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The Projection Booth: Your films resemble ritual objects more than conventional narratives: handmade, tactile, deliberately artificial. What kind of cinema were you responding to when you developed this aesthetic?
Bernard Mandico: I need to go back to the origins of my journey to answer you.
As a child, I first dreamed of being an actor/actress, believing that they were the driving force behind films.
Then I learned what a filmmaker was.
Living in the countryside without a camera, I drew, made cutouts, dreaming that I was making cinema with whatever I had at hand.
At 19, I joined an animation film school (Les Gobelins), which allowed me to enter the world of cinema. I made my first films there.
For me, animation was a special-effects process, not an end in itself.
Then I made commissioned films in order to live and to learn how to create under constraint.
I gradually moved away from animation and very quickly swore to always shoot on film and to create my effects during shooting.
For me, filming was a magical rite. Cinema is linked to alchemy and hypnosis; I wanted to summon the phantasmagorias of its origins.
For me, cinematic artifice is a form of realism. Since my reality is cinema, I use its primitive artifices and tangible fabrication to reach a form of realism and authenticity.
TPB: You began with short films and visual arts before moving to feature films. Do you consider The Wild Boys your first “engaged” film, or is it a continuation of ideas you had been refining for years?
BM: I am first and foremost a filmmaker, and I claim that identity since I was 19. Everything I do is cinema. I am not a visual artist but an artist of cinema. That defines me, whatever I do.
My short films have always contained political questions, both in form and in content. But the feature film allowed me to reach a wider audience — particularly The Wild Boys, which addresses a direct question: gender fluidity, non-binarity, and the denunciation of abuse.
TPB: Where did the idea for The Wild Boys come from: Burroughs, colonial adventure novels, or the idea of gender inversion?
BM: From the idea of inversion and fusion of genders.
Burroughs for the poisonous, organic dimension — the drive, the impulse. Colonial adventure novels so that I could work on subverting archetypes. Gender inversion and fusion are one of my creative engines.
TPB: Did you approach this film as a satire of the construction of the masculine myth, or were you more interested in dismantling it from within?
BM: The masculine myth has always exasperated me. What interests me is deconstruction. Starting with working with actresses and offering them unusual roles, far from archetypes, in order to better undo conventional images. That is how I was able to develop the adventure of The Wild Boys: by establishing a dialogue with actresses who play at exorcising the masculine image.
TPB: The island feels less like a place than an organism. When you imagined it, was it symbolic, erotic, political, or purely cinematic?
BM: I imagined it as a whole. I saw it as living matter — a giant oyster.
TPB: Casting women to embody the boys is the film’s most radical gesture. Was that decision immediate, or did it evolve during the writing process?
BM: From the moment I began imagining the project. It was never a question of doing otherwise. Otherwise I would not have made the film.
TPB: The transformation the boys undergo is botanical, sexual, ecstatic. It is not presented as a tragedy. Why is metamorphosis sensual rather than horrific?
BM: My characters are punished. But that punishment acts as a revelation.
The boys do not transition by choice. Nor is it a calvary of suffering — the question of punishment does not interest me. It is a sadistic Judeo-Christian notion.
On the contrary, these bourgeois boys (who are abusive and violent characters) experience becoming women (they become their prey).
They reveal themselves to themselves, in a relative gentleness.
They appreciate this transition, as a kind of deliverance.
But that does not mean the core of who they are has changed.
That is the ambiguity of the story.
It is not a moral tale, but an amoral initiatory narrative.
TPB: The film suggests that masculinity is unstable, almost a temporary condition. Does The Wild Boys suggest that identity itself is fluid, or more specifically that masculinity is a construction?
BM: Masculinity is conditioning, motivated by the notion of power.
The absolute evil is power and the abuse of power. For me, an ideal world would be one of permanent sexual fluidity, non-binary, where one could constantly play at being — without abusing the other.
What interests me from film to film is deconstructing the image of the male. That image is conditioned by the overrepresentation of the dominant male in films and in society in general.
Too often, men play at being males. And I like the idea of actresses playing at deconstructing the male image. I also like offering actresses unusual roles — roles that challenge their own identity. I like breaking boundaries and encouraging fluidity in the arts, without constraining my artistic freedom.
TPB: You shot primarily in black and white, punctuating the film with moments of color. Why was monochrome essential to this story?
BM: Black and white allows me to create unity between studio and natural settings. It also allows me to control the image more easily within limited means. And it gives the film a timeless, universal dimension.
Color emerges at moments of tension. I saw the film as a black tree bearing pink fruit.
TPB: You seem deeply influenced by early cinema, surrealism, and experimental traditions. Did you consciously place The Wild Boys within that lineage?
BM: I believe surrealist thought and its contemporary offshoots are the essence of my writing. The oneiric subversion of images.
TPB: Who are, in your view, your greatest influences or the filmmakers you most admire?
BM: There are many, and it’s an exercise where I’m always afraid of forgetting names, but here I go: Yannick Bellon, Jean Grémillon, Luis Buñuel, Orson Welles, Michael Powell, Federico Fellini, David Lynch, Caroline Leaf, Stanley Kubrick, Jean Vigo, Shuji Terayama, Pasolini, Sidney Lumet, Paradjanov, Carmelo Bene, Masaki Kobayashi, Elio Petri, Alain Resnais, Rivette, Godard… I’m forgetting many.
TPB: Colonial imagery is omnipresent: ships, discipline, punishment, domination. Would you say The Wild Boys is a political film?
BM: Yes, of course! For me it is obvious that this colonial past of many Western countries has forged an imaginary that is not sufficiently questioned in contemporary narratives.
We indulge in imagery and stories that were built on abject notions — abuse of power, the hierarchization of individuals, domination.
And in all these narratives, audiences are hooked through a populist device — an unhealthy stimulant or bandage: revenge.
“Revenge” is an illusory narrative engine.
I think it is far more important to deconstruct than simply to denounce.
Guest Co-Hosts: Rahne Alexander, Federico Bertolini
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