Film

Lucile Hadzihalilovic: ‘I grew up in south Morocco ... there was not a lot of access to the cinema’

Filmmaker discusses her new, unusual, project Earwig and working with her partner

Lucile Hadzihalilovic: ‘We were doing a film with European money from Belgium that could only happen if the film was mainly European and the main shoot was from the UK.’

Tara Brady's face
Tara Brady
Thu Jun 2 2022 - 05:00

It is impossible to name a filmmaker capable of matching the indelible imagery of Lucile Hadzihalilovic. In Innocence, the director’s 2004 adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s novella, Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, young girls arrive in coffins at a boarding school where they are taught ballet and clothed in white.

In Evolution, a young boy is brought to a mysterious island hospital near the sea where procedures cause males to become pregnant. Earwig, Hadzihalilovic’s English-language debut, features another young girl with melting ice for teeth. She is bound to an ill-defined guardian, an older man who, using a strange contraption, drains, refreezes, and refits her teeth every day.

It was that strange, oral device – designed for Hadzihalilovic’s film by Delicatessen director Marc Caro – as featured in British sculptor Brian Catling’s 2019 novel of the same name, that first drew Hadzihalilovic to her source material. “It’s funny because I think there were two images,” says  Hadzihalilovic.

Earwig is not easy to characterise or summarise

“The one with the teeth is quite obvious. I wanted to see this girl with ice teeth that look like normal teeth except that they are melting. Her caretaker has to redo them again and again. I think the other image was something which is not in the film because if it would have been it would have been so striking, I think that it would have killed the rest of the story.

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“It’s the moment when a soldier is at war, carrying these huge hearing devices. That image was in the script for a really, long time. But that reference to the war, we realised that was kind of another story. So that was the beginning of it. But then, there were a lot of striking things in the book, like the wonderful, surprising ending. It’s a great piece of literature.”

Catling, a poet, visual artist, and novelist, has come to greater prominence in recent years, following the publication of an ecstatic foreword by Alan Moore with the 2015 reprinting of his daring, poetic take on colonialism in The Vorrh trilogy. The Earwig author was remarkably giving, says Hadzihalilovic.

“He has been really, really generous with the book from the beginning,”says the director. “He told me he had a dream with a little girl bringing her teeth. And the following day, he started to write down the story. He didn’t know why. He said: I’m very happy you are going to make this. Because he likes my other films. And he said: be free to do what you want. And I said: you might not like what I make when I am free to do what I want. And he said: I hope so. But when he saw the film, he really liked it, and he was, again, very, very nice and said, oh, it’s not a betrayal.”

Earwig is not easy to characterise or summarise. Albert (Paul Hilton), a lonely middle-aged man, lives in a dingy flat with a girl called Mia (Romane Hemelaers), who requires dentures made of ice to be fitted daily. Periodically, Albert is telephoned by a stranger who inquires after Mia.

Albert often thinks of his late wife and a country house where they may have lived but the only time he seeks society in the film, is a visit to a seedy bar where a sinister man goads him into maiming a waitress named Celeste (Romola Garai) with a broken bottle.

Many questions remain unanswered. Is Albert Mia’s father? Is the voice on the phone real or imagined? And then there’s an ending that subverts even the most surreal expectations. The writing process – a duty shared with Evolution collaborator Geoff Cox – required a renewed sense of oddness: re-mystification, if you like.

Earwig follows the story of a girl with teeth made from ice.

“I think that was the challenge because myself and Geoff knew who was who,” says Hadzihalilovic. “We knew everything but not everything because there is a moment where the film is about something totally irrational. Time is disorganised but we had to keep a linear continuity. So there is a place where you say, is it a daughter or not?

“Well, it’s both and neither. So we have to keep blurring those spaces. The film is not about an organisation who is putting girls away. It’s really about Albert and his fears and so on. We really tried to make it clear that we were in his head. I was sometimes surprised by some of the interpretations of the audience. People often think: oh, the girl grows up to be Celeste.l I hadn’t thought of that.”

Albert is the latest in a parade of unreliable caregivers - some malevolent, others (like Marion Cotillard) powerless – that populate Hadzihalilovic’s cinema. La Bouche de Jean-Pierre, her short form Cannes debut from 1996, follows Mimi, who is sent to live with her aunt and her aunt’s predatory boyfriend Jean-Pierre, after her mother attempts suicide.

“It’s very difficult to say where that comes from,” laughs Hadzihalilovic. “My parents were really nice parents. They both were doctors so maybe there is something that influences me from that but not in such a direct way. I think I am very often playing the doctor in my films, and carrying out medical procedures. I will say I don’t think those parent characters are malevolent.

The film had to happen before Brexit was officialised or we would have lost our European money

“It’s really more that they are mysterious. Especially with the new film because it’s more phantasmagoric. And because Albert is so lost and broken that he can’t communicate. So he’s very repressed. And that repression makes things weird.”    The daughter of Bosnian immigrants, Hadzihalilovic grew up in Morocco before relocating to Paris, where she studied art history and film.

“I grew up in south Morocco and then Casablanca, but it was not like growing up in Paris or London,” she recalls. “There was not a lot of access to the cinema. My parents read a lot so my childhood was more about books. My father did like cinema, but mostly, I discovered cinema on my own when I was a teenager. I loved the Italian giallos because they were so scary and erotic. And then, around the age of 20, I saw a lot of films that made an impression: Eraserhead by David Lynch, films by Tarkovsky, Last Year at Marienbad.”

In the early 1990s, Hadzihalilovic met her domestic partner, the French filmmaker Gaspar Noé. The pair have subsequently collaborated through Les Cinémas de la Zone, the production company they co-founded in 1991, and were at the vanguard of the New French Extremity, the wave of cinema that shocked early 21st century audiences with such titles as Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (2001), Leos Carax’s Pola X (1999), and Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi (2000).

“When we first started, we did it, somehow, outside of the system,” she recalls. “We made short films. We could, at the time, find ways of getting money for short films that made this impossible. And then Gaspar was able to expand on the short films. Carne (the short Hadzihalilovic produced and edited in 1991) became I Stand Alone, his first feature.”

Hadzihalilovic contributed to the screenplay of Noé’s Enter the Void (2009), and continued as a producer of Lux Æterna (2019) and Vortex (2021). Living with another of France’s most daring talents, has certain advantages, she says.    “I think it helps very much,” says Hadzihalilovic .

“You understand each other’s problems. You can help each other. Gaspar is quite successful, and has been since the beginning. So that helps with producing. Sometimes, especially early on, it was a bit like, oh, she’s the girlfriend; she’s got as far as she can go. Or people thought that my films would be exactly like Gaspar’s films. Maybe it’s a bit different now. I got very lucky with Innocence. The BFI (British Film Institute) put money in. There was money from Canada. It was not so difficult to get money from France. It was thanks to international co production that it happened.”

In that spirit, Earwig was the last co-production between European countries and Britain before Brexit shifted the goalposts permanently.

“I was very trustful of my producers,” says the writer-director. “We were doing a film with European money from Belgium that could only happen if the film was mainly European and the main shoot was from the UK. So the film had to happen before Brexit was officialised or we would have lost our European money. We had the schedule but then because of Covid we were pushed later and later.

“And then the last moment, it was November, heading into December and we had to make it before the end of the year before Brexit happened. And it happened. It’s the last film production between Europe and Great Britain before Brexit. And it’s thanks to everyone who wanted to make the film happen.”

Earwig opens on June 10th