The 2022 Cannes Film Festival will open this Tuesday evening with a monstrous burst of laughter caused by Cut! Michel Hazavancius’ film retraces the shooting of a film of the living dead which turns into a nightmare when real zombies invade the set and try to bite Romain Duris, Bérénice Bejo, Finnegan Oldfield, Jean-Pascal Zadi and Grégory Gadebois to name a few. a handful of members of the film crew.
“This pastiche of Z series was an ideal pretext to talk about people who make films”, confides Michel Hazanavicius to 20 minutes. Inspired by Don’t cut!, signed in 2017 by the Japanese Shin’ichirô Ueda, this irresistible comedy is in fact a film for all audiences, thanks to its devastating humor around a band of agitated people from the jar. “I don’t really like zombie films and horror cinema is not the one I prefer, recognizes the director. The pretext was above all to share the energy that emanates from a shoot as if the spectator were its privileged witness. »
Nothing is serious, everything is serious
After The Artista tribute to silent cinema and The Redoubtable which revived the Godard of the New Wave, Michel Hazanavicius’ love for the 7th Art is more than ever evident in this fantasy full of surprises. “The heroes are torn between ‘Nothing is serious, it’s just a movie’ and ‘Everything is extremely serious, it’s a movie’ which corresponds rather well to the reality of filming”, insists filmmaker. The director of the fake feature film camped by Romain Duris is forced and forced to surpass himself in adversity, as we can see in the second part of the film. Michel Hazanavicius is not left out. He signs a tour de force with a sequence shot of more than thirty minutes regulated like a diabolical mechanism where the special effects of Jean-Christophe Spadaccini work wonders.
“ Cut! shows how one passes from an intellectual ideal to the reality of teamwork, laughs Michel Hazanavicius. I pushed the comic side to the limit by showing how much of ourselves we put into something that may seem futile from the outside, which gives the cinema its ridiculous and sublime side. “ Actors too invested or not enough, technicians not always very reliable, producers beside the plate and musician exceeded cause many bursts of laughter.
“I’ve never experienced shooting as crazy as the one that Romain Duris saw, but there is a kernel of truth in what the film shows,” insists the director. Is that why Cut! is so fun? In any case, opening Cannes with a joyful and cinephile film reconnects with the festive side of cinema and it does a lot of good.