Young, Wild, and Free: Bruno Dumont on “Red Rocks”

Дата публикации: 09-07-2026 08:00:00

Red Rocks (Bruno Dumont, 2026).In a career spanning four decades, French iconoclast Bruno Dumont has toggled between dour, forbidding portraits of the country’s north and its residents—The Life of Jesus (1997); Humanity (1999)—absurdist comedies—his 2014 TV miniseries Li’l Quinquin and feature films like Slack Bay (2016)—revisionist musicals about the Maid of Orléans—Jeannette (2017), Joan of Arc (2019)—and, with The Empire (2024), a sci-fi saga that plays like a gonzo spoof of Star Wars. But even if you’re familiar with such tonal nomadism, his latest will register as a singular departure. A riff on Romeo and Juliet, as the director himself billed it in pre-production, Red Rocks (2026) charts a few summer days in the lives of some kids in present-day Côte d’Azur. That’s nothing novel for Dumont, whose oeuvre—from Li’l Quinquin to his Joan of Arc diptych—has often centered on children. Yet the pint-sized first timers he’s cast here are among the youngest he’s ever worked with, and what makes Red Rocks so remarkable is the way it crackles with their same joie de vivre. Far less narratively driven than the director’s previous work, the film concerns two rival gangs of children whiling away time in an unnamed village around the Esterel Massif in the French Riviera. Driving around the beachside turf on a miniature quad is Géo (Kaylon Lancel), the troublemaking five-year-old leader of one faction, who becomes enamored by Ève (Kelsie Verdeilles), a shy and taciturn member of the other. The romance sets the two posses on a collision course, but that’s the only semblance of plot in a film that otherwise unspools as an unbroken, hazy July afternoon—more a collection of vignettes than a three-act coming of age. Shot with a handheld camera by Carlos Alfonso Corral with a wide-angle lens that echoes the young protagonists’ curiosity for the strange, wild world around them, Red Rocks follows Géo, Ève, and co. as they spend the holidays stealing from the tourists infesting the riviera, climbing the titular boulders, and jumping off of them. “I didn’t want to film kids,” Dumont told me after Red Rocks premiered in Cannes. “I wanted to capture the idea of childhood.” Refreshingly, that’s not couched as a period of unfettered innocence but rather a liminal stage marred by occasional outbursts of violence, all while Dumont keeps parents and adults by and large offscreen. Routinely seen holding hands and hugging, Géo and Ève try on gestures whose meanings they don’t yet understand, and the awkwardness of those exchanges is nothing short of charming. The minimalist approach and skeletal narrative might suggest some sort of doodle, but there’s something exhilarating about the freedom Red Rocks communicates—for characters and director alike.  The day after the film screened in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, I sat with Dumont to discuss his efforts to work with actors too young to know how to read, his struggles with producers concerned with the cast’s safety, and the joys of embracing a looser, freer approach to filmmaking.NOTEBOOK: Do you remember the first time you saw the red rocks, and what made you decide to set a film in the Esterel Massif?BRUNO DUMONT: It was on my way to Cannes. I noticed these red rocks from the window of the train that took me to the festival, and eventually decided to see them up-close. I discovered this extraordinary landscape, watched kids jump from those boulders, and realized there was something worth exploring. So the idea basically sprang from these two things combined: the landscape and the kids diving. Plus, I’d had enough of adults—the grownups’ world today, I detest it. But I didn’t just want to film kids; I wanted to capture the idea of childhood, to rediscover a wilder way of being in the world and use that to shake up a universe I find increasingly antiseptic, artificial, inert. That’s what cinema is to me: a means to rediscover one’s freedom. I didn’t find that freedom in France, because the French producers we’d originally planned on working with gave me a lot of shit when I tried to pitch them the film. But it was a sort of liberation nonetheless: I broke free from the straitjacket of the French film industry, from that claustrophobic world, and ventured into a completely new one. NOTEBOOK: It’s easy to register that freedom throughout Red Rocks, most of which doesn’t really feel scripted but captured on the fly. How much of the film was written, and how much was improvised instead?DUMONT: As a matter of fact [Red Rocks] is a very written film. After all, the only way to enter a story, to truly step into a character’s worldview, is through writing. But cinema is not literature, and hard as I work on my scripts, once I start shooting I forget about them altogether. If anything, writing helps me prepare psychologically to approach the film, and I think in the case of Red Rocks working on the screenplay in such detail helped me choose my young actors. And there were enormous risks behind that decision. The French producers who were initially attached to the project tried all they could to dissuade me from working with those children. NOTEBOOK: How come?DUMONT: Because they said they were too young! “It’s too dangerous,” they kept warning me, “you’re not going to get the permits you need! It’s one thing to work with ten-year-old kids, but with five-year-olds… you’re crazy!” Which is why I very quickly started looking for other producers and different means to get the film made. Again, yes, I did have the script, but once I started shooting it’s like I rediscovered this total freedom—and the script, by that point, I couldn’t care less about it. I shot these kids just as they are. I had a script and a storyboard, but there was something about the film’s subject that naturally invoked this feeling of boundless freedom. Still, this isn’t a documentary. It’s not like I placed a surveillance camera and just let the kids do their thing. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m very pleased you came out of it feeling like the whole thing was improvised, but I can assure you the film was very much fabricated! NOTEBOOK: And it’s not like the kids could have read the script anyway…DUMONT: No, they were too young to know how! [Laughs] Their parents did, though. When you work with such young actors, it’s the parents who call the shots—and in all honesty there were many kids who auditioned just because their families wanted them to, so I had to get rid of a few who didn’t want to be there in the first place. It’s kids, so they act with a certain insouciance, a certain joy, even immaturity. A journalist from Le Monde tried to interview them the other day, but you can’t! They couldn’t care less about his questions, and that attitude was just what I was after. I wanted that insouciance; I didn’t care about whether they’d be able to field questions around their performances, the film, the life on set.Red Rocks (Bruno Dumont, 2026).NOTEBOOK: Save for a few and very short-lived appearances, Red Rocks keeps the adults firmly outside the frame. What informed that decision? DUMONT: The adults in the film are all a little bizarre. I mean, the scene we shot in Italy, when Géo and Ève cross the border by train and arrive in Ventimiglia, makes the grownups’ turf look like the end of the world, full of deranged figures. Ève herself realizes as much when she goes, “My dad is crazy!” But the kids, they live in their own universe. And that’s fine. It’s what I was telling you earlier: I like to think of childhood as a force that can conjure a brand-new, more joyful world. NOTEBOOK: You’ve worked with kids before, but never quite so young. I was wondering about the kind of obstacles and opportunities the new age group opened up.DUMONT: You’ve got to adjust to them. That’s what takes so much time—the whole crew must adapt to their reality. It’s a long process. Take Kaylon [Lancel], the kid who plays Géo. I had to learn how to look at him, how to listen to him. Which is nothing substantially different from what I have to do when working with non-professional actors. I just think the relationship between performers and characters—the distance between them, I mean—is really quite close. Naturally, you can’t manage that with all kids; you have to pick children who can act, and there are plenty of them out there who just cannot. The kids you see in the film were picked because they could. Kaylon is not Géo, no matter how similar their personalities might be, and my job as a director is to nurture that proximity, to bring character and actor as close to each other as possible. It’s a long and difficult journey, a bit like filming a landscape, but I find it to be immensely rewarding. NOTEBOOK: But in more practical terms, how did you direct them? DUMONT: For one thing, they were equipped with earpieces, through which I gave them directions. And we also used colors to stand in for different actors. So when you see them speaking to other kids offscreen they are actually talking to these colors I would tape around the set. It’s really not that hard for them to accept and navigate that artifice; give them a couple of days and they’ll learn how to handle it. I’d speak to them in between takes: “More sad! Louder! Look at your shoes! Look away! Now look at the train…” It’s artificial, but the editing makes you think it isn’t. That’s what I meant when I said the film is entirely fabricated. NOTEBOOK: Did you rehearse with them before each scene?DUMONT: No, never. We went straight into shooting. They knew the script through their parents, who had to be told what each scene entailed, obviously. So we had some discussions. But again, it was all artificial. Even, and especially, the more violent sequences. That late scene where they fight, for instance—Géo had to hit another kid with a rock, but of course we used a fake prop, and he kept laughing all the time. They were always outside the drama. I really love editing—the chance to create, through découpage, realities that don’t exist. And it’s easy to conjure them when you work with kids. Toward the end of The Empire, my previous film, I’d cast a two-year-old as young Belzébuth, and we were able to work with him, too: I’d give him instructions off screen, basic prompts like, “Here, look at my hand!” I mean, sure, the kind of characters you can create with kids that age will always be fairly elementary, but you can still get them to perform.NOTEBOOK: Did you ever give them rules, or set limits to what they could and could not do? I’m asking because I was quite fascinated by their tendency to stare at the camera, and your decision to include those fourth-wall ruptures. DUMONT: Oh, there were so many shots like those. You can try to tweak some in post-production, by moving the pupil, say. But I must confess I really liked them. I liked the way Géo would sometimes stare back at the camera. It creates something—some kind of complicity with the viewer, maybe. NOTEBOOK: Where did you find these children?DUMONT: They’re all from the region, and lived very close to where we shot. NOTEBOOK: And how long did the casting take?DUMONT: Quite a while. When I first met Kaylon he was only three. And like any three-year-old, he would run and roll around all the time. You just couldn’t work with him. I tried to reason with him, to direct him. “Right, you’ll play Géo.” “No, my name is Kaylon.” “Yes, but you’re playing a kid named Géo” “No.” But when I tried again three years later, he’d got it: “Okay, Géo it is.” Again, you need to adjust to their worldview. I had to get to know him, had to learn how to direct him, how to talk to him. And that took a long time. The girl who plays Ève, Kelsie Verdeilles, she just didn’t speak. She was so incredibly shy. “Would you like to be in the film, Kelsie?” [Nods] “So