Sex with cars and a woman with a titanium spine: Julia Ducournau is once again celebrated as a provocateur with her second film. A conversation about scary fairy tales, naked bodies and why their “Titane” is a story about unconditional love.
Interview by
Tobias Kniebe and Annett Scheffel
When the French director Julia Ducournau raised the Palme d’Or in the air in July, she was the sensation of the Cannes Film Festival. With her second feature film “Titane”, the 37-year-old overtook all male favorites. It was only as the second woman in the history of the festival that she won the main prize for best film. “Titane” is about a young woman (Agathe Rousselle) who initially kills all people who come too close to her. Then she has sex with a Cadillac, goes through a pregnancy and gives birth in unimaginable pain to a baby whose spine is made of titanium. At the same time she transforms and wins the love of an aging macho man (Vincent Lindon), who finally accepts her as the indefinable being she has become. In her victory speech, Ducournau was delighted that Cannes had finally broken the “walls of normativity” and “let the monsters in”. During the conversation in Berlin, her enthusiasm for the unusual creatures that shape her cinema is immediately contagious.