EAT THE NIGHT Interview: Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel Talk Online Gaming, Queer Love, Young Realities

Contributing Writer; London (@blakethinks)
EAT THE NIGHT Interview: Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel Talk Online Gaming, Queer Love, Young Realities

Appoline and her brother Pablo have a close relationship.

Much of their treasured time together is spent playing Massively-Multiplayer-Online-RPG Darknoon. Featuring graphics reminiscent of World of Warcraft the combat of a character action game, and the community and diverse feature set of Final Fantasy XIV, it's easy to understand why the siblings have such deep affection for this game. Watching the introductory video that opens Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel's film, I feel my hand twitch for my credit card to sign up for the inevitable 30-day free trial.

-ALERT-

Their gameplay is interrupted by a text box. Darknoon's servers will be shutting down in 60 days. Blame economic shifts and an ever-changing gaming market.

There is a real world beyond Darknoon, and it holds solace for one sibling but not the other. Pablo becomes involved with a striking supermarket worker named Night. Unfortunately, Pablo is also involved in other dealings, supporting his sister through drug selling that soon goes awry. The siblings find both of their worlds closing in, just as Night begins to open the door to new possibilities.

With Eat the Night newly released in the US by Altered Innocence, I sat down with directors Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel to discuss their latest co-operative endeavour.

Screen Anarchy: EAT THE NIGHT fuses elements of social realist filmmaking and MMORPGs. What were your first or formative encounters with each?

Jonathan Vinel: Our cinema backdrop is fairly removed from social realism. We've worked with a video game aesthetic before, in our first film, Jessica Forever. We wanted to work closer still to that aesthetic.

We decided to create a game for the movie, and to mix all these different genres: social chronicle, action films, thrillers, and video games. The real work of it was to make something that wasn't just a patchwork of elements, something nicely melded together.

Caroline Poggi: We wanted to work with childhood images. Videogames were something that we grew up with. We wanted to portray young people living with their feelings both inside a virtual world and the real one, and show that those two worlds aren't as separate as we might imagine them to be. There's communication between the two, they're very much mixed. Young people have a place in their virtual world where they can express emotions --falling in love and spewing out rage.

The starting point of the film's development was the love story between the two guys. We came across some touching footage of the end of an MMORPG. Seeing the death of an environment where people had learned to live together and grown second families, this idea of being faced with the death of an environment that had seemed eternal, that was something that we wanted to work with.

What I find particularly striking is that you shoot both worlds in a similar manner. There are aerial shots of the siblings riding through the woods on an in-game beast, and the Kawasaki bike sequences in the real world are captured with near-identical framing.
You don't privilege one world over the other, you treat them as equals. How did you go about balancing them?

Jonathan: We wanted to speak about how this generation grew up with both the real world and the virtual world, and how important it is for them to acknowledge that the virtual world carries as much weight as the real one. They seep into each other. They exist together, and they're equal.

What helped us was that we shot the real world footage first. So, when it came to Darknoon, we knew what to base things on, what to replicate. We wanted to convey the idea that Appoline is living deeply through the game, whereas Pablo turns his real life into the game through his job as a dealer.

It was important to nail that idea in the final scene. [In the chase], it's shot like a video game. You've got checkpoints, you've got specific angles. It was important for us to translate that vision of the world into the way that it was shot.

Tell me more about the game: did your collaborators develop the game as a playable thing, or was it just created as cinematic footage?

Caroline: No, it's not playable. We didn't have the means for a game studio, so we worked with two friends that we'd worked on 3D elements with before. We only created what we needed for the movie. The problem with that was that, as the project moved forward, we needed more detailed expressions. It was a lot of 3D work and motion capture, and the game engine became a film studio. As the game work developed, it began to resemble a traditional film shoot in a virtual space.

You're essentially making two disparate films subsequently melded into one, working in 3D animation software and in live action. What was the process of combining them for the finished film?

Caroline: It was really hard. We shot live-action for eight weeks, and we didn't have the video game images yet, so we couldn't realize the montage. For everything related to the synthetic images, we used cardboard to signify 'the wolf is running' or 'here there are dead bodies falling from the sky'. For other moments, we used placeholder footage from other video games. It was hard for a movie about visual images to work without those visual images.

We had the finished game images a week before the end of production. That's when we worked out how we wanted to visualize the closing of the server. We needed to see the rest for it to click.

Tell me more about the look and feel of the game that you imagined within the film world. DARKMOON is a believable product. It's more than mere pastiche, this feels like a focus-tested, informed idea of what a popular MMORPG could be. It's similar to [World of] Warcraft in places, and there's some Zelda-like sound effects, but it also has its own unique elements. It's impressive what you've achieved.

