“Hunter Nights” is over.
I can't talk about it.
If I could talk about this film, I would not have shot it, shot it in every direction, from writing to editing. Is this a film anyway? The question remains unanswered. It’s a part of my life, with its words, its encounters, its desires. I am now ejected from it and that is why I must keep quiet. All this was experienced, invested; all of this must find other receptacles: screens or bodies.
Around the film I can talk, back to 2015. I was in Périgord, in a small house not far from the river. I immersed myself into books and forests, seeking to heal an abortive musical career on the rise; I was gradually regaining a taste for life after a decade of concerts, videos, dances, sound and visual experiments of all kinds; after the decline, the exhaustion, the poverty, the desire to put an end to it, then a chosen hospitalization, I was saving what remained to be saved, locked up with my notebooks, to write so as not to sink.
With a reassured and rested body, I returned to the desire to make a film. Cinema was my second love, after music to which I gave ten years of my life. Thierry, my companion and partner in queer crimes, helped me. While we were writing the film and I was lining up voice-overs in my notebook, a book came.
“Rose Turningham” was, in 2016, the first publication of Le Sélénite, the publishing house that I was going to create a year later, printed in 110 copies, part of which was not sold and used for filming. This book is a magical object which appears in the film and which helped me to construct it, to legitimize it, because basically everything is solitude, night, writing. Hunter is nothing without Rose, Rose is nothing without Hunter; they are faces of the same coin, translucent; if we look at one of those two faces, the other immediately overlaps.
Filming began a year after the book was published. I produced it myself, which meant having to wait two years to finish filming. At the beginning of 2017, I put together an almost perfect artistic and technical team (I can never thank them enough for following me through this madness) and we shot for 11 days, from July 24 to August 1 of the same year in Périgord Noir. where we wrote the first scenes. In front of Stanislas' camera, my cinematographer: Beatrice Arnac, Lola Jeannel, Thierry Chollet-Berger and beautiful, crazy souls who said yes to me without hesitation.
That first shoot was the most exhausting, absurd, and rewarding thing I've ever done in my life: in front of and behind the camera, taking care of script and props, rolling down hills with a backpack weighing several pounds, dancing in the rain, talking to my imaginary friend, alone in the world, lost, connected, Hunter and Rose were invested and lived.
Everything could have ended there.
This micro-budget film, victim of the vagaries of the weather, fortunately reinvented itself during filming, then during editing. I pulled on the puppet’s strings; Space engulfed itself.
It was only by doing it that I understood what I was doing. My symbolic mothers tried to destroy my personal project. I let them parasitize me; the story developed, with its escapades, its rough edges. I still had to deal with the Show. In the summer of 2018, we filmed for 4 days in Paris, from July 2 to 5, in Michel's magnificent private mansion, with Marie-France Garcia, Gwendal Raymond and Jean-Luc Verna. History repeated itself ; queer bodies were unleashed: I could not get lost in the forest, discovering this new body without fighting with the ghosts of my past.
But the fairy, the child, the stars were still missing: In May 2019 I filmed the last two days in a place I would never have dared to dream of: the Camille Flammarion astronomical Observatory, in the south of Paris.
The very last day with Gabin, the child I hoped for, the child I was, and with Miss Botero who I wanted so much for this project, remains one of the sweetest and most moving memories: a trunk full of wonders; an abandoned, reassuring house which was already the setting of the book; Gabin and Rose dancing in the garden, where Loïe Fuller, la fée lumière, had presented her nocturnal dance a century earlier.
A year of writing, two years of filming, almost as much editing, then a year and a half of post-production – each step requiring more money to be found.
In the middle of editing I found myself confined to Morocco. This forced break of a year and a half allowed me to think about something else and take a step back.
What I didn't say is that, at this stage, the film had become a 5-episode mini-series.
In 2021 I re-edited the film, to arrive at the three-part film that exists today.
The first one is certainly the film I dreamed of, extreme, bitter-sweet, open, like a book, absent from the show, there in the Universe.
Parts 2 and 3 are the destruction and clarification of my project parasitized by others, by my story, their stories — the two mothers — whole and nothing, a nothing which is everything, like the emptiness of having embraced death so may times, emptiness which allowed this prologue, a new beginning.
Is this film the film I wrote? I don’t know. He has left the territories of dreams for too long. I no longer remember what I thought of him when he didn't exist, like a child you carry and for whom you dream of a great school, a peaceful life and for whom you are ready, for love, to great sacrifices when the child decides to be an artist, a poet…
This evening I am typing this text on the computer where I wrote the book and then edited the film; I have to tap certain letters several times for them to appear; the machine is exhausted, broken, like me. She will die out, like me.
Creations will remain.
I don't know what I have to do with all this anymore. I no longer know what I see. So I write.
I want to write; I need to write.
Who will read? Who will see? Who will listen?
It's none of my business and that's a whole other story.
It's absurd to open a blog in 2023.
Just as much as it is to love and hope.
At least it is written, it appears.
I went through several nights. I'm going, without thinking.
I want to say that I am proud to give my blood, because it is thanks to those who gave me theirs, in other times, that I am still alive.
A creating body.