In theaters today, “The Chamber of Wonders” is the new film by Lisa Azuelos, the director of “LOL” and “How beautiful you are!”, which almost stopped the cinema.
What is it about ? Thelma’s life takes a tragic turn when an accident plunges her 12-year-old son Louis into a coma. Determined to wake him up by all means, she will make the crazy bet of accomplishing one by one the “10 things to do before the end of the world” that he had written down in his diary, to show him everything that the life has wonderful things to offer. But this journey into her teenager’s dreams will take her much further than she imagined… until she revives her own taste for life.
A need for renewal
Lisa Azuelos has always drawn on her personal life for her films. The Chamber of Wonders came just in time: “I no longer wanted to make films, to stop tackling such personal subjects as I have done since my debut as a director. After My baby I had the feeling of having done the trick: my last child had left home, I had the impression of having nothing more to tell, of getting old, in short, I was going through a kind of cinematic menopause! “ It was the producer Philippe Rousselet who offered him to shoot The Room of Wonders.
A need for renewal all the stronger as the director lost her parents in a very short time: her mother died just before filming and her father shortly after. “I actually believe that I had to work on this idea of going after my dreams because I had the feeling of being at the end of my life. This film gave me a great freedom of reflection on my life and on the fact of being alive. The simultaneous disappearance of my parents had left a lot of questions unanswered…”
Adaptation
The Chamber of Wonders is based on the novel of the same name by Julien Sandrel, which sold 320,000 copies in France. Lisa Azuelos had not read it when it was released and did not want to read it before shooting the film, preferring to rely on the script by Juliette Sales and Fabien Suarez. It is also the first of her films for which she is not a screenwriter.
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Around the world in times of pandemic
Lisa Azuelos was attracted by the “elsewhere” that the story promised. The Chamber of Wonders takes the viewer to Portugal, Great Britain and Japan. The team had to adapt to the constraints linked to confinement, in particular for Japan. The team was unsure of being able to go there until the last moment, and it was difficult to recreate this country in the studio.
The film was also edited and finished when Japan reopened its borders in the summer of 2022. A reduced team of four people took the opportunity to get there: “We had very little time to prepare for the shoot, the Japanese telling us that it was very complicated on location anyway, unless you had a big budget and a long preparation beforehand. So it was some sort of commando operation!”
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The actresses
Lisa Azuelos had wanted to shoot for a long time with Alexandra Lamy, whom she knows well: “We’ve been very good friends for over 10 years and we’ve wanted to work together for a long time. With her, I knew I was going to have fun, even if the subject of the film is quite serious…”
As for Muriel Robin, it was when she came across one of her books with friends that she considered giving her the role of Louis’ grandmother: “So I called her, we met and it happened very naturally, in an obvious way. I know that she is very happy to have been able to play this role. Muriel has a strong personality, but it’s never a fear for me, on the contrary.”