Jonathan: Sara Dibiza and Lucien Krampf, our game leads, have a strong grounding in game culture. I've also played a lot. It was a case of doing very precise work within clearly defined settings. We're big fans of FromSoftware's games. There was some Skyrim influence as well, a little bit of Black Desert, Final Fantasy XIV. The idea was to keep things gothic, almost grimdark, but to bring in the pop elements that you can see in the lighting, the outfits, Pablo's bike, the ecstasy. It was about mixing dark environments with bright pop.

I think you should make the game, it would be a big hit.

Jonathan: Well, we'd need money to actually make the game, but it's actually part of what's fun about it. We didn't make the game, it doesn't really have a story or a clear objective to it. What really mattered to us was the space that the player's feelings and emotions could take in that environment.

Tell me more about the directionlessness of both these spaces, reality and the virtual world. It's an interesting thing to make a film where your character's lives aren't really going anywhere.

Caroline: We didn't necessarily think about it that way. We often work with characters that are lost. They look for refuge and try to find a way to live their own way. Their worlds are often too tight. Pablo finds escapism in love, Appoline finds it in the game. It's always about looking for that escape, looking for that other thing --a way to get out of this tight and constricting world.

Jonathan: It's still important to have key moments in the narrative. We often end up making films that have a strong focus on feelings and emotion, and the narrative beats push things forward. I don't think we'd be happy if we made films where characters strayed down different paths without a clear objective. Finding a good equilibrium between drifting and momentum is what makes the film work.

It's striking that both worlds in the film are devastated by economic realities. The game is forced to shut down. Pablo is forced to turn to crime to make ends meet.

Jonathan: We didn't want to focus on the how and why of Pablo's drug dealing. We just wanted to put him there and ask the question: What do you do once you're there, once you're selling drugs? How do you live in that scenario? We don't want to judge, or be holier than thou.

When Darknoon closes, it resembles the end of our own worlds. The film is violent, but it's the most luminous film we have ever made. Despite the fact that it's very hard, you always have something, you go towards the light. You always try to shine.

And they have each other. How did you land on siblings as the center of this film? Then there's your third character, the disruptor that bridges them.

Jonathan: We both have siblings, we know how it is. We know the intimacy of growing with them, and the distance that comes with growing too fast together. But really, the key was Night. When we first thought up the film, it was Night and Pablo and that intense experience of falling in love. The rest latched onto it.

Caroline: With siblings, there's also the notion of sharing and teaching, of passing down information. For example, we wondered what kind of music Appoline would listen to. We settled on the idea that she would listen to what Pablo used to listen to when he was her age. It was about siblings creating a shared space together.

One of our big inspirations was Nenette et Bonnie by Claire Denis. With absent parents, the parental role shifts to another person. How do you grow in the absence of that parental figure?

Tell me about working with Altered Innocence on the US distribution of the film. This is a queer film, but it's so many other things as well.

Caroline: We'd worked with Altered Innocence before. Frank [Jaffe] had done a short film compilation of queer short films. It's a really small group, the queer filmmaker community in France. Alexis Langlois, Yann Gonzalez, Bertrand Mandico. It's an extended family that you end up working with over and over again.

Jonathan: We're really happy, because it's the first time that one of our films has played in US cinemas. Jessica Forever released in the US on streaming, through Shudder. And we'd never been to New York. We knew this environment from a great distance. We knew it from music, from film. Seeing it up close for the first time was amazing.

How did you land on the title of this film? When you first meet the character of Night, you're left wondering what that title means for where the film is heading.

Caroline: The title was there from the start, much like the character. There was a line at the end of the film that got removed, where Apolline would say that, through all of this, she learned to keep going towards the light, to chase the light and eat the night away. It was this idea that, no matter the harshness of reality, you should keep having at it no matter what.

But there was also the idea of the consumable drugs, to eat the night and take it for yourself. Then there's the straightforward meaning with the character, eating him sexually.

As for the specific phrase 'eat the night', there's a song from Bladee, there's a poem from Faulkner --we read that line again in a book by Marguerite Duras. It's a line that carries a lot of weight, and that you can find in a lot of literature. We wanted to bring a lot of weight to the film in using it.

What would you like audiences to take away from EAT THE NIGHT? What do you take away from having made it?

Caroline: What surprised us is that, after screenings, we had a lot of older women come up to us, women over 60. They said that they didn't know anything about video games, but that, through the film, they came to understand what the youth pours into those environments and what they mean to them. It made us realize that this is something that we want out of this film.

Jonathan: I want people to embrace hybrid cinema. The more that they do, the more we can break the boundaries of different arts. That's what we try to do in our work --put things together that are not meant to go together. I think that's what we like to see in life, when you weave different things together with love and create something new.

With thanks to Méthode Lacour--Cartau for interpreting. Eat the Night is now playing in US cinemas and on VoD from Altered Innocence. Visit the official site for more information.

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