With her eerie debut
Atlantics, the actor-
turned-director
makes one of the
year’s finest films.
ow 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 shortsbefore 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 friendshipINTERVIEW 057IN CONVERSATION Interview by DAVID JENKINS Illustration by TOM HUMBERSTONEMati Diop
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