Christophe Honoré: "During the two or three years that followed my father's death, I resented the whole earth"

Lucas was 17 when he suddenly lost his father in a car accident.

His adolescence lost, and now freed from all paternal authority, he drowns his sorrow in a life at a hundred miles an hour.

This story is that of the film

but also that of its director, Christophe Honoré.

Beyond delivering an autobiographical work, he satisfied a desire to describe a young man of today and also reveals the talents of a young actor.

The actor in question is called Paul Kircher, he radiates alongside Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lacoste.

In video, trailer:

Le Lycéen

by Christophe Honoré, with Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lacoste

Madame Figaro

– A sudden and brutal tragedy having arisen in my very idyllic life, I was a particular teenager, very free.

For two or three years after my father died, I resented the whole world.

It's a sentiment shared by many teenagers, but my personal injury meant that I no longer believed in the world.

When you lose your mother or father, you feel like you're alone and you know you can do whatever you want, because everyone will find extenuating circumstances for you.

So I allowed myself everything and I had this shameful fantasy that losing my father was a breath of fresh air, because no one was watching me anymore and I no longer had to report to anyone.

However, if we always associate freedom with a positive, rewarding value,

How did Paul Kircher stand out in your eyes?

You would have had to be blind not to see his talent!

Paul, shortlisted for the Cesar for best hope, has imposed himself as the castings go on because he is an insane actor.

He has a great ease, a freedom.

His story not resembling that of Lucas, his character, he had to compose;

in this, it was necessary to wait for the emergence of an actor and not of a nature.

It's very difficult for young actors to be able to put themselves in different states of sensitivity, and I saw that Paul was able to mix registers and express a multiplicity of emotions.

It reminds me of the way Juliette Binoche appeared at the cinema in

by André Téchiné, with a very difficult and complex romantic role.

I also saw that Juliette recognized herself in Paul and in his desire to prepare for each scene, to be very inventive.

I witnessed his admiration.

I believe that the film works in this double challenge: to be both a self-portrait and a portrait of a young man of today

Christophe Honore

How do you approach as a director a subject as difficult as mourning?

It takes time.

is my fourteenth film, and over the years I have come to be less cautious, less daring to fabricate things and have a deeper sincerity.

You have to wear yourself out a little bit as a director to achieve that.

Finally, with

I was signing a pact of loyalty to myself: I told myself that this film had to be as sincere as possible with regard to my adolescent emotions and that they not be filtered by my gaze as a 50-year-old man.

I believe that the film works in this double challenge: to be both a self-portrait and a portrait of a young man of today.

I don't think I would have been capable of this gymnastics five or six years ago.

What do you have left of your adolescence?

Like many boys, I remained a teenager very late, until I was 27-28 years old.

I even cultivated this state in my films and my novels, that is to say that I tried to make the question of incompleteness, a strong marker of adolescence, a way of consider my work.

I've always been wary of mastery and always preferred the shaky side of things.

There are filmmakers who are very marked by their childhood (when we discover Wes Anderson's films, we see that of a 10-year-old boy and we say to ourselves that it's crazy to have kept that look on the world), but me, I have the impression of having started to build myself at the time of adolescence.

This chaotic construction is certainly linked to the fact that I don't

completes my adolescence a little.

Now I have to assume my role as an adult, as a father, at the risk of being ridiculous.

However, everything would push me to give up because the current general atmosphere is still a bit heavy and, as an artist, we necessarily wonder about our function.

Christophe Honore

What father are you?

The question of education is very much linked to autonomy for me.

I feel like I tried to educate my daughter so that she could do without me, which is certainly due to the fact that I lost my father young.

While being very present, I have the impression of having prepared her to be independent and free from her family, her parents.

It must have worked since she is passing her baccalaureate and is only looking for schools far from Paris.

I tell myself that I succeeded, but that it will fall on me!

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What are your desires for the future?

I take over

according to Proust, at the Comédie-Française, in February and begins a next screenplay.

However, everything would push me to give up because the current general atmosphere is still a bit heavy and, as an artist, we inevitably wonder about our function.

I believe that we must persevere, without necessarily bearing witness to the times, and that cinema is never as faithful to reality as when it does not claim to be stronger than it.

I don't see why filmmakers would be prophets and how a director can say to himself: "I'm going to make a film and explain what the hospital is today."

Through a documentary, why not, but through fiction, I find that this stems from an indecent claim that terrifies me on the question of being a filmmaker today.