Agathe Riedinger has long been fascinated by snapshots, spending hours upon hours in the photo lab during her time at the Paris National Superior School of Decorative Arts, understanding that something that can be consumed in an instant nonetheless takes time to develop. Although the equipment would change when she would turn her attention from still photography to filmmaking, the thought of what could be achieved with a camera didn’t, as she once told the outlet Fade to Her, “Gradually, I went from making photographic pictures to video pictures.”
Riedinger couldn’t find a stronger subject for her gifts for capturing immediately striking images that invite audiences to look deeper into the frame than in her debut feature “Wild Diamond,” taking on the culture where reality television has become a dominant form of entertainment, and popular in large part because of just how little it asks of viewers. However, that isn’t the case for Liane (Malou Khebizi), who couldn’t invest any more fully in the dream of appearing on such a show, working as a waitress to finance breast implants at just the age of 19 in the hopes that it’ll convince the producers of “Miracle Island” that she’ll be a compelling character on the beach-set soap opera. However, being from a poor neighborhood in the South of France, Liane’s drive to attain stardom is viewed less as a bid for notoriety than the social mobility it would bring when she’s trapped at home with a single mother whose behavior once led to being placed in foster care and now back to care for a younger sister, with no obvious recourse than to try to capitalize on her looks when she isn’t made to feel she has much value elsewhere.
In the four years in between first imagining such a character for her short “Waiting for Jupiter” and making “Wild Diamond,” Riedinger would spend as much, if not more, time reading about the plight of courtesans in the 19th century as flipping on the TV where the parallels couldn’t be ignored as women were often pitted against one another for survival in a patriarchal system and putting sexuality on display could bring criticism and ill repute yet represented one of the few opportunities to also show power. With its title, it’s understood there’s a precious gem waiting to be revealed with no one putting more pressure on Liane than herself as she awaits a call back from “Miracle Island” that isn’t promised to ever arrive, but Riedinger allows one to see the beauty that’s there from the very first frame where all the makeup the teen puts on isn’t what makes her appealing, but her inner resolve that leads her to putting it on, and crafts an unusually provocative coming-of-age tale when growing up in the social media age, appearance-affirming comments below her TikTok videos can be just as dangerous as the negative ones as they push her to greater extremes to hold their attention.
A rare debut feature to be invited to the Cannes competition, “Wild Diamond” is ready to shine as it finally makes its way across the Atlantic and Riedinger graciously took the time to talk about how she came to empathize with aspiring reality TV contestants, making quite a discovery of her own in Khebizi, who had no prior acting experience before giving a riveting turn as Liane and since has gone on to appear in the late Laurent Cantet and Robin Campillo’s “Enzo,” and making the most of each individual image in the film.
You’ve said that your fascination with reality TV led you to make this film, but I was surprised by how you’re able to show the influence of it without really spending too much time on how it gets made. Was it a difficult story to crack, given your initial inspiration might’ve been different from where it ended up?
To tell you the truth, it wasn’t easy. It was a very long process, and before I got to this screenplay of “Wild Diamond,” I went through several stages trying to find the best approach. What I was doing was too black-and-white, too programmatic because what I really found interesting was why the character [of Liane] wants to make these shows, insofar as this is a character who at every minute is plunged in social media and the private lives of reality television candidates. I wanted to really look at that rather than the question of how reality television works, so the casting session [scene with Liane] was very important — and very difficult to write — but it showed what is expected of candidates, especially female candidates and what I found more interesting was to show Liane, who is intelligent and understands the system that she’s participating in, rather than just how it works. Of course, in writing it, I did [learn about the process behind] a reality show. That was essential to make a film that was both honest and authentic.
You’ve compared reality television as a pathway to social mobility a bit like courtesans in the 19th century and it was interesting to see in a very ultramodern film how you’ll bring in elements like classical music or an anachronistic typeface reminiscent of what you might see etched below a statue for the messages that Liane receives on an Instagram post. Was thinking about how to express time?
It’s true that we can’t really know how long [a period] the film [covers] and how long Liane’s wait [to be on the show] is. What interested me was to show the cruelty of the wait. In the film, she waits about a month before she gets her answer [as to whether she’s been cast on the show]. What interested me was to show that silence is an abyss and that there’s no bottom to it and no temporality. The representation of time goes through the interiority of the character and her silence, and her way of seeing the world moving around her fast while she is stuck.
