“People wanted Raw 2 - like Raw but more gory,” she says, rolling her eyes. Ducournau tells me several times that she hates when people reduce her films, which she sees as complex, genre-hopping creatures, to mere body horror. “It’s a year, every morning, you wake up, you take a shower, you dress, and you sit in front of your computer all day and nothing comes.” On the rare occasion that she did write a sentence, she immediately deleted it, disgusted. “When I say a year, it’s not like a year and I’m going on holidays,” she says. Every single day for an entire year, she woke up, sat down in front of her computer, and wrote absolutely nothing. After the surprising success of Raw - a coming-of-age film that made some people faint when it screened in Toronto - she was determined to write an even better feature, smarter and weirder than her first. Unlike her horrifying, cathartic, and wickedly hilarious films - watching them is like plunging your brain into an ice bath, then strapping it into a race car and driving it off a cliff - this particular story is about Ducournau herself. “But I like smoking.”īack to the scary story, which is not about an adolescent whose skin starts shedding like a snake’s (that would be the plot of her 2011 debut short, Junior), a bloodthirsty young cannibal making her way in veterinary school (her 2016 movie, Raw), or a female serial killer with a metal plate in her head who has sex with cars (that’s Titane). I don’t give a shit about that,” she says. “It’s not because I like fresh air or anything. She warns me that she can’t stay inside the museum chatting for too long without a break. She’s five-foot-nine but gives off the distinct impression that she is six-foot-nine. and flown here from a film festival in Texas, Ducournau, 37, looks soigné: pleated black Prada skirt, black leather Chanel jacket, iridescent-purple Issey Miyake tote bag, matched with scuffed white Adidas sneakers and the remnants of a late-summer tan. The two of us are walking through MoMA on a crisp fall Friday afternoon, in part because it’s one of the Parisian writer-director’s favorite spots to visit when she comes to New York City and in part because the museum happens to be putting on an exhibit called “Automania,” which could be an alternate title for her Cannes Palme d’Or–winning, paradigm-smashing, car-fucking second feature, Titane. Julia Ducournau is telling me a horror story. “My films are layers,” Titane writer-director Julia Ducournau says, “that I leave behind to get to the next skin.”
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