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August 3, 2023 • By Eileen G’Sell

Sometimes it’s small, like a car accident, or a man betraying his wife. Sometimes the accident is big, like the last days of the German Democratic Republic, or the first days after the World War. Most of the stories you can tell at this time are love stories, because people try to reorganize their love life to [create an] island. The first sentence in Afire is “Something is wrong,” because the engine of Felix’s car is broken.

The Lumière brothers started cinema the same year that Sigmund Freud found out how dreams work. Because I was reading a Chekhov novel about summer love and Richard Ford’s Wildlife, about a forest fire, I started thinking about summer stories. What is happening to our climate? What is happening to our world? Perhaps there aren’t a thousand new summer stories anymore, because we have destroyed the environment.

Everybody else is working—repairing the roof, cooking, doing dishes—but Leon keeps saying he needs to work. During our rehearsals, the actors were laughing, like in a comedy, and I thought, “This movie isn’t any good. It doesn’t cost me sweat and blood. My movies are about crying and suffering, never laughing. I have destroyed my career!”

You need someone [on-screen] who’s seducing, someone who has desire. You don’t need to see two half-naked or naked bodies. Mostly it’s women on [top of] the men. Their faces are distanced so they can have dialogue and you can do shot/countershot. The light is always on, so you can see everything. I feel embarrassed when I see this. It’s like my parents could be talking there.

They have sex, but they don’t want to talk about it. They are against the pornographic world—all these tits and asses and everything—but they’re also free. So I talked with the actors about this. And they [proposed] a homosexual initiation at the end of one character telling another a story. I liked this! You think you’re a cis or hetero guy, and you’re kissed by a man, and from this moment, you think, “Yes, this could be.”

Usually, actors have to fuck in front of the camera, but to make sounds for a microphone is much harder. The microphone knows if you’re lying. You can betray the camera, but you can’t betray the microphone. When I cast my characters, I always do it with closed eyes. You can hear if someone is a good actor or not.

I love how, in cinema, during final scenes, you have the feeling that, from this moment on, when [the screen] goes dark, the rest of the story belongs to the characters. [At the end of Afire], when she’s laughing at him and he’s laughing at her, it’s a new story that belongs to them. It’s not scripted anymore.

¤

Eileen G’Sell

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