Mati Diop: ​‘It’s a unique expe­ri­ence to have char­ac­ters come out of you’

How do you fol­low-up a coterie of excel­lent shorts which have trav­elled the globe and built your name as a direc­tor? If you’re French actor and film­mak­er Mati Diop, you make one of the decade’s finest debut fea­tures, Atlantics, about youth and the spec­tre of cap­i­tal­ism in mod­ern day Senegal.

LWLies: You’re known for act­ing, but also the shorts you have made. How long have you had the desire to make a feature?

Diop: I guess I want­ed to exper­i­ment and to try dif­fer­ent things. The writ­ing process was long and dif­fi­cult. Writ­ing is not my first tool – I come from sound and image. Even before my shorts I was mak­ing art videos and sound­scapes. It was first using sound, then image, then play­ing with the two, and then the text, nar­ra­tion and sto­ry came slow­ly after that. It was an evo­lu­tion­ary process. It went from pure plas­tic and sen­sa­tion­al to tan­gi­ble sto­ries. Also, in terms of the finan­cial means, a fea­ture is heavy – it takes for­ev­er, it involves a lot of peo­ple, so you real­ly have to be able to car­ry that. I think you also make shorts before because it’s way more free and light.

It feels like you had free­dom on this film. Like it’s your vision. Is that the case? 

Yes, yes, it’s my vision. What you see as a spec­ta­tor is not only the shoot­ing, but the years of writ­ing. My co-writer, Olivi­er Deman­gel, and I had a lot of free­dom. I real­ly enjoyed the prepa­ra­tion – the cast­ing and the scout­ing. You’re still in that moment of research. You’re cre­at­ing with­out hav­ing that time pres­sure. Then the shoot­ing was dif­fi­cult because it’s an ambi­tious film and I didn’t have a lot of time to direct the scenes. It was okay – I had sev­en weeks, which was rea­son­able. You need a lot of shoot­ing expe­ri­ence before you feel free on the set of a fea­ture. The tech­ni­cians work on set all the time. The sets become their home. But for a direc­tor, you write and you pre­pare and you’re mak­ing the film for years before you arrive on set.

What made you decide to set the sto­ry in the present day?

The film was shot in 2018. In my mind, there was always a con­fu­sion about the peri­od in which the film is set. On one hand it’s today, but the peri­od it refers to is maybe between 2000 and 2010. If we had set the sto­ry in 2006, it would have caused us to change some very pre­cise details such as the phones and the fash­ion. So we decid­ed to blur the time­frame. So now it’s some­where between 2008 and 2018. Today, in 2019, the sit­u­a­tion has changed a lot: there are still young peo­ple who are migrat­ing from Sene­gal to Spain, but far few­er. Most peo­ple don’t migrate by the sea, but by land.

Was it dif­fi­cult to explain the type of film you want­ed to make to your tech­ni­cal collaborators?

I chose my tech­ni­cal col­lab­o­ra­tors with the same pre­ci­sion and intu­ition that I would my actors. And they also chose me. It’s all very, very thought­ful. They share my vision.

The cast­ing of Mame Bine­ta Sane as Ada was impor­tant to the film. How did you know what you were look­ing for?

I know because I invent­ed her. Writ­ing comes from you, from the inte­ri­or. It’s a unique expe­ri­ence to have char­ac­ters come out of you. Espe­cial­ly the main char­ac­ter of a first fea­ture. It’s very close to you. You know the char­ac­ter by heart. You know them as much as you know your­self. When I cast, it’s not about choos­ing some­body, it’s about recog­nis­ing them.

It must be plea­sur­able when you see them for the first time.

Yes, yes. It’s mag­ic. But then you have to be care­ful, because you recog­nise that per­son, but you still have to make sure that this per­son has a cer­tain lev­el of qual­i­ty to do the film. Not only a cin­e­mat­ic qual­i­ty, but being able, as a per­son, to make it through the expe­ri­ence to the end, because it’s very challenging.

How do you dis­cov­er that?

Lit­tle by lit­tle. And by work­ing. The biggest part of it is intu­ition. But it’s also about work­ing on scenes, get­ting to know each oth­er, and most of all, hav­ing a rela­tion­ship based on trust. Trust is everything.

Are you build­ing a friendship?

Yes. A safe space. Like a place of col­lab­o­ra­tion and work, but also of com­plic­i­ty. I would say it’s com­plic­i­ty more than friendship.

Atlantics is released 29 Novem­ber. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.