NEWS

2015 WINNER: MARION DUPAS

Meeting-up with the talented filmmaker, Marion Dupas.

Can you talk about your music clip produced for Chateau Marmont and with which you won the YDA Silver Screen in the animation category. Definitely a digital and religious feel running through the film.How did you design and think through this clip?

Marion Dupas: It started out with a meeting with the Chateau Marmont. They didn’t yet know what to call their album and they left me totally free to choose the image. For a long time I had been wanting to mix  mythology that is present everywhere in our daily life with that of the Indian pantheon. As a filmmaker, my life is very uncertain and I have always managed to harmonise this uncertainty alongside my own version of spirituality and it is naturally reflected in my work.

YouTube Preview Image Jodorowsky is a huge reference for me and I have always been fascinated by the imagery of religion and icons in general. We exist in a society of icons thanks in part to Instagram. We all contribute a little every day to this oeuvre with our own selfie-icons. The choice of the square format was not at all trivial.  This express choice refers directly to the internet cultures
African wax, wifi bars, figures of Hinduism are all very present in your work… What are your other references?

MD: My taste for Bad Taste is what links these elements! I have always accorded a place of choice to bad taste and especially where there are some special technical skills used to create something WOW. I’m totally fascinated by nail art and tattoos and I have always maintained that today’s ‘bad taste’ will be tomorrow’s ‘ good taste’. Let’s say that infusing bad taste means you are a certain kind of influencer/trend setter.

The esoteric concept of tuning this clip meant I wanted to take the cheapest concept and re-spiritualize it; to restore its spirit by rendering all its redneck style beauty. Replacing the sacred wheel of Shiva with a car rim was very important to me because I believe there is a pure form of spirituality in popular subcultures and sub-genres.

The last commercial that has marked you?

MD: In the Parisian metro last year, there was a huge poster for a rugby match. The metro passengers found themselves gaping at a huge awful purplish gradient of colour containing a giant sea shell that opened wide, revealing a rugby ball inside !!

The project you dream of doing?

MD: Making a commercial by borrowing the toilet cleaning products style with a crazy Creative, and doing it exactly the way I want to do it! Say no more.

News and your future projects?

MD: I have made several movies in the last year and collaborated on an erotic Mook with a website. It’s going to be sold soon  in bookshop.

Then I worked on a big project for a Buddhist foundation. They contacted me to make an animated film. That was a nice surprise ! They saw the Chateau Marmot video and loved the loading Buddha. Even religious people can have a sense of humour, you see! However,  blasphemy was not possible (new territory for me) as it’s a film that aims to share Buddhist philosophy. I have always given preference to the crazy over the beautiful.

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How do you conceive your clip imagery?

MD: It’s hard enough to explain my work always stems from the mess in my secret garden. I have ideas that come to me, a little like epiphanies and I try to sort and articulate a universe around them, thereby creating a visual concept. My films are always built around a visual concept.

How did you become an animated filmmaker?

MD: It’s complicated because when you graduate sometimes you can feel a bit useless. You are not very good at art; no good at technique, so I really started making films in my room and therefore developed my style. I loved ‘Art Deco’, but once I finished school I was really free to develop my own creativity. My personal culture is garnered from the internet, graphic tablets, photoshop … At school I was always a little ashamed of what I liked – but once I was out of school out I realised it didn’t matter. I was ready to assume my Bad Taste.

Just an animated director ?

MD: I directed one live film for the artist Kwamie Liv last summer. I want to give a new dimension to my work and I want to direct actors. I feel it is vital to my work. I needed to mix the two aspects of a director’s job. All the treatments I have been writing recently go in this direction, very graphic, always conceptual but using other techniques in order to enrich my work. Frenzy (my prod agency) is encouraging me to take this path.

An artist to see?

MD: You shouldn’t miss the Tianzhuo Chen performance. It was a real shocker !!

A tip for future directors?

MD: Open your chakras !!

 

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