Miss Flicks

Emmanuel Courcol on his French box office hit The Marching Band

After taking the box office by storm on his home turf, director Emmanuel Courcol is now bringing his feel-good drama The Marching Band to the UK.

The film stars Pierre Lottin and Benjamin Lavernhe as long-lost brothers Jimmy and Thibaut, who are finally reunited when Thibaut searches for a bone marrow donor after he is diagnosed with leukaemia. They come from completely different worlds but share a common love and talent for music. When Jimmy’s community marching band loses its conductor, Thibaut offers to help.

In a conversation with Miss Flicks, Courcol discussed the origin of the film, casting Lottin and Lavernhe and how they prepared for their respective roles.

I read that you took a trip to see a brass band in Northern France. How did that trip inform your script?

In fact, it’s a story that is shaped by my obsessions and the things that actually interest me – that is to say, the family bond, specifically the paternal bond, and then music. How this bond develops through music and through the meeting of two very different worlds. There’s also that, when I want to tell a story: it’s the clash of cultures, the encounter of cultures.

You wrote the role of Jimmy for Pierre, who you had worked with before on The Big Hit. What made him so perfect for the character of Jimmy?

Because I think that Pierre, Pierre Lottin, is really a populist guy – an actor who is made to portray populist heroes. There’s something that belongs to him, that is part of him, that emanates from him, which seems obvious for those kinds of roles. In the same way, Benjamin embodies something else, because everyone has their own life, their origins, their upbringing – and that translates in their acting as well.

Did Pierre get to choose what instrument Jimmy would play in the film?

Irène (Muscari, co-writer) and me, we wrote everything with Pierre in mind. Really! Because I had just worked with him, and he was truly inspiring for the role. And he’s also a musician – even though his instrument is the piano – but he’s an instinctive musician. He didn’t go to a music school, he can’t read music, but he plays the piano very well. He has a very good ear, and that’s what allowed him to really slip into the role. That’s also why he spent a few months learning the trombone, so he could actually play for real in the film, with the orchestra.

With Benjamin, how did he prepare to play a professional conductor?

He worked a lot with a conductor – a young orchestra conductor – for two or three months. He trained in what we call conducting gestures, as if it were a score, like a script for an actor. Because he doesn’t read music either, but he’s also a very good, intuitive musician with a good ear. So he worked very seriously in order to be able to truly conduct the orchestra. And that’s what happened – I think during the takes, he was actually conducting the orchestra. The musicians were watching him. He had a bit of imposter syndrome, but it worked really well.

It was so convincing.

One thing is that at the end of the first day of shooting with the orchestra, one musician – the first violin – came up to him and said, ‘You know, we’ve had worse ones.’

With the scenes of the brass band rehearsing, was it hard for those musicians to be deliberately bad and off-key and out of time?

But that’s the reality of these brass bands, of these wind orchestras. There are very different levels. Some are more advanced than others. But what’s interesting is that they play together, they support each other, and the most important thing isn’t just playing the piece perfectly, it’s about playing together and having a good time together.

I adored the final scene. It’s so emotional. There’s so many people, the clashes of the music. Can you talk to me a bit about what went into filming that scene?

This is obviously a very emblematic scene of the film, which is very important, and (it) was complex to shoot because there were so many people. But yeah, it’s the final meeting of different kinds of music and musicians, from very different backgrounds. And it pretty much sums up the film. It’s the encounter between amateur musicians and musical elites, creating a moment of fusion. It’s a bit of a utopia, because it allows us to show that this is possible. So it’s both a metaphor and a utopia for our society.

And finally, Emmanuel, what are you working on next?

Right now, I’m filming a movie. I just finished five weeks of shooting in Greenland, and I still have three weeks left to shoot in Paris. It’s a family drama. It’s about a young girl who disappears in Greenland, and her younger sister and parents follow in her footsteps a few years later. It’s an opportunity to discover this country, and for the family, it’s also a chance to discover each other together.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length

The Marching Band will be released in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday 16th May. You can read my review here.