Philippe LesageAn Interview with Philippe Lesage Edward Frumkin November 2025 Interviews Issue 115 My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water. – Robert Bresson, Notes on a Cinematographer (1975), p 13 Bresson’s quote aptly summarises Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage’s own approach to filmmaking, which involves a willingness to trust his actors and an openness to new perspectives that emerge on set. An approach he has utilised in both his recent narrative films and earlier observational documentaries. Earlier documentaries include The Heart That Beats (2010), where Lesage follows patients awaiting their medical and personal status updates from doctors, and Laylou (2012), where the eponymous protagonist transforms into an adult on the cusp of their 17th birthday. Though Lesage has gone on to make fiction films, he hasn’t forgotten his roots in documentary filmmaking, evident in his use of long takes in his narrative works such as The Demons (2015), and his breakthrough Genesis (2018), where his adolescent characters go through intense revelations of themselves. The latter, in particular, showcases his openness to his actors’ contributions to the original script. Laylou His newest film, Who by Fire (2024), builds on the themes of teenage angst and desire that Lesage previously laid out in his narrative films. We see filmmaker Albert taking his kids and son’s bestie, Jeff (also an aspiring director like his father), along for a summer vacation at a cabin hosted by Albert’s collaborator, Blake. During the trip, Jeff develops feelings for Albert’s daughter, Aliocha, which complicates his chances of getting mentorship from Blake. Though the kids are at the heart of the film, the adults are integral too, as they shape legacies and habits for their descendants to follow. Lesage isn’t interested in remedying the toxic masculinity that affects Jeff’s mentor figures. Instead, Lesage explores what it takes to be in love and how it isn’t easily reciprocated by others. Senses of Cinema recently spoke with Lesage over Zoom to discuss his film, discussing his move from nonfiction to fiction filmmaking, the role of dance and music in his work, and how the latter aspect informs his upcoming foray into musicals. *** Before Copenhague: A Love Story (2016), you were making documentaries. Can you talk about the shift from making documentaries to narrative films? It’s a shift that went very smoothly. I tried to put a lot of cinema and fiction already into my documentaries. For me, there’s no distinction between documentaries and fiction. They’re both serving the same master, which is cinema. I was inspired by documentaries that follow the fly on the wall principle. But of course, you realise that you’re not a fly … Whether it’s in a hospital [in The Heart That Beats (2010)] or filming a football team [in Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble? (2006)], you come with your sensibility and your look on things. I was putting a lot of fiction into my documentaries, and I put a lot of documentaries now into my fiction. In fiction, the scenes that I’m most excited to shoot are the ones that are not planned and not in the script. There are moments where the characters and the actors start to improvise and where we put the script behind us and try something fresh and spontaneous. These moments happen when you’re doing documentaries. It made me a better actor’s director. You realize very easily when people are completely aware of the camera and lose their natural behaviour. They’re completely forgetting that they are the subject of a film and you can also feel those moments. So it was a very interesting school because I think it’s a bit the same with the actors. I don’t want to praise myself, but I think I’m good with actors and I like to direct them. They like to work with me as well because I can sense when they are playing in a way. I try to go beyond that and create an atmosphere where we are no longer making a film, but we are forgetting that we are making a film because everything comes so naturally and so easily. And that’s why I try to give as much freedom as I can to my actors when I shoot. They can stand up if they’re sitting. Those little strategies are there to put them in a certain state. We are actually working towards a state of discovery and trying different things every take. I do a lot of takes. But it’s not like an obsessive, crazy type of OCD way of doing many things. It’s because we try different things. I like to be surprised by them as well, and they also enjoy being surprised by me. If I come up with an idea after 10 takes, then let’s try something different here. And sometimes those suggestions come from the actors themselves. So all these things came from my experience as a nonfiction filmmaker. I also prefer the term nonfiction than documentaries, to be honest. Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble? As you said, you’re putting fiction into your nonfiction works. How much do you film with the script in mind? And how much don’t you film with the script in mind? When I arrive on the film set, I know the script, which I have written myself. I really enjoy writing; it is exciting. I just finished a new script, and while writing it I experienced a floating sensation. It’s like time stops, because I’m writing the film that I want to see. When it comes to that reality, we prepare everything according to the script. The more you’re well prepared, the more you can leave space for the unexpected. So I say as a joke that when I arrive on the film set, the first thing I do in the morning is to throw the script in the garbage bin. And it’s a bit true, in a sense, that I don’t really read the script again because I know what’s going to happen and I want to get something different out of it. A script itself is an unfinished thing. It’s not really alive and interesting. Maybe I’m quoting Robert Bresson here but “a script needs to die, and then there’s a rebirth on the film set. And then after the shooting, something dies as well. And then the real rebirth that comes with the editing.” It’s an experience of life and death. I was giving a master class to film students and I told them ‘you’re going to be very unhappy if you stick to exactly what you had in mind, you’re never gonna find it’. So it’s you know what you want, but you know what you don’t want. That openness, I think, is so important. So it also comes with the depth process of welcoming every new day on the film set as a day of possibilities, as a day of new surprises that will only push further your story. Same goes with the casting. I rarely wrote with specific actors in mind. I found my actors by doing months and sometimes a year or two of casting. There’s actors I want to work with again that I really love. Especially in the last script I wrote, I have a couple of specific names in my head. Still, I know that the world of cinema is a world of bad news. You will lose a good actor that you had in mind maybe a couple of weeks before you start