About La Pampa

Antoine Chevrollier ’s interview

I never studied, I was catapulted into the world of cinema. I came to Paris wanting to make films but knowing nothing about the industry. I rented a camera, directed a first, then a second film, and I became an assistant. I then directed a clip for the music band Bagdad, which did well in the queer network. This is when Eric Rochant noticed me while he was preparing The Bureau. He asked me to direct the tense scenes in the first season. I then directed Baron Noir, and created Oussekine, which I felt absolutely had to be told. On the side, I was writing Block Pass.

I love Fishtank and the way Andrea Arnold intensely crafts and gives depth to her characters. I like storytelling with rather quiet characters, in whom a gesture, a gaze, a garment speaks volumes. Mungiu and Coppola do that as well. When we wrote Block Pass with Bérénice Bocquillon and Faïza Guène, the question we kept asking was: who are our characters? 

The idea for the film came as I was chatting with a friend at a café terrace, and I thought of this area called La Pampa in the village I grew up in. It’s a motocross park, and I would fantasise so much about it at the time. It’s an expensive sport, and you don’t make much money from it. My parents couldn’t afford a motorbike, and I would watch the others through the wire fence. I fantasised not so much about riding the bike, but rather about the heightened virility of these men, and women at that, who played the patriarchal and toxic virility game so brilliantly. I was riveted. I later deconstructed it.   

My take is that of a realistic but not naturalistic description of what I see, as I sometimes consider it a lazy, cynical form. I have loved some naturalistic films, but it remains a type of film directed by the bourgeoisie that sometimes takes a patronising look on other classes which it imagines without knowing it, or that it films in pallid settings and lighting. I wasn’t interested in that, I wanted to be very close to a specific reality. That’s what Bourdieu talks about in Distinction, how the working-class cultural baggage is coarser, weightier. At the start, although things have changed, I wanted to dedicate Block Pass to the people I grew up with, for it to be a generous film. Generosity is often seen as in bad taste. I believe you can tie things together.