Interview with Pierre le Gall

Pierre le Gall makes an auspicious directorial debut with Flesh and Fuel, the winner of this year’s Queer Palm Revelation prize at Cannes. A character study of gay truck driver, Étienne (Alexis Manenti, of Les Miserables), it examines the moment Étienne meets Bartosz (Julian Swiezewski), another driver for a different company. The film follows how they become lovers as well as how their work schedules make being together difficult. As the guys arrange to hook up, Étienne may be falling in love with Bartosz – but as a lone wolf, he has trouble expressing his true feelings.

 The relationship between the men is both sexy and sweet, and many scenes in Flesh and Fuel show Étienne obviously thinking about Bartosz, who has captured his heart. The guys frequently talk over the phone during long hauls or doing breaks. One cute episode has them honking as they pass each other on a bridge on New Year’s Day. In another, more intimate encounter, Bartosz tells Étienne to close his eyes – le Gall makes the screen go black – and imagine walking through a forest at night, before describing an erotic encounter. 

The sex in Flesh and Fuel is both discrete and explicit, with le Gall depicting moments of passion inside a trucker’s cab, or elsewhere. The filmmaker artfully frames the bodies in ways that express the claustrophobia of their lives. 

Le Gall immerses viewers in Étienne’s life, which consists mainly of his work. He is respected by his fellow drivers and becomes a mentor to the young Jordan (Armindo Alves de Sa). But Étienne has little social life outside of his work; he sees his family – mother, sister, nephew – in person about twice a year. Alexis Manenti’s lived-in performance makes Flesh and Fuel riveting. As Étienne awakens to the possibility of love and the lengths he will go – or drive – to find happiness, the actor conveys his emotions in just a glance, or a smile. Manenti’s body language often expresses the closed-in Étienne’s desire or his despair.

With the assistance of interpreter Barbara Van Lombeek, Le Gall spoke with Senses of Cinema about his love story prior to its premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

– G.M.K

We get a sense of why Étienne drives. Why do you make films in general and this film in particular for your feature debut?

I’m just a storyteller. I was a screenwriter for animation, theatre, and TV, before I made this. It was important for me for this film to have emotion and tell a great contemporary love story with the themes of solitude and loneliness echoing our contemporary society. This world of the truckers was not often represented in film. It lends itself to great cinematography. I wanted to represent the way economics and the pressure of society to perform this work impacts truckers as well as the loneliness of people that do this kind of work. There is very little room for having a private life because they work so much.

In one of the most poignant moments, Étienne says, “I didn’t think this [romance] happened to people like me.” What decisions did you make about his character? Why tell his story?

It was very important to tell a story about a working-class/labourer character. When I started writing the film, I discovered the trucker world with a gay trucker friend, and I asked him about the possibility of falling in love in this virile and very masculine world. It was impossible for him to fall in love because he works six days a week. He cannot think of a life with another guy because he spends so much of his time working. I also wanted to portray characters who are minorities. When we grow up in a minority – sexual or otherwise – it is hard to imagine a future love story with other people. It’s a basic message, but for me, it is universal, and crosses boundaries with work and sexual identities. 

Alexis Manenti in Flesh and Fuel

It is interesting that you do not provide much detail about Bartosz in the film. Can you explain that decision?

The work life of truckers in France is not presented or explored in French society. It is a socially complex world. It was important for me to show it with a curiosity. I wanted to represent missing the person you are in love with. I wanted the audience to remember how it feels when you are first in love with someone and when you miss them – and you wonder who is he? where is he? and what is he doing? I wanted the audience to feel the same, this feeling of missing this important person you cannot see. There is this particularity within the French trucker world. When the EU opened to all the world, it meant that French truckers would not be as competitive as Eastern Europeans. So French truckers would be confined locally, whereas the Poles travel all over Europe. I wanted to play with people’s prejudices. I wanted the audience to experience the feeling of who is this Polish guy? How do we feel about him? Can we trust him? The audience can ask that of themselves. When Etienne goes to Warsaw, I wanted people to wonder if Bartosz had been lying all along. I wanted them to see their own prejudices about Eastern Europeans.

Étienne’s loneliness and isolation are palpable thanks to Alexis Manenti’s superb performance. Can you talk about creating the film’s melancholic tone?

