Interview with Vincent Maël Cardona about Le Roi Soleil

How did you come up with the idea of this film?

The lottery as a social factor has always interested me. We live in societies that are largely organized around money, yet the lottery embodies the myth of shuffling the pack of cards. It’s the belief that it is possible to flip the table, to escape determinism by ticking numbers at random. What interests me in this, and which for me makes a film, is exactly this notion of belief. The mere existence of the lottery — with its promises and its group of lucky winners — is enough: I have the right to believe. This willingness to suspend disbelief makes fiction possible. The question of whether it is true or false matters less than that of plausibility. Hence this film, where characters confronted with the myth of the lottery will be led to develop a fictional story and evaluate whether it is plausible or not.

What does the film tell us about our time?

General opinion is that we are living in a strange, troubling time, but a time that is infinitely rich in new possibilities. What is striking is how moral and political barriers that are supposed to contain the power of money seem to come down one after the other, as if we agree to give ourselves to money. The film hopes to talk about this: characters that look like us, much less strong and principled than they might think. They battle through as they find themselves face-to-face with both money and fiction and try to create a story before gradually becoming its victims.

How did you achieve such a synergy between your actors?

As we did our read-throughs, we laughed a lot and I remembered that many of these bursts of laughter came from the idea that we were still going to attempt some not so obvious stuff… On set, the actors, the technicians, no one was totally clear about how things would end up coming together. And if, at the end of the day, we feel a form of synergy in the film, then maybe it comes from that somewhat blind but joyful trust that we had between us.

What challenge has it been to portray multiple points of view in your story, both in terms of writing and editing?

In terms of writing, the main difficulty was finding the right balance between the progressive derealization experienced by the characters, them losing their points of reference, and ours as a spectator. The film constantly plays around the question of improbability, the characters spend their time wondering if what they tell themselves is credible. However, since the film itself is gradually contaminated by the characters’ fictional stories, this problem of implausibility creeps into it. And also creeps into us. Far from trying to overcome this difficulty, we tried to play with it during the editing. The idea is to flirt with what leads to so greedily feasting upon fictional stories in our everyday lives: our willingness to believe just to believe.