It all started five years ago in Marseille with a news story about a small-time pimp. A 16-year-old teenage runaway is arrested in a cheap motel where he lives with two prostitutes the same age as him. For several months, they live off prostitution money. He is accused of procuring, although they are merely living their love story.
To write this film, I came back to live in the city where I grew up, Marseille. I knew some of the actors of the film, they inspired me for the screenplay before the casting and the shoot. Very quickly, it became obvious than we should use non-professional actors. They instinctively had the characters’ voice and gestures. Their faces told a story. Dylan Robert, the lead actor, is very close to Zachary. With the other actors, I looked for serendipity between real life and the script. Another actor, who had been incarcerated for four years would leave his prison daily to play one of the main characters.
Shéhérazade blends the language of documentaries, thrillers, films noirs and love stories. Although, with Catherine Paillé, we have crafted a very precise character arch, I wanted to tell a modern story, steeped in our current reality, much like Italian neorealist films. I wrote the mafia plots and scenes after careful research and afterwards I rewrote them during the shoot with some actors who knew more about the situations I was describing.
I wanted to infuse romance into this love story and build an epic story. I wanted Zachary and Shéraz to burn their wings for their love story, I wanted them to touch upon bliss. Pasolini and Elia Kazan were important inspirations for my writing, so that I may make the love story characters live daily, so very close to the edge, into a modern-day A Sentimental Education.
