Cold Head, instructions for use: “We literally filmed in the storm”

Stéphane Marchetti and Florence Loiret Caille tell us about the creation of this first fiction.

With The Cold Headreleased this week in cinemas, Stéphane Marchetti sees his career take a new turn. Albert-Londres Prize for his documentary Rafah, chronicles of a city in the Gaza Strip (2008) and acclaimed for Calais, children of the jungle (2017), dedicated to underage migrants trying to cross into England, this time he directs his first fiction. A particularly fair and realistic story carried by Florence Loiret Caille And Saabo Balde.

She plays Marie, a broke forty-something, who survives on the border between France and Italy thanks to small-scale trafficking, helped by her policeman companion to avoid being arrested. Her life changes when she crosses paths with Souleymane, a young migrant ready to do anything to find his little sister who is a refugee across the Channel.

Met at the Sarlat festival, the director and the main actress told us behind the scenes of this exceptional shoot: in the freezing winter, we had to shoot quickly, while respecting the safety rules of high altitude.

Florence Loiret Caille is striking with her accuracy in Cold Head (review)

Filming in the heart of an exceptional natural setting…

“We literally filmed in the storm, it couldn’t be fake”, immediately tells the actress about the key scene which gives the film its title. While crossing the border between France and Italy on foot, after having passed it several times by car, or during a hike for her, Marie and Souleymane are slowed down by violent snowy winds.

“It’s really a scene that I was very keen on,” explains the director. “There was a real desire for cinema behind it. The second week, we saw on the news that there was a storm coming and as a result, We went to see our general manager to see how it would be possible to take advantage of it. He found us a little frosty, but he replied: ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ We took all the precautions, we respected the safety conditions to be able to shoot in just two days, at more than 1,300 meters above sea level.

We had reduced the team a little, for example because there was no need for light, but that still represents around fifteen people to manage without putting them in danger. It was a very ‘hand-held camera’.

Overall, the cold was really an element on this film where we spent entire nights shooting. We got home at 4 a.m. and it was -20 degrees. All off-set discussions were on ‘how do we protect our hands and feet from the cold?’

With the cinematographer Sebastien Goepfert, we were really on this crest: we wanted it to be credible, that it could really be anchored in reality, but at the same time, it was a film crossed by cinema with a real formal identity. This involves the choice of settings, lights, shooting at night… We wanted it to transport the viewer with them to the mountain and to bring tension. Let it be palpable throughout the film.”

Take responsibility for your sources of inspiration

“As soon as we talk about the mountain, Fargo Or the Revenant are necessarily sources of inspiration, he recognizes. I also drew on comics, particularly in the work of Jean-Marc Rochette (the author of Snowpiercereditor’s note)who made a trilogy on the mountain (Ailefroide, altitude 3954). Without forgetting the work of a photographer, Christophe Jacquot, who enormously captured nature and bad weather. There is something dramatic in the beauty of storms, very strong and very powerful in bad weather.

I am from Lyon, so I lived at the foot of the mountains. We are on a summit where everything is magnificent. Suddenly, there are three clouds arriving. The snow falls and it becomes hell in a few seconds. It was really this feeling that we wanted the spectators to experience. What does it feel like to cross a pass on foot? We hear about it in the film, but we don’t see it. Then at some point, we’re going to cross this mountain, and understand what that means.”

Moving from reality to fiction

“This film is based on a mixture of two real-life anecdotes: I met a teenager at the door of the Chapel who explained to me that he was in Ventimiglia, on the Italian border, explains Stéphane Marchetti. He was trying to pass and he met a man, a grandfather, who said to him: ‘I can pass it on, it’s €60 to put you in the trunk.’ I found it mind-blowing. In Calais, when we were filming our report, we met someone at the food distribution who knew everything about everyone. We realized that he was also a smuggler because he also had debts to pay. I found it interesting to confront these two characters.

The documentary that I made was quite different from the film, it was really focused on the children who arrived alone in Calais and who wanted to reach England. Tell the story of The Cold Head in a report, it would inevitably have been piecemeal, there would have been a frustrating side. I couldn’t have shown the same intimacy. Often on a documentary, we are dependent on the people we meet, the settings… There, I wanted to create a universe, characters, to put some intimacy into it. And of course, we also want it to reach the widest possible audience.”

