There are rarely details in Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s films that aren’t intentional, but the selection of a prismatic gem as the prized bauble ferociously fought over in their latest adventure “Reflection in a Dead Diamond” comes to have a little more meaning than even they might’ve considered. The directors behind “The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears” and “Let the Corpses Tan” have made a jewel of their own with their first foray into the spy genre, finding that retirement hasn’t taken for a former agent who goes by the code name John D (Fabio Testi), who expected any experience of investigating international intrigue to be behind him as he settles into the Miramere Luxury Hotel on the French Riviera. Yet as he’s asked to reminisce about his past by a fellow guest, he finds himself right back in the thick of the action when she disappears and while he contends with the case in the present, he is constantly reminded of his days (played by Yannick Renier) chasing a masked assassin known as Serpentik (Thi Mai Nguyen), who was hard to get a hold on either physically or psychologically.
Cattet and Forzani have long struck a fine balance of paying homage to the films that dazzled them in their youth from giallos to spaghetti westerns while creating their own cinematic wonders full of originality and while they’ve been attracted to sleazy characters and scenarios where the most fun is, their technical prowess has always been top class. So “Reflections in a Dead Diamond” would seem to take things one step further when in addition to all the various tones and genres they blend together with abandon, the story itself toys with notions of memory and meta narratives, stacking up with all the delicious layers of a Napoleon cake. The result is a film that gleams from every angle as a diamond would but changing upon how the light hits it, ideally providing a different experience that’s no less satisfying to a viewer who enjoyed the Eurotrash espionage films from the 1960s or someone simply wandering in for an escapist action film. No wonder then that the film has been a rousing crowdpleaser on its festival stops all across the globe from Berlin to Tribeca and ahead a streaming premiere on Shudder on December 5th, Forzani and Cattet graciously took the time to talk about creating such a bloody good time, designing a film with multiple simultaneous meanings and pulling off elaborate shots that would be impossible to film more than once.
Being a fan for a while, I had to ask has it been intentional to investigate a different genre each time out or has that just been how the career has unfolded?
Bruno Forzani: It’s a bit like life. At the beginning, when we made “Amer” and “Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears,” it was our universe. But at the end of “Strange Color,” it was so hard to work on this project that we couldn’t work together anymore. So Hélène had the idea to adapt a book, so it was a totally different universe [than something we originated]. And to do that, it opened our mind. We have explored a universe that we didn’t know and it was more Italian Western style or more a police story. It wasn’t something about an intimate universe linked to fantasies. That gave us the will to continue to work together. And we came to “Reflection [in a Dead Diamond],” it was a new challenge, a new universe. For “Let the Corpses Tan,” it was more linked to gunfights and things like that. Here it was more [physical] action, like car chases and fight scenes, so it was a new challenge and each time it allows us to learn new things.
I’ve heard you had the idea for “Reflection” for some time, but there’s so many layers to this. How did it build up over the years?
Bruno Forzani: In fact, we had the idea in 2011. We saw “Road to Nowhere” a movie by Monte Hellman, and Fabio Testi was in it, and he reminded us of Sean Connery or Dick Bogart in “Death in Venice.” And [Testi] has done the two kinds of cinema — he’s been in auteurist films like De Sica or Zulewski movies, and he did a lot of Italian Westerns, and when we came out from the screening, we said maybe we could do a mix between James Bond and “Death in Venice,” mixing these two opposite cinemas. We began to write the script in 2019 and [over] these years, we were inspired by [art] exhibitions and by opera and what was happening in the world and we tried to combine all these things.
We wrote the script like Satoshi Kon, the director of “Perfect Blue” and “Millennium Actress” He wrote the script with several layers and each time you watch the movie, you can see it differently. We also watched the TV show “Westworld,” and we really liked the first season. It’s the same kind of writing. You can see the [story] in several ways. So that gave us the will to come back to writing this. One of the doors to enter this universe was “Sunset Boulevard,” which also helped us to begin to write the story.
