Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Raw Garance Marillier
Once bitten … Garance Marillier in Raw.
Once bitten … Garance Marillier in Raw.

Raw director Julia Ducournau: 'Cannibalism is part of humanity'

This article is more than 6 years old

Her flesh-eating horror movie attained notoriety when two people fainted at a screening. But, says the French feminist film-maker, no one talks about the other 998 in the audience …

Early on in Julia Ducournau’s Raw, a group of veterinary students are shown how to sedate a horse. It’s distressing, watching the beast collapse after being administered ketamine, and more so because Ducournau presents it so matter of factly: she got permission to film a sedation that was already scheduled to happen at a veterinary school, and just stuck her actors in the frame. She wanted to show how even these majestic creatures are at the mercy of their bodies, she explains, and becomes defiant as she links that back to Raw’s central character, 16-year-old Justine (Garance Marillier).

“I didn’t want to glamorise anything, especially with the girls’ bodies,” she says. “A body is a body. In every movie we see, women have to be beautiful and fit or whatever the hell, and they have to fit a certain box, and no: women fart, poop, pee, burp. This is why you can relate to them, because they are not these heavenly creatures; they are real people with real feelings, and when they go down, they go down. This is something we don’t see enough of. Always in movies when people cry, they cry like this” – she mimes a sorrowful weep – “like Saint Mary crying. We’re all equal with our bodies, so fuck off.”

Justine’s body is very much the focus of Raw, which has been making festival audiences gape and cringe since its premiere at Cannes last May. Justine’s parents are both vets and vegetarians, and as she enrols at vet college, her future seems set in stone. But as part of an aggressive hazing week, she’s forced to eat rabbit kidney, and begins to develop carnal, carnivorous desires. Ducournau began working on it in 2012 as a writing challenge: could she get us to feel empathy for someone who we would ordinarily view as a monster?

“I thought it was very funny how people tend to qualify as monstrous or inhuman deeds that are actually very human,” she says. “Cannibalism is part of humanity. Some tribes do it ritually and have no shame doing it. You have this feeling when you bite someone’s arm for fun, that you want to go a bit further, but you don’t because you have a moral canvas. This thing is in us, we just don’t want to see it. So I thought, since my characters always feel like monsters deep inside, I wanted the audience to feel like a monster as well, and to understand what she’s doing. Because we are all monsters, really.”

Ducournau grew up in Paris, and studied screenwriting at the film school La Fémis, leaving in 2008. She directed a short, 2011’s Junior, about a girl who sheds her skin, snake-like, after contracting a stomach bug, and then Mange, a TV film in 2012, about an ex-bulimic seeking revenge on her college tormentor. Then she started on Raw. All three contain copious amounts of body horror. She’s obsessed with it.

“The way the body evolves and reacts, it’s like a preview of what you’re going through in your mind,” she says, and talks about the rash Justine suffers after her first taste of meat. If we go to the doctor with such an affliction, they may well explain that it’s stress-related, says Ducournau. “And then you try to be more in touch with how you really feel. In movies, I don’t like it when people call their friends saying: ‘I don’t feel good, I don’t know what’s going on with me.’ Body transformation talks for the character. When she has a rash, when she starts puking, it talks for her, there’s something wrong. And you feel it with her.”

Ducournau says her flesh fascination stems from her childhood: her father is a dermatologist, her mother a gynaecologist. “Doctors have this very upfront yet distant way of talking about bodies and death,” she says. She was party to their medical discussions, which comes through in her films; Raw’s camera is unflinching, the closeups unforgiving, the atrocities unglorified. “It definitely made me body-conscious, but not in the way we use that term today.”

“I was aware that my body could mutate in unexpected ways and have autonomy. You haven’t decided to have a rash, it’s your body doing it. So, are you your body or is your body you? This is the kind of thing I always thought about: what does it mean in terms of identity?” She says she is inspired by David Cronenberg’s handling of similar material, and says she strives to explore “the human condition with a lot of honesty. I could have made a gore-fest with this film. But no, I wanted the audience to feel for her, and to understand that it’s actually being very human to be like this.”

