One afternoon in Paris I get an unexpected call to go watch Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Rampling film a scene in a new project they’re working on with French artist Loris Gréaud. The emotional response shoots directly to disbelief, then skeptical intrigue given Gréaud’s previous interaction with press and finally excitement. It’s Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Rampling after all.So I head to a studio in Belleville to find meet Gréaud as he is shooting the final scene in his first feature-length film, titled “Sculpt.”“It’s a time-based project,” Gréaud says of the film he has been shooting for the past 30 months around the world, a project he started, he says, “to reverse some of the process of cinema,” explaining that instead of first building a team, he set off on his own with equipment.Cameras starts rolling as dissonant melodies and synth beats from the soundtrack by The Residents played. Dafoe stalks around a fog-filled room where men with menacing faces painted black slowly bind naked shibari women and then string them up on suspended bamboo poles, like meat hanging in the butcher shop.Gréaud says this final moment is what director David Lynch, a previous collaborator, calls “the eye of the duck,” the scene where it all comes together.“This scene with Willem Dafoe is linking all the different clouds of narration and stories inside the fiction,” Gréaud explains. “It’s like a sort of opera. A polyphony.”Originally, Dafoe was hesitant to join Gréaud saying that the text was “compelling but too dense.” However, Gréaud flew from Paris to New York in a last-ditch effort to convince Dafoe and the actor relented.“The way he talked about it, I got seduced into it,” Dafoe says. “I like to be a part of the fabric of a project. I’m not a guy that comes in like a gunslinger and just does his thing, because my thing is always in concert with what’s going on, and what’s going on is dense, so it was hard to figure out in a short time,” Dafoe continues. “Basically I was scared of it. But I liked how he presented himself and made himself so available.”The surrealism of the haphazard invitation to an evening of filming acting masters in a shibari studio continues with former Yves Saint Laurent muse Betty Catroux sitting in the corner wearing all black and with sunglasses on. Having just filmed her scene with Dafoe she says, “I felt like I was going to buy drugs,” adding, “I thought it would be too humiliating to act with him. I’m just the Saint Laurent girl. That’s been my role in life,” she says without any remorse.Between scenes, the shibari women put on robes to have a glass of wine and a snack. Erotic rope binding evidently makes a girl hungry.Then Charlotte Rampling appears. And she’s wearing a blue teddy bear costume with a cloud on the front à la Care Bears. Surely, at this point, there is no more world order, and outside this studio Paris is burning in some apocalyptic grande finale.Blue bear Rampling, with her smoldering stare that is somehow both vacant and soulful, speaks cryptically in low tones to Dafoe. He then growls at the bizarro bear as she walks away.This isn’t Rampling’s first film with Gréaud. She previously appeared, with Lynch, in the 2012 short film “The Snorks: A Concert for Creatures,” but even she is in the dark on what’s happening here. “I can’t tell you. It’s an articulation in Loris’s imagination,” she says. “I like his universe a lot. It’s fascinating, and it’s always interesting to follow him.”Another participant on the project is voodoo high priestess Miriam Chamani who stars in the feature and, Gréaud says, has also “cursed the role of the film,” to haunt the project with spirits in order to “create a film that could look at the viewer on the same level as the viewer was looking at the film.” And the late architect Claude Parent, who Gréaud says was his mentor, designed a “mental architecture” for the film.As the conductor in his “opera” of sorts, Gréaud convenes a peculiar band of participants and shuffles them around unfamiliar environments. “The field where we meet is certainly the field of art but where it becomes interesting is where the person steps out of his own practice, his own knowledge and shares it in a blurred space,” he says. “So it’s more the discussion that transforms the activity and the image.”With this cast of characters, it is evident Gréaud is a master of the art of persuasion. Having convinced Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Rampling to play, then I’m game to watch. Perhaps clarity of Gréaud’s vision and the evening’s events will come when the other scenes click into place and we see the final film in totality, or as Gréaud said, “When the film sees you.”
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