Julie Gautier, ex-freediver: "I'm not the same as when I was 20 years old, and the water has something to do with it"

Sea and father

Born in Reunion Island, she began diving at the age of 11, with her father, a submarine hunter. "It was my way of staying longer in the water and with him." She develops her sense of observation as well as knowledge of fish behavior. At 18, she discovered that snorkeling, without a bottle, was a sport, she started and won two records in France (-65 meters and -68 meters). It's something else: "We look at ourselves, we try to surpass ourselves, to show our abilities, our value to the world."

A path with water

"It's not a foreign or risky environment for me. I am as comfortable in the water as I am on land. But in the water, and especially in apnea, you can neither fight nor go fast. Progression requires adaptations of the body, mental adaptations. It's something you then bring back with you to earth. Today, I am a fairly thoughtful person, I know what I want, where I am going, I am not the same as when I was 20 years old, and water necessarily has something to do with it. My path was shaped by my experience with her."

Read alsoHallucinations, letting go, narcosis... Julie Gautier and Guillaume Néry tell the depths of apnea

Art to alert

"I'm an underwater storyteller. The artistic side touches outside the marine environment, touches those who have no connection with the ocean." After a documentary on swimming in the Loire and the worldwide success of Free Fall (with Guillaume Néry), a film made in apnea in a natural well 200 meters deep in the Bahamas, mimicking a fall in the open air, she will shoot at the end of June her next artistic short film, The Bakelite Giant (Bakelite is the ancestor of plastic, Editor's note), produced by Newtopia, Cyril Dion and Marion Cotillard's production company. "An ecological fable to raise awareness about plastic pollution in the oceans. What shocks me is not the big pieces of plastic (there are not that many), it's the micropieces that we can no longer eliminate. Even in the Azores, which are still far from everything, I see them."

In video, The Big Blue, the trailer