In theaters since Wednesday, “Visions” is Yann Gozlan’s new film. The director of “Black Box” allows the most French of German actresses to return to France.
What is it about ? An experienced airline pilot, Estelle leads, between two long-haul flights, a perfect life with Guillaume, her loving and protective husband. One day, by chance, in an airport corridor, she crosses paths again with Ana, a photographer with whom she had a passionate affair twenty years earlier. Estelle is then far from imagining that this reunion will lead her into a nightmarish spiral and tip her life into the irrational…
Return to France
Visions marks the return of Diane Kruger in a French film, her last appearance in a French production dating back to Everything Separates Us in 2017. An estrangement due to her family life with her companion, the actor Norman Reedus: “In recent years with Covid, confinements and my family life which has become richer, I too have been shaken up and impacted by this slowdown. As a young mother, I did not want to move away from my daughter , nor his father.”
Genesis
Yann Gozlan wanted to explore the themes of control and disruption, a duality that fascinates him. “I am convinced that despite everything, we remain, beneath the surface, beings driven by impulses. No matter how much we want to reason and present ourselves as civilized people, our animal part is always there, ready to burst the dikes that we was built to contain our instincts…”
At the same time, he often evoked with Michel Fessler, one of the co-screenwriters, the premonitory dreams. It was the latter who suggested to him, shortly before the filming of An Ideal Man, the story of a woman haunted by a dream, that of a house, which ended up bursting into reality. The director concludes: “I then decided to merge my initial desire on the theme of control with this beginning of the story which intrigued me around premonitions”.
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Documentation
The director researched a lot before writing. He became interested in the profession of pilot and met several of them. It was necessary that all the cockpit scenes be as authentic as possible, for the sake of credibility but also because “this realistic anchoring was essential to allow the film to switch into a more dreamlike dimension”.
He also immersed himself in reading books dealing with psychoanalysis and the unconscious. One of the reference books that accompanied him throughout his writing was The disturbing strangeness from Sigmund Freud: “Through this essay, Freud explains to us that the strange is all the more distressing as it resides in what is most familiar to us. Is what we call the familiar what we know best? think of home, of intimacy?
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The shadow of Robert Altman
Concerning the climate of the film, Yann Gozlan had in mind two feature films by Robert Altman discovered as a teenager and which had a great impact on him: Images and Trois femmes. “Something particularly strange and bewitching emanated from these two works. A fascinating interplay between fantasy and reality.”
To sleep standing up
During the preparation of the film, Yann Gozlan spoke to pilots who told him about their sleep problems and the need to take powerful sleeping pills to be able to sleep, called Stilnox. The director did not have permission to use this name and had to invent the name “Nyxstill”.