Lucie in Ré’s first seed was a box of film stored in my fridge. This box imposed a simple, spontaneous film, in a great assumed poverty, without light, and therefore rather on location. Summer was coming and I wanted to film what was around me, in its ordinary, familiar aspect; to caress social issues in a comic tone.

I picked up a few more cans of more or less out-of-date film, and the film grew. Lucie in Ré was shot on a more or less improvised basis, with the staging sometimes preceding the script, the sets and the actors – who weren’t all actors – writing the story in spite of themselves, the sequences being invented from one day to the next.
I believe that cinema can also be like that, that we can talk about small things, I believe in craftsmanship; in a kind of arte povera.

The faster this world moves, the more I want to get back to craftsmanship, to make eco-films that are responsible, reasonable, decent, imperfect but human.

The form of Lucie in Ré matches its subject matter; it’s a hybrid film, beginning and ending digitally, in Lucie’s Parisian daily life, governed by her connected life. When Lucie loses her phone, film takes over, and in the picture, it’s silver that takes the viewer on vacation. These breaks change not only the texture of the image, but also the way we shoot. The mixture of freedom and difficulty imposed by film is inherent to the making of the film, as it is to Lucie’s summer.