About Vincent must die
by Frédéric Mercier
A bad joke turns Vincent’s whole world against him. People try to kill him for no apparent reason. He meets Margot as he is forced to flee. The many attacks against him are as arbitrary as in Alfred Hitchock’s The Birds, one of the many references in a film at a crossroads of many different genres. Stéphan Castang chose to tell Vincent’s wayfaring tale as a pre-apocalyptic nightmare to express the skewed nature of our connection to others and our fear of what is different. However, through Margot’s and Vincent’s love story, he shares with us an intimate Apocalypse.
Interview with Stéphan Castang
“Even if I’m an actor who has been working in subsidised theatres, I’ve always wanted to write and direct films. In 2011, I took a leap and directed my first short film, French Kids. I then met Thierry Lounas, who asked me to direct a film he’d just finished writing in a screenwriting residency, and I immediately saw the very fulfilling story of a neurotic. Mathieur Naert’s take on the hostility of our world that is in the script really resonates with me. How can one convey the social violence of our modern world? I liked the fact that Vincent took this absurd situation as some sort of a hypothesis to be experimented.”
“Vincent is neither nice or mean, but rather happy with himself. He thinks he belongs and, throughout the film, he’s chased. Rather quickly, he’s faced with a strange phenomenon. I like the fact that there’s no psychology in his actions, much like a burlesque character. I chose Karim Leklou because he can be gentle and raw, scary and incredibly striking.”
“Humour in the film doesn’t come from wit or characters. I had actually asked the actors not to act using comedic tropes. On the contrary, they had to act out the drama, the tragedy, passion and panic of the situation. Humour comes out of that very discrepancy.”
“I wanted to stay true to the motifs of the genre, because too often people just toy with them. One of my many references was Martin Scorcese’s After Hours, a wonderfilm about persecution and the abuse of the body. That’s also what my film is about: the encounter between two abused bodies. Together, they will earn to comfort one another."
