Produced by the National Film Board of Canada PRESS KIT

Produced by the National Film Board of Canada PRESS KIT

The film Like a dream in the morning mist, a mighty ox emerges from the rain-soaked earth dragging the remnants of an old cart. A prisoner of its yoke, the great beast pulls its heavy load, which carries within it a greedy and angry nation of people a hungry parasite that saps its energy and consumes its body and soul. An allegory of mankind heading for disaster, Bydlo is a tragic vision inspired by the fourth movement of Mussorgsky s Pictures at an Exhibition. Drawing on the composer s brilliant ability to evoke work and labour in his music, Patrick Bouchard brings the earth to life through animated clay sculptures, creating a concrete and terrifying world, a tactile nightmare in which man is his own slave driver. Meaning of the title The word bydlo is Polish and means cattle. It s also the title of the fourth movement of Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite for piano in 10 movements composed in the summer of 1874 by Modest Mussorgsky, inspired by an exhibition of paintings by his friend Victor Hartmann, who had died the year before. Only six of the original 10 pictures survive today; unfortunately the one titled Bydlo, most likely a depiction of an ox pulling a heaving cart, is not one of them. Maurice Ravel s orchestration from 1922 helped the work find a larger audience. In Poland and in certain regions of Central Europe, the term bydlo is sometimes used to belittle the poor and those members of society forced to do manual labour, relegating them to the status of beasts of burden. 2 PRESS KIT BYDLO

Patrick Bouchard Filmmaker Born in Saguenay, Quebec, in 1974, Patrick Bouchard studied at the Université du Québec à Chicou-timi, where he made his first film with puppets, Jean Leviériste (1998), as part of an interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts. After impressing NFB producer Pierre Hébert, Patrick began work on his first professional film, The Brainwashers (2002), a comic but chilling look at a musician tormented by his overactive imagination. This ambitious puppet film won the Jutra Award for animated short film. Dehors novembre (2005), based on a song by Les Colocs and scripted by Marcel Jean, also won a Jutra, and screened in competition in Annecy. Working again with scriptwriter Martin-Rodolphe Villeneuve, his partner on The Brainwashers, Patrick followed up with a third puppet film, Subservience (2007), about a society suffering from bourgeois selfishness and the foolish passivity of its servants. At the Off-Courts de Trouville festival in 2007, he made Talon d argile, a very short film that was created in 24 hours featuring clay figures that constantly mutate. This experience revived a teenage dream of his to make a film inspired by the fourth movement of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky s Pictures at an Exhibition. He has teamed up with the NFB for the fourth time to make Bydlo, which explores a new aesthetic using Plastiline modelling clay. 3 PRESS KIT BYDLO

Julie Roy Producer Julie Roy has been a producer at the Animation and Youth Studio of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) since April 2007. She holds a master s degree from the University of Montreal in Film Studies and has also written widely on women and animation film. She has been invited to several festivals as program organizer. Before becoming a producer, Julie Roy was responsible for marketing some 60 short animation films made at the NFB between 2000 and 2006, as well as heading the high-profile marketing campaign for the NFB s 65th anniversary, coordinating the presentation of a Norman McLaren retrospective that ran in several countries and overseeing the release of the DVD box set Norman McLaren: The Master s Edition. Most notably, she produced Hungu (2008) by Nicolas Brault, which won three awards; The Necktie/Le nœud cravate (2008) by Jean- François Lévesque, winner of 10 awards; and Mamori (2010) by Karl Lemieux, which won the Grand Prix of the 25 FPS Festival in Zagreb. Working closely with emerging filmmakers, she is in charge of the Cinéaste recherché(e) competition, which seeks to showcase new talent, and also heads the animation department of the ACIC (Aide au cinéma indépendant canadien) of the NFB. She has also co-produced short films with France s Folimage studio through its Résidence d artistes Folimage program, including Rosa, Rosa (2008) by Félix Dufour- Laperrière; Rains by David Coquard-Dassault; and The Banquet of the Concubine (2012) by Hefang Wei. Her most recent productions include Here and the Great Elsewhere (2012) by Michèle Lemieux, Bydlo (2012) by Patrick Bouchard and the international co-productions Kali the Little Vampire (2012) by Regina Pessoa and Edmond Was a Donkey (2012) by Franck Dion. 4 PRESS KIT BYDLO

Alexeïeff also created a film that was inspired by Pictures at an Exhibition. Have you seen it? I didn t see it for a long time. It was only as I was getting ready to shoot Bydlo that I had the chance to see it. Interview with the filmmaker What are the origins of Bydlo? It s an old project whose roots go back to my high school days, when the music teacher was introducing us to different musical genres. The teacher chose a movement from Mussorgsky s Pictures at an Exhibition entitled Bydlo, which means cattle in Polish, as an example of a symphonic poem. She asked us to close our eyes while listening to it and try to imagine an ox pulling a cart. It was an experience that affected me deeply. I learned afterwards that Mussorgsky had been inspired by 10 paintings done by a friend of his, Victor Hartmann, who had died the year before, and that he had composed Pictures at an Exhibition very quickly, in a state of creative frenzy. The version we listened to in class had been orchestrated by Ravel (the piece had originally been composed as a work for piano), and so it was this version that stayed in my memory. I became very interested in Mussorgsky, and when I later saw Fantasia I discovered that Disney had animated Night on Bald Mountain. Given that you first had the idea so long ago, why did it take you so much time to get around to making Bydlo? Over the years, I kept thinking about it, but I couldn t see how to transform it into a script. I could see an ox pulling a cart appearing on the horizon, moving closer and passing just in front of the camera and then moving into the distance. I could see the mud mounting the wheels of the cart, arms in motion, and hammers, but it refused to take shape. There was not enough there in terms of dramatic content. Soon after making The Brainwashers I had spoken to producer Alain Corneau about the project, but nothing came of it. Six years later, I spoke to producer Julie Roy about my idea and she immediately grasped its essence, even though there was still no real script. She suggested that I work with screenwriter Cynthia Tremblay, something which really kick-started the whole creative process. Night on Bald Mountain also inspired Alexandre Alexeïeff, the inventor of the pinscreen. Yes, it was a film I only discovered later on, once I had already started doing animation. 5 PRESS KIT BYDLO

You ve worked with a screenwriter on every one of your films. Has the process been fairly similar in each case? No. For The Brainwashers, Martin-Rodolphe Villeneuve and I would brainstorm together, and I would say that in the end each of us is responsible for half the ideas that found their way into the script and eventually onto the screen. Dehors novembre was based on an original idea and script by Marcel Jean, while Subservience was based on an idea and script by Martin-Rodolphe Villeneuve. In both cases, my contribution came at the moment of creating the storyboard, when I adapted and transformed ideas found in the script to make them technically feasible. In the case of Bydlo, I needed to find a way to unblock ideas that I had been thinking about for a very long time. And this came about thanks to a series of exchanges with the screenwriter. It was through working with Cynthia Tremblay that we came up with the idea of an ox that emerges out of the earth, which was the key to the script. It seems so simple, but we started with the idea of an ox that appears on the horizon and moved to an ox that emerges from the earth. It s not the same thing at all; it has a completely different meaning. Although it was my idea, without Cynthia s help I would never have got there. She was a bit like a midwife who helps at a birth? What s clear is that I needed someone s help. I would never have been able to come up with the idea without it. Because for me, everything is first and foremost visual. I work based on my intuition, and so I need someone to put words and order to the images. As soon as the idea of the ox emerging from the earth appeared, I knew that we had the essence of the film. But it took us several different versions of the script to get there. At one point we were even thinking of talking about child soldiers... It s a powerful and emotional subject, but it just didn t feel right for me. Why not? I m not a very political person. I m more interested in human nature and the human condition than I am in current affairs. I think about man in the context of several millennia, though obviously I have my own share of fears and worries. In the end, it is this more personal vision that you see reflected in my films rather than an analysis of the intricacies of current events. For you, what does the ox represent? For me it s the strength and force of nature. The yoke suggests the idea of labour and working the earth. The arrival of the humans transforms the ox into an object to be exploited, and emptied of its essence. I also see in it the nobility of nature, of the environment (it s an ox made of earth), of labour... 6 PRESS KIT BYDLO

So there s an environmental subtext to the film? You could interpret it that way. But I m not a filmmaker with a message. Let me be clear, Bydlo is not a film about current affairs. It can be interpreted as being about global warming, overpopulation, overconsumption, the exploitation of nature and of others, or you can make it be about war, but its interpretation remains open and this is the way I ve always wanted it. This was something that it took Cynthia and me a while to agree upon, because like all good scriptwriters she was looking for a way to limit and focus the meaning of the film, while I wanted something that was more open-ended and allowed for a variety of interpretations. Your earlier professional films all used marionettes moving around in a set. Then in 2007, at the Off-Courts de Trouville festival, you made a short called Talon d argile in 24 hours, working with a block of clay to create animation. When you made Talon d argile, was it a way of experimenting with a new technique that you wanted to use in Bydlo? Not in the least. I d wanted to try the technique for some time and the Off-Courts festival was a good time to do so. Thanks to the festival I had the resources to do so, including the chance of collaborate with Yan Lanouette-Turgeon on the editing. Between major film projects you also sometimes do short film exercises, like Talon d argile, using more artisanal techniques. For example, I remember seeing some short films that used pixillation. Yes, and I don t think I do enough of them. Each one of these film exercises helps me with the work that comes after. These projects take me further. And in fact the difference between a major film project and a film exercise is the freedom they give me. When you work on film exercises no one expects anything from you, and you do it for yourself alone, and with a degree of ease and pleasure and a certain purity of action that does me a lot of good. You can t compare the quality of Talon d argile with Bydlo, but making Talon d argile was a completely joyful and nourishing experience, while the making of Bydlo gave me pleasure, but it also involved a lot of suffering and hard work and took an incredible amount of energy. That s why I think I should allow myself to do these film exercises more often. What were the biggest challenges in making Bydlo? Each film has its own technical challenges, and in Bydlo they were linked with my choice of Plastiline modelling clay. It s a material that is not easy to manipulate, and one that tends to tear or break easily when you work with it. It s much less malleable than other types of modelling clay. 7 PRESS KIT BYDLO

Another of the qualities of Plastiline is that you can easily make a patina. It has a very greasy surface, so you can make anything adhere to it: tar, dust, straw, shards of wood. So why choose it? The main reason was that you can melt it and use a mould to create your characters. Because we had literally hundreds of characters in the film, it was essential to be able to use a mould and not have to model every single one of them. The second reason is that unlike the latex that is usually used in moulding, there is an earthy quality that fits well with the film s subject, because I wanted the film to have a tactile quality, so that viewers could see the traces left by my fingers. Once moulded and cooled, Plastiline reasserts its original texture, so that you can see the traces of the animator s touch, just as you would with clay. Is this tactile quality important to you? It s a reflection of all the work that has gone into the film. It s part of the beauty of the technique. I am not interested in so-called realism. I don t want people to think that my characters are real, that they are made of flesh. I want to celebrate the materials I use. How much Plastiline did you use to make the film? At least 500 kilos. The main set we created, which was four metres square, was entirely covered by Plastiline. And then if you include all the characters and the different versions of the ox, it all adds up. It s a very dense material and weighs about twice as much as butter, so that a block that is about the same size as a 500-gram block of butter actually weighs one kilo. Did the laborious nature of working with Plastiline force you to make any concessions? Constantly. Throughout the making of the film I had to re-evaluate what it was possible to do. I wasn t able to reach the degree of precision in creating the characters that the script demanded. Because the characters became more stylized than we had originally envisioned, the effect was to make the story more allegorical and less real. Another challenge for me was that we filmed a lot of sequences starting with their endings. Which meant that sometimes there were four or five different shots that had to be edited together, each of which had been filmed starting with the end. So it sometimes took a considerable mental effort to work on the editing because we were going against everything that felt logical and natural. 8 PRESS KIT BYDLO

In making Bydlo you worked with another animator for the first time. Was this challenging for you? Pierre M. Trudeau joined us at a time when there was a lot of animation to do, and lots of different characters to create. It was my producer Julie Roy s idea and I m grateful to her for it. I couldn t have worked with just anyone, because like everyone else I have my own ideas and ways of working, but Julie suspected that Pierre and I would be a good fit and she was right. Pierre is a talented and experienced animator who is also a director in his own right. At the same time, he s also very discreet and non-competitive and is good at taking direction from another filmmaker. He believed in the project and so it was easy for me to trust him. In fact, communication between us was so good that at times we were even able to communicate directly through our characters. Pierre adapted himself to my style, which is different from his, in a way that was truly remarkable. He is also an excellent sculptor, and he arrived at a time when I was taking a few days off and immediately found a solution to a problem I had been having with sculpting the ox emerging from the earth. How did you decide which of you would animate which characters? It all happened very smoothly. There were certain characters that I could see very clearly in my head, so once we were on set, I simply told him I was going to work on those ones. We divided the remaining characters between us. I gave Pierre certain directions, and he offered some suggestions and then we went to work! Would you work with another animator on a different project? Yes, if it was necessary for the project. But there is something very personal about the act of animation and so it s not always easy to share the process. 9 PRESS KIT BYDLO

Team DIRECTION, ANIMATION Patrick Bouchard MusiC Robert Marcel Lepage Key Grip Stephane DeErnsted Script Cynthia Tremblay Based on an original idea by Patrick Bouchard Consultant Marcel Jean ORIGINAL MUSIC AND ADAPTATION Original music and adaptation of Bydlo by Modest Mussorgsky, 2011 National Film Board of Canada (SOCAN) ELECTRONIC ARRANGEMENTS Nicolas Borycki Digital Imaging Consultant Jacques Lévesque Technical Coordinator Julie Laperrière With the participation of ARTE France Film Program Unit Sound Design Olivier Calvert Editing Alain Baril Stéphane Lafleur Foley Lise Wedlock Recording Geoffrey Mitchell Luc Léger Short film program manager Hélène Vayssières Logo ARTE Line Producer Francine Langdeau Visual Effects and Technical Support Benoît Chagnon Re-recording Serge Boivin Dolby (Digital) Executive Producer René Chénier Animators and Direction Assistants Pierre M. Trudeau Chantal Masson Set Builder Dany Boivin Model Maker Jean-Philippe Morin Digital Imaging Specialists Pierre Plouffe Susan Gourley Online Editing Denis Gathelier Shooting Special Effects Director of Photography Pierre Mignot Producer Julie Roy Bydlo French Program Animation and Youth Studio 2012 Office national du film du Canada / National Film Board of Canada Mould Maker, Characters Claire Brognez Ox Armature Construction Dominique Bédard Props Masters André-Line Beauparlant Diane Gauthier First Camera Assistant Carla Clarke Second Camera Assistant Jimmy Medellin Chief Electrician Daniel Chrétien nfb.ca/animation 10 PRESS KIT BYDLO

Press Publicity Nadine Viau n.viau@nfb.ca 514-496-4486 See the trailer of the film: nfb.ca/film/bydlo_trailer/ Consult the making of: nfb.ca/film/bydlo_creative_process Download high-resolution images: onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/salle-de-presse/galerie-photo/ Distribution International Sales Christina Rogers c.rogers@nfb.ca 310-399-4519 Festivals Élise Labbé e.labbe@nfb.ca 11 PRESS KIT BYDLO