We met Fabienne Berthaud, back in the cinema with “Tom” after her “A bigger world”. The opportunity to learn a little more about this enchanting tale, written with tenderness and beautifully interpreted.
Meeting with Fabienne Berthaud
Director of the very nice film toman initiation story at the height of a child staged with a great delicacy and a beautiful depthFabienne Berthaud wanted to tell this story from the novel by Barbara Constantine, Tom, little Tom, tiny little man, Tom. From her writing work to that with her main actors, she agreed to answer our questions.
You are both a writer and a director. What was your working method to write the film tom ?
Fabienne Berthaud : I adapted the novel into a screenplay with Pascal Arnold, already co-screenwriter on three of my films. I’ve known him since I was 14, we know each other very well and so we worked together on this novel by Barbara Constantine. Once the scenario is finished, time passes, because I don’t know yet who will play. There is also the time of financing. Once I have my casting, I rewrite again. I need to lean on the personalities, to know who plays. I like to start from reality to go towards fiction, I need to believe in it.
When the preparation arrives, I go on location scouting. I carry history within me, but then the places I discover will tell me whether I want to stay there or not. This is where I rewrite again, according to these sets, which will help me find the aesthetics of the film. So I rewrite all the time, until the end, until the mixing.
When do the words of the screenplay give way to images?
The words are a support, the scenario is a bit like the skeleton of the film. A look can remove a sentence, sometimes the look is enough. We first need the words, but once we have the characters, we understand something in the image that we don’t need to underline with dialogue. I’m more the type to take dialogue out of the shoot than add it.
It is the young Tanguy Mercier who embodies Tom, how was the work with him?
Tanguy Mercier talks a lot with his body and his eyes. I remember the scene where Joss, his mother, slaps him. The way he played that, he was really in the feeling. While he is not a child-victim in the film, he is already mature, he almost forms a couple with his mother. It is astonishing.
What’s great is that he acts with his instinct, he didn’t go into the boxes of culture and education. He has something organic, animal in his decisions.
When Félix Maritaud, who plays the character of Samy, arrived on the set, Tanguy changed his attitude. He started to smile more, like it was Tom’s story. As if he had followed the story, and that the real joined the fiction. And I think it takes both to make a film. Because I want people to believe it. You have to believe in everything. In any case, I need to believe in everything to make and to love a film.
Tanguy Mercier forms a formidable film duo with Nadia Tereszkiewicz. How did you choose it?
It was Haut et Court who first told me about Nadia, who is in their series Possessions. And then it was the casting manager who told me about it. I met her, we did a reading. I had never seen her play before, but I immediately said to myself: “it’s her”. I don’t need to see people play to choose them. Besides, I often work with people who are not actors. Everyone is in their place, there are never bad actors, only bad directors.
Nadia has what I was looking for for the character. That is to say a freshness, I see it as a fruit, a currant, a raspberry, full of juice. Passion, freshness, I love that. I thought it was beautiful, I wanted to avoid having a 40-year-old mother, because Joss is 24, and it wouldn’t have been the same thing at all. It would have been sad. Joss is young, brave, she fights and she will get through it, that’s for sure.
tom is a film that has a healing power, going against the heavy dramatic trend. Was it a central will?
We’re all screwed up right now, and I wanted to give people that. You have to see things that are human. By dint of seeing only the blackness of our societies, showing it in films… I can’t anymore. I need to make cinema that feels good, maybe that’s the label feel good movie but I don’t care, let’s go to the human and the soothing.
