Interview with “Who by Fire” Director Philippe Lesage

Québécois director Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire offers a “coming-of-age tale in which the adults are as much in need of growth as the youth (if not more so),” as I write in my review. Set in the northern wilderness, the film features as much hiking, hunting, and canoeing through rapids as it does conversation and wine. Starring an engaging ensemble of francophone actors, it never fails to hold interest I had a chance to speak with Lesage recently by Zoom and here is that interview, edited for length and clarity. His English is pretty solid, so I have only had to tweak a few phrases, mostly where he spoke in French (which I also speak) instead of in English; otherwise, the words are his own.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed: The title of your film in French is “comme le feu.” Why did you translate it in English as “who by fire.”

Philippe Lesage: So the title in French is of course a very open title. And I didn’t want to have a particular meaning during the development of the project. I mean, the title has changed so many times and I struggled a bit with the title, to be honest. And I didn’t want to have a title that would give any guidance or any prejudice to the viewer. For instance, when I present a film at a festival or in front of an audience, I never say much about the film beforehand because I really respect the intelligence and the creativity of the audience. And I make films that leave space for multiple interpretations and I want the viewer to have a certain kind of personal relationship with the film. But “comme le feu” was like “le feu sacré” (“sacred fire”) in a way, and it’s about passion, but it’s also inevitably the opposite side, which is destruction and death. So you have both because the flame in French—having the flame—could be both positive and negative. So I liked that.

And then I was looking for the translation of it and the direct translation, I was told by my English peers, was terrible; “like fire” wouldn’t make sense. And then I had a friend that I met and I was discussing that with her and she said, why don’t you call it after the Leonard Cohen song “Who by Fire”? And I thought that was a very, very good idea. And of course it’s a song by Leonard Cohen, but it’s also a Jewish prayer—a Yom Kippur prayer—and it’s a prayer and a song that could be interpreted in many ways, as well. And I really liked the idea of life, of vulnerability, of death and doubt and baptism. And there were so many things in that prayer/song that I thought it would completely fit the film, as well.

CLR: In the press notes you write about how much of your narrative film work, once you switched from documentary, has autobiographical elements in it.

PL: Yes.

CLR: Are there such elements in this movie?

PL: It was originally based on something that happened to my big brother, who is also a filmmaker, a documentarian, named Jean-François. His name is Jean Francois, so we call him “Jeff” [the name of the main male character in the film]. And he was invited over to this legendary Canadian filmmaker’s place, exactly like in the film. We had a friend and it was the parents of the friends who were friends with that director. And they went for a couple of days to the fishing camp/hunting camp of this famous filmmaker. So that was really the premise and the starting point. And then I asked him questions about it and how it was and I stole a few elements out of that story, but for me it really resonated in a sense that I thought it was a beautiful start with what I wanted to … well, I didn’t know what I wanted to do for my next film, but I felt like it kind of crystallized a lot of things that I was concerned about or that I wanted to do a film about.

And with that young boy as a starting point—and of course, first love and all—you’re dealing with all these strong emotions when you’re young. That’s something that I can never get enough of because I’ve been writing a lot about that. And then to meet this great artist he admires, with all this charisma and panache, and then he expects to be kind of intimidated at first, but he’s also expecting something from this adult, from this kind of role model. And obviously he would like to have Blake [the filmmaker in the film] as a mentor. And the thing that I find interesting, which is very different from my previous stuff, is that it is as a starting point the perception of Jeff and then it becomes a bit more the perception of the young girl, Aliocha, as well. It was like a take on how they perceive adults; we see adults through their own filter, in a way. And that was very interesting because it’s also a film about adulthood and manhood. So I’m kind of detaching myself from the coming-of-age thing, in that sense, with this film. And my next one is going to be about young adults who are more in their twenties and early thirties.

CLR: The ostensible adults in this movie have a lot of growing up to do, themselves.

PL: Yes, exactly.

CLR: So how did you find your location? I realize that in the great Canadian North, there are probably many such locations, but it was really quite beautiful.

