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| The Soul Eater |
What at first seems like a routine investigation into a brutal killing spirals into something much darker in French thriller The Soul Eater, the seventh film made by the directing team of Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo. It’s a film which premièred at Fantasia 2024 and which opens in US cinemas this week. The directors and I previously spoke back in 2017 when they made Leatherface, and their work has evolved a good deal since then, so it was nice to catch up and discuss their process this time around.
“For us it was really like trying a new subgenre that we never tried before,” says Julien. “It's a dark thriller, and it's the first time that we told that kind of story. In the beginning it was a French novel, and so it was also the first time for us that we adapted a pre-existing story. The characters here are all very dark and there is not much of hope in this story. But that's also what interested us when we first discovered the book, and the fact that it was quite an original way to deal with such a difficult subject, because it's kind of a universal theme. Hurting kids and molesting kids is something that is quite universal as a taboo, and the way it was done in that story was interesting for us because it kept the entertaining aspect of what is a good thriller. We didn't want it to be too dark and hard to watch for the audience, but we wanted to keep this entertaining aspect.”
“It was an idea from a good friend of ours, Fabrice Lambot, who is a French producer,” says Alexandre. “We worked with him on our third movie, Among The Living, and we stayed very close with him. One day he came to us and told us ‘Guys, I bought the rights of this novel and I got two young writers to write it. So do you want to read it?’ He was totally in love with the novel. So when he decided to adapt it, it was very simple. We read the book, we read the script at the same time, and we said, ‘Okay, we like the subject, it's very dark and moody, so let's go.’”
There are a lot of different layers to the plot and a lot of small hidden clues along the way, which must have presented a challenge – working out how much to show and how to balance all of those things. Was that one of their first considerations when they approached the project?
“Yes, yes,” says Julien. “It was something that was in our mind during the whole process because it was the first time that we were dealing with a thriller. In this genre you have to give a lot of information to the audience without being too boring. So we have, of course, worked on the adaptation of the novel with this in mind, like ‘How can we give info to the public just with images?’ Even during the editing process, this was something that we kept in mind all the time. Finding the balance was something challenging.”
They had to balance genres as well, because they naturally attract a horror audience, but here there are also elements of crime thriller and perhaps film noir.
He nods. “We've done horror and fantasy movies our whole career. It’s in our DNA, and we love that. So of course we knew that people that are familiar with our movies were expecting a kind of violence or graphic gore or something like that. But for us, what we kept in mind during the whole time was the fact that we wanted to be efficient and surprise the audience. That's always our mindset when we are working on a new project because we know that the audience is expecting things.
“Especially when you shoot horror movies, this kind of genre is made of clichés, and all the fans knows all of these clichés by heart. That's why we are always trying to find different ways to express the tension of a scene or not to show the gory moments at the moment the audience is expressed expecting it. We shot a lot more horror or graphic sequences in the movie that we cut during the editing process. Because in the end, when we watched the movie in the editing room for the first time, the balance was not good.
“We had horrific elements and police/crime elements and sometimes it didn't match. So we just focused on the characters, on the emotion. Each time we said ‘Okay, is it adding something to the character? Is it giving an emotion to the audience? And is it the emotion that we need at that moment? Do we need a jump scare here? Is it not going to erase the emotion that we have created before?’ And so we cut a lot of moments with ghost appearances, and gory nightmare moments, just to focus on emotion.
I mention that the film made me think a lot of Wendigo stories because there's tension between psychological, cultural and supernatural explanations.
“It's definitely that,” he says. “It's a made up mythology, by the author of the book, but yeah, it's close to the wendigo. It's also a matter of balance here because in the book it was really not much about asking yourself the question ‘Is the creature is real or not?’ It's a question that is swept away very quickly in the book. When we took the reins of this project, we wanted to have little bit more of questioning for the audience. Is it just in the minds of the kids or is there really a creature there? But it's not something with which we play a lot in the movie. We focus more on the investigation.”
“We are walking on the line,” adds Alexandre. “Are we horror or crime? We don't know. And that's why we accepted to do this movie. We are absolutely big, big, big fans of a French movie by Mathieu Kassovitz called The Crimson Rivers, and it was absolutely the same with this movie. For us, the Crimson Rivers is an absolute classic of a movie for walking on the line and balance.”
