Why François Ozon copied (without foreseeing it) a cult scene from "La Boum" in "Été 85"

INTERVIEW

Two boys are dancing in a nightclub, David puts his walkman over Alexis' ears to play 

Rod Stewart's

.

This gesture of the characters of the film 

, and the change of musical atmosphere that accompanies it, is a flagrant tribute to the cult film

.

This central scene of François Ozon's latest film was however completely improvised, as the director explains in 

.

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A tribute to the director's adolescence

By adapting Aidan Chambers and Jean-Pierre Carasso's book

for the cinema 

, François Ozon had a clear objective in mind.

"I really did

for the teenager I was," he sums up.

"And the cult French teen-movie of the 1980s was really 

Which partly explains its borrowing from this film, with the walkman scene.

According to the director, reproducing this scene was also a marker of the times of his youth.

"It was really part of the customs of all teenagers at the time, when we were in a boom, to put a walkman on someone else's head," he recalls.

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 The "solar" story behind "Summer 85", the new film by François Ozon

An improvisation launched "without really believing it"

This walkman scene in

therefore sounds obvious.

François Ozon had not yet written it in his screenplay.

It was actually born of an unforeseen event.

"I had asked my Belgian director of photography Hicham Alaoui for strobes with a very 1980s light. But, when I arrived in the nightclub, that was not at all what I had in mind. to be that in the 1980s, the French and Belgian strobes were not the same ", laughs the director.

It is therefore to pass the time that François Ozon makes play, a little by chance, this scene with the actors Benjamin Voisin and Félix Lefebvre.

"We had to wait until we had the right equipment. And during this waiting time, I improvised the scene where David puts the walkman on Alexis' ears", recalls François Ozon.

"The funny thing is we did this scene a bit like that, without really believing it."

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An "emblematic scene" which makes the link with his new film

It was not until post-production that François Ozon played the central role of this scene.

"We realized later with the editor that this was actually the heart of the film," he reveals.

"This is THE emblematic scene, since it shows that these two boys do not dance to the same music. It tells the whole drama of their love story".

This nod to

is also a link with the future film by François Ozon,

.

It was shot between the two confinements and has not yet been released in theaters.

And his two headliners are none other than André Dussolier and ... Sophie Marceau, revealed by her role as Vic in

.