PL: It is a “huis clos” [a kind of entrapment both metaphysical and physical] but I wanted to get out of the house and I wanted the nature to be vibrant and alive and with all this mystery and also with this dreadful and dangerous aspect of nature, like this bigger-than-life kind of nature. And so I did some scouting for two years, started during Covid. I’m really not a woodman type; I don’t fish and I don’t hunt. I’m a city boy; I cannot stand being in the countryside for more than four days. But then it was Covid, so everybody started to get out of the town, out of the cities.

And so I did the scouting for two years and I was looking for something very specific because we have this big tradition here of those very old fishing camps and hunting camps that used to belong mostly to Americans and British. I hope it’s not going to go back to that in a couple of years, but now they mostly belong to Canadians. And I was looking for those houses because normally they kept this kind of log cabin and they kept the whole style and they didn’t try to refurbish them into cabins that look suburban, like a rich suburban house or something. And so I visited many of them and they’re kind of hidden. They’re not widely known by the public.

And then I found this beautiful compound, and it was this very beautiful, huge fishing camp that belonged to very nice people, actually. But it took a lot of research and then because of course it was unlucky that I couldn’t find a proper river right next to it or a proper mountain and proper lake. And so we shot all over the country for those scenes. The river is shot four hours from that place and the mountains are shot in another region. So basically it’s like three or four regions of Québec that are shown in the film.

CLR: It’s movie magic.

PL: It’s expensive! My producer was not happy that I was not sticking to one location. 

CLR: So, you have cast actors with a variety of francophone accents, from Metropolitan France or Belgian and variations in between, including French Canadian. Was it important to you that Albert, played by the Montrealer Paul Ahmarani, and Blake, played by the Belgian Arieh Worthalter, who therefore have very different accents, sound as different the one from the other as they do?

PL: It was a very long research and long casting process to find those fantastic actors.

CLR: I mean, they’re great. I’m just curious.

PL: But it wasn’t planned that Blake was going to be European, but it’s good to talk about it because most of the English-speaking people or foreign-language-speaking people don’t realize the accent difference. And it is very interesting because I was looking for Blake for a long, long time, and the funny thing is that I had many more choices among actors here in Québec for Albert because I think there are many more Albert types. But it was tougher to find the Blake type. And so then I kind of expanded my research towards Europe since we were in co-production with France with the film. And then I met Arieh, and then that changed the script a bit, and it’s very interesting because of course that’s not what the film is about. But I was asked a question recently, and it’s a very interesting question because it was a French woman who just saw the film and she said, “Isn’t it a bit about this kind of colonial attitude?” And I thought it was very interesting, but of course that was not what I wanted to express at the beginning. But if you want to read it that way, it’s totally fine with me.

But what I thought was also interesting is that we have these kinds of European types, mostly French of course, because of the language. And they come here because they want to be in touch with the nature and they go live in the woods and they have this kind of Canadian dream and that’s funny to us. And so with Blake, I thought it was funny because he pretends a bit to be this kind of hunter-fisher, very close-to-nature type of guy, but he doesn’t call the moose in a very professional way. He’s kind of acting, in a way.

CLR: Or, as we say here, he’s cosplaying.

PL: I don’t know that expression.

CLR:  When you take on a persona or you’re dressing up in a different costume, performing a part.

PL: Exactly! So that is a layer which I think is funny that you see when you are aware of the difference and where Blake comes from.

CLR: I’m so grateful that you also cast Irène Jacob. I’m a big fan of 1990s cinema and of Kieślowski’s trilogy. So it was great to see her in this film.

PL: Yes, she’s perfect in it, actually. I really like her presence.

CLR: Absolutely. So, your cinematographer, Balthazar Lab, does excellent work. What guidance did you give him? What did you talk about when you were planning to shoot the film?

PL: We talked about texture. We talked about the fact that I can’t afford to shoot on film because … well, if I were doing one or two takes per scene, I could afford it on that project, but that’s not the case. I like the camera, when on a set, to roll, and I’m probably the Canadian director right now who’s doing the most takes. 

CLR: (laughs) You’re the Canadian Kubrick! 

PL: Yeah, but it’s not about asking Tom Cruise to open a door 65 times over three/four days. It is because of the long takes. And it is also to give space to the actors to have the chance to explore, and every take is different. So that’s very, very stimulating for everyone. It’s not like this obsessive, crazy thing.

