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SOMETHING WILD
THE BEAST Bertrand Bonello’s striking look at the past, present and future is a rare animal…
There were many starting points,’ director Bertrand Bonello tells Teasers about his new film, The Beast. A heady mix of drama, romance, sci-fi and thriller, it stars Léa Seydoux and George MacKay, who play versions of the same characters, Gabrielle and Louis, across three time periods: La Belle Époque Paris just before the Great Flood of 1910; 2014 LA; and a future-set 2044.
Initially, Bonello (Nocturama) wanted to make a melodrama, ‘which is something I’ve never done’. This desire brought him to Henry James’ 1903 story The Beast in the Jungle, a ‘heartbreaking, awful and beautiful’ tale of a man increasingly paralysed by the idea that something terrible will attack him in the unknowable future.
It rears its head in the 1910 segment, when Seydoux’s celebrated pianist meets MacKay’s admirer, who sharpens her fear of this bestial presence.
In the 2014 section, Gabrielle is an actor targeted by MacKay’s disturbed ‘incel’ – a 30-year-old virginal vlogger. Inspired by the slasher movie When a Stranger Calls, Bonello also drew upon YouTube posts from real-life 2014 mass killer Elliot Rodger, who uploaded his misogynistic manifesto to the internet before taking seven lives. ‘The way he says things, it’s so simple. If I had written the stuff myself, I would have written something more crazy. And it’s so much stronger, this simplicity.’
While Bonello wanted to explore the idea that ‘fear and love are related’, in the 2044 part, he looked to ‘invent a concept about the loss of emotions and the price to pay’. Designing the future, ‘I decided to have the world like today, but to take away many things,’ he says. ‘Make it very minimalistic. So there is no more internet, commercials, phones, screens, cars, sound…
Everything’s recreated in something very, very cold and minimalistic.’
‘I like a film that gives me more questions than answers’
BERTRAND BONELLO
Bonello, who worked with Seydoux on fashion biopic Saint Laurent, wrote specifically for her. ‘Of French actresses, she’s the only one that could be in three periods. She’s perfect in 1910 and today and tomorrow, because she has something timeless.’ As for the role(s) of Louis, before MacKay, Bonello intended to cast the late French actor Gaspard Ulliel, another Saint Laurent alumni. ‘He died a few weeks before the shoot. And for me, it was impossible to replace him with another French actor to avoid comparisons.’
The result is one of the more mysterious movies you’ll see this year. ‘Me as a spectator, I like a film that gives me more questions than answers,’ Bonello says. ‘This film is quite complex. But inside, it’s much simpler. The feelings, the emotions, of the scenes are very basic. It’s love, it’s fear, it’s tenderness, it’s loneliness.’