Quotes

[on Misericordia (2024)] The title came to me while I was writing this script. For me, mercy exceeds the question of forgiveness. It has to do with empathy, with understanding others beyond any morality. It's about reaching out to others. It's an old-fashioned word that we don't use much anymore, and it becomes the film well, its timelessness, and above one of the great characters in it, namely the priest.

[on Misericordia (2024)] It's a twilight film. It begins with a funeral and ends in a cemetery at night. A man returns to the place of his adolescence, his early youth, and gradually finds himself imprisoned there. Autumn suits the film's themes. Autumn is melancholy. It offers beautiful light and colour. And it also brings its share of bad weather, fog, and wind. I was very interested in filming in November. But the colourful autumn - the red and yellow leaves - doesn't last long, three weeks or a month. Here, it was risky and fragile - when we were shooting, we hoped that the leaves would stick to the trees - and in a few days we went from summer to winter.

[on Misericordia (2024)] Hitchcock and Fritz Lang are always a reference for me. In any case, they're part of a common cultural background, so they're always there, at the back of my mind. I'm often referred to Chabrol, no doubt for his mix of darkness and comedy. But there's often this mocking, ironic side to him that I have a problem with. I'm very close to my characters. I put a part of myself into each of them. If I had to name one filmmaker, oddly enough, the one who hung over this film was Bergman. It doesn't have much to do with film noir, but Bergman shows great mercy. A way of loving people no matter what, in spite of everything. His films are at once very controlled, very calm, and shot through with a real darkness.