This was the most important thing for me – to convey this melancholia. To me, melancholia is a very bourgeois feeling because in my mind, you have to have time to experience it. When I grew up in the countryside, all the workers who surrounded me, didn’t have time to be melancholic. If you work on a line in a factory, you just don’t have time for melancholia.
When I write, it is a feeling I experience a lot. But when I encountered the world of the truckers, it’s different, because they are alone at the wheel for hours and they have time to think things over and ruminate. They are probably one of the few workforces who experience melancholia. At the same time, it was important for me that viewers experience this melancholia. In the casting process, I looked for someone who could embody that feeling. Alexis was perfect. He had this very mysterious look; it’s hard to know what he is thinking. The audience can project themselves into his head. 

Time and space sometimes escape us, so one of the most important scenes in the film is with the baby. Jordan wants to do weeklong trips, but his wife thinks it is not such a good idea. You realise how great a toll work takes on people’s lives. Sometimes people do not fully understand how central work is to your life and that you don’t have much time for the rest of your life. It’s so important to me that the audience experience this melancholy.

You obviously respect these workers. What research did you do/what did you learn about truckers and what access did you have to this world that you were able to show the work in such detail? How did you immerse yourself in this world/community?

At first, it was during COVID, so I read everything I could and watched documentaries. Then, when I could, I embarked on journeys with my trucker friend, Jean-Sebastian, and we’d go on weekly trips to the UK and Switzerland, and I’d write down every detail – like how the clock works – in huge notebooks. We would go to warehouses, and I would take notes about the security protocols to get the exact lines people would say. At restaurants, I’d note down how colleagues would address each other to get that right. At petrol stations and parking places, I would document how people would address and engage with one another. Afterwords, I worked with my cowriter Camille Perton, and we would put it in dramaturgy.

Julian Swiezewski in the foreground, in Flesh and Fuel

What about ideas of masculinity in this world you depict? I wondered early on if Étienne was out to his colleagues and we get an answer when Jordan realises Étienne likes men. There is also a scene where the male truckers are upset with their female counterparts talking about their periods. What points did you want to make about ideas of gender and queerness in truckers?

Just as I played with people’s prejudices about the Polish character, I wanted to play with the audience’s assumption that someone like Jordan would not understand gay identity, and figure he must be homophobic. It is important to have characters who are more empathetic than the audience. The audience goes on a journey of discovery there and I like to create this level of surprise.

To go back to the scene with the period, I wanted to show this reality. In the French trucker world, 5 percent are women. It starts as a comic scene with Jordan talking about defecating. But it takes on a political aspect, with truckers excluded from using the warehouse toilets. But then I turn it upside down when the woman mentions her period, because you are back in a world that is still very macho. But in the end, I wanted to show a more modern and open version of the trucker world. The Algerian trucker and the female trucker relate to each other as both are part of the minority. This is something Jean Genet mentioned – that if you want to be understood as a minority, you have to understand other minorities as well. I am a gay filmmaker, and for me, this message is very important, and the scene depicts that.

Étienne is very shy and expresses so much of what he’s feeling without words. Whereas Bartosz is more open, he has hidden depths. I liked their relationship and was rooting for them. How did you work on the dynamic between Étienne and Bartosz? It is the heart of the film.

In the casting process, Alexis is a very shy person but at the same time, he can be physically very imposing. But he also has this kind of teenage face and is more introverted as a person. Julian is lighter, thinner, and has something cat-like in his physique. That is why he has a panther on his truck. He is another, surprising version of manhood, and it is a slightly more fun one. When I met Julian in Warsaw and he took his cap off, I saw he was starting to bald, so there was this other element of surprise we could play with. 

I learned about Julian through an actress friend who showed me a picture of him in Instagram. I immediately fell in love with him and thought this was my guy. And if I fell in love with him like that, the audience would fall in love with him as well. The photo represented masculine behaviour but the funny side and a very improvised act. 

We worked with an intimacy coach. Alexis was extremely shy at first, because he had never done a nude scene before, whereas Julian had done a lot of nudity on the stage and even wrote an essay about nudity in theatre, so he was comfortable with it. But Julian was shy about his French, so Julian helped Alexis with the nudity and Alexis helped Julian with his French. They ended up being a great couple because they helped each other with their fears. 

The sex scenes in Flesh and Fuel are both discrete and explicit. Can you discuss what you intended with these scenes? There is nudity and sexuality, and the film has moments of eroticism and unexpected tenderness. 

