[Portrait to be found in the autumn issue, at your newsstand or by subscription.] Since Irréprochable, Sébastien Marnier films characters willing to do anything to enter worlds that do not want them. An obsession born from his own history, which he continues with Paolo, his first series available from September 25 on HBO Max.
In about ten years, Marina Foïs, Laurent Lafitte or Laure Calamy have all taken turns before Sébastien Marnier’s camera. Since Irréprochable, his first feature film released in 2016, the 48-year-old director and screenwriter twists the thriller’s codes to tell always the same story: characters from modest backgrounds who try to force their way into a world determined to keep them at a distance. “The common thread among all my protagonists is that they are people who invite themselves into another social class and, at all costs, seek to find their place there”, he summarizes from his apartment in the 9th arrondissement of Paris.
This obsession runs through Irréprochable, L’Heure de la sortie (2019) and L’Origine du mal (2022). It returns today in Paolo, his first series for HBO Max, adapted from his novel Mimi, winner of the Gay Novel Prize in 2013. Jérôme Niel plays a mute mover who reappears in the life of a childhood friend who becomes a candidate in the municipal elections of a small provincial town. “When HBO offered me to develop a series, I thought we had to be smart,” the filmmaker resumes. “Adapting Mimi wasn’t obvious, but I already had a grand melodrama with a very solid series architecture.”
As is often the case with Sébastien Marnier, this fiction draws directly from his personal history. In Mimi, the action took place in the City of 4000 in La Courneuve (Seine-Saint-Denis), where he grew up. Paolo, by contrast, relocates the action between Reims and Épernay, in the Marne. “I had no desire to go back to La Courneuve,” he explains. “I only experienced horrible things there, with assaults of all kinds. When they wanted to hand me the keys to the city after my first novel, I refused.”
In this difficult youth, his parents were his main refuge. At 19, after a heartbreak, he comes out to them. The next day, his father, a Communist elected official in Seine-Saint-Denis, leaves on a business trip to Africa. “Before taking the plane,” he recalls, “he left me a fifteen-page letter. I still keep it precious.”
His upbringing strongly left-leaning also shapes his cinephilia. As a child, Sébastien Marnier first discovers Eastern European productions before privately accessing video stores. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, A Clockwork Orange… It is there that he discovers genre films and their margins. “I completely understand why horror is such an important genre in queer culture,” he analyzes. “Even without realizing it, I identified with those characters.”
For a long time, he too felt he was standing at the door of French cinema, which he calls “inhospitable and intrinsically elitist”: “I felt that everything was more complicated because I wasn’t born on the right side of the ring road…” His characters are ready to push through to find their place. He has chosen to open doors in a different way. On his sets, he seeks to create the exact opposite of the domination dynamics he films. “I try to make my sets as non-hierarchical as possible. I go to the front when my team is unhappy,” he details. “That must come from my coco upbringing. Being gay must have played a part too: we’ve suffered enough.”
