Guillaume Nicloux

Professor at La Fémis (Paris)

[press conference for Valley of Love (2015) at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival] The place was the triggering factor for this story - a specific event that took place in one of the places where we filmed led me to write this film when I came back from the trip. And then things gradually came together in a fairly natural manner. I got rid of a kind of handicap I had - I used to protect myself using genre films when exploring human relationships. Here I have the feeling I was a bit more sincere with myself and the story I wanted to tell. Everything is very interlinked, things are very introspective. I tried to keep this inner tension - I didn't want to display my innermost emotions. It took me some time to notice that, in a sense, Gérard represented what I'd experienced very powerfully in this canyon, when I first visited that place. I had, no doubt, a lot of fear in showing this via Gérard. In the beginning, I used a sort of trick, I resorted to a kind of mythology, but that was perhaps a mistake and I realized very quickly that I would have to face things in a much more sincere manner. Gérard is the hard-core of the film, in a certain way - it's linked to what I really saw and experienced in that place. I don't really want to go into the details, but there's a clear link between my meeting with Gérard and the purpose of the film.