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| The Right Words |
One of the films already shortlisted and hoping to get lucky with this year’s Oscar nominations, The Right Words deals with a teenager’s efforts to overcome his fears and confess his feelings to the girl he loves – a situation complicated by a bus full of teenagers who have seen the poem he wrote for her after it was stolen and put on social media. As young Mahdi’s sister Kenza (Aya Halal) and her best friend Aïssatou (Ramatoulaye Ndongo – known simply as Rama) switch from teasing to offering a whole lot of conflicting advice, the film takes in issues around bullying, gender stereotypes and the importance of being oneself at a stage in life when it’s sometimes difficult to figure out what that means.
Present to talk about it at a press conference were director Adrian Moyse Dullin, producer Lucas Tothe, and stars Aya and Rama, all gamely conversing in English for the sake of international journalists, despite their first language (and the film’s) being French. Naturally, the first subject of discussion was the Oscar shortlist.
“It's amazing,” says Adrian. “It's amazing to be there. And it's also the travel. Travelling with this film was amazing. We went to Cannes and Sundance in one year. The festival run was amazing – we made like 200 festivals, so it’s like the cherry on the cake.
He was at home, making his dinner, when he heard the news, he says. He didn’t know when the announcement was due to be made. Neither did Lucas, who apologises for not having an exciting story to tell – he was just cooking some pasta tubes.
“The Right Words is about a few themes, but at first, it's about shame,” says Adrian. “It's about how hard it can be to not to be ashamed of our desire, and not to be ashamed of who we are. The character is very shy and he wants to declare his love to a girl, and there are many obstacles for him to do that. And it also speaks about gender stereotypes.. And it's about how hard it can be to go further and to grow.
“When I write I love to connect myself to something that I experienced in the past. So I used this shame emotion to tell the story and to write the script. I tried to write with my heart...But also, of course, I tried to deliver a film that was universal, and so that's why I [had] a teenager in the film, to give the sensation that it's a universal story besides my experience.
“I said to myself, when I was writing, ‘I want to do a romcom and I want to shoot it like a thriller.’ So my intention was to write like a comedy, to have jokes between characters, but I want them to treat it like a thriller, to give this sensation of oppression and to give us the anxiety of the character. To give the sensation that he's trapped in a bus and he can't escape this bus. And he can't escape how the others look at him, and the trap that you feel about social media, to be observed, and to be trapped in the bus with his sister and friends.”
“It was nice, for me, to make this film,” says Lucas. “First, because it was the first short film from Adrian...I like making short films with Adrian, and it may help us to make a feature film afterwards. So it was the first goal and then it was quite a big deal to make a film and a big challenge to make a short film and tell a story only in the bus. It was a challenge and it was exciting to to try to make it possible.
“We got connected through a friend who invited me to read a good script. So I read the script and maybe like two days after I called Adrian, and it was a pleasure to work with him.”
Asked about how the film was cast, Adrian enthuses about the talent of his young stars.
“They are amazing. They are very smart. They have a good emotional intelligence. We found them in casting – they are for the first time on screen. So we find them not in an agency. We had to cast in the street, on social media, in sports clubs. So we were looking for teenagers everywhere in in Paris and in the suburbs of Paris. And then when we found them, I asked them a lot of questions. I wanted to see if they were not smart enough. But if they had an emotional intelligence, if they were, then if they were compatible. And they are best friends in life also. We were very touched by the fact that they were very friendly.”
Aya, a little uncertain about trying to express herself in English, ventures that at first she didn’t think she had much in common with Kenza, but she has sympathy for her character, arguing that she really thinks she’s giving Mahdi good advice because it reflects what she finds attractive in men.
“The other thing is that she's always on her smartphone, always on social media,” says Adrian. “It's like she wants content for her social media, she wants something to happen in her social media and her way of being, of living. It’s like a game for between her brother and her...They're playing, but now it's going too far. It's mixed real life and social media so nothing is real anymore for them. They're playing between reality and fiction.”
