A former journalist converted to cinema, Erwan Le Duc is constantly filming. Since the release of his first feature film Partridgein 2019, he constantly gets back behind the camera to let his colorful characters live with a little absurdity and a lot of tenderness. But with The world does not existhe delivers a mini-series of a completely different register. Psychological thriller inspired by Twin Peakshe gives voice to a Nils Schneider in the midst of an identity crisis, to retrace the return to the country of Adam Vollmann, a journalist-writer in search of his childhood sweetheart accused of the murder of a young girl. But when traumatic childhood memories come to the surface, nothing goes as planned…
The free adaptation of a novel
When Nicole Collet puts Fabrice Humbert’s book in his hands, Erwan Le Duc is immediately struck:
“The book stuck to me, there was something a little viscous about the character. It’s the portrait of this man locked in his head that I liked, that I wanted to represent. And then, adapting a book was exciting and reassuring too. The characters are already solid, they exist outside of my writing. Fabrice Humbert was immediately in a logic of betrayal of the book. That’s what he liked too. I perceived it a bit as an invitation to be bold.”
A series with a dizzying atmosphere
The world does not exist is also a story full of tension, that of a character who implodes little by little and of a small, idle town in the north of France, with a ghostly atmosphere.
“I spent part of my childhood in an identical town, in the north. Places where boredom, quite prevalent, leads us to tell ourselves stories. Reality being so “nothing”, it is also to make it tremble that tragedies occur. I find it interesting to shoot something that is intimate, in a place with which you yourself have an intimate relationship. This allowed me to go beyond the folkloric aspect of the place, to feel legitimate there. The challenge was to continue to tell a story and place it in reality, very concrete despite everything. The settings elsewhere are mostly natural, the strange really exists.”
An image which is also carried by the music of Julie Roué, rewarded at the Series Mania 2024 festival.
“But I also needed the music to take the spectator by the hand, to let go at times and leave them stuck in the middle of nowhere. For this soundtrack, we researched a lot with Julie Roué, sometimes towards the cinema music of Lynch, Fincher or even towards the compositions of Johnny Greenwood in his work with Paul Thomas Anderson.”
Sound clips:
- Sound clips from the series The world does not exist by Erwan Le Duc, 2024
- Archive of Eric Dufour in The Paths of Philosophy on France Culture, 10/10/2012
