After
The Father
,
The Son
.
Ecstatic after his triumph at the great annual Hollywood party, the French playwright Florian Zeller, awarded the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for his film
The Father,
immediately expressed "
great joy
".
And, galvanized, he recalled that all his energy is now focused on the new film adaptation on a sequel to
The Father
, also taken from his trilogy,
The Son
.
To read also: Oscars 2021: the French Florian Zeller doubly rewarded
This night will remain unforgettable for Florian Zeller as he confided on the phone to AFP: "
We started the evening with the Oscar for best screenplay and we ended it with the Oscar for best actor for Anthony Hopkins after his victory. .
"
To read also: Florian Zeller: "Even if
The Father
, nominated six times at the Oscars, is not politicized, the game remains open"
The playwright received his award in Paris, where the Oscars had planned a dedicated site for artists unable to travel to Los Angeles due to the pandemic. "
It makes all the more sense for me that I do not dissociate the desire to make this film from the one I had to do it with Anthony Hopkins, I wrote it for him
", underlined the author of 41 years. “
Being able to share this moment, this recognition and this joy with him makes all the more sense for me,
” insists Florian Zeller.
The successful playwright himself directed
The Father
, his first feature film which follows an old man played by Hopkins sinking into a dementia as disturbing as it is disturbing. And the cinema allowed him to go even further in the story he started with his play, he explained.
Then he clarified the nature of his work as an adapter: “
What I absolutely did not want to do was film a play but do something that only cinema can do.
With his accomplice Christopher Hampton, who translated his plays into English and who shared the Oscar with him, Florian Zeller can be proud today of having achieved his ambition.
He also returned to the uniqueness of his now Oscar-winning work: “
The singularity of this piece was to put the spectator in a unique position, as if he were in the head of the main character.
I wanted
The Father
not to be just a story but an experience, the experience of what it might mean to lose all your bearings, including as a spectator.
I wanted this film to extend that into an even more immersive experience - which the language of cinema allows!
- to really be in that character's brain.
"
The father, mother and son trilogy
The most performed French author in the world did not even have to wait to receive the precious golden statuette to complete his next film, again taken from one of his plays,
The Son
, which belongs to the same. trilogy as
The Father
.
Filming for
The Son is
set to begin this summer in New York, with some dreamy stars: Hugh Jackman and Oscar-winning actress Laura Dern, the director has revealed. “The Son
is a story that means a lot to me. I have been working on it for many months and I am very happy to have been able to bring together the actors that I admire and that I love in order to be able to tell it,
”he confides.
The Son will
therefore tell as in the original work. "
The story of a father and a mother who no longer live together. They have a 17-year-old boy who is going through a difficult period, who has academic difficulties, depression, and these parents are trying to save their son in this mysterious period of adolescence,
”analyzes the author.
With his success at the Oscars, Hollywood studios could scramble to entrust him with future scripts. And Florian Zeller does not rule out one day "
working on works that are not his
".
This new ambition made possible in America seems to delight him:
“I started by writing novels and then I discovered the theater and it became an immense passion which occupied me for fifteen years (...).
And then suddenly, I made this movie!
What I mean by that is that I learned never to close the doors, to leave them ajar so that we can be surprised by life.
"
But for now his mind is elsewhere:
" In fact today, I am so focused on
The Son
that these proposals do not really have any relevance to me.
Once I'm done, we'll see.
But for now what really matters to me is to follow this story to the end.
"
Florian Zeller, editor-in-chief of
Figaroscope
The Father
by Florian Zeller in 2020, with Anthony Hopkins