Fantasia Film Festival 2020: Interview with 2011 Director Alex Prieur-Grenier

Alexandre Prieur-Grenier is a Canadian filmmaker who makes his feature film debut at the 2020 edition of the Fantasia Film Festival. 2011 is an experimental psychological thriller shot over two years inside his own apartment. Prieur-Grenier has since moved out of that apartment, but his memories of the long shoot will be sticking with him for some time. I was able to speak with him about the film:

Wilson Kwong for Film Inquiry: Can you talk about the production of 2011? I understand that it was filmed sporadically between 2016 and 2017.

Alexandre Prieur-Grenier: We shot mostly two to four days a month for two years, and most of the movie was shot in my apartment. It was always meant to be a feature film, but in the beginning, it was really experimental. We saw it more as a laboratory to explore what we could do with the cinema. So that’s the reason why we just shot a couple of days every month, so that we could change the script and adapt the editing of the film during the process. In the beginning, I was also supposed to play the main character. But then two other actors – Emile Schneider and Hugolin Chevrette – proposed that they should play the main characters, and I thought, “Oh, that’s the perfect match.”

So it sounds like the film as a whole really evolved over time. Is the product we’re seeing really different than the idea you initially had in your head when you first conceptualized things?

Alexandre Prieur-Grenier: The main idea of the film is pretty much the same, but it did evolve a lot because every time we shot a little, we would get inspired about something. We would change a lot of details, and it kept evolving over time.

It seems like filming a few days a month ended up benefiting the creative process for the film. Was this kind of shooting schedule intentional, or more of logistical choice?

Alexandre Prieur-Grenier: It’s actually both. We didn’t have a lot of money to do the movie, so most of it was coming from my own pocket and everybody worked for free. That meant we couldn’t shoot 30 or 40 days in a row, so we thought it might be a good idea to spread it through a year at first. Then it took two years because it’s just hard to schedule everybody. We ended up exploring it through time because usually when we shoot a movie, time is always against us. And we were like,  “Let’s think about it another way and use time in a productive way.”

What’s really interesting about 2011 is how it mixes in so many different genres. There’s some horror, thriller, experimental, and even science fiction components to it. When you were crafting the film, did you have all these different genres in your mind that you wanted to play around with? Or did things come together in a more organic way?

Alexandre Prieur-Grenier: It came together organically. But I’m a cinephile, so I also enjoy a lot of different genres. I knew that it was going to be a psychological thriller, a horror, and even a little bit of a comedy. But I also tried to blur the line between genres and really explore what the possibilities would be if we weren’t just stuck to one. I have a big list of movies that inspired me, from Shinya Tsukamoto to David Lynch to Brian DePalma, and so many other filmmakers. So that helped the actors, being able to use other’s work to help them grasp what I was talking about.

And since the film is so experimental in nature, how do you see this being marketed to audiences?

Alexandre Prieur-Grenier: That’s a good question. We still don’t know because we’ve sent the film to a couple of distributors, and most of them said, “We liked the movie, but we don’t know exactly what to do with it.” So we’re just waiting and we don’t know what’s going to happen to the movie. If some distributor takes it, we’ll be really happy. But if nobody takes it, we’re going to just send it to festivals internationally and it’ll hopefully also be screened here in Quebec.

Speaking of film festivals, do you think Fantasia being a virtual festival this year had any impact on 2011?

Alex Prieur-Grenier: Oh, for sure it had an impact. I think that we probably would be talking less about the movie if it was screening physically because it would’ve been scheduled just for two days, maybe at random hours and on a smaller screen. But with a virtual festival like this, the idea is for people to talk about smaller films and let these movies have a bigger life than it probably would have in person. But of course, the experience of showing a film to a group of people, that’s something that I miss.

Film Inquiry would like to thank Alex Prieur-Grenier for taking the time to speak with us!