Désirée de Lamarzelle: Normandy Naked laughs a lot without caricaturing farmers. A real challenge today?

Philippe Le Guay has documented a lot with these peasants. This is not a two-minute topic about the agricultural crisis, it's a story. She must be right. She must entertain people, make them laugh, touch them and move them by not losing ground. You really have to have great filmmakers and great writers like Philippe, to get to mix both. With replicas like that of François-Xavier Demaison who says "we should forbid peasants to live in the countryside." And that throughout the film, it's not easy. The best movies are made like that.

What about casting with many village peasants?

It's a great experience playing with "non-actors". I love that. If you faked, that you play wrong, it does not happen with them. But if you are sincere, they totally forget the cameras and answer you. There is a kind of honesty, of truth that embeds us.

Even all naked?

Even naked, of course. It is true that reading the script I had a reaction of modesty. Modesty is also a question of culture - I have never seen my parents naked - and told me "it is possible, I will never dare to show myself naked". We even considered the cache-sex! But the more the shooting happened, the more I saw that it made farmers laugh, so I said to myself "go collective, we go all! ".

You are very credible in mayor. Ever thought of becoming mayor?

Oh no (laughs)! But I really like my character. It's the father of the village. He loves his people and wants to do something to change the situation. He is a very positive hero. He is always positive until he breaks down himself.

How do you prepare for your roles?

It's still a bit schizophrenic. That is to say that I prepare myself for situations, emotions that he will play. Since I'm three months in advance, I store it by reading the script. Then I incube these emotions. Then my brain persuades the body what I will have to live when it comes. And usually if I worked well, it comes.

It's a comedy but also a film that tells the dramatic position of breeders, peasants today ...

Yes, it is the strength of Philippe Le Guay to come to make a comedy with a subject of substance. We discover their dramatic situation, all the more absurd when we think that everything we eat passes through the hands of the peasants, that they have made their profession an indispensable vocation for our survival, and that today they find themselves starving. As you know, the purchasing power of farmers has not changed in thirty years. So the situation is highly dramatic.

The peasants now eat shit, pesticides, ... And we bobos we go to the bio.

This is a paradox that seems difficult to solve?

Hopefully we will take this problem "head on". It already existed at the beginning of the 20th century: my grandfather could not stay on the farm because there was not enough to feed one more child. He had been sent to Paris to make a jeweler's cap. And for a century, it has not stopped. Now farmers often have another job next door. They never have a holiday, they take care of the animals 365 days a year, and all this so as not to have the SMIC.

This is the second recent film related to rurality ( The truancy) in which you play, a coincidence?

I'm not too responsible but I'm always looking for films where I have a personal echo. Nature is not Club Med . When we shot Truancy, for example, it was exciting. She can be deeply hostile. Fortunately Nicolas Vanier knew nature by heart, and all the corners we shot. It is relatively austere, when you are in a forest you do not see the sky, you are with huge things. I love trees, but still it is not a feeling of security.

In the absence of solution, the help-aid, the collective are omnipresent in the film?

It's the collective that makes us reach our goals, that we manage to make this photo, which will finally make "the one" of all newspapers in the area and perhaps internationally.

What do you expect from the public reaction?

This film is one more element, a stone in the building to alert. And the messages go very well in comedies. It's great that all of a sudden you realize that things have to stop. But for the agricultural crisis, if I had the solution I would be happy. The peasants now eat shit, pesticides, ... And we bobos we go to the bio.