Rotterdam 2026 Interview: Guillaume Nicloux Talks About MI AMOR

The French writer, playwright, professor, actor and director Guillame Nicloux is no stranger to the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In the past 30 years, he visited several times, and his films have often featured in the festival's program. This year he brought a special treat for the festival: the world première of his new thriller Mi Amor, starring Pom Klementieff and Benoît Magimel as a DJ and her employer who are looking for a missing person in the Canary Islands. You can read my positive review here.

The day after the première, we met Guillame Nicloux at the press center of the festival for an interview. Note that some mild spoilers for Mi Amor come up in the interview, but nothing too disrupting (I think).

ScreenAnarchy: Mi Amor, like many of your films, has a very distinct look. Did you have that in mind from the beginning already, that you wanted a thriller with this look, or did this follow from the script?

Guillame Nicloux: People often ask me that, which order I use. But that is not fixed, it is porous. I am inspired by a lot of things, like geography. From the moment I landed on Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, I felt I HAD to shoot a thriller there, a psychological thriller. That was immediate. The environment was a catalyst for me, finding a narrative, the elements and emotions. To be more precise: in this case I had already heard of the island, but on the day I arrived I felt the desire to write a first draft, immediately, while I was there. The writing process was really intertwined with the location.

I can imagine. I haven't been to Grand Canaria yet but I have visited some of the other islands and they are each like different planets, Lanzerote looks nothing like Tenerife...

And there is Fuerteventura, which is totally different again. Like a little Montana.

I was surprised to find out that an outlandish part of the story of Mi Amor appears to be based on a real incident which happened on Tenerife, with a cult and all?

It is true that there are a lot of cults and sects on the islands, but not just that. There are a lot of different communities coming together there, of all sorts. In part because the weather is nice all year round, there is the warm gulf stream, and it is part of Spain... It is a pleasant place to be, it is welcoming and beautiful. You have the landscapes. And I also did not make up the rumor about Hitler hiding in a house after the Second World War to flee to South America. That house is Villa Winter, on Fuerteventura. I mean, it's on a different island than where Mi Amor takes place, but the current owner of the villa does tell that story to visitors.

So you have a great location and were inspired to start writing. But making a film is an arduous process which involves many people. What happened after you finish the draft? When is the decision made to go forward, to start casting and such?

Well, there is the classic process after the writing has happened. The next step is finding the funds, and then the producer starts the casting process. There is nothing special about this movie in that regard. Sometimes it is a bit more experimental and we try different ways of working, like we did with Being Blanche Houellebecq, where the script was much more fluid, improvised, and that approach asks for a different kind of funding as well. Those films form a counterweight for me, a balance with the more structured films like Mi Amor. I find it stimulating to alternate those, there is a different kind of energy. Experimental films have a very interesting set to work on, they feed the creative process in me.

I'm asking about the process, because I also speak with a lot of filmmakers who cannot get their projects off the ground, they stall in pre-production. It can take ten years before they finally get something to the shooting part. But you are very prolific, you manage to get almost one film made every year.

I love doing what I want, and I have the privilege to work with the right producers. I am surrounded with the right people who allow me to make films. It is a little miracle, movie after movie, and I love being able to create this alchemy with all people involved. To combine all those talents. And you're right, it IS very difficult to produce films nowadays, it is a big problem for many filmmakers. So I'm lucky, I feel very fortunate.

In Mi Amor, you do experiment a bit with the colors, giving the island an even more extraterrestrial look. Trees look pink. How did you do that and why did you choose this?

It was an idea that slid in gradually while we were filming, to move the color spectrum a bit into infrared. I started to think about what visual impact I wanted. What would, for this film, help the story? I wanted it to look visually strong, to look strange. To make it look like a fantastic realism. And when we found out how to do that, we had to find a balance where skin-tones would still look normal but the landscapes would shift, change.

You are not just a famous writer and director but also sometimes an actor in other directors' films. To my surprise I saw you played the supermarket manager in Gaspar Noë's I Stand Alone. How did that come about, and how do you react to each other's films?

Oh, we've been good friends for 35 years already. He's also in my movies, like in The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. We are always interested in each other's films, we even show each other our early cuts. We are very close.

Your previous film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam was Lockdown Tower, and in earlier interviews you stated that it was your most personal film, based on a nightmare, a fear you had as a child of disappearing in a life-devouring void. Is that why you feel drawn towards making thrillers?

Yes, that was my childhood nightmare. And channelling that entire darkness, despair and anxiety, those anxious feelings, into a film was for me a sort of therapy. What also happened is that there was a trauma linked to that memory, and at one point I tried hypnosis-therapy to help me. What happened in those sessions under hypnosis, was that a spider had taken over my entire head. With the help of therapists, they shrunk the spider, made a ball out of it and made me throw it away. And that got rid of the trauma. In Lockdown Tower, you're in the darkness while it's shrinking, and shrinking, and the child in there, of course, is me at the end. When people ask the mother "what did he do to die?" and the mother says "nothing", it's because the child has solved his trauma. And I made another film called The End, which is also an exploration of my fears and nightmares. Though that one is more about suicide. Ehm... we're having a lot of fun right here (laughs). Very uplifting. There is catharsis in seeing how we can expel trauma, and almost find pleasure in the entire trauma relieving process. They are two films about disappearance: one physical and the other meta-physical.

And in Mi Amor, the main characters experience a lot of anxiety over a disappearance. In my opinion, Pom Klementieff and Benoît Magimel are fantastic in it. Did you have them in mind while writing the characters?

Sometimes I do write a scenario with someone in mind already, but this time it went differently. The producers and I saw her in Guardians of the Galaxy III, we liked her and thought "let's send her the script". She received it while on the set of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning and just like that, she agreed. Very easy. And I had wanted to work with Benoît Magimel for a very long time already. This was an ideal opportunity to do it.

You are a renowned novel writer, a playwright, and a director. Yet you often write your film and television scripts, like Mi Amor, with someone else: Nathalie Leuthreau. Why is that?

Well, sometimes I need help (laughs). And Nathalie Leuthreau is also the sole writer sometimes, The Divine Sarah Bernhardt she did by herself. We had worked together on a television series, that went well, and we've worked together on all movies since.


And that concluded the interview. A special thanks go to Christelle Gualdi who was the interpreter, without whom the interview would have been very short (as my French is terrible).

Mi Amor had its world première at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and will travel the festival circuit.