Thomas Cailley deciphers the opening sequence of The Animal Kingdom

A traffic jam on a highway, a father and son arguing, and suddenly the monsters appear. What does the impressive start of the Animal Kingdom hide? Answer with the filmmaker.

A father and his son are in a car. The tension, the reproaches, the kid looking out the window and sighing. The father who tries by all means to gain her attention. And the argument… The mother is absent and it is she who is at the heart of the discussion. It gets bogged down and we are soon at a standstill. Like the car: the highway is stuck in a traffic jam. When, suddenly, shots ring out. Something or someone is pounding on the door of the ambulance blocked a few meters away. The doors open. A shadow escapes. What flees is a half-man, half-bird creature with enormous wings. His presence sows chaos in the rows of motorists for a few minutes. No more. And very quickly everything returns to normal. This strangeness is only for us. In the world of film, this phenomenon has already happened… The Animal Kingdom is entirely contained within this stunning opening. This is why we asked Thomas Cailley how was this idea born, what it meant for him and also… why start such a dynamic and always moving film in a traffic jam?

“One of the first ideas we had about this film, one of the basic ideas, was that we didn’t want to end up in the panic of patient zero. It was necessary at all costs to avoid processing the first mutation. It was a trap: if we brought out the first monster, then the whole film would stall after that. We risked finding ourselves prisoner of the genre, of the thriller. And The Animal Kingdom would become a race; we would have to run behind monsters throughout the entire film. Conversely, I wanted the film to have this intimate dimension, I wanted to tell the story of this mutation and this father-son relationship over time. I wanted us to be able to settle in with the characters; let it be the characters that come first, not the genre. Besides, when I’m asked to define the genre of the film, I say that it’s a character film.

Thomas Cailley: “I have the impression that the public has taken over the Animal Kingdom”

So we decided quite early on to tell the story a year or two years after the start of the first mutations. The questions it posed (“it’s there, so what do we do with it?”) were more interesting than simple issues of survival and pure gender. Immediately afterwards, the other crucial question presented itself to us: how to show this? How to show a world that has already turned upside down? This is the ambition of this opening. We started writing during the summer of 2019, and we finalized this sequence at the end of November, beginning of December. I remember very well that while writing it I felt that the film was held together. In terms of tone and register, it was really the scene we needed because it combines all the intentions of the film. We start intimately in the car, and we end with this spectacular shot with the monster coming out. We are at the same time in very realistic things but with an element of fantasy; there’s comedy, drama…it’s all there.

Finally, it seemed interesting to me to start with two characters stuck in a metal carcass, in the middle of a concrete sarcophagus, in the middle of a traffic jam. Everything is polluted, there is the noise of horns, stress…. And the film will end the opposite of that. The traffic jam tells of this world at a standstill. It is a society waiting to be revitalized. That too was an idea from the film that I immediately wanted to evoke: we are at a standstill, and to get out of it, we will have to welcome other ways of being alive. »