WHEEL ME OUT - Nicolas Provost

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Were you surprised that some people booed after the screening of Long Live the New Flesh at the recent Berlinale? It was an interesting experience. I thought the Berlinale shorts programme was a good platform for introducing more innovative work, but the films in my programme were very traditional so I wasn’t surprised that people were surprised. I didn’t make it to provoke or be a bad boy, I just tried to do something interesting.

If this would have happened to me in my first movies I would have been hurt, but I’ve been making films for ten years and I always try something new. You can’t convince these people that it’s interesting and it’s their right to express disappointment. I’m sure this won’t be the last time. Maybe with the feature I’ll experience the same thing.

still from Plot Point

Your short film Plot Point plays with expectations by combining self-shot New York street scenes with a typical action film sound design. Where did you get this idea? The first idea was to follow the New York City police like the reality programme Cops and try to get them to act, in order to blend fiction with reality. But the Commissioner said no. So I just went out and started filming police with a hidden camera. I stayed around Times Square because the light was good and it had everything I needed: interesting characters, suspicious looking people, a little bit of action or insinuations of action. I filmed intuitively, thinking how I would make links between characters in the editing process.

I used a classic script structure with a beginning, middle and end, with a couple plot points, so you feel you’ve been looking at a Hollywood movie but actually nothing has happened. I was making fiction out of reality using Hollywood codes, so I also needed Hollywood elements. The sound design is from found footage and all the voices are sampled from other movies.

I’ve made another film, Stardust, set in Las Vegas and this has a lot more characters and intrigues. I went there not knowing what would happen but I was looking for magic moments, for characters, and I managed to find the biggest Hollywood stars you can imagine. Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper and Jon Voight are all in my movie and they don’t even know it.

still from Stardust

Can you say more about the importance of sound design to your films? For me it’s always 50 per cent of the movie, even if it’s a silent film like Storyteller. My three heroes for whom sound is also very important are Hitchcock, Lynch and Kubrick. They really question the phenomenon of cinema and what you can do with it, while still making accessible box office films. Cinema should make you dream, it should move you and these three, they use dream logic. This is what I want to do with my work, make people dream.

Oh Dear in particular is very dreamlike. Child racers in full uniforms driving go-karts, a live deer grazing on an indoor race track... The Rotterdam film festival asked me to make a one minute film, and I wanted it to be with some action. I thought maybe I could use contrasting elements, like this macho mood from go-kart driving but with children.

That one is about innocence for me. I was a big dreamer who was raised watching a lot of films on TV. I lived in a very small, idyllic town and seeing all these movies made me dream. I‘m still trying to experience that feeling you have as a child when you’re so innocent and the world is still a big mystery, and you look forward to everything that’s going happen to you. WMO

More about Nicolas Provost

www.nicolasprovost.com