How did they work with the young actors to explore some of these quite distressing themes and make sure that they were okay through the process?
“It was kind of easy,” says Julien. “it's not the first time that we worked with kids, and it's just a matter of how you explain things and what kind of words you use. Here we never told the whole story to the youngest boy. The challenge for us was to have the right emotion at the right moment. We explained it with kids’ words. We were using the term ‘bad guys’ or ‘the monsters’. He never knew what it was really about. We were like, ‘Okay, now you are seeing the monster just behind the guy, okay?’ And ‘Now you are in the basement of the bad guys.’ “We were surprised at the première in Paris to see the kid with his mother coming to see the movie. Had we preserved him for nothing? And she said ‘No, no, it's okay. He wanted to see the movie, so don't worry.’ And as soon as the parents are okay with it, you know, we say ‘Okay, you are in charge,’ to be honest.”
They have an amazing adult cast, too.
“Yeah,” he says. “We were lucky because we wanted to work with Virginie Ledoyen for a long time now and we knew that she was fond of horror and genre movie in generals. We were big fans of her work because, you know, she's working for decades. She began her career as a teenager and so we grew up watching her movies. It was kind of obvious because we were talking the same language and she had the same reference as we had. It’s very exciting when you talk to an actor or an actress about a movie and she has seen the movie, you know? We were talking about a classic, like, I don't know, a John Carpenter movie or a Lucio Fulci movie, and she said ‘Yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about.’
“As for Paul Hamy, he's not a well known actor and he's always in supporting roles, but when we discovered him, we were blown away by his performance. When we first met him we felt that he's very physically impressive because he's so tall and muscular and when he starts talking he has a tiny voice, very sweet. And so we were really interested in this kind of strange feeling when you see him. He looks like a boxer and when you talk with him, he's like a little boy. This was something that we immediately thought we could use in the movie because that's the character, you know? He's trying to show a different version of himself, of who he is inside and his real motivations. it was quite easy to hire him on this project.”
“And we have of course, Sandrine Bonnaire,” adds Alexandre. “In France she's a very, very, very big actress. She's very iconic and she's very sharp when she decides to make a movie or not. She's a very intellectual woman. And so it was totally unexpected for us when she accepted. She's a bad guy. She's a pure evil woman in the movie. And it was totally incredible for us to hear from her: ‘Yes, I want to do this work because I never do that kind of role in all of my career.’
“It was like a Christmas present for Julien and I because, like Julien said, we are absolutely in love with Virginie Ledoyen since decades and especially in one movie – maybe one of the most important movies in our lives – by Claude Chabrol. The movie is La Cérémonie. If you don't know this movie, you have to watch it because it's an incredible movie. Led, of course, by Virginie, who was 16-years-old, and Sandrine who was 30-years-old. It’s a pure shocker. A We love this movie and we were so happy to reunite them 30 years after that, because they never met again after it. And it was for us, well, wow – we had the cast of one of our favorite movie ever to watch.”
Finally, we talk about the other monster in the film the poverty that is slowly consuming the town where it takes place. Capturing this began with finding the right location, says Julien.
“We shot in this French region which is in the east of the country near the German border and called the Vosges. The book was set in that region and it’s a region that we really love because we always thought it was pure synergy in this area. It's not just about poverty. It's about the fact that, as in a lot of other countries in the world, you have these places where life is gone. The villages or small towns are almost abandoned and you just meet old people All the places of life have closed, like the bakery or the pub or the supermarket, and all the young people have left to find jobs and to do some studies and they have left for bigger cities. And so you have this incredible mood.
“The mood is about a life that has now vanished and disappeared, and this is something very striking. When we were doing the scouting, this was something that really struck us. You are walking in almost haunted places, ghost towns. It's very sad because you feel these were places that were full of life because you have this amazing architecture and a lot of beautiful buildings and all the shutters are closed and you can almost hear the past life. And so this plus the natural environment, the fact that it's a region full of very, very deep forests and small mountains and you can see that the nature is surrounding all the villages and the houses. You can immediately think that people believed in stories and in creatures and in monsters because you are surrounded with this natural environment and this very dark forest, so all these elements were a good mixture for the story.”
