Interview: Julia Ducournau on Building Her Own Modern Mythology with Titane

At the Cannes Film Festival’s awards ceremony this July, jury president Spike Lee sent shock waves through the auditorium that reverberated throughout the film world when he accidentally revealed the evening’s big winner at the start of the show. That gaffe, though, couldn’t detract from the momentousness of the jury later awarding the prestigious Palme d’Or to a female filmmaker for only the second time in its history: Julia Ducournau for Titane. It’s easy to imagine that the moment created in the director the same blind-siding jolt of energy that she seeks to inspire in viewers of her new film.

With Titane, Ducournau expands on the foundational elements of body horror and humanity established by 2016’s Raw. Once again plumbing the extremes of existence, sparks fly upon the collision of two characters each broken by the pains of their past. Trauma from a physically impaling car accident in childhood renders Agathe Rousselle’s Alexia a shell of a person, feeling more kinship with metallic objects than other people. Vincent Lindon’s Vincent Legrand, meanwhile, punishes his body by injecting it with steroids to protect himself from death in the way he couldn’t for his long-missing son. The duo might be unrecognizable in their warped physicality, yet Ducournau renders them unmistakable in their humanity no matter how grim or gruesome Titane gets. While lies and self-deception bring them together, it’s the unavoidable truth of their shared brokenness that eventually binds them.

I spoke with Ducournau after Titane premiered to a standing ovation at the New York Film Festival. Our conversation covered her many inspirations for the film, her approach to filming bodies, and her reimagining of foundational texts to build a modern mythology.

You’ve said that around the third draft of Titane that you abandoned the traditional academic three-act story structure. Without that to guide you, were you relying on any other framework to help shape the film?

It was mainly this idea of an ascending transformation for the film that I had in mind being driven by the energy and evolution of emotion. I wanted to convey [the emotion] that drove me. However, the father, played by Vincent Lindon, doesn’t arrive until late in the film. That was a big bet for me that it would work or not. I thought about William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A., where the main character is killed—sorry for the spoiler—an hour into the film. The one who then becomes the main character is actually another cop who’s way [quieter] for the start of the film and that you somehow haven’t seen coming. It’s the same thing in Psycho. This has always been something that’s very interesting to me, this kind of passing of the baton between characters. It’s not exactly what I’m doing here because, obviously, we still have the two characters. But, all of a sudden, you have a take on the story that I’m telling that’s different. I tried to take another point of view and add something to it.

You’ve said that one source of inspiration for Titane was a nightmare that you had of yourself giving birth to car engine parts. How do you go about transforming something like that into something that could encapsulate horror, hope, and humanity?

It’s about transcending it. That nightmare was really disturbing and, for me, it always had to be a starting point. I didn’t want audiences to leave with that. Somehow, it had to be less morbid to somehow make it a contemplation on how, through love, you can accept a person and yourself for who you truly are. Whether it’s something that could appear monstrous, whether it’s something that you have social expectation [around], or a social construct about survival, acceptance is outside of all this determinism. I don’t know exactly how we transcended it, except that I knew that I really wanted to have this feeling of unconditional love that’s somehow helping us through the birth of a new world, of a new humanity.

You’ve talked a lot about your inspiration from Greek mythology, but I did make note that when Alexia first arrives at the fire station, the other men jokingly name her Jesus. Was that another nod to another larger-than-life figure who’s helped the world process the duality of what it means to be both human and superhuman in the same body?

You’re absolutely right, it’s biblical. Mythological stories are very interesting starting points of reflection, and a good territory to play with symbols. Because I’m creating a world that’s obviously not our world. In order to create the mythology of the film, if you wish, I have to somehow play with bigger-than-life characters and storylines that somehow echo something deep in us. That’s the thing with foundational texts. They’re epics. But, at the same time, they really say something that echo something deep in our humanity even though most of these stories are actually incredibly gruesome and dark. Obviously, you have a lot of violence in some of the biblical texts, and you have some very incestuous stories in Greek mythology. And yet, these are the texts that we accept as being very foundational for us. For me, it’s interesting to try to divert and digest all these symbols in order to try to build my own modern mythology.

