{"id":87009,"date":"2016-05-06T10:21:41","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T09:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/?p=87009"},"modified":"2016-05-06T10:32:03","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T09:32:03","slug":"lucile-hadzihalilovic-on-the-beauty-strangeness-and-struggle-of-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/interviews\/lucile-hadzihalilovic-on-the-beauty-strangeness-and-struggle-of-evolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucile Hadzihalilovic on the strange beauty and struggle of Evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s film Evolution<\/em><\/strong> opens in the UK today and we’re at a bit of a loss as to how to describe it. First and foremost it’s brilliant, and it’s beautifully made. It’s a body horror, a sci-fi, a fairytale, a coming of age story, it’s a bit Lovecraft, a bit Ishiguro…It’s amazing. You have to see it. Read our 5 star review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s the story of a young boy living on a rocky island somewhere in the Mediterranean (probably). The only inhabitants are other boys his age and the women looking after them. Every day he takes his medicine and swims in the sea, but when he finds the corpse of a boy in the water, it’s the start of a startling discovery…<\/p>\n

Evolution<\/em><\/strong> is the first film in just over 10 years from\u00a0Hadzihalilovic, who previously made the superb fairytale Innocence<\/em><\/strong>,\u00a0<\/em>and she tells us that it’s taken that long to get this film made.\u00a0We sat down with her at the London Film Festival to talk about finally getting the film to screens, the inspiration for this strange story, and why she doesn’t want the viewer to have all the answers.<\/p>\n

First of all, congratulations on the film! How does it feel to finally show it to people?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m really amazed by the good reactions! I still can\u2019t believe my eyes! I think we’ve had very good reactions from people who seem to have really understood the film. It was so difficult to make it, to find the financing for this film. For years we had people saying “We don\u2019t get it, what is this bizarre stuff, what is the meaning of it?” So it’s a very good surprise to get this reaction now!<\/p>\n

How would you describe Evolution<\/em> to people when you were trying to find financing?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u00a0said that it was a genre film. I thought that\u00a0would make it understandable. It\u2019s a horror film, I would say, with other kinds of elements and it\u2019s not a typical horror movie. So that was a difficulty, that was in between different kind of things.<\/p>\n

And so it was not a commercial genre film, so we had to find money from people who give money for more auteur films. And in France and even in Belgium, it\u2019s not in the culture I guess, this kind of metaphorical thing, so for them it was a bit…impure! Because it deals with genre, with horror specifically, and\u00a0I think some people wouldn\u2019t feel comfortable with having children involved. In other countries it\u2019s less of a problem, in Spain they have so many films with torturing children!<\/p>\n

In France the metaphorical aspect was something not easy to deal with and I think it didn\u2019t help. I guess it\u2019s a film that you have to experience, through the sounds and the images, and it\u2019s not so much in the narrative, it\u2019s not in the characters or the dialogue, so it was the reason why I guess it was difficult to get from the script, even if we tried to make it as expressive as possible. And the strange thing also was people didn\u2019t ask for images. They wanted to have everything in the script.<\/p>\n

It’s such a visual experience, those underwater sequences are amazing!<\/strong><\/p>\n

You need people that have imagination when they read it and that have\u00a0confidence also in you. And we were lucky to get those images!\u00a0We were aware that we had to get the audience attention very strongly from the beginning, and it was a kind of gift from this place that the underwater shots were so beautiful. It was like such a wonderful surprise that when you put your head underwater you can get that.<\/p>\n

I had imagined things in detail, but because I\u2019m not a diver, I wasn\u2019t sure what we could get. And the great\u00a0surprise was that it could also be a landscape, not only details. But I could get this impression of texture with the weeds, and the very beautiful thing was the movement in the water, I was not expecting that to be so interesting.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do you remember where the first idea for the film came from?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t think so when I began to work on it, but the more I\u2019ve been asked about it, the more obvious it seems to me that of course it comes from my own childhood and memories of that age.<\/p>\n

When I was ten I had appendicitis and I went to the hospital for the first time of my life, and it was nothing dramatic, it was just a normal thing, but it was a very strong experience because it was the first time I had adults touching my body, and even open it. So it\u2019s normal but also at the same time it\u2019s very weird and very strong. And also because it was a moment of changes and I was maybe 11, it was right at the beginning of puberty so it also has a stronger resonance and a more confused one probably. It\u2019s probably the heart of it.<\/p>\n

Innocence<\/em> was a film about young girls, and this is about young boys. Did you always picture it as such?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t really think that I was going to do a film with young boys as an\u00a0opposite to Innocence<\/em><\/strong>, I just thought that this story was much more interesting and abnormal with a boy instead of a girl. Then\u00a0the boys and the mothers, it\u2019s this sort of social organisation that makes you think a bit of Innocence<\/em><\/strong> of course, so the boy was essential to the project from the very beginning. It was always a mother and a boy.<\/p>\n

