“I started writing the film in 2002”: Hypnotic, Robert Rodriguez’s tribute to Hitchcock at the Midnight Screening in Cannes

“My children were crawling when I was talking about the film. Today, they are working on it!” It took twenty years for Robert Rodriguez to bring to the screen Hypnotic, an original idea on which he has been working since 2002, and which he finally shot, helped by his children who had grown up (Rebel Rodriguez on music, Racer Max on the production and its other heirs in support of editing, special effects or storyboards).

This accomplishment, Robert Rodriguez the famous this evening at the Cannes Film Festival in Midnight, returning with great pleasure to the Croisette after his selections for Desperado (1995) and Sin City (2005). Worn by Ben Affleck, Alice Braga and William Fichtner (who accompanies the filmmaker in Cannes), Hypnotic is one of his favorite original stories.

“This film was born out of my love of Hitchcock films”, he explains to AlloCiné. “At the time, there had just been a re-release of Sueurs Froides, and I wanted to offer something in that vein. I’ve always loved this kind of film, even when I was a kid. Very generous, a lot of twists and a title in one word (Vertigo, editor’s note). I immediately thought of Hypnotic”.

The feature film, which sees an inspector investigating mysterious robberies and discovering a link with the disappearance of his daughter, uses mental manipulation as a screenplay spring. “There’s this idea of ​​a big bad guy, someone the hero tries to corner but keeps altering his perception of reality with powers that push the limits of hypnosis.”

I did not think that we could resume a film twenty years later

“I started writing in 2002, some scenes are still in the movie that you saw by the way, and then I had to put that aside and finish other projects. And before you know it account, fifteen years have passed. And then Alita was offered to me as well as a few other projects. And finally, I was able to get back to Hypnotic. I did not think that we could resume a film twenty years later, but I was keen on this project and I am delighted to have finally been able to finalize it.”

Jacovids / Moreau / Bestimage

Beyond its dimension of police and mental thriller, some sequences of which evoke Inception or the visual universe of Doctor Strange, Hypnotic talks about cinema and has a real meta dimension. “In the end, that’s a bit what we do, we directors. Create a universe that hypnotizes the spectator to the point of believing that there are neither actors nor script. I had always wanted to make a film on the movie theater”. And what better place to do it than in Cannes?

Hypnotic is out on August 23 in French theaters