Movie theater. “Bringing territories into existence without a lot of images”: filming in Béarn, the Larrieu brothers talk about their relationship with the Pyrenees

After “Le Roman de Jim”, you adapt another book by Pierric Bailly. How did this new rapprochement come about?

First of all, there was a wonderful encounter with the first novel. At the end of Jim’s filming, Pierric Bailly sent us “La Foudre”. We liked it. We simply said to ourselves that after having made the portrait of a man, we wanted to do that of a woman. He was offered an adaptation where his main character would not be a shepherd but a shepherdess, and the landscape would no longer be the Jura but the Pyrenees.

Why not stay in the setting of Pierric Bailly’s novels?

We discovered the Jura with the previous film and it was very good, but this second book was an opportunity to shoot in the Pyrenees differently than we usually do. In this case, by filming the pastoral environment and the people who work there. We return home but in reality not quite. The characters are different, we are not in the Hautes-Pyrénées which we know better, but in the Aspe valley which we knew a little less. It’s new.

Do you have any bearings despite everything?

Yes, we also shot the very beginning of the medium-length film “La Bréche de Roland” [sorti en l'an 2000, NDLR] on the Chemin de la Mâture. What changes this time is filming with flocks of sheep and working dogs. We shoot in June, at the time of the summer pastures. This is the environment in which we set our story, we wanted to do so. But this requires framing the context: where does the herd come from, where does it settle…

Pyrenean pastoralism is now also a subject of tension around the bear and the wolf. Will this appear in your film?

This is not the subject of the film, these themes are not approached in an activist way, but it is part of it. The reality of the herd is also the presence of the bear which requires having guard dogs and being vigilant on certain very tense evenings. We are not discovering the subject, a very long time ago, in the 1990s, we made a commissioned film for the Pyrenees National Park. We were interested in coming back to it, but from a very different point of view.

What has changed in twenty-five, thirty years?

Maybe we’re wrong, but we found the register more violent at the time. Today, we meet people who work with the bear. They have dogs, protocols, the herds go down to the cabins in the evening. They deal with it. We were quite surprised by that. In reality, they are almost more worried about the arrival of the wolf [aperçu notamment dans l'Est-Béarn, autour de Bruges, où a lieu une partie du tournage, NDLR].

“In westerns, all the places are mentioned, they go to Fort Machin, in the canyon thing. It seems extremely exotic to us but these are real places.”

The Pyrenees appear in a large part of your filmography. It’s a little more than decoration…

We are often told this but in reality, we really haven’t filmed in the Pyrenees since 2007. The film “21 Nights with Pattie” (2015), for example, was made in Aude, not in the mountains… Generally speaking, these are territories that don’t have a lot of images, that we want to make them exist. We found ourselves on this subject with Pierrick Bailly, who puts the Jura in the spotlight a lot.

What attracts you to these mountains? The realistic side, the hardness of his characters?

It’s rather the opposite in our films… What amuses us usually is rather how the stranger arrives in an environment about which he understands nothing. These are often characters who come from elsewhere, as in “Voyage to the Pyrenees” (2008). This is the first time that we will have a character who lives and works in the Pyrenees.

This is also the first time that you will mention by name the places where you are filming…

It’s true. We saw that Pierrick was doing that in the Jura and we said to ourselves that it would be good. In westerns, all the places are mentioned, they go to Fort Machin, in the canyon thing. It seems extremely exotic to us but these are real places.

There are a lot of cinema sets in the Pyrenees, the Hôtel des Princes in Les Eaux-Bonnes, the desert villages…

We were told about it. We know that one day we have to look around a bit. There is Spain too, on the other side, which we know a little about. It’s very rich. We’ll see…

The heroine of “La Foudre” is a shepherdess. Is the plot linked to his job?

We often reduce the characters to their professional activity. She is not only a shepherd. It’s his job but the story takes him elsewhere. In Pierric’s novel, there are psychological dramas, love dramas, suspense, sometimes thrillers. The text allows us to mix realities.

Why did you choose Hafsia Herzi in the title role?

We knew that as an actress, Hafsia liked to learn trades [César de la meilleure actrice pour son rôle de surveillante de prison dans « Borgo », NDLR]. When we met her, she told us that her mother had been a shepherd in her youth. We also introduced him to a shepherdess, Florence Debove, who wrote works on summer pastures. She also spoke with the person who will take care of the working dogs. She’s a great actress, very invested in the role.

Sara Giraudeau is also in this feature film. She already appeared in “Le Roman de Jim”. There is always an actress who returns from one film to another…