Alice Winocour: ​‘Post-trau­mat­ic mem­o­ry is some­thing very specific’

Since her 2012 debut Augus­tine, French film­mak­er Alice Winocour has proven she’s able to turn her hand to seem­ing­ly any genre, from the home inva­sion thriller Dis­or­der, to co-writ­ing Turk­ish com­ing-of-age sto­ry Mus­tang, through to sci-fi moth­er­hood dra­ma Prox­i­ma. Her lat­est film, Paris Mem­o­ries, is much clos­er to home, focussing on a woman who sur­vives the dead­ly ter­ror­ist attack of Novem­ber 2015, and attempts to come to terms with her last­ing trauma.

LWLies: It’s my under­stand­ing that this is a film very root­ed in per­son­al experience… 

Winocour: Yes, my lit­tle broth­er was involved in the Bat­a­clan attack on Paris, so my start­ing point was about my per­son­al mem­o­ries of that night. He sent me a text say­ing he was in the the­atre. Then I was inspired by the vic­tims I met after, and the dis­cus­sions I had with my broth­er. I want­ed to tell a sto­ry about resilience and so it’s real­ly a fic­tion, it’s not at all the Bat­a­clan attack which is in the film. After the event I did anoth­er movie, Prox­i­ma, but when I came back to Paris, I felt I had to do a film about this, real­ly to face my own per­son­al trau­ma. But then I also met with vic­tims, and the com­mu­ni­ty they’d built, which was real­ly inter­est­ing to me.

Why did you decide to cre­ate a fic­tion­al ter­ror­ist attack rather than use the actu­al Paris attack?

My broth­er made me under­stand it was not pos­si­ble to tru­ly depict the actu­al attack. I decid­ed to depict an attack in the film, but I thought very care­ful­ly about how to stage it, and it’s kind of abstract with­in the film – it’s not like an action movie, with mul­ti­ple points of view. I want­ed it to be from a sin­gle point of view, the point of view of the vic­tim, and it’s real­ly more about sound. I want­ed to cre­ate this feel­ing of empa­thy with the char­ac­ter, and to under­stand this feel­ing that in one sec­ond, you go from one world to anoth­er. I wrote and direct­ed a film about sol­diers return­ing from Afghanistan with PTSD, but it’s real­ly dif­fer­ent to go to war and to be trau­ma­tised, from being in a Parisian restau­rant drink­ing wine and sud­den­ly you see peo­ple dead around you. That’s what I want­ed to express with that scene.

It feels like expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing like this might be impos­si­ble to for­get, but Mia real­ly has to go through this process of unlock­ing her mem­o­ries. Did you find it’s com­mon for vic­tims to for­get the details of what hap­pened to them?

It’s very com­mon, as your body and mind just can’t stand it because of the vio­lence. This is real­ly a film about mem­o­ry, and post-trau­mat­ic mem­o­ry is some­thing very spe­cif­ic. You see flash­backs in the film, but they’re not real­ly like nor­mal flash­backs, they’re more like recre­ations that are trig­gered by spe­cif­ic sounds or events, like a sud­den psy­chic break, where sud­den­ly you’re back in the place. It’s like a puz­zle real­ly, as Mia has all these details but not in the right order, and she’s try­ing to put them back togeth­er, but then she meets all these oth­er vic­tims, with dif­fer­ent pieces, and dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. It’s like this inter­view, in a way, you won’t remem­ber it the same way that I do. Though it’s hope­ful­ly not a trau­mat­ic event in the same way [laughs] But I mean to say, we don’t see events from the same perspective.

Vir­ginie Efi­ra gives such a great per­for­mance. Did you have her in mind when you were writ­ing the script?

Actu­al­ly, I wrote the film for an Amer­i­can actress, as I thought she would have to be a stranger to the city of Paris. But then writ­ing the film I realised she’s not a stranger to the city. She’s a Parisian but now feels like a stranger due to the trau­ma, and that was more inter­est­ing to me. When I start­ed think­ing of a French actress, I always had Vir­ginie in mind, as she’s some­one who seems very strong, and I didn’t want the char­ac­ter to feel like, maybe, the stereo­typ­i­cal vic­tim. To me she had to be some­one who pro­ject­ed this idea that she doesn’t want to be defined by her vic­tim­hood, and she wants to under­stand what hap­pened to her. But it was very dif­fi­cult for Vir­ginie, as she was hav­ing to play this char­ac­ter who finds her body sud­den­ly alien to her­self. So she has to be present, but you can also see she’s out of the sit­u­a­tion. I showed her a lot of Cro­nen­berg films – the big one was The Dead Zone, and we looked at Christo­pher Walken’s per­for­mance in that film, and the way to per­form a char­ac­ter who is not men­tal­ly present in a scene.