Animation Filmmaking Is a Living Process w/ Félix Dufour-Laperrière

MATT: Félix, welcome to the Showcast.

FÉLIX: My pleasure

MATT: It’s lovely to have you here. And of course, we’re going to be talking about Death Does Not Exist. A very powerful title and it’s a very powerful movie. But I always like to begin with a simple question, just to break the ice. I’d like to talk about the art of animation and where this journey in animation began for you. If you were to look back for a moment in your life, when you realized this was something you would be really interested in pursuing, even as a career, what moment might that be?

FÉLIX: That’s a very good question, and I’m glad I know the answer. I had a crucial moment. I was 18 years old. I loved films. I was thinking about making some. But the sound and fury of live-action directing wasn’t for me. And I stumbled into a DVD shop. There was a free DVD to rent, and it was of Jan Svankmajer’s short films. He’s a pretty famous surrealist animator from the Czech Republc, from the 70s and 80s. A wonderful, giant artist. And his short films are a wonder of depth, and imagination, and liberty. And it was all doen by one single person in a small room. So, this extraordinary balance of intimacy and eloquence charmed me into animation.

MATT: Yeah, what a legend he was. I’ve seen a lot of his works. I love his stuff. I even saw Alice, which was his foray into blending that animation style of his with live-action. Beautiful stuff.

And you brought up something really interesting there. The potential of animation. Especially when it comes to a film like Death Does Not Exist. It almost feels like this films could not have been made as a live-action. This had to be an animated film–and an animation film in your style. Wouldn’t you agree?

FÉLIX: I totally agree. I’m first and foremost an animation filmmaker. So, when I’m writing a script, I have animated moving images. I have an animated mise-en-scene in mind. The images that emerge from the writing process are all animated. So, it’s directly linked–it’s at the root of the process. And on a second level, when you work on your script and you work on what the film will be, the concrete matter of what the film will be, the animated image offers a lot of possibilities. Very specific and singular mise-en-scene possibilities. It’s a powerful tool. Very demanding, I would say, but joyful to use. It’s full of surprises and full of painstaking, long hours to correct little details in After Effects.

MATT: Yeah. And especially the way in which you worked on this film and the approach you used. And I’d like to, maybe, ask you about that a little later on. But first, let’s get into Death Does Not Exist as far as the story, the concept, is concerned. And obviously, when we talk about that, the best approach is to ask a very simple question. What was the starting point for you? I mean, what was the inspiration behind the concept and the story of Death Does Not Exist?

FÉLIX: There were two starting points. First, the attack The radical, violent attack by a group of young people attacking a symbol of wealth, power, authority, and stability. They’re attacking the stability of the world. And that was one starting point. The second starting point was the Faustian pact between Hélène and Manon. They kind of agree to go down together. And it’s a shared fall in my eyes. So, this Faustian pact was at the very beginning of the project too. And in my eyes, I tried to make a tragic tale. Fantastic, in a way. Because there are a lot of magical and fantastic elements that are included in it. And tragic because it’s a story about contradictions, impossibilities, and opposite necessities, I would say.

MATT: This balance between the more magical fairytale side of the story and the tragedy–because there are moments that are particularly dark–was that something that required a certain balance, as far as the narrative is concerned?

FÉLIX: Totally. And I think, if you’re talking about the very violent and pretty brutal moments, I wanted to make sure that, at the same time, violence wouldn’t become a spectable while not avoiding the concrete consequences of it. It’s not a walk in the park. It’s real things going on, without making a spectacle out of them. It was about showing the direct and brutal consequences for those who suffer from [violence] and for those who are perpetrating it. It was a reflection that went on all throughout the film.

And the balance… It’s a tale. So, at the beginning, to put on the system and mechanics of the tale… for me, there’s 10-15 minutes of almost an action film. Very dense. It’s going quick and you’re getting into the reality of the necessities of the characters. After that, there’s a more reflective, suspended moment. Explorative. And afterward, the conclusion is pretty dense, also.

MATT: Yeah, a lot of pace, rhythm. And as far as the violent element is concerned, we sometimes forget that when we talk about fairytales, those traditional fairytales did very often have a violent element to them that is sometimes overlooked, and maybe in more modern adaptations has kind of been softened. But it was there. And let’s face it, life itself has violence. Violence is kind of part of life, sadly, tragically, but sadly true.

