You moved from Cameroon to the US when you were five years old, and French was your first language. Did the feeling of otherness that you experienced as a child drive you to tell stories that center outsiders?

Definitely, although it’s something that I wasn’t consciously aware of. It just seeped into my work because of the way I related to other people. As a child, I was trying to connect with other kids, in a new country, in this new language, getting teased for my accent. I developed an understanding that I was somehow different, but didn’t understand why. It made me go inward. I became a very introverted kid. But it made me much more observant. Those qualities really fed the way I look at the world, and my writing quite directly. 

Were movies a source of solace for you when you were young?

Absolutely. My three siblings and I fell into films quite early. It became our way of canceling out the noise around us. We didn’t have friends, and we weren’t outdoorsy kids. We were basically just stuck in front of our television, for better or worse. We were renting four or five movies a week, a lot of horror, a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, and watching what was on TV when our parents weren’t around. That’s how we discovered a lot of classic films—a lot of early Scorsese. We were exposed to such a breadth of films, and to different auteurs. It informed my storytelling, and showed me what was possible visually.

It also taught me that storytelling is all about character. That’s what draws us in. What’s happening with this person? Why are they making the choices they’re making? What is it about their background that’s informing these things? How is it affecting the key relationships in their lives? And ultimately, is this a journey we want to go on as viewers? These are the key questions I ask myself when I’m starting to write something new. Because ultimately, we watch movies to see ourselves in a new way. We recognize ourselves even within the most outrageous worlds. There is always that moment of connection we feel with good characters, and that’s what makes us care.

That’s so interesting, because the protagonist in Our Father, the Devil, Marie, is literally obscured from the audience from the first frame of the film, and remains oblique for quite a while. Then there’s a switch, when suddenly you begin to understand what’s happening underneath. But you really resist the convention of forging an identificatory relationship between your audience and your protagonist.

Absolutely, because this is a woman who is hiding, who has so much baggage. I wanted people to experience the film as slowly peeling back the layers of who this woman is. Why is she behaving this way? The audience experiences Marie the way people around her do; she’s an enigma. So that felt like the right way to introduce her.

There are so many layers here: Marie is a woman, a woman of color, and an immigrant. Were you commenting on the societal requirement for someone in Marie’s subject position to maintain a veneer of stoicism, and to disavow any sense of fragility?

Yes, but I would say it goes deeper—it’s more cultural. In Africa, mental health services are still very new. We’re taught that we just have to deal with our problems, and there’s a culture of sweeping things under the rug. There isn’t a lot of space to process or share what you’re feeling. Women of color have to be strong constantly, and just carry on regardless of what they’ve been through, regardless of the scars they’re trying to heal from. Marie doesn’t know how to ask for help. And it almost kills her.

Because you initially resist identification with the audience, by the time we’re with Marie we’re really with her. That connection is so much deeper. 

That’s what I hoped people would feel. Because when you’re yearning to understand a character, you’re really leaning in. The strategy was to push the audience to lean in, to want to get to know her. By the time you get access, you are invested in what she’s going through.

What cinematic strategies did you deploy to create that effect?

We were very selective with close ups. When we do give the audience a close up, that’s when they lean in. We were walking a tightrope between showing just enough of what is happening for Marie internally and knowing that people wouldn’t understand what was going on in the beginning. We also tried to play with thriller tropes. I love a slow burn, when you can feel that something is bubbling underneath. That genre really informed the visual language of the film.

I know the film is classified as a thriller, but do you ever think of it as a horror film? I’m a little biased because we’re doing this interview for a horror magazine, but I think there are so many horrific elements in it.

Absolutely, horror was an influence—for example, our use of slow zooms and pans. But it wasn’t necessarily intentional. It might be because horror is so baked into my way of seeing things. But you’re right, it is a social horror film. Marie is faced with the man who destroyed her entire life, her entire family. And nobody else in the town knows. It’s horrific. But other horror elements were probably unconscious decisions, because it’s just part of my cinematic language as a filmmaker.

I really read the film through the lens of rape revenge. On the textual level, you have the assault, and this secret about Father Patrick that only Marie knows. But on the subtextual level, the thing I love about rape revenge is that women are allowed to be both protagonist and antagonist. You so rarely see female rage on screen. 

That reading of the film is spot on. Again, not a conscious decision, but in looking at the film after making it, it’s definitely there. I’m so aware of this lack of female characters on screen being allowed to express their rage. And I was very interested in this tension between hero and villain. I wanted to play with a character that embodied both. For me, Marie is the villain of this movie. It’s not Father Patrick. She is both hero and villain. And I find that to be incredibly interesting and refreshing. It’s so human. We all have the capacity to do good and evil, at the same time. And we have to accept that duality in ourselves. We tend to want to put characters in one category or another. Execs are always giving notes about characters being unlikable. But humans are not likable all the time. So I wanted to see how an audience would digest a character like that.

The larger question you’re asking is, who deserves to be forgiven? Rather than giving us a likable female character, you offer us real moral ambiguity. You allow the audience to sit with that murkiness.

That’s what I yearn for when I’m watching films. I want the filmmaker to trust me. I want to make my own decision about who these people are. I don’t want to be spoon fed. I don’t want a certain narrative forced down my throat. I love movies like Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher and even Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. Those films challenge you to process complicated characters. Those films linger.