So in order to prepare, we talked about texture and I really wanted the film to have a kind of 1970s Hollywood type of texture. And even though we were not shooting on film, we found these old Panavision lenses—I think it’s the B series, it’s very technical, but they shot so many great films with C series and B series—and what I asked Balthazar to watch was [cinematographer] Vilmos Zsigmond’s work in the ‘70s, mostly because he films nature extremely well. So there’s Deliverance, of course, and The Deer Hunter, and then I had him watch some old documentaries from Canada as well, like The Shimmering Beast, by Pierre Perrault. The character of Albert is an homage to one of the characters in that documentary.

The thing that happened is that I also had an extremely long casting process to find the proper cinematographer for the project. And I had many very talented people who were in the race. And so we had a very short time for preparation, but Balthazar is so bright and he understood right away what I wanted. And during the shoot, at some point we were so much in tune that we almost didn’t have to talk. We were really on the same page. 

CLR: Speaking of Deliverance—I’m glad you brought it up—you of course have an extended sequence at the end in canoes on a river with rapids, and your actor Arieh Worthalter is in the middle of the rapids wrestling with the boat and people are falling into the water. How did you arrange all that? It looked kind of complicated to shoot, and I’m sure you were obviously all safe, but how did that sequence go? Did it take a lot of planning?  

PL: It was extremely expensive in terms of security, I can tell you. So everybody was safe, but I have to admit something, and I have no problem admitting it because it’s also the way I work, and that’s that I leave a lot of space for the unexpected, but I can afford it because we are super-prepared. So we don’t improvise. But I think the more you prepare, the more you can leave the surprises that come on a film set and then you can explore different things. And I really like that. I’m not a guy who’s going to really follow the script line by line when I’m on a set. I don’t even look at my script once I’m on the set. Of course I wrote it, so I know it very well.

So, for those scenes, it’s an interesting question because for those scenes, what you see in the film is very different from what was in the screenplay. In the screenplay, it was very complicated. There was a rescue on the rocks with Hélène and Eddy, the husband; they were stuck on a rock. They were trying to rescue them. And we had stunts and we had body doubles. And I never storyboard because I hate it. But then I had to storyboard that part because there were too many people involved and it was complicated.

And we did not have a big budget. I think with stunts and stuff like that, normally you need really, really, really, really long days because with stunts, if you get one minute per day of shooting, it’s a good day. So it was really something else. And then in the edit suite, we realized with my editor that it was strange, because the film has its own pace—it takes its time and has long takes—and then at the end it was suddenly like boom, boom, bang, bang, like a lot of editing because if you have stunts and body doubles, you need to edit, otherwise it doesn’t work. And we were confronted with that problem. So we had to rewrite the scene in the edit suite.

And because I shot a lot and because unexpected things happened, we could build something around that that was credible and very authentic. For instance, Irène Jacob and Laurent Lucas, they were not supposed to flip over in the canoe like that. The characters did it because it is the actors who did it. It was a small accident. But I could use that. And then of course, there’s a real stunt made by Noah Parker, who’s playing Jeff, doing his own stunt. He really wanted to do his own stunt. So he was with the stunt coordinator, all padded, and he really wanted to go in the rapids and to do the scene. So I kept that.

And also one of the parts that I enjoy the most in that canoe sequence is when Blake and Jeff are in the canoe and then the canoe turns around and then they’re facing the rapids in the wrong direction. And that was also not planned, but they did it on the first take; something went wrong. And then I asked them to repeat it. So they did. I think the shot that you see is not the first time they did it. That was very a natural accident, but they did it exactly the same every time. That’s so good.

And then what was also not planned in that scene is when Arieh is trying to remove the canoe from the water, and it must have weighed like tons. It’s Herculean; it shows Herculean strength. And that scene, it’s unbelievable. But it was so good and I was keeping all the people; they were waiting for me, like the security guard also, for me to say cut. But I could see he wasn’t in danger, he was in control, so I didn’t say cut. And he was completely understanding of that and was completely in character. That was great!

CLR: Well, it’s a really interesting sequence, so thank you for explaining how that worked. And thank you for talking to me! I wish you good things with the film.

PL: Thank you very much, Chris.