The Innocents: how to direct children in a horror film?

This is the film that shook Cannes, Gérardmer or L'Étrange Festival, to name but a few. The very successful and harrowing "The Innocents" is finally released in our theaters, and its director, the Norwegian Eskil Vogt, tells us about it.

We talked a lot about Léa Seydoux and Mathieu Amalric, thanks to the many films they presented in a few days. But not by Eskil Vogt. Or not enough, when he was one of the strong men of the last Cannes Film Festival. Co-screenwriter of Julie (in 12 chapters), which offered a Best Actress Award to its actress Renate Reinsve and today earned her a nomination for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, he has also distinguished himself as as director, in the Un Certain Regard category.

It was there that he unveiled The Innocents, his second feature film. Or the story of four children who discover powers and have fun pushing their limits, without suspecting the worrying turn their games will take. A real shock film, brilliantly staged, which maintains a constant tension and proves fascinating in its way of theorizing on the notion of gaze.

Fascinating, its author is also. Passed by FEMIS, the Norwegian expresses himself in almost perfect French, as we could see on the Croisette, the day after the official presentation of his baby, then rewarded at Gérardmer or L'Étrange Festival. We discussed several ideas, and that's when this one came to me, very simple, to take children's imaginations seriously. Because when you are a child and you play, you believe in it so much that it seems true to you. And here, magical things happen, and then everyone goes back to their parents and everything disappears a little, so that we wonder if it was real or a figment of their imagination.

I had proposed this idea to Joachim [for him to direct the film], but he was less interested in it so I put it aside. Except that we continued to explore this register by creating Thelma, and that worked for me more and more.

The fact that these children's games turn into horror, is this a way for you to show the impact that today's world can have on them and their imagination? Rather, I wanted to talk about childhood in general, and not just today. It's a moment that we have all experienced, and I wanted to evoke the imagination of children and their ability to feel things very strongly, which can turn against them. Because a simple shadow on a wall in the evening can terrify you to the point of preventing you from sleeping.

As an adult, I have never felt fear as strongly as when I was a child, so it had to be part of the film. Making a film about childhood from the angle of nostalgia, saying that everything was fine, that doesn't have much interest. It needed this aspect, but also the unpredictable side of children, who experiment and push the limits of the morality imposed on them. They have to wonder about it to find their inner morality. All of this creates something more complex, more interesting than a classic childhood story.