shooting. These things always happen. There’s a location you’re going to lose. So you always need to not attach too much and embrace the unpredictable world of cinema. You mentioned earlier about not living with the characters. Blake is not an easy character to root for. Does showing imperfections in your characters make it harder for the audience to root for them? All of my characters come with their weaknesses. They’re not black or white. They’re made of nuance and are humans. I’m very critical, and I’m trying to deconstruct huge, archaic forms of masculinity in [Who By Fire]. I’m putting the knife where it hurts. The adults Blake and Albert are both sides of some kind of vanity. They want to be at the centre of attention and want to show their power, but in very different ways. I thought that was very interesting and fun to explore. But I would rather spend a weekend with Albert than with Blake, to be frankly honest. I know some people who are like Blake and I want to avoid them. I don’t wish anyone to be surrounded by them. Who By Fire Now let’s go to the kids. Teenagers and children are at the centre of your narrative films. How do you see them acting the opposite of adults? For me, it’s the irony of that story. There’s also a little bit of that in Genesis, because you can feel that the grown-ups in Genesis are trying to break youth and their freedom. Their freedom is disturbing, and they’re jealous of that power. The power of being young is a great power. But you’re not aware that you’re having that power when you’re young. It’s a beautiful place to make mistakes, to stand up again and to fail. But then everything in society is portraying youth as something that everybody wants to get back to when they are older. People would give their life to be able to be young again. I was thinking about wars and older men – subconsciously or consciously – sending younger men to die. Maybe because the younger men represent some sort of sexual revolt and everything [else] that they no longer [identify with], We can see that there’s something in men, and it doesn’t get better when they’re getting older. It’s absolutely destructive. And I think that maybe the need to please and to love is sadly replaced in some men by the need to have power. It comes with the need of destruction. There’s a bit of it in that relation with the young people in my film. You can see that there’s this destructive impulse. Just take a look at what we do with the planet. It’s on fire, and we continue to destroy it. There’s no way it’s going to stop. On a lighter note, dancing is present in your films. It is a common activity where your protagonists, especially the male protagonists, develop sexual, romantic feelings, mainly for their female counterparts. Why are you interested in having a dance scene in your films? Do you love dancing? I do dance, but I’m not crazy about dancing. In my films, it’s never only a dance, of course. I don’t really want to analyse it. You can probably do it better than I can. The dance is a big release of freedom, joy and craziness after a tense and uncomfortable dinner. If you look at Quebec films in the last 15 years, there’s probably a dance scene in every two films. But I wanted to nail it. I wanted to do an amazing dancing scene. If you look at the comments on Letterboxd, there’s people who don’t like the film, but everybody likes that dancing. I must have succeeded somewhere with [The B-52’s] Rock Lobster dancing scene. And I take it because it comes at a good moment. It’s not a musical, of course, and it’s not choreographed as such. Yet, I’m proud of this scene. It’s a relevant question you’re asking because I just finished writing a musical. Music for me is so important and I cannot do a film without music. Maybe after the musical. Let’s see. Who By Fire Well, I do love Rock Lobster in Who By Fire, as well as your use of Le Tigre’s Deceptacon in Genesis and Miram Makeba’s Pata Pata in The Demons. Do you have the music in mind when you write the script, or does it change on set or in post? What you just named is music that people are actually dancing to on set. Sometimes, I took the risk of not having secured the rights before shooting the scene. With Le Tigre, we got the rights after filming. With Rock Lobster, we secured the rights before shooting. Normally, I make a big playlist before writing [screenplays]. There’s always many songs that get into the film at the end, and others that don’t fit, or we didn’t get the rights. It’s a mixture of many, many things. With Who by Fire, I first wanted to have Sweet Child O’ Mine from Guns N’ Roses. I wanted to do an amazing air guitar solo at the end of the song, and have crazy choreography around it. But the song is so expensive that it’s ridiculous. So fuck them. Since the character Albert was talking about his Rock Lobster TV show, Paul Ahmarani, who plays Albert, said, “Why don’t you just put Rock Lobster?,” a couple of days before shooting the film. And I said, “That’s a really brilliant idea.” There are some very funny moments in Who By Fire, like the Cabin Fever line, which I laughed hard at during the New York Film Festival screening. How do you balance the dramatic and the delightful moments when you’re filming? I don’t like films that have no humour in them. There’s humour in all my films. If you pretend to want to capture some reality of life, I’d rather do it through the lens of human comedy. And Human Comedy in the Balzac way. There are funny moments in my documentary that takes place in the hospital. It’s not because I’m making fun of sick people. It’s not diminishing anyone, but it’s just that the situations are so absurd, grotesque and so unbelievable, that they make the audience laugh, and they make me laugh first. I don’t like when directors are taking themselves so seriously that they’re not capable of putting humour in their films. Most of the great films I like have humour. I really like comedy. Films where there’s a hero with a quest, and the hero is taking himself very seriously, and he wants to fight against the bad guys and stuff – normally, these heroes are not very funny. But in comedy, it’s a place where we actually like characters that are mean, full of flaws, neurotic, silly, and selfish. You’re pointing in the right direction, because my musical is, of course, a comedy as well. Right now, I think there’s no more sardonic, subtle comedy. It has disappeared a bit. Noah Baumbach was doing that and he was following in the footsteps of Woody Allen. There’s a dearth of witty comedies that are not slapstick and not like something absolutely grotesque and vulgar, but something with normal people in them. There’s still a place to make interesting comedy. What else can you say about your musical? What’s the musical about? I don’t want to say what it’s about now, because I just finished the script. I hope the film is going to be made. I already have an important producer in France attached to the project. I can say that it’s taking place with film people, and it’s a satire of the film world.
