Julia Ducour­nau: ​‘The way los­ing your vir­gin­i­ty is por­trayed in most movies is very outdated’

Amid the polite, for­eign-lan­guage fare you usu­al­ly catch at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, there’s usu­al­ly a rogue treat thrown in for genre fans. In 2016, it was Julia Ducournau’s teen body hor­ror, Raw. Here this out­spo­ken first-time direc­tor delves under her film’s thick skin.

LWLies: If you enter the film’s title into Google, the first result that comes up is a sto­ry about some­one hav­ing a heart attack at a screening.

Dur­cour­nau: A heart attack? No, it was two peo­ple not feel­ing very well out of a room of 1200 peo­ple. It’s real­ly fun­ny that the empha­sis was on two peo­ple who didn’t feel well when 1198 peo­ple were feel­ing good! But I under­stand that. It’s a dis­turb­ing movie, definitely.

One inter­view­er referred to Raw as a hor­ror film and you respond­ed by say­ing you weren’t keen on such gener­ic ways of describ­ing movies.

Just because I love hor­ror movies, it doesn’t mean I think that my movie is one. Raw wasn’t writ­ten to scare peo­ple. To make them uneasy, to dis­turb them? Yes. But to scare them? No. I watch hor­ror movies almost every day. It’s not a gorefest. If I had want­ed to show only the gory moments of the girls eat­ing bod­ies, I could have done that. My movie is more of a crossover between com­e­dy-dra­ma and body hor­ror. I use dif­fer­ent types of film gram­mar, so I don’t think it fits into one par­tic­u­lar box. I don’t want peo­ple to expect scares because they’ll be disappointed.

There’s an inter­est­ing idea at the cen­tre of the film that says we’re all the prod­uct of our parents.

The good thing is that none of the par­ents in the movie are any­thing like my par­ents, so they didn’t take it per­son­al­ly at all. For me, it’s not so shock­ing. When you want to build your­self up as an adult, you have to let go of cer­tain things. Some­times it hurts peo­ple when I say that fam­i­ly is a form of deter­min­ism, but I think it is. You see pat­terns repro­duced, even if it’s against your will. It would be inter­est­ing to see if there’s an evil pat­tern in my fam­i­ly that I might be doomed to repro­duce. Is there any­thing I can do? Am I the prod­uct of my par­ents, or am I my own self? It’s about ques­tion­ing to what extent you have a chance to act on things.

Could Raw be remade in the US?

I have no idea. It would be a big sur­prise to me if there was a remake, but why not? It’s true, in France we don’t have big cam­pus­es like the one I used in the movie. I said to the loca­tion peo­ple I want­ed some­thing a bit Amer­i­can, a big school like you’d find in a city. But I have a lot of Amer­i­can ref­er­ences in my head. It makes it less claus­tro­pho­bic when you know you’re going to make a movie that takes place in a school. The idea of being stuck in class­rooms was, for me, unbear­able. And so I real­ly need­ed this dif­fer­ence kind of space to be able to do wide shots of nature and the sky. It was impor­tant to me because I know that with such a dense and dis­turb­ing top­ic, visu­al­ly, we would need to breathe a bit.

When you wrote the film, was the cen­tral char­ac­ter always a girl? 

Yes. It’s an instant reflex because I’m a woman. The movie is quite per­son­al, so it was more easy for me to relate to a female char­ac­ter. Which doesn’t mean I’ll nev­er write about a male char­ac­ter. A screen­writer and direc­tor should be able to relate to any char­ac­ter – our job is to have imag­i­na­tion. If I want to write about a drag­on, I need to feel for the drag­on. We can make any­thing exist. It’s not writ­ing about a man or woman, it’s writ­ing about every­thing. There is a piece of me in every character.

How did you approach the erot­ic aspects of the film?

I think there was some­thing to be done about how you approach sex­u­al­i­ty when you are still a vir­gin, and a child. It was impor­tant to approach this from a girl’s point of view. In most movies, los­ing your vir­gin­i­ty is unfor­tu­nate­ly always asso­ci­at­ed with some­thing very sacred, very impor­tant. I think this is very out­dat­ed and no longer rel­e­vant. For me, girls have needs just as boys do, and they can ful­fil their needs with­out com­pli­ca­tions and shame. I want­ed to present sex­u­al­i­ty in this way, as a big ​‘fuck you’ to everyone.