Playwright Florian Zeller's debut film The Father, a two-time Oscar winner, hits theaters on Wednesday.

Contacted by Europe 1, the director confided in having wanted to produce a real "experience for the spectator", which is found in the skin of the main character: an old man losing his bearings.

INTERVIEW

A double Oscar-winning French film is released in theaters on Wednesday:

The

Father,

playwright Florian Zeller's first film as a director.

He won the Oscar for Best Adaptation and Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins, last April after being honored at the Baftas, UK, receiving the awards for Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay.

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"An experience for the spectator"

How does a person with senile dementia or Alzheimer's feel?

Here is the idea of ​​Florian Zeller's film: that the spectator finds himself in the head and in the place of the character played by Anthony Hopkins, a disoriented old man, lost in his large bourgeois London apartment, who no longer recognizes his daughter or the rooms in which he evolves.

According to director Florian Zeller, 

The Father

is a movie experience.

"I wanted it not to be just a story but an experience for the spectator", he explains at the microphone of Europe 1. "The experience of what it feels like to lose everything, including your landmarks, in as a spectator ".

"A kind of puzzle"

His ambition, he says, was "to play with this feeling of disorientation, that the film presents itself to us as a kind of puzzle and that we have to play with each of these pieces to try to find a combination that makes sense and that we are in an active relationship with the narration. "

The Father

is therefore a film both terrifying and fascinating that brings us back to old memories: that of this parent or grandparent who wastes away before our eyes and that we can no longer understand, even if we continue to understand it. like.

After a successful career in the theater, Florian Zeller proves from his first film that he is now also a great director.