Director Justine Triet and co-writer (and partner) Arthur Harari explain how they have crafted their emotional thriller as an ambiguous anatomy of marriage.
Triet and Harari co-wrote one of the most complex and intense relationships between a married couple this year — a film that already earned the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and should be a major Oscar contender this season.
Triet and Harari, who are partners in real life (they share two children), approach the story from a unique perspective that could be described as “complicated” but “exciting.”
“Jodie Foster told me very funny things,” recalls Triet. “She said, ‘when I’m starting to write, I think about what is the most shameful for my character.’ I didn’t think that at the first moment, but we were thinking we have to dive into the mediocrity of this character, we have to be very frank. If we just write a new movie about a couple that’s very safe, to say, ‘OK, we have a few problems’ … I think we had to be a little ugly in a way.”
Sandra’s murder trial was a challenge in and of itself. Things often got lost in translation because French expressions don’t often translate well into English, not to mention that the French legal process is much different than the American.
Snoop the Dog
Working with the dog who played the family pet, Snoop was technically difficult because in the scene where he discovers the body, they couldn’t get him to walk as slowly as they had imagined on paper.
The first scene in which the dog’s ball ominously tumbles down a flight of stairs proved to be tricky. “It took so many tries before we figured out that the only way to get it at the pace at which we wanted it and for it to stop where we needed it to stop so that the dog could pick it up was to drench it in glue, to change the way that the ball was coming down,” explains Triet.
“We worked to keep it as ambiguous as possible,” says Harari. “Not because it’s a game, but because the main thing is to get to that point where the child is really in a dilemma. He understands that he probably will never know, and it’s a torture for him. We had to put the audience in the same position.”