Finding the perfect actress

“Marie is a somewhat distant cousin of the character Angie in It’s a Free World by Ken Loach or Julia by Erick Zonca, explains Stéphane, delighted to have been able to find the ideal actress to play him. She has a little badass side that Gena Rowlands can have in Gloria. This type of character is quite tough, who will have to break through the armor to become someone else and come to the aid, too.

At the beginning, when we write a first screenplay, we ask ourselves lots of questions, we ask for advice and I kept saying to myself: ‘Don’t cast an actress in it because if it doesn’t happen you’ll be stuck.’ Once, I was rereading the script in front of The Legends Office which was rebroadcast, and I knew I wanted her. What’s funny is that the first name my producer suggested to me was also that of Florence.”

“It was Stéphane who contacted me to tell me that he had written a film with me in mind, confirms the actress. Of course, this doesn’t happen every day! Personally, this hasn’t happened to me since Solveig Anspach (who directed her in Queen of Montreuil And The aquatic effecteditor’s note). I was very curious to meet. After ten minutes, I was won over. We understood each other well, we had the same references. He was talking about Zonca earlier and one of my first films was the short version of The dream life of angels. It was about a girl who lost her job and found herself on the street overnight. With a Beretta that she had found by accident.”

Directing actors to stay “true”

“There weren’t many rehearsalsrecognizes the director. Coming from the documentary, I wanted to keep the first impression aspect. Saabo and Florence met once for a test, but then they didn’t see each other again until filming. I didn’t feel the need to prepare much. I wanted us to keep something very fresh at the time of filming. Then, as Florence is really a very instinctive actress, animal in fact, I knew that there were inevitably going to be things that would spring from sweetness.”

“I find it very difficult to talk about this work in particular, because I have no distance from it, says the actress about this. Of course, we always try to forget the camera, but there, I was so into it! If I’m not at it, if I watch myself doing it, I’m useless. On The Legends Office, it was the same, by the way. I have to immerse myself in a certain state. That’s more important to me than knowing what I should do or what I should play. I have to really believe in everything that happens to my character: his joy, his anger… And also believe in what the other person embodies. On this film, it worked so well that it made me feel strange several times when Souleymane started speaking French again. I feel like my brain is freezing. I had a little time to adapt (laughs).”

Stéphane Marchetti and Florence Loiret Caille at the Sarlat festival, in November 2023.

Avoid being moralistic

“As these subjects are very complicated, I absolutely did not want to make a film with a global or moralizing discourse, explains Stéphane, who says he has thought a lot about this question. I was very careful to tell a singular story, the story of a person. Very often in the media, we don’t even know what to call migrants: displaced people? The refugees ? I wanted to look into this meeting between these two people. But behind it, there is no morality, no judgment on what happened. That wasn’t what interested me. I think that to talk about immigration today, we have to somewhat mourn a certain simplicity in our willingness to think. When you think about it, there are 5,000 people crossing the border at Briançon via the Col de L’echelle, and those are 5,000 different stories. We would tend to put a sort of mask on them, to talk about them anonymously and gratuitously. The idea was to give a face, an identity, a story to a particular character.”

Title changes

Asked about the name of his film, which could just as easily have been called “At the border” as this theme is important in its history, Stéphane Marchetti admits to having changed his mind several times.

“A title, either we have it from the start and it doesn’t change, or we change it often, he notes. Cold Head arrived quite late, but I like it. Finally more thanAt the border Or The Ferryman, which we first mentioned, because Marie is really very, very instinctive. She acts and she thinks afterwards. Except at the crucial moment of the film where she regains her senses. She can once again count on her cool head to get herself and Souleymane out of this white hell.”

As for the border, “it is not symbolized by absolutely anything in a mountain, it is abstract”he explains.

“Borders have always been set arbitrarily, it is man who has decided to put a limit here or there, develops the director. This is a question that concerns me. Migration is a question that has been there since the existence of humanity. I believe that in our current societies, this was THE question of the last ten years. It will probably be that of the next thirty. Tens of millions of people are displaced every year. It’s only going to get worse, I think, with the climate crises. The question of borders, whether we are for or against, it constantly permeates our societies.”

And now ?

“I would like to continue the adventure in fiction, finally recognizes Stéphane Marchetti. I have made a lot of documentaries, reports, which have been a coincidence in my life. A happy coincidence, because I think that without it, I would not have been the director that I am today. But then, at six years old, Steven Spielberg was my role model. I want to continue in fiction.”