You have to have a strong heart to attack the
Devil all the time
.
Based on Donald Ray Pollock's novel, the Netflix film lines up an impressive cast - Sebastian Stan, Bill Skarsgard, Jason Clarke - to chain tragedies in 1950s and 1960s America.
Angry with God since the horrors of the Japanese front, Willard is raising his son Arvin the hard way.
Bonnie & Clyde from the asphalt, Sandy and Karl decimate the hitchhikers.
From their pulpit of the Deep Midwest, Pastors Roy (Harry Melling) and Preston (Robert Pattinson) crush their followers with their charisma.
Awesome supporting role in
Tenet
and
The King
, the British actor confirms his flair and flamboyance.
Under his sermons, the crowd goes into a trance.
But his puffy shirts, worthy of a rock star and not of a man of faith, undoubtedly hide a part of his personality.
More worrying ...
What should be a long hopeless tunnel turns out to be a poisonous epic carried by the sticky, gothic atmosphere of Antonio Campos.
In 2017, the American signed the soap opera
The Sinner
which explored the same themes of transmission and repression.
"
We leave a lot of baggage to our children without being aware of it, our suffering, our values
", notes the director.
“I was in the midst of preparing for The
Devil the whole time
when I was approached for
The Sinner.
The research undertaken on the film guided me on the series, ”
says Antonio Campos.
Between faith and fanaticism
The filmmaker admits to having been haunted by the striking imagery of Donald Ray Pollock:
"this dog at the foot of this misshapen cross, this house at the top of a hill, these woods from which touches of disturbing red emerge ... ".
To honor it, he and his team unearthed such charismatic and disturbing places in Alabama.
Campos drew a lot of inspiration from the photographers of the time: William Eggleston and Robert Frank who immortalized the Americana of highways and parking lots.
"On the other hand, we wanted to avoid references to" Southern Gothic "classics such as the expressionism and shadow play of The Night of the Hunter",
specifies the one who professes a love of cinema since childhood.
“As a
kid, I wanted to go back in time like in Back to the Future or be an archaeologist like
Indinia Jones.
When I was 13, my mother took me to see
Clockwork Orange.
Seeing Kubrick's name appear in the credits, I understood that I wanted to be a director and tell stories to decipher what I was feeling.
And later to search the psyche of those around me, ”
he recalls.
Antonio Campos was equally fascinated by the relationship to redemption and to the religion of these characters inhabited "by the devil".
The line between faith and fanaticism is thin.
"The title
Le Diable tout le temps
evokes evil, the traumas that we fight within ourselves, but this story is also that of a perverted vision of religion by its representatives who abuse their power over the faithful, and particularly the youngest. the most venerable ”.
To Robert Pattinson, his friend, who signed on simple presentation of the first draft of the script, Campos made watch videos of preachers but also those of the idol of the time, Elvis Presley.
To link intrigues, at first disparate, Campos and his screenwriter brother asked Donald Ray Pollock to endorse with his rocky voice the clothes of the narrator, Arvin.
The scorned innocence of the latter, in common thread, gives Tom Holland a silent and adult role a million miles from his exploits as
Spider-Man
.
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