As far as music and the choice of font are concerned, they go together and what was important for me was to show, through this artistic choice, the noble aspect of Liane’s dream, starting from the idea that her dream is noble. There’s a nearly divine element to her quest. There’s an absolute that she’s after that’s practically mythological, and I wanted to show that grandiose side of her, even though her actual dream is trivial and one could say in poor taste. we see that the social media in the film is very violent. It shows violence, but for her, it is noble because it’s a proof that she has made her mark. It shows the way that she has moved people through her content, and that validates her and it elevates her, so I wanted the font to be closer to something classical, not modern, and to be very carefully designed for this noble quality.
Malou is from the South of France like Liane, and I understand she’s very different from the character, but clearly you wanted to bring her experience into the performance. How much did you have in mind versus what she ultimately gave to the role?
The character was very well-[established in the script]. It’s a character I have lived with for many years, so I had a very precise idea, not of her physicality, but of her musicality — how she spoke, how she sat, why she wore a dress of this color, why she listened to this music, how she would react, how she would look at people. There was something very precise in my head, which meant that the casting wasn’t as obvious as any other. And Malou really understood all the elements of the character. Malou is determined like Liane, and she has a very strong sense of justice, but being quite different, especially physically, she managed to understand and better integrate the “how” of the “why” and all the mechanisms of Liane. We adjusted things together, and she brought her fire and her strength, which fit perfectly with Liane’s character, but there were hardly any changes once Malou arrived. Liane and Malou made an almost complete fusion.
The camera is so connected to Liane, and it seems there’s so much freedom of movement, but I understand that all it was all very, very precise. What it was like finding the balance between giving Malou the space to operate and at the same time having these wonderfully composed shots?
Malou is a truly outstanding technician, and that was quite an incredible discovery, because she had never acted before. She has an incredible sense of space and movement and camera that was quite incredible. The cinematographer Noé Bach had a detailed shotlist and we figured out our angles according to the camera axis and the movements we wanted to make, and we showed Malou that, and within that, she found her own freedom. What was also important and really wonderful was that Noé also understood Malou, so when I was talking about fusion, Liane really merged with Malou, but also she merged with the camera as well, so there was something very organic, because we were able to understand if we were able to improvise, how Malou would move and the camera was able to do that as well. There were a few scenes that were much more freestyle, notably the scene when Liane’s with her little sister and the boys mimicking a dog’s barking at the beginning of the film, we knew generally what camera angle we had to follow, but it was very free. I’m very fond of visual accidents — I love the loss of focus and blurriness – things like that, and I think the more you frame, the more freedom you have. Constraint also creates a lot of freedom, and Malou completely grasped that.
There’s a scene that doesn’t involve actors that I had to ask about since it seems to capture a core idea of the film and it seems almost like a throwaway shot early, but it really stuck with me – it has a car in a parking lot surrounded by palm trees and the mundane quality of the foreground is what emphasizes the beauty in the back. It’s a juxtaposition that seems to recur throughout the film regarding this character where you can see the bruises on Liane’s ankle as she puts on glittery shoes and I wondered were you mentally collecting images over the time you were putting this together to express that idea?
Yes, of course. I’ve stored a number of desires, all the more crystallized that it was difficult to set up this project. Like Liane, I had a frustration and a rage to do something that felt very important. I had mood boards for all the categories of film production, and lots and lots of ideas like that that I had written or drawn that I shared with the team. And in this scene in particular, no one believed in it. It’s really one of those scenes where when we had to save time [in the heat of production], I was told, “Take it out, we don’t care about this scene.” And I was like, “No, it’s in these little scenes that I want to reveal magic in things that are basic and trivial.” On the shoot, no one was satisfied with that scene, except me. I was in a trance because I saw the magic in it. And everything in the film is very constructed — the photography, the light, the costumes, the positions of bodies in the frame. And I love to have all sorts of different layers in all these very thought-out choices. I always tried to add different symbols to it, so there would be different levels of meaning to each shot, so I’m delighted if you were able to see some of them.
That makes two of us that were satisfied with that shot.
What was it been like to see the reaction to this around the world so far?
It is very peculiar because when the film was shown at Cannes, I simply hadn’t expected it to have such visibility. I had wanted simply to make the film, and it was very hard to get it made, so I had barely imagined that it would have a life in France, let alone such an international life and that’s been wild. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to detach from the film, but I’ve had so many encounters with the audiences in so many different countries, it’s just very moving. To give a film over to the audience is a very beautiful thing and there’s a proportional reversal between the difficulty and harshness of trying to get this film made and the joy of giving it to the world, and something that I’m not yet sure I’ve completely realized.
“Wild Diamond” opens on July 11th in New York at IFC Center, July 18th in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal and July 25th at the Cleveland Cinematheque.