Ari­ane Labed: ​‘It’s a fight if you want to shoot on film’

Ari­ane Labed says she ​“loves cin­e­ma”. The appre­ci­a­tion is no lip ser­vice or a line fed to the media. Her career reflects that: in the choic­es she makes, the roles she plays, the films she directs. From her debut short behind the cam­era, Olla, to the body-pop­ping hotel maid she plays in absur­dist black com­e­dy The Lob­ster, she tends to grav­i­tate towards chal­leng­ing mate­r­i­al as a cre­ative choice. And so it is with Adrien Beau’s The Vourdalak, a bril­liant­ly counter-intu­itive vam­pire sto­ry in which her char­ac­ter allows her face and body to do most of the talk­ing. The film also goes against the grain of VFX-heavy con­tem­po­rary film­mak­ing – in The Vourdalak, you see, the vam­pire is actu­al­ly played by a mar­i­onette. Lit­tle White Lies spoke to Ari­ane at the 2023 Thes­sa­loni­ki Film Fes­ti­val in ear­ly November.

LWLies: How does The Vourdalak dif­fer from tra­di­tion­al vam­pire films?

Labed: It’s anoth­er way of treat­ing the dri­ve for a vam­pire. In this case, it’s love in the fam­i­ly cir­cle, and I real­ly like that – it’s a vam­pire that only tar­gets who they love. They are not those rich peo­ple in a cas­tle; it’s [aver­age] peo­ple who live in a vil­lage. It’s almost the oppo­site of what we have in mind when talk­ing about Dracula.

How do you think the film is rel­e­vant today?

It talks about human­i­ty: how when you love some­one, espe­cial­ly if it’s in the fam­i­ly, there’s some­thing ​“tox­ic” about it, you know, ​“I love you so you’re gonna be mine and I’m gonna eat you”. I think that’s very rel­e­vant. And then there is patri­archy. This father fig­ure com­ing back from the dead, try­ing to make his son be the same as he is and try­ing to keep the [fam­i­ly] lega­cy some­how. I think that’s very rel­e­vant today. Since the ​“Me Too” move­ment, when some­thing like that hap­pens, you always have peo­ple fight­ing very hard to keep things how they were.

It’s shot on 16mm, as was your short film, Olla. You must like the format…

Hon­est­ly, I said it as half a joke but I was actu­al­ly very seri­ous… I wouldn’t do The Vourdalak if it was shot on dig­i­tal. I said that to the pro­duc­ers, I said it to the direc­tor… please help me fight for it. It’s a fight if you want to shoot on film – though that’s crazy because if you think about paint­ing, for exam­ple, you don’t tell the painter that they should use oil or gouache.

The artist choos­es the medium.

Exact­ly. This is a very low-bud­get film, but it was a pri­or­i­ty and I think every­body in the end agreed on that. Espe­cial­ly when you want to work with a pup­pet. When you want to work with things that are obvi­ous­ly not try­ing to tell you that they’re real. […] It’s about aes­thet­ics and about how things are on set when you have a low-bud­get film. It means that between the action and cuts, it is a very, very pre­cious time because there is some­thing organ­ic run­ning and it’s print­ing on some­thing very con­crete. That changes the whole approach to film­ing and the whole behav­iour on set. It’s a time clos­er to the­atre [and being] on stage.

I saw this incred­i­ble quote from the edi­tor of The Vourdalak. He said that, ​“with spe­cial effects, it looks real but it feels fake”. And with what you guys cre­at­ed, ​“it looks fake, but it feels real”.

That’s beau­ti­ful – I agree with that! Dig­i­tal sees more than your own eye, mak­ing every­thing more than real, which I think is ter­ri­bly ugly. We can see the actor’s fucked-up skin, the rough­ness of the tree, every­thing is aggres­sive and sharp. While in film you have this lay­er of ​“this is a fic­tion, I’m telling you a sto­ry,” but print­ed on some­thing very real. I real­ly agree with him.

Is it a choice to make non-main­stream films – what’s the dri­ve behind it?

I real­ly love cin­e­ma. I deeply do. I love mak­ing films. I love the medi­um. And it has to do with the idea of tak­ing risks, and work­ing with peo­ple will­ing to take risks… It makes my whole career not very log­i­cal some­how – but it makes sense to me.

You were born in Greece and raised in France. You also lived in Lon­don – so where is home, does it even matter?

After Brex­it and espe­cial­ly dur­ing lock­down I decid­ed I couldn’t stay in Lon­don any­more. And Greece is my favourite place. Athens for sure is my favourite city. […] I guess I cre­at­ed my home in Athens, but the meta­phys­i­cal idea of home… I don’t have it and I don’t care about it that much.

Why do you like Greece so much?

I think it’s the lifestyle. Cul­tur­al­ly I con­nect more with Mediter­ranean cul­ture. There’s this chaot­ic thing in Athens with all these ugly beau­ti­ful build­ings, and then you look up and there’s The Acrop­o­lis. It makes me feel very relaxed. In Lon­don there’s some­thing very pre­cious about it… we know the val­ue that the build­ings have there. Here it’s like, what­ev­er, and I like that…

The casu­al, vague dilap­i­da­tion of stuff can be liberating.

Yes. Exact­ly! That’s a good way of putting it.

How long were you in Lon­don? What did you like about it?

I was there for 10 years. The thing I love about Lon­don is that you can real­ly feel like you live in a vil­lage even if you’re in Zone 1… If you’re writ­ing and if you’re able to stay home you can have this kind of neigh­bour­hood life which I real­ly appre­ci­ate and love. I’m also very lucky that peo­ple wel­comed me there. I’ve just made my first fea­ture and it’s a BBC film.

Tell us a lit­tle bit about it.

It’s a film called Sis­ters, an adap­ta­tion of the book of the same name by Daisy John­son. It’s a sto­ry about two sis­ters who have a kind of tox­ic rela­tion­ship. The nov­el is a bit goth­ic as well… it starts as a teenage com­ing of age kind of film – and then it goes some­where else.

I’m intrigued, when can we see it?

I don’t know – I’m edit­ing it now.

Are you excit­ed about it?

Right now it’s the worst. I’m in the phase where I hate every­thing, all my choic­es are wrong. Right now I don’t want any­one to see any­thing! But peo­ple keep telling me that it’s normal.

Your hus­band, Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos, is a film­mak­er, what’s it like to talk about film at home? Oh, and by the way, LWLies are big fans of his new film [Poor Things]…

It’s a mas­ter­piece. It’s amaz­ing… Before I met him on my first film, I was main­ly doing the­atre, exper­i­men­tal the­atre. I kind of start­ed to get into the cin­e­ma world with him. We used to watch like four films a day in the begin­ning of our rela­tion­ship… But he’s not the kind of per­son who actu­al­ly talks about film, he just shows them and doesn’t say much… But of course it’s great to be able to talk about every­thing and share our scripts and our doubts.

Last ques­tion, Ari­ane – what do you love about movies?

I love the fact that they extract me from life, teach me some­thing, and then send me back hav­ing learned some­thing I didn’t know. They teach me how to live, somehow.

This inter­view was edit­ed for clar­i­ty and length.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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