Alice Winocour arrives smiling and light in this corner, hidden from view, of the café in the rue de Turenne, in Paris, where she has her habits. Carried out in the middle of a heat wave, the interview will not be long in coming, either.
We are here to talk about See Paris again, her new film, about what led her to take an interest in the terrorist attacks of 2015, even more so in the condition of its survivors, with their lives to be mended, now, in the shadow of post-trauma. It very quickly appears that deep family foundations, on several floors, determine his movement towards the film. If their evocation comes strongly during our meeting, a hook is however necessary to make them resonate in the life and work of the filmmaker.
This 46-year-old Parisian took a while to dive into her career. However, she lived a childhood bathed in cinema: “My parents, who were a bit hippie and very cinephile, thought that we could show children almost anything. I saw a lot of films very early on and formed an intimate and obsessive relationship with cinema. Psychosis, for example, by Alfred Hitchcock, became our bedside film with my brother, we played it every day, it was at the center of our games. I suddenly have a relationship less intellectual than nervous, sensory, to the cinema. » She nevertheless left to study criminal law for four years at the University of Assas: “I hardly went to class, I was at the cinema all day, but in my head, of course, I was going to be a lawyer. »
Alice Winocour, director: “I suddenly have a less intellectual than nervous, sensory relationship with the cinema”
Entrance to the Fémis, a prestigious film school, for which she is attempting the competition as a “bet”, corrects the shooting, although it fits at first glance in the scenario section. Again, it will have to settle. Alice Winocour believes in the power of the unconscious. He guided “pretty much everything i’ve done in my life”, she says. And it is by writing the scenario ofaugustine for someone else that she realizes she wants to direct. The film was released in 2012, she is 36 years old. It depicts the relationship between Professor Charcot and the young patient from working-class backgrounds that will allow him to lay the foundations of hysteria. It is less the medical discovery that preoccupies the filmmaker than this mixture of attraction and impediment, subjection and revolt, which puts two close bodies under tension.
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