Longtime Apartamento contributor Durga Chew-Bose introduces ‘Behind Bonjour’, a short film that goes behind the scenes of her feature directorial debut, Bonjour Tristesse. For more from the set, read Durga’s interview with Miyako Bellizzi, the costume designer for Bonjour Tristesse, in Apartamento magazine issue #34.
Since the release of our film, my mind keeps wandering back to our summer in Cassis, France. Without trouble, I’m transported to its blue waters and white rocks, its pine trees and their discreet shadows; the views that often inspired my cinematographer, Max Pittner, and I to consider what can be revealed with darkness instead of with light. Our location served as our guide. If we listened to it—the sound of gravel under screeching car wheels, a door slamming shut each time there was a breeze, the click-clack of heels on tiled terrasse steps—the movie would find its rhythms. So, we listened.
We had 30 days to shoot Bonjour Tristesse, our adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s novel. We had a villa scouted months prior. We had our cast, and we had our lovely crew. We had days spent testing costumes with our costume designer, Miyako Bellizzi, and evenings when we would all break for dinner or long walks, discovering along the way potential spots for scenes I was still rewriting.
What we didn’t have was a movie. It’s funny now to think back to that time and remember it for what it was: the desire to make something, as a team, one choice at a time. The process was incremental though hardly tedious. I enjoyed every minute of it.
Somewhere along the way, our friend, Marius Müller, joined us during production to shoot a behind the scenes of our day to day. He was there, witnessing those in-between moments, long before and after the camera was rolling: quick dips in the sea, weekly apéros hosted by different departments, a round of applause whenever we’d wrap another day, troubleshooting during night shoots, props being tested, tasted, set. There was, of course, plenty of waiting around. Plenty of sitting and staring off as a camera was being rigged. Plenty of coordinating and caring for details, many unforeseen. Most of all, there was plenty of joy. Everyone was so happy to be there, and despite the film’s mystery (What would it be? Who would it be? What were we making?), everything felt of a piece. I remember one day, captured at the very start of this short, where Eric Pierard, our props master, arrived with a box of vintage wind-up toys. I had written a scene in the film inspired in part by a moment in David Lean’s Summertime. Eric had sourced the most special ‘cast’ of toys, and I was tasked with ‘auditioning’ them, so to speak. We sat at a table and played. So much of making this film involved a sense of play, of registering as best we could how lucky we all were to spend our summer together in the South of France.
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