FÉLIX: It’s everywhere.

MATT: Another aspect that I found compelling about this film is the activism. The journey of Hélène–I believe that’s the name of the protagonist of your film–she goes through this journey and it’s almost like she’s trying to understand herself but also her own thoughts about activism and her commitment to her activism. How much of that comes from you, personally?

FÉLIX: I drew a lot from my contradictions, from my personal convictions, yet personal compromises. Because I’m the father of two kids. I’m deeply worried. And I have a strong anger about the state of the world. Yet, I would say that maybe my main goal is to keep the world livable and decent for my kids to grow up in. So, yeah, I drew a lot from my own contradictions. It’s a film about contradictions. It takes a certain intensity. There’s a maximal side to it because it’s a tale, but I tried to make it readable on different levels of intensity. So, it’s also a film about commitment, about relationships, about connections. In the format or in the context of a tale, it gets pretty intense.

MATT: And a lot of that intensity, I guess, comes from you, as you said. So, that adds another layer to it. If we think of the film, which I do, and certainly, that’s the way, in my opinion, film should be considered–animation or live-action–as an art form, it’s very important for the artist to connect in such a personal way with the work that he’s making.

FÉLIX: I feel it’s a film of paradox. The characters are all paradoxical alter egos, in a way. There are a lot of things in it that aren’t enough. For example, just taking care of the world and the people you love is not enough. On the other hand, not breaking what needs to be broken or changed without taking care of life and the connections, and what makes the world livable, isn’t enough. It’s a film of paradoxes, and I put a lot of my own paradoxes in it.

MATT: One of the things that I’d like to dig deeper into is the actual animation style which, as I said earlier, I found very fascinating. Anybody who will watch this film or has seen this film will definitely be so impressed with it. And correct me if I’m wrong, you chose to make this film using hand-drawn animation and graphic tablets, and painted colors on paper. First of all, what drew you to this approach? And second of all, how difficult is it to work with this approach.

FÉLIX: It is demanding. Yet, it’s not more difficult than that. I have a very good team, very good animators, so we know how to work together. And they’re well-trained, and we’re used to a very authorial, distinctive approach to animation. Very precise. So, it wasn’t different from another technique but it has its own specific questions and challenges.

The script was written at the beginning with the goal of not always distinguishing the characters from the background. This implies that the characters are part of the context where they act, where they live. And on the other hand, backgrounds and contexts can be seen as emerging from the character’s movement and inner life. The lines are not always closed. Figures aren’t always separated from the backgrounds. So, it gives a certain sense of abstraction. There’s a tension, a dynamic relation between the characters and the background. And that tension, I think, has something to do with the radicalism, the radical purposes of the characters.

And all the film was constructed as a sequence of color fields. There are some color fields at the beginning, at the end, and a couple of times within the film itself. And all the sequences were built on quite a limited palette. I try to stick to a very limited palette, to choose what is visible, what will be revealed by movement or what will be included in the whole of the shot. So, it was planned like that from the very beginning. The film can also be read as a sequence of color fields, from which emerges a story, characters, movements, ideas, and everything.

And I like that idea of that relation to abstraction and that relation to radicalism and extremism. There’s an erasing of reality. The legibility of reality has something to do with the purpose of the film, the themes that are explored.

MATT: I’m glad you brought that up because, obviously, another great thing about the style that you use is this–you mentioned the word radical. And I actually didn’t think of that word immediately. But that’s it, that’s what it is. The color palette that is seen throughout the movie. Certain scenes are in green, others in reds and whites… And I feel like that was a very deliberate choice, as far as the style is concerned, of what you were trying to convey.

FÉLIX: Definitely. And the characters are changing colors because they adapt to the context, or the context adapts to their presence. It’s a two-way relationship. So, it’s a challenge. It can be read as a radical choice. But I hope it fits with what the film is trying to explore.

MATT: But because we’re talking about style… Obviously, this is a hot topic in film today. Since I started interviewing filmmakers and artists, I’ve been talking about how the filmmaking world–in this case, animation–has adapted to technologies. And now, of course, AI is causing a lot of disruption. So, as we’re talking about style, and since we talked about the specific style us used for this film, what’s your reaction to AI’s disruption? Positive or negative?

