After the vegetarian cannibal sisters of Raw and the human-car pregnancy of Titane, director Julia Ducournau’s latest film Alpha has been described as her most grounded, personal work to date. Just not by the director herself.
“I want to stop people saying it’s my most personal film to date – that's something the French distributor came up with when it was announced at Cannes, it was never a direct quote from me!” she told Zavvi. “Everything I make is incredibly personal, not just in the characters but in every choice I make.
“Filmmaking is a continuous movement, and you want to dig deeper within yourself and express yourself with more sincerity each time, exploring the unsaid taboos within you in the hope of exposing yourself more to the world. This isn’t my most personal film because I hope every film will be – my fourth film, fifth film, tenth film will all by my most personal to date.”
Alpha is set around the time of Ducournau’s own formative teenage years in the mid 1990s, in an unnamed French city decimated by a pandemic which shares many similarities to the AIDS virus. Those affected are predominantly queer or drug users, and they rapidly lose weight before turning to stone, their bones cracking as they disintegrate into dust.
The story revolves around 13-year-old Alpha (newcomer Mélissa Boros), who becomes ostracized from her peers after being tattooed with an uncleansed needle at a house party, leaving a visible mark on her arm that won’t clear. At the same time, her long-estranged uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim) returns to her life, sharing a room with her in the cramped apartment she shares with her single mother – he's in the final stages of illness, and has moved there in a last-ditch attempt to get clean.
Ducournau grew up during the AIDS pandemic, and although she’s drawing from it here, stresses that this shouldn’t be seen as a movie about it.
“The core of the movie is that the virus spreading is fear, and that’s why I created a whole other disease with its own symptom and name, which is never said in the film but you can see in one of the posters if you look really closely. I wanted to explore the reaction of society towards patients, and that’s where the parallels with the AIDS crisis are.
“I was drawing from memories and conversations I’ve had with people who were a little bit older than me at that time, who were part of communities targeted by these extreme moral panics in society, who were shamed and ostracised wherever they went. I wanted to explore this behaviour of rejection and shame, and that naturally recalls a society of the 80s or 90s, even if it’s not directly about AIDS.”
Although it’s a period piece, the France of Alpha feels very deliberately out of time to the point of feeling like a dystopia. Ducournau said this approach to bringing this period to life was to very deliberately avoid triggering any nostalgia in the audience.
She explained: “I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to fetishise this period through costumes or hairstyles, or depict a specific city, so I could examine the way society was dysfunctioning around these characters without distractions. I wanted the film to feel visceral, and having text on the screen saying “1990” would directly tie it to the past.
“My films are very mental, you never know what part of the country you’re in, and this is the first time I adapted that approach to the period setting as well – the only place you know for sure where you are is inside my head. But I don’t want anybody to think this is a dystopia, as I was drawing from what life in the 1990s was really like.
“There’s a scene where a teacher is called the F-slur in front of his students, and they all laugh – younger people call this dystopian, but I have to push back on this, because it was representative of the fear that had completely taken over the world, where homophobia was so normalised because of attitudes around AIDS. I witnessed things like this all the time when I was a teenager, and I don’t want to write that off as a dystopian past, but a reminder that this is what happens when we let that fear take hold.”
Ducournau has elsewhere called Tahar Rahim one of the greatest working actors, and they’d been circling each other for several years before he signed up for the transformational role at the centre of Alpha.
He told Zavvi: “The first time we met was in Toronto, it was daytime and she was dressed in all black, hanging at the bar – and then I saw Raw, and I just loved it. Then a few years later I was on the Cannes jury with Spike Lee when Titane premiered; we saw it first thing in the morning and it absolutely pummelled us.
“It was so fresh and unusual, and seeing it in the middle of the festival absolutely energised us. I of course already knew I wanted to work with her, but I was so happy getting the call a few years later saying she wanted to work with me – there was no question that I’d do whatever she asked.”
Although the later stages of the virus required visual effects to be brought to life, Rahim knew he was still going to lose weight to play Amin. This isn’t his first time taking an extreme approach to getting into character, but the already slender actor lost an extra three stone before cameras started rolling.
“I had to match the character, because it would have hurt the movie if I didn’t”, he explained. “We don’t say it in the movie, but we assume he’s addicted to heroin, and the reality is being addicted to that product makes you lose every single cell of fat and muscle in your body when you get to that stage.
“More importantly, I knew that living through that would help in creating the character and understanding his emotions; I wouldn’t achieve that if I didn’t allow myself to live through it. The part Julia offered me is a gift, and we share an understanding that the body is the most universal language – to get into their head, I have to learn through their body.”
Ducournau hates her films being labelled as “body horror” - especially as, in the case of Alpha, you couldn’t easily label it a horror – but is always attracted to working with actors who prioritise this physical approach to getting into character.
“Tahar shares this with Vincent Lindon, who I worked with on Titane and it’s not something French actors traditionally do in approaching a character. They think about their bodies before the intellectual side of getting into character, having to feel physically what they do before they can work on who they are – it's something I admire in both of them.”
Although she’s playing a 13-year-old, lead actress Mélissa Boros is far older; Ducournau only met with adult actresses for the title role, having to look for non-professional performers due to the requirements that they needed to look younger. This is only Boros’ second part, and she was thrown in at the deep end opposite an internationally recognised star who had literally starved himself to be there.
For Rahim, working with a new actor is always a joy, and he immediately built a real familial relationship with his co-star.
He explained: “For starters, I have a lot of nieces and nephews, so I know a lot about these relationships! But when working with new, young actors, it all comes back to trust in the director – if this is who Julia has decided to hire, then it means there’s no doubt she’s the right person for the role.
“It’s easy to bond when you’re both going through the same thing, but working with a great director was initially still nerve wracking for her – I could see some fears initially, but she proved herself a strong actor, it was great to see her blossom over the course of the shooting.”
“Throughout the shoot we watched her battling and breaking down the walls she felt were around her one by one”, Ducournau added. “She freed herself from her fears, which were all about her own expectations of what her performance should be, and it was a beautiful thing to watch – by the end, she felt no pressure of holding a film like this on her shoulders.”
If you’ve loved Raw and Titane, Alpha is different to what you’ve come to expect from the writer/director. It’s the most personal film she’s told to date – until the next one comes along, of course.
Alpha is in UK cinemas from Friday, 14th November
