18/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: The French director behind The Big Hit proves that music really brings people together – even long-lost siblings

(© Fabrizio de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) is a famous conductor. While looking for a bone-marrow transplant, he accidentally finds out he was adopted – he also has a younger brother whom he has never met. They have little in common, it seems, but Jimmy (Pierre Lottin) loves music as well, and he plays the trombone in a local marching band. French helmer Emmanuel Courcol breaks down his new film The Marching Band [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Emmanuel Courcol
film profile], which is poised to enjoy a Cannes Première screening.

Cineuropa: Your movie, while a bit sombre, is a crowd-pleaser. Were you consciously trying to put the audience first?
Emmanuel Courcol: I had been thinking about the viewers ever since we wrote the script with Irène Muscari; we also talked about them with my producer. I always do that. Still, I don’t feel like I was trying to be market-orientated. That’s not what I had in mind. My main concern was making sure the audience doesn’t leave the cinema feeling desperate. So many films these days are just sad; they make you feel pessimistic about the whole human condition. If you add to that what’s already going on in the world and everything we see on TV, it’s a lot. I prefer making others feel a little bit better when the lights go up.

Is it tricky when music plays such a big part in the story? These two men, who are very different, basically learn to communicate through it. That’s how they find each another.
We thought about this balance a lot with Irène and with our composer, Michel Petrossian, because we had to create a very nuanced, varied musical landscape. Classical music was our starting point, and then we moved onto things that are more popular, only for them to cross paths later on. But the real meeting point for these two brothers was jazz, of course.

Everyone keeps repeating that we can always do more and reach bigger goals. Here, when Thibaut tells Jimmy he can “do better”, at least better than his current life, it turns into a trap.
Thibaut comes from a world of excellence: in music, culture and education. His environment is available to the select few, but he has managed to conquer it and find fame there. In order to make it, he had to be competitive. To him, it comes naturally. But when he starts telling Jimmy he should do better as well – using the same words he used to hear in the past – it has more to do with his sense of guilt. You could say that Thibaut has been dealt better cards in life. When his brother is trying to catch up with him and follow his rules, it’s bound to go south. Thibaut has good intentions, but Jimmy just isn’t ready.

Families are a funny thing, and they can mean various things: people you grew up with, people you are related to or people you choose. How must it feel to discover a brother you didn’t know you had, someone so similar yet so different?
Part of it comes from my personal story. I come from a family that had nothing to do with what I do. None of my siblings are artists. They stayed close to our bourgeois, Catholic roots, whereas I went elsewhere. It happens – we all take different paths. Also, as you mentioned, over the course of our lives, we tend to have different families: the one we were born into and, at least in my case, an artistic family I’ve managed to build on the way, once I decided to make films. Irène, who is from Italy, also decided to leave and forge her own destiny. We are both coming from completely different environments. To me, it’s an interesting subject.

Why were you interested in someone who is struggling so much, battling an illness, yet to whom all of these new things suddenly happen?
I realised my films often have to do with the cruel aspects of life. Or with injustice, like in the case of my debut feature, Ceasefire [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. It was about two brothers, too: the one who stays and the one who leaves. It dealt with another topic that’s important to me: legacy and the possibility of leaving something to others.

Here, I wanted to find a way for these brothers to meet: a bone-marrow transplant felt like a good excuse. It allowed me to develop a script full of different themes and ruminations on life. Thibaut meets Jimmy and starts thinking about the existence that could have been his. He sees him and wonders: what if things were the other way around? There is a sense of urgency because of what he is experiencing, but it was never about the illness itself. It was about his trajectory.