‘The Soul Eater’ Directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury On Their Chilling New Crime Thriller
Writers and directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury are known for their bloody tales, from Inside to Kandisha. Now, they’re taking on true crime with their latest film The Soul Eater, which is out now on VOD. Steeped in the typical gnarly dread that Bustillo and Maury are known for, they flip the script on the police procedural for something creepy and deeply unsettling.
The synopsis simply reads, “When violent and gruesome deaths start plaguing a small mountain village, an old legend about a malevolent creature resurfaces.”
We spoke with the directing duo about tackling the true crime subgenre, actors doing their own stunts, and working with their dream cast.
There are slight spoilers ahead for The Soul Eater, so readers, proceed with caution.
Dread Central: Congratulations on The Soul Eater. How does it feel? It’s so different from The Deep House, and it’s so cool how you guys work with so many different subgenres. So what was it like to dive into (pun intended) a supernatural police procedural crime thriller for the two of you?
Julien Maury: Dive into. [Laughs] It’s the first time we are not telling a horror or fantasy story and going straight into a dark thriller police investigation movie. But this is also a genre we love as an audience, as viewers, and also because The Soul Eater is an adaptation of a French novel. And when we discovered it, when the producer sent a copy of it, we really felt that it was very efficient and we felt that it could come into our universe. We always want to tell a story that means something to us, and we never considered ourselves yes men. So we need to have something when someone sends us a script, something that is touching us. That was the case here.
The main difference I think, is that when you tell a crime story like that, when you are following an investigation, you have to give a lot of information and clues to your audience. And when you translate it into movies and pictures, it’s very tricky not to be too talkative and too boring for the audience. So this was something that was for us, something to watch during the world, the world process until the editing where we were trying to find the right balance and to have the audience really into it, but not being like, okay, they are talking too much. I can’t stand it anymore.
DC: It’s not all exposition and info-dumping. You don’t want it to just be that.
JM: Usually in our movies, you introduce your characters and then you dive into the action. I mean, here it was like they were finding bodies and you don’t know what happened. That can be frustrating for an audience. They are just discovering corpses, so that’s also why we have added sequences, like the sequence at the end of the film at the breakfast table.
This wasn’t in the book and this wasn’t in the first draft. This is something that we wanted to show because we felt like it was a payoff. During the whole movie, we’re talking about what could have happened. And we always think as an audience when we write or when we work on a movie, we always place ourselves in the seat of the audience and say, “This can be frustrating if we don’t see the effect of that drug. We want to see it.”
DC: Cool. I loved Paul Hamy’s performance as Franck, but you really put him through the physical ringer in this movie. So what was it like working with him with his physicality and how much he had to do with his body in The Soul Eater?
JM: He knew it before. It wasn’t a surprise. He trained. But as soon as he agreed to do The Soul Eater, he started to jog and run every day and said, “OK, I need to have the physical condition because I want to do it all by myself.”
DC: He did all of his own stunts then?
JM: Almost.
Alexandre Bustillo: Not in the forest.
JM: This is the only one that was done by a stunt guy. It was kind of hard to stop [Paul] because he is like a kid and he wanted to do everything. When he saw the stuntman, he was like, “I can do it. I can do it and I want to do it.” It was the same when he was running on the trees. The guy he’s chasing is a professional. So the guy showed him how to walk and run on these very steep surfaces and then he hurt himself! He was like, “I can do it. I can run as fast as he is.” I said, “No, no, no, you can’t! Just focus on what you have to do.” [Laughs]
But it was cool because we always preferred to work with actors who are really into it and really passionate about what they have to do and not calling for the stand doubles all the time. No, he was really highly motivated. When we first met him, what really struck us was the fact that he has this really impressive physical aspect. He’s very tall and muscular and he has almost the face of a boxer. So when you see him, you are kind of impressed. As soon as he starts talking, he’s one of the sweetest guys you can imagine. He’s very gentle and polite, and this is really striking. It’s something that we thought we could use in because in The Soul Eater, he’s always pretending to be someone else. It was very cool to work with Paul.
