Comic Timing: Slack Bay Continues French Director Bruno Dumont’s Pivot Into Slapstick and Farce

MM: There is a certain grace with which you shoot vehicles and objects. I think back to your early commercial industrial filmmaking career where you were forced to shoot actual machines. How does that tie into how you shoot actual machines in your films?

Bruno Dumont: It is the comedy that brings back the human mechanism. Comedy is mechanical. The machines become like humans and the other way around. Machin, the big police detective, is like a car.

MM: Violence and sex—two subjects often represented through the mediums of painting and film—are frequently depicted in raw, visceral detail in your earlier work. How do painting and film intersect for you?

Dumont: The best way to meditate is to look at a painting. In a movie you don’t really have time to look at the painting, because the images are really moving fast. For me, I spend my time meditating looking at painting as well as reading literature. I think that grace is there, violence is there, but it’s all a question of greed. That’s why I talk about the mystical because I think everything is connected to everything. You just need to shoot one thing to show something different—that’s what poetry is.

Violence is inherent to peace, because we need the violence to know peace. In movies you have to represent violence so that we become more peaceful in our lives. I believe a lot in catharsis in cinema. As an audience member I’ve had some amazing cathartic experiences. Cinema makes me more civilized—not every movie, of course. But the big directors do a lot of good for me.

MM: My friend watched Twentynine Palms recently, and she was so horrified by the violence and the images that she couldn’t go to sleep afterwards. I had a similar experience with the film where I was unsettled to my core. 

Dumont: Twentynine Palms is really hyper violent. Because I did that I don’t need to do that anymore in life. I’m less violent now. Now I’m really nice; I just make movies [laughs]. Now that I’ve put my camera there and shot every angle of sex, I’m trying to treat sex as more of a suggestion. I’ve done graphic sex in Twentynine Palms, and so I don’t need to do it anymore. 

MM: With Li’l Quinquin, Slack Bay, the forthcoming Joan of Arc musical and a Li’l Quinquin sequel on the docket, do you see a natural end to this recent comedic turn on the horizon?

Bruno Dumont: I think with the Li’l Quinquin sequel which I’m shooting this summer, I can go even further with the comedy. I’ll try, at least. At the same time, it is the character of Jeannette, the bartender—that’s drama. It’s a drama, so I’m on both fronts with that. At some point I’m going to evolve and say, “That’s enough with comedy. Let’s move onto something else.” Maybe I’ll end up doing documentaries [laughs].

MM: Whatever you end up doing next, do you think these core tenets that have always been present in your filmmaking will persist: your hometown location in the north of France, the amateur actors, etc.?

Dumont: Yes. You have to shoot somewhere. When I’m shooting in a place I know I have a connection with, I feel better. Rather than here in Los Angeles; I don’t know Los Angeles. I’d have to live here for several years. Twentynine Palms is a desert. The desert is universal; it’s your mind. So that was not complicated. But the city is a different story. MM

Slack Bay, written and directed by Bruno Dumont, opened in theaters on April 21, 2017, courtesy of Kino Lorber.

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