Raw director Julia Ducournau.

If you had read the reports from the Toronto film festival last September, you could be forgiven for thinking she had made a gore-fest. During the film’s screening at the Midnight Madness slot, two audience members fainted and ambulances were called. Ducournau is all for the film causing physical reactions, she says, as it causes us to reflect on why it has made us feel like that, but the sensationalist coverage of the Toronto faintings perturbed her. “They only told me after the Q&A, when I went to the green room. My first reaction was: ‘Oh my God, are they OK?’ Because I don’t think it’s cool that people don’t feel good, I don’t want that. And then it became this snowball effect on the internet that I watched from afar. People were saying things that are not true, and I couldn’t stop it.”

Like what? “All of a sudden, the movie became the scariest, most disgusting movie ever made, and I’m like: ‘You haven’t even watched the movie, how can you say this?’ It’s not even a horror movie, even though I love horror movies. It was midnight, these people had watched movies all day, they probably forgot to eat and were tired and that’s it. There were 1,000 people in that room and two people fainted, and it becomes this. It’s madness.” She was even accused of “planting” the situation, setting it up for headlines, “which is really stupid. Why would we do that? This is not the movie. I’m really sick of talking about what happened in Toronto, to be honest. I’m just sorry for those two people. That’s all. The rest is irrelevant.”

She’s fired up now. She talks about the feminist context into which the film has been placed, and her aversion to being seen as a female director making female films. She references Raw’s gruelling bikini wax, in which pubic hairs are ripped off in extreme close-up. The point, though, says Ducournau, is that we can all feel that pain, regardless of what genitals we have.

“I do believe that my movies talk to anyone. I don’t want to genderise my audience or my movie; this is just another way of putting people in boxes. I’m a woman, yes, I’m a strong woman, and my movie is feminist, but I’m sure that everyone can get it.” She leans forward, upset, voice raised. “Why does no one say that Scorsese with Leonardo DiCaprio make movies for men by men? No! Of course women are going to see it! Why would it be different the other way? Why? It’s the same way that they do female razors that are pink! This is a fucking razor! Everyone uses it! There are not 300 ways to use a razor. Why would it be pink and cost one Euro more?

“This is terrible. This is exactly what I want to avoid. It’s become madness, this genderising. They actually sell pink pens for women. Like you have to have a woman’s hand to write it. What is that? I really don’t want people to do the same with my movie.”

Does she think they are? “I’ve been asked a lot of questions about this by audiences,” she says. “People telling me it was nice to have a woman director because it brought softness to the industry. And I was like: ‘Have you seen my movie? Did you see it? How can you say it? I’m not toilet paper. Toilet paper is soft. I’m not soft.”

She laughs. What she says is telling; Raw is about someone who resists categorisation. “A lot. Of course,” she says. People are putting Justine into certain boxes, and she’s rejecting it. “Absolutely. This is also why I like metamorphosis so much. Metamorphosis is about getting out of boxes. You just, drop the layers, you know? And, in the end, it is just the essential that remains. My movie is really about that. It’s its own animal, as they say.”

Raw is released on 7 April in the UK and 20 April in Australia.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Film-maker Julia Ducournau: ‘Women kicked serious ass this year’

  • The Father, Titane and Quo Vadis, Aida? lead European film awards nominations

  • Jane Campion: ‘Film-making set me free… it was as if I had found myself’

  • Why the heavily criticised digital revolution has been good for cinema

  • Titane may not have been the best film at Cannes, but it had guts, drive – and an anthro-automotive hybrid devil child

  • Get political and have great scares: the new rules of horror movies

  • Raw review – cannibal fantasy makes for a tender dish

  • Raw director Julia Ducournau on how to make a horror film as creepy as possible

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed