Fighting fit for a debut feature

Samuel Kircher, son of actress Irène Jacob, takes on male dynamics in the world of boxing in Wild Foxes Photo: Conic

For a first film it’s always wise for a director to opt for a subject that is up, close and personal. For debut director Valéry Carnoy such a formula could not have worked better. His first feature Wild Foxes (La Danse Des Renards) bowed last year at the Cannes Film Festival as part of the Directors’ Fortnight and attracted a flurry of interest as well as the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film in addition to the the SACD prize awarded by the Society of Authors.

Dividing his time between his home base in Brussels and Paris, the 39-year-old filmmaker admitted that the idea for Wild Foxes, set in the intense world of a sports school for young boxers, stemmed “from a sensation that I had when I was around 15 years old. I felt that I was going to die in an accident – and then I did have an accident and was very weak for four or five months.”

He was unable to have a blood transfusion because of the risks associated with his age. “Once I recovered I then went into a sports training camp. That completely changed my attitude to myself. It was fairly physical and brutal but it also gave me a certain sensitivity. So from one day to the next I could be very tough and then emotionally rather weak. Essentially, though, the film is about friendship.”

Valéry Carnoy: 'It was important to me to make something very honest, from this mix of memory and feeling which I had when I was recuperating'

Although he had two brothers he suggests that he did not have much of a home life because his mother worked all the time. He was sent away to a boarding school where sports were the main preoccupation. “It suited me because I did not have that much confidence in myself but I was very good at football, fast on the pitch and I could trap the ball really well. I had no specific idea of what I was going to do as an adolescent and I never imagined that film directing might be a possibility,” he said.

In the meantime he completed five years of a degree in intercultural psychology at the University of Brussels before he found his way into the National Institute of Performing Arts in the Belgian capital. He trained as a cameraman and received a professional bounce when his graduation short film My Planet was selected for more than 90 different films festivals and was the recipient for 20 or so awards.

He had explored the concept of male group dynamics in another short film Titan, in which one of the youngsters “became almost too physically powerful for the good of the rest of the group.” He continued: “It was inspired by a childhood friend who was very important for me at the time … and I wanted to explore the world of masculinity and also to pay tribute to my friend in a way. It was more a film about power and how you have to accept that perhaps you are less strong than the others.”

The ground was set for his first full-length feature Wild Foxes for which he had already created a cinematic “family” of sorts. “The producer [Julie Desparbes] also worked with me on the script and she has become very important for me. I also have a female editor [Suzana Pedro] and script editor [Jacques Akchoti} and the cameraman [Arnaud Guez] were in my class at film school. Originally I had wanted to be a camera operator so it was great to be able to offer them the opportunity to work on a feature and I hope we can keep going forward together.”

For Wild Foxes he toured around boxing clubs Paris but for the main role of Camille he signed up Samuel Kircher, who already had done one feature film [opposite Léa Drucker in Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer in 2023] and is the son of actress Irène Jacob and the brother of Paul Kircher (praised for his performance in Thomas Cailley’s The Animal Kingdom (La Règne Animal) with Romain Duris playing his father).

Valéry Carnoy on his young ensemble cast: 'I needed them all to act naturally which was the only way I could make the film'

“We worked with him in advance for five or six months. He acquired muscles and was able to train with actual young boxers who shared their knowledge with him which seemed to work. I needed them all to act naturally which was the only way I could make the film. If any of my dialogue jarred with them then I would change it. The same would go for the costumes – we took their advice on board. We had around 20 to 30 days of rehearsal before we isolated ourselves away for the shoot in a remote house in a forest in the Ardennes.”

As with Carnoy in his early years an accident serves as a pivotal moment for Camille, pushing him to reassess his life's direction, and opening up themes of friendship, masculinity, and the transition from boyhood to manhood. “It was important to me to make something very honest, from this mix of memory and feeling which I had when I was recuperating,” recalled Carnoy. “Boxing at a competitive level is hard: you have to punch other people and you have to take the punches… And he got friends thanks to that, and because he’s good, he got even more friends, and popularity, but he didn’t really decide that that was what he wanted.

“It’s just the others who decide for him and suddenly, because of the accident and all the psychological things happening to him, he understands that he doesn’t want to punch someone else. Because of the male pressure and all the things happening to him, he has to keep going and going which is very unfair. He understands that as a teenager, it’s not that what he wants to do. I thought all this struggling would make for a good script.”

Carnoy believes that Belgium continues to make its mark in cinema because the atmosphere is distinctly different. “It is almost like a system of ‘soft power.’ We don’t just want to please local filmgoers but we want Belgian films to travel the world. Directors often deal with social issues such as you see in the cinema of the Dardenne brothers. My film is set in the world of boxing with young adolescents but it deals with painful aspects. I’m lucky to have the means to make something like that. Among the Belgian acting fraternity Bouli Lanners was a kind of mentor of me, and I would love to be able to work with Matthias Schoenaerts and obviously Olivier Gourmet is exceptional.”

For one of his next two projects he has managed to keep the personal connection to the fore. He explains: “It’s a romantic comedy about adultery and a woman leading a double life and how a young man discovers who is mother really is.” Carnoy’s own mother lives part of the time in Casamance, a region of Senegal. The other is big budget affair received as a commission and tentatively entitled Gangs of Brussels.

Wild Foxes is released by Conic in the UK and Ireland from 1 May. For more information visit the official site.

Richard Mowe interviewed Valéry Carnoy at the UniFrance Rendezvous with French Cinema in Paris at the start of the year.