“Mutual aid will put the world right”
Based on a damning observation about our climate irresponsibility, you are creating a comedy. For what ?
We are living in a very anxiety-provoking period since Covid, with an increase in disasters. However, I remain very optimistic. I’m exasperated to hear environmentalists only talk about restrictions and bans: it’s completely counterproductive! This is why I wanted a film that was happy and positive, but which asked urgent and essential questions.
In your film, society collapses. Where did this idea come from?
For twenty years, I traveled in the Far North, amazed by nature. Ecology was indifferent to me then. In particular, I crossed Siberia on foot, equipped with a fishing rod and a gun, collecting what I could gather. When we take from nature what we need, we experience a feeling of gratitude. Like this Indian I filmed, praying out loud: “Caribou, I killed you because I need your meat to feed my family. »
Then you noticed a change…
Fifteen years ago, I noticed the beginnings of a change. In Siberia, I saw the forest advancing on the tundra because the permafrost was thawing. Which complicates the lives of my nomadic reindeer herder friends, because the tundra feeds their herds. Without permafrost, roads are no longer passable and villages must be supplied by helicopter. Those of the Inuit also sink into the ground which has become spongy.
More electricity, more money, more IT… does your scenario seem realistic?
It’s perfectly credible. The world will collapse if we don’t change course. We consume in eight months what the Earth produces in twelve. This cannot last. We came very close during the Lehman Brothers crisis of 2008: people rushed to the banks, the counters had to be closed! During Covid, toilet paper and rice were taken by storm. The hysteria that grips the population when a shortage looms fuels my concern. My hope is that we change, that we appeal to the values which, in my eyes, have disappeared for forty years: solidarity, sharing and the relationship with nature.
Reweaving our fraying bonds is the other subject of your film…
The bigger the cities and the more isolated the people, the more conflicts there are between them. All over the world, kindness is in decline. Among the nomadic people with whom I lived for a year, there is no money. The only wealth is solidarity, mutual aid, exchange. In the situation of scarcity described in the film, these values allow the meeting between an urban family seeking refuge in the countryside and the farmers who shelter them. I believe that humanity can only save itself in this way.
While your film praises happy sobriety, you chose to entrust the main role to Michaël Youn, whose image is associated with excess. For what ?
Precisely for this reason. Before filming, we didn’t know each other. When Michaël read the script, he wrote to me: “This film is necessary. » The first time I invited him to my farm in Sologne, this true city dweller was destabilized. But during filming, in contact with the Morvan forest, he began to love the landscapes, he no longer wanted to return to Paris! There was, in him, the same evolution as that of his character in the film.
Did you worry about the impact of filming on the environment?
I made a film with a very small ecological footprint, for example renouncing air-conditioned dressing rooms for the actors, and we lived no worse. This is the happy sobriety that Pierre Rabhi spoke of: wherever we reduce the ecological footprint, we create happiness.