FÉLIX: I think AI is mostly an average and median matter. They’re dealing with averages and medians. That’s useful in commercial products or projects. We’re doing very independent authorial films, and we’re working on singularities. So, all our work is about singularities, ideas, persons. Even the people we choose to work with, the ideas we’re putting on the screen. So, I think we’re evolving aside. AI may bring more tools that will be useful. Right now, it isn’t precise enough and controllable enough to be useful in our very precise process. Maybe, it will become one day. It would leave us more money just to pay the good people and intelligent people to make more things move, which is good. And in animation, what moves is expensive.

So, I don’t see it as a threat, not at all. But mostly, it brings about a reflection about democracy and the redistribution of wealth. It’s first and foremost, in my eyes, a way of controlling the revenue. It will get wealth very concentrated, more and more. So, I think it raises, first and foremost, the question of redistributing that wealth and also the production means. In our very specific cinema field, I work in Quebec in Canada. We work with public funding. So, we have a little private funding, but it’s mostly a large majority of public funding. If this stays, AI won’t be a problem. But our government will need to tax these AI companies, so we can have funds to have a national culture and a publicly-funded cultural scene.

MATT: Interesting point. And of course, this whole matter of AI would probably require an entirely different podcast just to talk about that, alone. But just to put it in perspective, with a film like Death Does Not Exist, how long does that take to work on?

FÉLIX: The making itself is a bit more than four years. I worked with my main animator, Yoon-Jin Park, for a year and a half. Just the two of us, to put everything on: the animatic, storyboard animatic, the general layout of the structure of the film. And then, we worked a bit less than three years with the whole team. About 40 people–25,27 in Montreal, and 18 in France. So, that’s 40, 45 people, depending on the moment. So, it’s a bit more than four years in the making. Plus, on top of that, the writing, the funding and everything. So, it’s a whole period of time.

MATT: And this might be my last question because I want to be respectful of your time. But just in terms of the process itself, we talked about your films being artistic rather than the more commercial side of animation. So, when it comes to a film like Death Does Not Exist, when you come up with the concept, from the very beginning of the project to the end, how much does the film actually change? Of is it exactly how you first envisioned it?

FÉLIX: Hopefully not. We worked a lot on the script. I work a lot on the writing from the very beginning. Being very precise on script writing and everything. But it’s a living process, hopefully. And I try to keep every step–the funding, the preparation, the pre-production, the production itself, and post-production–at a certain level of openness. So, we can move things, we can change things. We can adapt and evolve. And our ideas are evolving. Our take on the subject matter is evolving.

So, that film evolved a lot. It has a very dark tone at the very beginning. I tried to make it more open and with a greater space of love, friendship, and the importance of life at the center of it, even if it’s a pretty tense and dark story. But yeah, hopefully it evolves. It changes and it ages with us.

MATT: And I had a feeling you would say that you’d want to keep a little bit of openness, so that the artwork itself could almost come to life on its own, certainly in certain aspects, and you’d have breathing room to play around with, I guess.

FÉLIX: That’s what I told my kids when they were asking me, why are you making films? Because it’s the way I live my life, and it’s a beautiful way. So, we try to do it in an honest way, deeply involved. And it moves. It’s alive.

MATT: It’s alive. And of course, now it’s actually out into the world because we were just talking a little before we started the recording… the film premiered in Cannes, which you said was a great experience. And then, of course, now it’s screening in Annecy. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask, what was the experience like in Cannes? What was the reaction to it? And did you have a great time there?

FÉLIX: It was a wonderful time. Very occupied, very busy, hectic. But it was a wonderful privilege to bring animated cinema like that with a very singular animated mise-en-scene to a general audience. To people who are film lovers but in a general sense. So, it wasn’t a specialised crowd as it will be in Annecy. They’re very demanding and specialized in Annecy. Everybody knows about animation. A lot of them are making it. So in Cannes, it was world cinema at its largest aperture. So, it was a wonderful experience to bring it and to challenge the viewers with our very specific approach and very animated approach. It was a pleasure for me. I’m still a bit tired from it. It was quite an adventure.

MATT: I’m glad you brought that up because very often, animation does not get maybe the space that it deserves in the A festivals–in the main programs of the A festivals. But certainly, films like yours will get it more room and hopefully they will. We need that diversity. But in the meantime, Félix, thank you very much for joining us. It’s been a great conversation. Thank you very much.

FÉLIX: My pleasure.