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Francis Leclerc claims to have been looking for the Roy Dupuis whom he
missed, the one in Being at Home with Claude and Cap Tourmente.
“Roy is organic, he’s a machine, a hard worker. Even off-screen he’s very
involved, very inspiring. He’s instinctive and technical at the same time
… and the camera just loves him. Asselin’s blue and brown photography
simply suits him perfectly! Having said that, I didn’t want to give him
the appearance that he’s familiar with; I wanted him to be hunched and
vulnerable because I thought he’d played the same type of role for the
past 10 years – in great shape and relying on the intensity of his eyes.”
“Sodec doesn’t automatically finance a production because Roy Dupuis has
agreed to act in your film. I don’t know if it helped to have him on board
for three years, but I imagine that his name aroused some curiosity. I had
to admit the application four times before they granted the funding.” The idea came from a childhood memory of Marcel Beaulieu, the co-writer. One day, a forgotten memory resurfaced unexpectedly. He deduced that it was possible, if you so wished, to erase a whole section of your past. He submitted this idea to Leclerc as a one-and-a-half page treatment about a man who has fallen into a coma trying to find out where he is. From there the two collaborators developed the story of Alexandre, who at the age of 40 was the average age of the two writers. It was Leclerc, who was raised on the Isle of Orleans, who had the idea of switching the story to Charlevoix, more precisely to La Malbaie. Initially, the action took place in the autumn, but because of production delays it had to make do with shooting in winter, which the director is now very pleased about. When asked why the film develops from being a thriller to a quest for identity, he offers a series of explanations. “It’s not the accident itself that’s important but the encounter with the animal. Alexandre is confronted twice by a deer; once in his childhood, which changes him for life, and the second time when he sees this dying beast by the side of the road in a snowstorm, and decides to put it down.” It was Dupuis who had the idea of making Alexandre stammer, an idea that often isn’t easy to carry out, given that a film is shot out of sequence. For two days before the start of filming, the director and his actor read the script together, resulting in several changes being made. “He was asking all the time – why this? why that? I had engaged the most questioning actor on the planet” |