Asked about her character, Rama says “I think Aïssatou is a very kind person and she sees good work every time and everywhere, so sometimes she's like not in the real life. So she takes some slap sometimes. And I think during the film she tried to help Mahdi And she doesn’t want to hurt her best friend...And she doesn’t think about doing something. She does everything with her heart.”
“She was not thinking about the consequences of what she was doing,” adds Adrian, stepping in to translate as she switches to French.
The conversation drifts for a while, but Adrian steers it back around to the relationship between Aïssatou and Kenza, which has distinct overtones of unrequited love.
“I think Mahdi and Aïssatou, they're on the same path. They try to deny love, they try to find a way to stay it, and to explain it. But then they are too sensitive, too romantic, probably, for the others, for the bus and for the space and for what's going on around them. So yeah, I tried to explain the story of these two characters who are falling in love with mixed emotions, and they are afraid, they are ashamed of their desires.”
Mahdi’s journey, he says, involves the realisation that he doesn’t need to worry about what other people think, and that what matters is being true to himself.
I ask about the technical challenges of filming on the bus, which is packed full of teenagers sitting and standing. It’s a noisy environment which offers very little room for either cast or crew to move around.
“It was very difficult,” says Adrian, “because we were a small team, maybe 20 people with actors and extras. So it was all handled like a choreography. I wanted the audience to feel that we are trapped in this bus. I always wanted to shoot with people in the background, people in the foreground, I wanted the actors to be in the middle of the crowd. So we were always playing with extras all around us, and so it was a very confined space. We recreated this atmosphere in post because we wanted to give the impression that we are trapped, so a lot of sounds, we did that in post.”
The stars altered the dialogue, they explain, to make it sound like something teenagers might really say.
“It was too formal,” says Aya, laughing. “We feel that it was an older person who wrote it down, and we don't speak like that. So we said ‘It’s not going to work. We have to say this.’”
If translating language across generations is difficult, so is understanding feelings. It’s often difficult for older people to grasp the intensity of emotions around first love. I ask Adrian how he approached that so that he could make sure the film didn’t seem patronising towards Mahdi.
“I just tried to connect myself with the emotion that I had when I was a teenager, basically,” he says. “I was like, ‘Okay, let's, let's think about how is it the first time.’ I wanted to show the cinema that we made when we do that for the first time. It’s like such a huge mountain. It's very complicated, but actually, I have something to say about that. It’s very funny because Mahdi's character at the scene that we shoot at the end, it was the first time that he did a love declaration in life and in the film, so it was the first time that I did that. So he was very afraid of doing this and shooting the scene about getting the text in front of the girl. And so it was mixed between reality and fiction at that time when we shot, but he was very ashamed himself to play it.”
For Lucas, the big challenges involved in making the film concerned shooting on the bus and keeping everyone safe and compliant with the rules during a period of Covid lockdowns. They got special permission to shoot, he says – otherwise it would not have been possible. Lots of prior contingency planning also paid off.
“Due to the Covid, during the first day of the shooting, they locked down, so It's not seven days of shooting, it's only five. So it was quite difficult to have a script. You know what I mean? So it was a big deal for us to make it possible and ensure that we had everything to edit the film. All the time, we got prepared very well, because we another challenge was to have teenagers on screen, it was their first time on screen. So we prepared everything six months before the shooting, just to make sure that ultimately, during the shooting, it was quite easy for everyone.”
After all that, what would it feel like to win an Oscar?
“For me, it's step by step,” says Adrian, sensibly. “But I would be very happy for everybody who was working on the film. I will be happy to share this Oscar with with them and I will be happy also for the thematic of the film, for what the film is defending. So be yourself. Go away with the gender stereotypes. Have some criticism about social media...and yeah, I think I will be happy to share the ideas of the film...Let's go out of the gender stereotypes and be free.”
