Alpha: Interview with Julia Ducournau

By Belit Lago

This is the second time that the director of Raw has visited the Festival, although all three of her feature films have been screened in Sitges. With Alpha, which was part of the Official Selection at the Cannes festival, she leaves behind the theme of fatherhood that was central to Titane and embarks on a visceral exploration of her mother.

After winning the Palme d'Or with Titane, all eyes were on Alpha. Did you feel that pressure?

The Palme d'Or hasn't affected my way of working at all. Alpha is a film I already had in mind long before winning at Cannes; I simply kept it in reserve because I wanted to make it later on. Unlike Raw and Titane, the main theme is the relationship with the mother figure, which is difficult to address, especially when you're talking about emancipation.

What's the difference between a mother and a father for you?

That you can't kill your mother, because if you do, you also kill a part of yourself. Your mother represents that symbiotic bond from which you originate, and this never disappears; it remains within you throughout your entire life. So, how do you emancipate yourself from this? How do you find a way to reinvent yourself outside of this relationship? For me, that question was very difficult to answer. In fact, if you take a look at the filmography of many great filmmakers, you'll see that movies about mothers come later in their careers, because they require a detachment from a very personal part of oneself, and that's painful.

In Alpha, you talk about a disease that audiences associate with the AIDS epidemic. What are your memories of that historic moment?

Despite the fact that people talk about this allegory or metaphor, the main theme of the film is the contamination by fear itself. It is not a story about AIDS per se, because if I had wanted to touch upon that issue, I would have made a very different, more historical film. Here, I made up a disease with its own symptoms, but my relationship with that period can be seen in the way society treats the patients in the film. This was born from my memories of that time, and the feeling that, all of a sudden, the whole world turned against a specific group of people, making them feel ashamed of their lifestyle, thinking they deserved to be sick. When I was still a child, realizing that we lived in a “motherless” world, where all these people were absolutely alone and where society could cast you aside just because of what you represented, was an enormous trauma for me.

Catalan director Carla Simón recently released Romería. Do you think it's a coincidence that it deals with a similar subject?

I love Carla's work and the person she is. And no, I don't think it's a coincidence, because we haven't been the only ones. The subject of AIDS has resurfaced in many art forms in recent years: two French novels were published on the subject, Christophe Honoré staged a play in Paris entitled Les Idoles about the authors who wrote about the disease that ultimately took them away, the latest film to win Un Certain Regard at Cannes, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo by Diego Céspedes, dealt with the same subject, and I'm not surprised.

Do you think we can extract any positive messages from all this?

It's truly interesting how a network of emotions and a way of thinking can connect people who have never met, creating this synergy between artists. This speaks to the world we live in, and it's also partly due to the COVID pandemic we've experienced, although the dark times we've been through also play a role, which somehow bring us back to that very place. And now I speak for myself, and perhaps also for Carla, because we are from the same generation, but I think it was the first time we felt that the world was reaching a dead end, that the future was extremely compromised in many respects. In the wake of the AIDS crisis, sexuality turned into something dangerous; it was no longer linked to love and became directly associated with death, rejection, and fear. Homophobia, xenophobia, and misogyny all went through the roof. All kinds of fear of the other spread like a disease at that time, and that's what I'm talking about in Alpha, rather than about just the disease itself.

Tahar Rahim is incredible as Amin. How did he work on building the character?

We spent many months talking about our lives because, obviously, when dealing with a subject like this, we had a lot to share with each other. I believe that when you demand so much from an actor - not just in terms of weight loss, of course, but also in the way they delve into their own emotions and their own lives to get into the character's skin - you have to offer something in return. With him, I shared my wounds, my sufferings, my life, and that of my family. As for the diet, which was extremely intense, of course it was supervised by both doctors and nutritionists. At the same time, he was also working with an association in Paris that helps drug addicts obtain clean equipment and manages drug consumption rooms.

How did the design of the bodily mutations in the film work? Did you have any limitations?

Considering the reputation of my other feature films, I was very afraid that people would go to see Alpha with the idea that it was going to be a gore fest. I'm not going to talk about body horror because I don't like labels, but I didn't want the audience to walk into the theater with preconceived notions. Following the path of my previous films would have been, morally, politically, and artistically, moving in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go. Through the way I use the tools of genre in Alpha, I try to achieve empathy with the patients, an immediate understanding. As a director, at no point did I ever want to stage panic. The way you discover the patients for the first time is through a gesture of caregiving: we see the mother bringing them food and apologizing because the hospital has failed them. The plan doesn't stop there; I don't analyze them because they belong to this world like any other individual who needs care, and I didn't want to scare people with their image, quite the contrary.

Do you have anything to say about the critics?

The truth is, it doesn't keep me awake at night. It's something I don't care about, I don't even think about it. I'm very proud of my work, I gave 200% to this film. I believe that every time you and your team give it your very best, nothing can affect you, because I know I can look in the mirror and feel that I've made not only the film I wanted to make, but a film that's even better than the one I had set out to make, thanks to the work of all of them.