Both films are kind of coming of age fairytales, did you think of them as connected in any way?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In fact the very beginning of this project\u00a0was before Innocence<\/em><\/strong>, and then I read Frank Wedekin’s\u00a0story [Mine-Haha, Or On The Bodily Education Of Young Girls<\/em><\/strong>, which became Innocence<\/em><\/strong>]\u00a0<\/i>and I really jumped on that. I went\u00a0back to Evolution<\/em><\/strong> after Innocence<\/em><\/strong> so I guess it influenced me a bit in terms of organisation, structure, whatever, but I wanted it to be different from Innocence<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I wanted it to be more narrative, less abstract than Innocence<\/em><\/strong> was, to go to other directions. But while I was preparing and shooting it I understood\u00a0how much it was similar to Innocence<\/em><\/strong>, of course because of the children and so many other elements, so I was a bit scared by not being able to escape myself, but yeah, I can see the strong similarities. But at the beginning it was not intentional, it was a bit the opposite.<\/p>\n

SPOILERS BEGIN<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Evolution\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are some science fiction elements to the film, I wanted specifically to ask about the starfish…<\/strong><\/p>\n

The starfish thing was very exciting, we did a lot of research on them.\u00a0The thing is that the script has evolved a lot. At some point it was obvious that we would not get any\u00a0more money so I had to cut a lot of things in the script, and one\u00a0of them was that we had more things with the starfish, not an explanation but reasons why the starfish, so at the end it\u2019s just the starfish by itself.<\/p>\n

So it was very very exciting to do research about this and marine beings and it gives a lot of ideas about how they live, how they reproduce themselves and this idea that the human beings are not the centre. There are other directions, other possibilities, it was very exciting but it\u2019s not so much in the narrative, it\u2019s more in the background.<\/p>\n

The part regarding the boys, there is no scientific basis for this at all so that was totally not realistic, but we thought about “What happened if this creature does not have a possibility [to reproduce], are they hermaphrodites\u2026?” and\u00a0all these answers would be different kinds of stories. So we had backstory, we thought it was not important to explain to the audience who exactly these women were,\u00a0even if we have an idea.<\/p>\n

And also what I said about reproducing, starfish or other creatures, they have ways to reproduce which is to put their semen into\u00a0the water or in other creatures so it was like giving you ideas about how this could work. So all these mechanical things, but it\u2019s not very important or interesting to explain. Maybe we could have done more if we had more money or time to shoot but it\u2019s not a very important thing. And also, with starfish, there is a reason why beyond just visually it\u2019s such a strange animal\u2026<\/p>\n

SPOILERS END<\/strong><\/p>\n

It feels like there’s a Lovecraft element as well, but I don’t know if that’s just because it’s strange and by the sea!<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny because when\u00a0Evolution<\/em><\/strong> was first being shown there were some who talked about Lovecraft, and I said “Yeah,” but it\u2019s obvious because I read Lovecraft when I was a teenager and it had a big impact on me. So yeah, it also has elements from that and also maybe something, it\u2019s not at all an adaptation of that, but The Island Of Dr Moreau<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0And it’s kind of a fairytale.<\/p>\n

\"evolution10-1453927517\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s a film that leaves a lot unexplained. Did that make it difficult to find the right cast?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, well the children didn\u2019t ask about that! They didn\u2019t care. I think they didn\u2019t care about the story! They just want the experience of making a film. Even though the main character was 13 years old, for [actor Max Brebant]\u00a0the main thing was “Who is the girl that I\u2019m going to kiss?” As for the adults, yeah, I didn\u2019t want to explain too much.<\/p>\n

For\u00a0instance, Julie-Marie Parmentier, who plays the mother, asked more about her character, and it was interesting because she took a more normal and realistic approach, like “OK it\u2019s a mother who has to deal with a child which is kind of rebelling and questioning and having fears and she\u2019s not really able to deal with that.” I like that she was trying\u00a0to bring this very human and normal thing to the character.<\/p>\n

Do you think it’s important to leave a lot of questions open for the viewer?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well yeah, I hope that it\u2019s talking about very simple and human things. It\u2019s not difficult to understand that, even if you don\u2019t understand every part of the story itself. The story is more of a superficial thing that helps me to have these images and feeling and emotion. It’s a bit\u00a0like Eraserhead,<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0where you don\u2019t understand everything but you understand what it\u2019s about. I hope it could be the same with this\u00a0film, it\u2019s not that strong.<\/p>\n

When I watch a film I like to participate, I like to have a little bit of freedom. It doesn\u2019t mean that a film has to be empty, quite\u00a0the opposite, but I have to make my own path in it and I think it stays more in my mind when I do that, and also when I don\u2019t get everything. More than if you receive a message, ok, it can be a very interesting message but it\u2019s less cinematic to me.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a bit like\u00a0a piece of music, when you feel it and it doesn\u2019t bring a message and you have to make it your own in a way.<\/p>\n

Evolution<\/em> will be released in cinemas on 6 May 2016. Read our review from the London Film Festival here<\/a>. For more news about the biggest movies, pick up the latest issue of SciFiNow.<\/a><\/strong><\/strong>
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