It seems like Diabolik, the master thief of the comics, was a great inspiration as well. What was it like to create the character of this masked assassin Serpentik?
Bruno Forzani: At the beginning, it was a joke for Hélène because first I was writing the script, and she knew that we were going to do this mix between James Bond and “Death in Venice” and because Hélène loves Fumetti [Neri, the genre] and she loves Diabolik, I created Serpentik, who was a female Diabolik…
Hélène Cattet: I always wanted to make a fight scene with a super heroine, so it was the perfect moment.
Bruno Forzani: And it was a way to play with this mask. In this kind of genre, you have always the mask and Serpentik became a key for the main character. She could have several meanings.
Is it true for the fight scenes, you were looking for dancers as opposed to people that knew stunt choreography?
Hélène Cattet: For the fight scene, we had a question. did we need a choreographer or no? Because we were really afraid that if there was a choreographer, the way to direct [the scene] would change a lot, so we thought it was better if we try to do everything by ourselves and we have made a test just with us and our friends, with Thi Mai [Nguyen, who plays Serpentik] and with the dancer. Finally, we thought we don’t need a choreographer. We can do it by ourselves. But we had someone for the security.
Bruno Forzani: In fact, on our previous shorts or features, we have worked several times with a contemporary dancer because they know the way to move perfectly with their body and for Serpentik, when we met Thi Mai, she’s a contemporary dancer, and her father was a master of Kung Fu, so she grew up inside this culture. She knew the fight and the dance and she was the perfect mix for what we were looking for.
So many of the effects in your films are done practically in camera and they get so messy in all sorts of respects, so you probably only have like one chance to shoot them. Was there anything that you were particularly nervous about?
Hélène Cattet: We were really afraid for when Serpentik takes off John’s suit with just the blade [of her sword]. That was a lot of stress because it’s very artisanal.
Bruno Forzani: It’s a suit with a pre-cut and there were some nylon strings and there are eight, nine, ten people who at “one, two, three,” they [pull the strings] and you know the suit can [pull apart] just like this and it doesn’t fall. That was the most stressful moment.
You make great use of the Côte d’Azur. Did you know you’d have everything you needed in this location in order to tell this story?
Bruno Forzani: Yeah, in fact I grew up there in the Côte d’Azur and with Hélène, we know this place very well. All the locations we know inspire us and the subject of an hero who is dying [is emblematic of] a world that is dying and the Côte d’Azur was a bit of that because there was a golden era during the ’60s and all the nature was eaten away by the concrete after. It was the perfect place because it had a luxurious image, but when you look at it more closely, it’s more macabre.
When you’re about to make one of these films, do you actually watch a lot of films for reference or is it all pulling from memories that you have? Because you end up doing something so original that doesn’t owe to the past, but there is a lot of homage.
Hélène Cattet: Usually we don’t watch movies just before making the movie because we don’t want those movies to interfere. So it is just our memory when we are writing the script.
Bruno Forzani: What is great with memories is that they are fake memories. You remember a sequence and you imagine it totally [more elaborate than what it was]. And when you watch it again, it’s simple.
Hélène Cattet: But in our head, it’s totally different. So it’s great to have bad memory.
That’s actually what you get at thematically in this film. When you have so much in this movie for people to unpack, what’s it been like to share with audiences?
Hélène Cattet: I’s very strong because the first time we showed a movie, it was in Berlin and there were a lot of people in the theater.
Bruno Forzani: 1,500, I think, and it’s a big, big theater with a big screen and big sound.
Hélène Cattet: And it was incredible because the people were really reacting. They were laughing.
Bruno Forzani: They had a lot of pleasure.
Hélène Cattet: So it was really powerful.
Bruno Forzani: And when we went to Fantastic Fest in Austin, it was the same thing. People knew our previous movies very well and it was a nice reaction. We are very happy with that because it’s such a long way to do this movie. It was five years of work. We try to do our best to give pleasure to the audience and when we see that people have it, it’s very cool.
“Reflection in a Dead Diamond” starts streaming on Shudder on December 5th.