Born in 1966, Guillaume Nicloux has made around fifteen films since 1990, navigating between genres, from thrillers to fables and comedy. He made two films with Michel Houellebecq, which he made into a particularly original burlesque figure. Tower is his first foray into the fantasy and horror genre.
Two traditions meet in your film. First, one based on imaginary postulates that would come from so-called genre, science-fiction or terror cinema, and another that would relate more to the gaze cast on society. How did the idea for the film come to you?
She came to me in a very sunny place which was not that of confinement, and in a very spontaneous way as it sometimes happens. I had the idea of a very conceptual pitch, and then it was the confinement that triggered the writing. This forced confinement has reignited the imagination of this proposal. The theme of many of my films is steeped in the idea of forced confinement. I always stage imprisoned characters. The geography of the place always dictates the narrative structure and the stakes of the characters. What I seek most often is to find a space of freedom inside the constraint.
One thinks of JG Ballard’s novel, “IGH” (1975), which describes how everything goes haywire in a huge tower. In the book, it is a class war that breaks out between the inhabitants of the top of the building, the rich, and those of the first floors, the poor. In your film, this war is replaced by a war of races and a tribalization of society. Your characters cling to a primitive identity. Does this correspond to your vision of contemporary society?
There is of course this dimension that hovers. It is an underground reading that one could do. Underground because I’ve always thought that, in genre films, it’s more skilful to introduce a disturbance inside something that is very regulated, built on rules. I find that the use of genre film makes it possible to distill the traumas of society and to show them in a very frontal light, curiously.
So yes, we could say that the film is a critique of communitarianism, of withdrawal, knowing that fear provokes stupidity and suddenly leads to a dehumanization which would tend towards a return to a prehistoric era, towards the Lascaux cave. And we realize that the only character carried by a hope, that of saving a child, is a young woman of mixed race. I am for mixing genres, at all levels. All I show, in the end, is everything that scares me and everything that I reject. For a horror film to be successful, horrible things have to happen in it. Horror is the defeat of everything, the abandonment of sharing, of solidarity. It’s crazy.
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