Eva Hus­son explains why all the actors in Bang Gang are white

It is par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing that a film’s entire cast is white when they are also naked. French writer/​director Eva Husson’s first fea­ture begins with a teen orgy, before flash­ing back to show how the dynam­ic between five char­ac­ters cre­at­ed this scene, via more teen orgies. We are shown a fies­ta of flesh, not shot exploita­tive­ly or porno­graph­i­cal­ly, but still dis­ap­point­ing in its pale, slim uniformity.

LWLies spoke with Hus­son, an expres­sive woman who answered our ques­tion about the non-diver­si­ty of the bod­ies by point­ing to the finite resources of inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tions cou­pled with the pop­u­la­tion make-up where they shot in Biar­ritz, in the south of France.

“You have to realise that we are in France, so there is a vast major­i­ty of peo­ple who are white to start with, and, if you go south, it is a dis­as­ter. In Biar­ritz, you hard­ly have any black peo­ple walk­ing the streets.

“So, when you con­sid­er that in the cast­ing process you reject 99 per cent of the peo­ple, you don’t have that much play room to work with in terms of who you real­ly want in terms of appear­ance. You end up cast­ing the peo­ple who you find good act­ing-wise and they fit the char­ac­ters that you have in mind.

“I did have a lit­tle actress that I liked in the role of George (played in the film by Mar­i­lyn Lima) who was black and she was 14. It was real­ly the age. I was like, ​‘I’m just not going to do that to her, she’s just too young.’ I want­ed some­one who had lived a lit­tle bit. Do you know what I mean? I’ve had that reproach and I think peo­ple don’t realise how hard it is to cast under cer­tain bud­get restric­tions and in cer­tain local­i­ties. If I had made this movie in Chica­go, it would have not looked like that. In my oth­er work I always try to be as diverse as I can.”

Bang Bang is in cin­e­mas and on-demand 17 June.