in the latest elections for the European Parliament, the far right got a clear majority. There are many economic and political reasons why that happened.
As professionals, my sister and I come from the world of documentary film. We investigated the East of France to understand what pushed locals to vote for the far right. Other than the economic circumstances, what pushes Fus to change is peer pressure, which is also a theme we are very interested in, and which we worked on in 17 Girls. This is why Fus is, at once, charming and disgusting, ugly and fair, funny and pathetic. No character is perfectly linear: the father is at times too inflexible and leaves his child with no wiggle room, while the younger child seems to live the whole situation with levity.
Do you think that if the mother had been present, things would have ended up differently?
Yes, this is stated quite positively in the film. The absence of the mother unbalanced the family and compromised communication. We don’t want to be too explicit, though we evoked the mother several times with a few phrases here and there, just to hint at what she might have thought of the situation. The father wonders if she would have been able to communicate better with their children, which grows into one of the key questions of our film: if we communicated better, would things get better, too?
Sisterly filmmaking duos are rare. How do you two work together?
We do everything together, sharing everything at 50%. One might think that since Muriel is a film graduate, she’s the one to cover all technical bases, but in fact, we both do. Same goes for writing: even though I am a novelist, my sister contributes to screenwriting as much as I do. We oversee editing together, too. We know each other well and understand each other quickly. We share the same values, both in content and in form. It is very rare that we have opposing opinions about a film. We worked so hard on our projects in the preliminary phase that we are in perfect agreement on what our goals are, which makes principal photography a breeze.
Your film has been nominated at the Venice Film Festival. How do you feel about this recognition, and what do you expect from your international audience?
We are so very happy. It’s an honour to be in Venice. Having our film nominated together with some of the greatest filmmakers around is impressive, and also a bit distressing! Stimulating, too. We are proud to share this adventure with our cast. This is the beautiful final step of something we’ve worked very hard for two years on. We sincerely hope our work will be known and discussed internationally.