The Piano Teacher is such an interesting comp.

She’s batshit crazy.

Fucking nuts. But I love her!

I love her!

I wanted to ask you about the film’s setting. Marie works in a retirement community, where the past is all the residents have left. I find it interesting that Marie works in this environment, where she can mediate her patients’ relationship to past and present, but remains under the control of an abusive, authoritative boss. Were those themes relevant to your choice of setting?

Yes. She is working with older residents who are living in the past, and their present is in limbo because they are nearing the end of their lives. And Marie is living in the past; she hasn’t been able to move on. She’s putting on a show that she’s a normal person. But she goes home and has nightmares every night—she’s living with PTSD. The character of Sabine, Marie’s boss, reflects the microaggressions that people of color deal with as a product of institutionalized racism. 

How did you decide where to film?

That town is actually my producer’s hometown. I wrote the movie in French, so we needed a small town in Europe, and I wanted it to take place in an idyllic setting, because you don’t expect violence to happen in a place like that. I also wanted it to be in a town where there weren’t many people of color, so that I could isolate Marie and her best friend Nadia even more. And it’s an aging town as well, so there’s an emptiness. There’s darkness underneath the beauty.

Let’s talk about the violence in the film, and the lack thereof. Most of the violence takes place offscreen. Why did you make that decision?

I didn’t want to retraumatize an audience. I thought that the audience drawn to this film might be people who came from a similar background to Marie. And I didn’t think that seeing the violence on screen would add anything. For me, the psychological violence was much more interesting. As a horror buff, I know that it’s often what you don’t see that’s the most terrifying. What you can imagine is so much worse than what a filmmaker can create.

The intimacy in the film is handled so beautifully. Was this shot before Intimacy Coordinators really became a thing?

It was right around the time when it started to become a thing. We didn’t have access to one, because of our budget and COVID. I had really candid conversations with my two actors (Babetida Sadjo and Franck Saurel), and we really let Babetida take the lead. I’m really proud of that scene, the care that went into preparing for it. Babetida told me that it was the safest she’d ever felt on set.

It’s such a delicate, thoughtful scene. It’s an investigative scene. At each moment, Marie is deciding if she wants to continue. I could sense that it was led by Babetida. I think that scene might have felt different if it had been choreographed by a third party.

I’m so happy you said that, because I felt the same thing. We were being led by her. And that investigative element you’re speaking about is what the scene is. He’s waiting for her. Arnaud doesn’t know what happened to Marie, but he knows something happened. This is the scene when her wall comes down. This is the scene when she’s able to take back control. And our DP Tinx Chan had such an incredible connection with Babetida. He felt her. A lot of the shots weren’t planned, we just knew he’d be following them. But he really felt her. It’s one of my favorite scenes.

How does your background as an actor inform your directing?

It’s everything. I understand that different actors have different needs. And it’s about building trust. When you’re an actor, you need to feel safe. You want to be able to offer ideas; you want to be able to bring yourself into the role. There’s nothing I hated more as an actor than result-driven direction. I really enjoy the collaboration of working with actors. The right actor is going to bring something to the role that you haven’t written. At some point, you have to accept that the actor knows the character better than you do. And when I see the characters come to life on set, it’s the most magical thing. I’ll never forget our first day of shooting, Babetida just transformed into Marie. You could hear a pin drop. Marie was in the room. 

I have to ask you about the lipstick.

Well this segues perfectly, because the lipstick was not in the script! That was an idea that Babetida brought me. I had written in the black lipstick that she wears through the first half of the film. And it’s her armor, the death of her sexuality really. And when she puts on the red lipstick, she decides she’s open to something, to the possibility of something developing with Arnaud. I love that scene. I want so badly for this woman to let go, to be able to find love. And that was a moment when we were shooting when I didn’t even feel like I wrote it. I felt it. The script had taken on a life of its own.

The third issue of our magazine is themed “Hysteria.” I was thinking a lot about this movie in that context, and the way sexual assault survivors are often deemed hysterical or crazy. This movie allows a survivor to act out, to bring her trauma out in the open. It frees her.

Thank you for saying that. It was really important to me to provide that space. I’m not a survivor of sexual violence, but I really tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who had that experience. No one has the right to tell you how to process your trauma. And this was an opportunity to allow that rage to come out. I had no idea how the performance was going to unfold, and it was so exciting to have a front seat to it. But we all felt a collective sense of relief on set, and that relief is something I am most proud of. I’ve had a lot of survivors come up to me after screenings and say, “Thank you for making this film. I was screaming right along with Babetida’s character.” That is so important. Women don’t often get the space to scream.

What are you working on now?

Well, I’ve got a horror movie.

No way! 

I do. I’m working on a sci-fi horror film. It’s an adaptation, and I’m working with the author, and he’s brilliant. It’s an unusual film that explores female identity, and ambition, and the parts of ourselves that we are running from. I’m really excited to be moving into the horror genre in a more literal way. A lot of people picked up on the moments of horror in Our Father, the Devil, but with this project I can step into the genre much more directly. I’m also working on a thriller about the end of a forty-year marriage. They’re both very unique and very interesting films—very different.

I can’t wait to see an Ellie Foumbi horror film.