Cannes One To Watch: ‘Vincent Must Die’ Director Stéphan Castang
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In an early scene of French director Stéphan Castang’s Cannes Critics’ Week entry Vincent Must Die, a colleague of the film’s titular protagonist whacks him around the head with his laptop. A little later, another workmate stabs him in the arm. “He’s just an average guy who wakes up one morning to discover that everyone wants to kill him,” Castang explains. The debut feature follows in the wake of Julia Ducournau’s Raw and Just Philippot’s The Swarm as French genre titles to be championed by the first and second film-focused Critics’ Week.
Castang came late to film directing after spending two decades working as a theatre actor. “I always wanted to write and direct films but then I took a very long detour,” he says. He finally started exploring filmmaking with a short film, French Kids — in which a group of rebellious high school students react to an aggressive guidance counsellor — that played in the Generation 14plus section of Berlin in 2012. Subsequent shorts include the 2050-set sci-fi Panthéon Discount, set in a world where doctors have been replaced by a super-scanner that diagnoses ailments and treats them on the basis of the patient’s bank balance, and the octogenarian love-triangle tale Finale.
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Vincent Must Die is one of the first projects to come to fruition for Wild West, the joint Blumhouse-style venture created by Thierry Lounas’ French film company Capricci and Goodfellas (ex-Wild Bunch International) in 2021 to develop and produce French genre cinema. The screenplay by Mathieu Naert was originally developed in Capricci’s So Film Genre Screenwriting Lab, which laid the foundations for the creation of Wild West.
“I was a script consultant on the residency but on another project,” says Castang. “Thierry asked me to look at the script and whether I would be interested in directing it. Initially, I wasn’t too keen, as I like to write my own films, but when I read it, I felt a complicity. There was something in it that chimed with my own neurosis. I felt I could find a place for myself in the story. I also like the way it mixed lots of genres. It’s not locked in absolute genre codes, it’s a love story with a sort of zombie angle as well.”
Castang reveals that he drew on the work of John Carpenter, Luis Buñuel and Ducournau, adding his own humor and nods to everyday French life. He also picked the cast, led by Karim Lekou opposite Vimala Pons. “Karim is a great actor and he had two qualities that worked for this role. On one hand, he comes over as a bit banal, as Mr. Average. And on the other he has a very singular look.”
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