DC: And then there’s Virginie Ledoyen. I love the contrast between her character as the strong kind of scary woman type versus the male character. I wanted to hear just about casting her as the commander because she is such a commanding presence on screen, but also very vulnerable as we learn. That dichotomy is really beautiful with her character, especially in contrast with Franck.
AB: We’ve been trying to work with Virginie for maybe 10 years now. We are absolutely big fans of Virginie, who’s very well known in France. She’s been an actor maybe now more than 30 years, and she started at around 10 years old. We’re absolutely big fans of her. We have a lot of friends in common, especially Pascal Laugier, who is the director of Martyrs. Virgin was the lead actress in his first picture Saint Ange.
So we tried to work with Virginie on our third movie, Among The Living. She couldn’t at this time, but Virginie was still in our minds. When we started to do the casting for The Soul Eater, the producer asked us, “So who could be the policewoman?” Of course, it’ll be Virginie. So we called her, we sent her the script, and two days later, she said, “Yes, guys, I want to do it.” It was maybe one of the most happy days during all the prep to have Virginie. Finally, after so many years, we’ve been in love with her since we were 15!
DC: That’s so exciting. That’s so cool for you to finally get her in a role!
AB: It was an honor, It was an honor, too, to have Sandrine Bonnaire in the film. She is a very big star in France, a very intellectual star. You know what I mean? She has only done very specific movies. Not commercial movies, but very sharp movies. And especially one of our favorite movies, by Claude Chabrol. He did an incredible movie, La Cérémonie, with Sandrine and Virginie.
DC: I need to watch it. I love his movies. His work is so visceral and weird, but not horror, but still very upsetting.
AB: So we are very, very excited to re-create the original casting of La Cérémonie because Virginie and Sandrine hadn’t seen each other since shooting the film 25 years ago. So it was very cool to do this reunification. We are very proud of that.
DC: That’s so cool. So you said that your producer brought you the story, right? I know that a lot of the time, you guys write your own scripts. What were the biggest challenges and changes? You mentioned, Kulian, some of the changes, but were these characters always a woman and a man? Was that always in the script or did you make that decision to have the gender split as characters?
JM: No, we didn’t change the gender of the main characters except for the villain, the bad guy. It was a bad guy, and we changed the gender. Yeah, it was a man, and we felt like it was too obvious and we felt it was much more disturbing if it was a woman. And especially because there are some evil women in the world. It’s much more disturbing in a way, since it’s so rare.
AB: It was the same from Inside, because when we wrote Inside for the first time, the villain was a guy, not a woman. It was just a killer looking for pregnant women to eat their placenta, to stay young. That was the first idea. And then we said, “But it’s the same story every time [that a] guy is a villain.” So we changed the gender of the villain in Inside. From there, the story came naturally, and it was the same logic with The Soul Eater. If women are evil, too, it’s all over. That is the end of the world.
JM: But what we’ve changed in the duo of the police investigators is just the way they react. In the book, it was kind of much more of a cliche because the guy was very confident and was talking to her, he was hitting on her, and it felt strange. This guy is hiding something and he has a hidden agenda. How can he be so confident in himself and be so cool and have the right punchlines?
Also in the book, he was older than she was, and this aspect was cliche for us as well. We felt it was much more interesting to have her older and reverse this type of story. It’s always about a love interest, and we felt like it was much more interesting to evacuate the love. And to have this new dynamic in the duo, having two broken souls in a way.
DC: Well, because the friendship that blossoms between them is really great. You don’t see that friendship a lot. It’s either love interest or they hate each other. But here, there’s a tentative platonic intimacy.
JM: Yeah. When I am talking about broken souls, I mean it’s what we tried to do was as if they recognized each other as being broken and as if they knew that they were similar in a way they had this failure inside them.
DC: Wow. Thank you both so much for chatting with me about The Soul Eater. I was so surprised by this movie, and I love how you guys did a police procedural. It was really cool to see how you handled that genre. Do you like the genre? Would you do it again?
JM: Yeah. Why not?
DC: Never say never, right?
JM: Yeah, exactly. This is a genre that we like to watch as an audience. So yeah, it was a challenge for us to try to direct one. And of course, it’s always the same if we have the right story. If we find a story that has an echo to our universe, this is something that of course we could do again.
The Soul Eater is now available on VOD.
Categorized:Interviews