How did you approach incorporating humor in the film?

I think that humor is a quick way to empathize with the character that you can’t relate to. That’s something that I do a lot with Alexia at the start, especially in the killing spree in the house. That, for me, was always a comedic scene. This spree comes after something starts derailing inside her. Something happens that basically makes a control freak out of someone who likes losing control. And at this level of losing control, it’s already an entry point to the character that we didn’t have before. We know what it feels like to lose control, and we know how it feels to go berserk because all of a sudden you can’t master anything around you.

Titane is, of course, very serious and precise, but little moments like this seem very crucial for keeping your tether to heart and humanity. It’s not just provocation.

For me, this scene is a place for comedy because it implies also the fact that, through her physical fatigue, we can feel through her. We can actually, for the first time, empathize with her mind. We can understand that she feels like she’s this close to giving up, that she can’t take it anymore because these people are just coming and coming and coming. For the first time, you can actually understand her mind. What I’d done before is that I tried to [appeal to the viewer’s] empathy through her body, not through her mind, because she’s unrelatable. She’s someone who we can’t like at the start of the film, and rightly so. But I was trying to make you feel what she feels, and this scene adds another level of coming close to her through this comedic aspect of her fatigue—and then we can actually empathize with her mind.

How did you develop your approach to filming Alexia and Vincent’s bodies?

I think the first thing I can say is that I tried to film them the same way. For me, it was super important that basically the triviality of both their bodies—the bruises, the scars, the scratches, and all that—are something that somehow makes them vulnerable. And it makes them also human, even though they are these bigger figures that we talked about in mythology. It still makes them human. So, it was very important for me to make them endearing through their bodies and through their own triviality. And, obviously, I set myself to the idea to not film them differently just because one is a male character and the other is a female one. It was very clear to me that bodies are just bodies, with all their vulnerability.

Their bodies feel almost like landscapes, especially when you look at the contrast between the tattoos or the muscles showing modifications to present the way they want and the bruises or gashes where that performance leaves a mark.

For me, [it’s important] that you see Vincent’s muscle the same as Alexia’s tattoos. I see them like armor trying to protect them from the outside world and from the pain that they feel inside. They try to change their image in order to not get to their own essence, not being touched with this pain. They’re kind of like lies, if you wish, their own lies. The lies of the fantasy that’s Vincent and his son, trying to build up his son the way he wants to, and her pretending to be his son. The more vulnerability that you have, with the bruises and the scratches, the more that you go through the armor. And this is actually how you humanize your character through their bodies as well. And, obviously, that’s why at the end it opens up fully so that she somehow sheds her last skin to get to who she is.

I know you resist prescribing morality or lessons to your work, but something that really stuck with me that you said about Raw was a suggestion that the main character, Justine, was more human because she completes a journey. If nothing else, would you say that your films are meant to expand our idea of who and what can be human beyond the limitations of the flesh and the structures of social norms?

There’s this thing that’s essential in Alexia’s journey through the film: The less her body looks human, the more she’s humanized. This is something that was inspired by the journey of the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus. I’ve always thought it was very beautiful the way that the monster is humanized through violence. The more violent it becomes, the more it actually becomes human. It starts having human emotions, an analytical mind, and all that, which is very scary for its creator because this violence reflects that of its creator. Hence the guilt of Victor Frankenstein. That’s the kind of irony that I tried to capture. The less she looks like a human, the more she gets in touch with her own humanity.

I asked this question to Vincent Lindon, and he told me to see what you’d say. Whenever you gave him the script for Titane, you said that you would tell him only after you finished shooting it why it had to be him for the character of Vincent Legrand? What did you tell him afterward?

That’s private, I’m not gonna say that!

He told me his side of the story.

Tell me, tell me!

He said that, in the rare instances that you didn’t agree on something or he didn’t understand something, you knew that he was one of the very few actors that you could trust to be right in those situations.

That’s partly true. All I can tell you is that he didn’t tell you the whole story! [laughs]