Horror film Titane’s bold conception behind the blood and gore

Titane has elicited walkouts and groans from audiences but it’s now France’s foreign film Oscar nominee and winning recognition for its director and stars.

Julia Ducournau wins the Palme D'Or at Cannes.

With her second feature Titane, Julia Ducournau, the mistress of body horror in France, stunned festival-goers and became only the second woman to win the Cannes Palme d’Or after Jane Campion took out the coveted prize for the Piano in 1993. As with her debut – the 2016 female cannibal movie Raw – Ducournau was not holding back with the horror and cast an unknown actor, Agathe Rousselle, as her protagonist.

But who would expect that Vincent Lindon, one of France’s most famous and respected actors, would be her co-star?

The film, which had walkouts and people reportedly fainting during its Australian premiere screening at the Sydney Film Festival, is now France’s foreign film Oscar nominee.

It’s also been nominated for best film in the upcoming European Film Awards, as have Ducournau, 38, for best director and both Rousselle, 33, and Lindon, 62, in the acting categories.

“All the cast and crew of Titane were so young, so nice and they worked very hard,” recalls Lindon, who comes from a famous well-heeled family, including a former French prime minister. “It was really regenerating, it was fantastic. I loved this experience to lose control, to hear people speaking about a subject that was sometimes far from me. They reminded me of myself when I was young.”

There’s an animalistic quality to the burly actor that still makes him very attractive. Lindon had famous romances – for 10 years with Claude Chirac, daughter of French president Jacques Chirac, and with Princess Caroline of Monaco from 1991 to 1995 – before he ultimately married French star Sandrine Kiberlain, from whom he is divorced. In Titane’s nude scenes his body is remarkable. One imagines he felt his fire chief character had to measure up alongside the young men in the film who are played by real-life firemen and are known to be some of the fittest people in France (as in most places).

“Yeah, they’re very young,” Lindon sighs and smiles. “But the acting was difficult for them, they had to learn how to do that.”

Lindon does not in fact appear in the first half of the film where we watch the young Alexia having a titanium plate fitted into her head following a car accident. The film fast-forwards to the adult Titane, played by Rouselle, as she earns a living stripping at car shows.

One night after the show she murders an aggressive fan and in the aftermath has sex with a flame-painted Cadillac, which results – all too bizarrely – in a pregnancy.

Agathe Rousselle gets acquainted with the Cadillac in Titane.

When a witness observes one of her subsequent gruesome murders she is forced to flee and she assumes the identity of Adrien, the long-lost son of Lindon’s character, Vincent Legrande. The troubled fire chief, who injects himself with steroids, is happy to have someone to love.

The film has received mixed reviews, with a surprisingly positive take from The Times, which described it as “oddly, darkly, great”, despite critic Kevin Maher conceding there is “oodles of sadistic nipple-ripping, eye-gouging, face-stabbing, extreme sex and some of the most disturbing scenes of body horror conceived for the cinema.

There were walkouts at my screening, eerily preceded by audible groans from the audience, and one desperate cry of: “Noooo!!!”

Lindon, who is known for playing defenders of the working class – he won for best actor in Cannes for Stephane Brize’s The Measure of a Man in 2015 – had known Ducournau for nine years before making the film.

His tentative casting came about when they were having drinks with a mutual friend she was dating at the time at one of Lindon’s favourite Left Bank haunts, the Cafe de Flore (where I had interviewed him for an earlier film) when she stopped him as she was coming back from the loo.

“It was one o’clock in the morning and in the past we’d never discussed working together,” he notes. “But Julia suddenly said ‘I’m writing a script and thinking about you’. We didn’t discuss it further when we sat back down.” The following morning he called their friend saying, “I like Julia, but it’s kind of a joke I really don’t appreciate. You never do that to an actor or an actress. Was she drunk?”

The friend advised Lindon to call Ducournau and he did, when she confirmed she was writing the male character in her new film with him in mind. It was another two years before Lindon received the screenplay. “I had to do it,” he recalls. “It was an animal reaction, not a brain reaction. It came from my heart.

Vincent Lindon.

“Vincent Legrande is a guy who’s doing his job and he’s very sad because he lost his son. He’s not conscious about his femininity but there’s a lot of room in his heart for his paternity. I think he’s one of the most human characters I’ve ever played. And the humanity of the movie starts when he arrives. Alexia and Vincente are completely lost. They don’t know how to love. Alexia is afraid of living and Vincent is afraid of dying and they come together and discover a new kind of love.”

In an earlier interview Ducournau had said she wanted to show a side of Lindon that she knows but has never seen on screen. What does he think of that? “Yes, she decided to show something that people don’t know and maybe even me because we don’t know our secrets. That’s the incredible thing, we don’t know our secrets because if we knew them it’s not a secret anymore. But it’s true that I wanted to make a different film than I usually do.”

While the avid sportsman worked out intensively over a year and a half to get fit, he says did not mind the nude scenes at all. “To be naked that doesn’t scare me because we are all the same. The only thing I was scared to do was to dance. It was really a huge mountain for me because I am not a dancer; I don’t dance in my real life. I’m completely naked when I dance. When they dance is the moment where they are completely without control.”

What will his family think when they see this risque movie? I ask him in Cannes. “My parents are not with us any more,” he says of Laurent Lindon, his industrialist father, and Alix Dufaure, a former fashion journalist at Marie Claire magazine. “The only people who are alive, thank god, are my children.” His immediate family are likely to understand at any rate. Lindon’s daughter Suzanne has made her directing debut Spring Blossom and also stars in that film. Lindon still regularly works with Kiberlain, Suzanne’s mother (they have just co-starred in Brize’s Another World, releasing here next year).

In the meantime, he has reunited with director Claire Denis, with whom he has worked many times, and stars for the first time alongside Juliette Binoche in the romantic film Fire.

“Fire is a beautiful love story made by Claire Denis,” Lindon says. “Her movies are always very special.”