you want to act in it, yes?” [Shakes his head]. It was a constant contradiction with her. But I thought she was very interesting. And once she finally joined the others and we began shooting, she started speaking. And now she does a lot. It was really quite astonishing to witness—it felt like working with a mute girl, at first. “So be it,” I thought. “Let’s see what comes out of this.” Kelsie didn’t say a word and Géo was this strange kid. It all worked out beautifully, in the end, but it was very risky. Red Rocks (Bruno Dumont, 2026).NOTEBOOK: Could you speak about the film’s aesthetic? I was particularly intrigued by your choice to shoot with a wide-angle lens. DUMONT: It was just the best fit for the subject. In terms of the aspect ratio, to film on a wide format like cinemascope would have felt too overwhelming. And the 1.66 seemed to me the simplest, clearest option. Same for the lens. We were torn between 20mm and 25mm, but I think the former suits childhood better—everything is sharp, clear, and that struck me as the most expressive way to visualize the world through a child’s eyes. As for the choice to shoot with a handheld camera, well, Carlos [Alfonso Corral] works a lot that way, and when we realized the number of scenes we had to shoot each day, and in such a short time, having to set up a camera on a tripod for each seemed outright impossible. Plus, if you shoot handheld in France, you can shoot without permits. We already knew the kind of answer we’d get if we asked a French producer if we could film a child running along a railway track—so we didn’t bother asking. We shot handheld both for logistical and aesthetic reasons; the approach helped us film in a way that felt a little wild, and we could go really fast. The kids were always running around and Carlos could follow them more easily that way. NOTEBOOK: I must confess I was a little bit concerned whenever I saw them driving those tiny quads next to real-sized cars.  DUMONT: Believe it or not, in the script the kids were originally meant to drive real-sized cars themselves! But the French said no—it was impossible, interdit, whatever. But isn’t that what cinema is all about, a way to cheat reality? Surely you can hide someone inside a car to work the pedals and make it seem as if the kids themselves are driving? But no, those French producers just wouldn’t listen. Part of me thinks they simply couldn’t tell the difference between reality and fiction. Then I met Géo’s mom, and she showed me a video of her son riding a miniature quad. That’s when everything clicked. I thought it was a formidable idea: we gave Géo a quad and his friends a toy car and had them drive around. Géo had been driving his little quad for so long he was a complete natural, and the others learned super fast. It was hilarious, and quite a godsend, never mind the risks. NOTEBOOK: And yet, for all the dangers and occasional outbursts of violence, there’s so much affection between these children. Time and again we see Géo hug Ève, Manon, hold their hands. Were you the one who told them to act this way? Or were your instructions more like, “Show affection,” and they came up with those gestures on their own?DUMONT: It was all their making. I noticed they liked to hug each other—this while we were busy prepping for the shoot. I heard them talk about their special friends, about their girlfriends and boyfriends. I say this because, young as they are, these things and words are part of their universe already. I thought that was really quite lovely, and decided to capture those interactions. Again, I had to adjust to their worldview, assimilate their ways of expressing themselves, of showing affection to each other. NOTEBOOK: It’s like they’re playing adults, and it’s a beautiful thing to see. There’s a charming awkwardness to these moments; they’ve seen their parents perform these same gestures countless times but you can tell they haven’t really made them theirs yet. DUMONT: Their world is one of cuddles, of simple, innocent acts, and I needed to respect that, because it was their childhood I wanted to capture. To tell you the truth, the script wasn’t that specific about what those affectionate moments would look like. I mean, there’s a scene in the film where Géo and Ève are holding hands and she [spontaneously] goes to scratch [herself while holding his hand]—there’s something just astonishing about such details, you can’t write them. It’s as if they were completely detached from the feelings they were showing each other. As adults, we have a tendency to project our own emotions, to graft our ideas and experiences onto these rudimentary exchanges, but there is no need. The affection these kids show each other has no secret purpose. It’s a naiveté that’s simply wondrous to witness. NOTEBOOK: Is there a place from your childhood that’s had the same transformative impact on you as the red rocks have on Géo? DUMONT: I’m not sure I have a specific place in mind, so I’d probably say the Nord at large—the region in France where I grew up. But I want to be clear: This isn’t an autobiographical film. I think there’s something naturally wonderful about those red boulders, and I see that kind of wonder as intimately connected to my idea of childhood. The film immortalizes its setting as some kind of timeless place, at once real and imaginary. But I think wonder exists everywhere, even and especially in the profane, and I’m not so much into idealizing places. Or children, for that matter. I didn’t want to film some kind of perfect little kid like you see in so many French or American films, a cute, polite little boy with beautiful blond hair who only says smart things. How fucking boring. I like to think that, through Géo, I managed to film the sort of child that’s in all of us: a perfectly ordinary kid. Because it’s only by filming the ordinary that I can hope to approximate the extraordinary.

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