My golden rule was that I wanted to avoid the homoeroticism of this trucker world. This would have been a form of “bourgeois colonialism” to homoeroticise this world that is underrepresented in film. That was why it was important to film sex – frontal, realistic. It had to be accurate. I wanted the sex scene to be really raw but also have this humour in it. You have this intimacy between the two characters. I didn’t want the audience to feel like it is voyeurism – more that you share the intimacy and fun of these two people. One of my references was Ira Sachs’ Passages, where Adele Exarchopoulos falls on the floor and it’s funny. I could accept the sex scene more easily because it’s kind of fun. The tenderness – once I had the fucking out of the way, then there is this fantasy scene – you realise what he misses is more of a tender hug. This is another dimension to the character. The second part of the film is his quest for this tenderness. You forget about the rawness of the sex.

One of the things I thought about was how much time had passed between the episodes, or how long Étienne and Bartosz were on the road (or apart). Was that a deliberate decision to let viewers work out the passage of time for themselves?

I am so happy you asked this! It was a guideline for me directing this film. It was important to let the audience lose track of time and space. Because when I did a journey with my trucker friend, in one week we work sometimes by day, or by night, and sleep 8 or 10 hours. By the middle of the week, I didn’t know what day it was, or where we were – in Switzerland, in Italy or France? During my passenger experience, I totally lost my sense of time and space, and I wanted to share this experience in my movie. 

I kept thinking, how much time has passed since they’ve been together, and I felt it was deliberate on your part. It was effective.

It was the most difficult thing to write because you have to write ellipses. But you also have to give the audience a clue as to how much time has passed. For example, Christmas. One scene Étienne is on the phone discussing Christmas with his sister, and three scenes later we are in a warehouse where a guy is wearing a Christmas hat. So two months passed in three scenes. Then, three scenes later, Étienne and Bartosz pass each other on a bridge and say Happy New Year, so it was a week before the last sequence. 

Flesh and Fuel

You use handheld camerawork but also shoot the passing landscape as Étienne drives. There is also a fantasy sequence, which departs from the realism of the rest of the film. You also frame Étienne in ways that isolate him or convey confinement. Can you describe your visual approach to the material?

It was extremely important that we would not have the horizon in the movie. In traditional road movies, the cinematography underscores that the road means freedom. Flesh and Fuel is not a road movie. We made sure the camera would be in the worst possible place. It was also important to have a sense of repetition at his work. 

Your film also has a political angle in that you have Étienne’s company taking jobs in the U.K., because Europe cannot afford high prices and goes with cheaper trucking companies like the one Bartosz works for. What are your observations on the politics of trucking?

I think the trucker world is where people experience the worst outcomes of capitalism. They are the biggest victims. In the early 2010s, the trucker world was taken over by Eastern Europeans because they were cheaper that Western Europeans. But in the 2020s, people from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Africa came to work for German and French companies. Their wages are sometimes five times lower than those for local people. 

I centred my film around a Polish character because I didn’t want to depict the horrible working conditions and misery of the non-European workers. I wanted the love story to be the main focus. At the Eurotunnel, I filmed a scene with a Filipino trucker, but I cut it during editing because I did not want to go down this path. It was my choice to not feature the worst aspects, even if that makes the film less contemporary in terms of what is happening in the trucker world. 

Truckers are lonely and solitary. They hardly see the people who work for the same company as them. One of the few times this international world comes together is when they cross the Channel on the ferry or the Eurotunnel. You see all these faces come together – some look exhausted and some are very dirty. Showing this was important because it’s a political statement on its own. The audience can infer what is happening from that scene.

What does it mean to premiere your first film at Cannes?

I feel very lucky because I know a lot of other French filmmakers, and they don’t have the same opportunity. I am very honoured to present my film there. It was very important to introduce this film in Cannes because when you read the logline, some people just think it is another gay movie, or a love story between two gay truckers, but the film is more than just this pitch. It is important to prove that a gay romance can be for heterosexual people and all countries. Cannes is the most important film festival. You can present your film to a Mexican, Chilean, Chinese, or Japanese audience. It’s very political. The reason why I write and direct films is to transmit emotions and to tell stories. I want to create a space and discussion about what is a workplace in our country, and in your county, and what is a place for sexual minorities in your country and my country. We can discuss and maybe create a better world. Cannes is a magical place, but it is a political place as well. I come to Cannes with strong feelings to speak seriously about truckers, capitalism, and love.