An Interview with Antoine Chevrollier

For his feature film debut, Block Pass, which premiered at Cannes this year, director Antoine Chevrollier reteams with actor Sayyid El Alami who starred in his 2022 TV miniseries, Oussekine. 

In this powerful drama, Willy (El Alami) is a teenager in rural France whose best friend, Jojo (Amaury Foucher), is a motocross star at La Pampa (the local track). Willy rides, but Jojo competes, and shortly after the film begins, Jojo is one victory away from a championship – something his hard-headed father, David (Damien Bonnard), wants perhaps more than Jojo does. 

But Block Pass is not a competition film. It focuses largely on Willy and his intense friendship with Jojo. (The teens are so close they even have matching tattoos.) When Willy inadvertently walks in on Jojo having sex with his coach, Teddy (Artus Solaro), Willy is shocked – not because Jojo is gay, but because he has kept this from him. But Willy also knows to keep this secret from Jojo’s domineering father. 

Willy’s homelife is also fraught. He fights with his mother, Séverine (Florence Janas), who pressures him about school, and disrespects her new boyfriend, Etienne (Mathieu Demy). Willy is still mourning his father, who died years ago, and is bitter about his mum selling their home. 

When Willy meets Marina (Léonie Dahan-Lamort), he gets a glimpse of life outside his bubble, and a possible relationship. But after a tragedy occurs, Willy has to focus on how to manage things in the aftermath. 

Chevrollier spoke with Senses of Cinema about his striking debut and its depictions of masculinity, class, and motocross. 

– GMK 

What inspired this story and these characters? Why did you choose to tell this story for your feature film debut?

When I started to think about a new project, after Oussekine, which depicted police brutality, I thought what is essential for me and my family? And what I haven’t seen in film or TV? The influence for Block Pass comes from my neighbourhood. My hometown is this small village in the film. My parents and family are all still there. The impetus for Block Pass was “How I can show the violence between the collective and the individual in this rural area?” 

I like coming-of-age movies. I started to think about my childhood in this place. It’s a motocross place. It still is. I remember when I was a young teenager, I watched guys through the fences, and I don’t know if I was jealous of them or had empathy. But when I was growing up, the sport didn’t interest me – it was these tough men and their behaviour. They have a lot of testosterone, virilism, and toxic masculinity. I was not attracted to it, but I was struck by it from a distance. I started to write. I work with sensation and images. I created images with the helmet, or skin, and I had a first draft. I worked with two co-writers, and we started to structure the movie as a coming-of-age film. We talked about violence and exclusion and people not understanding each other.

The power of the film comes from Willy’s strength of character. What backstory did you give his character? 

In the writing of Block Pass, Jojo and Marina give Willy a way to understand more of the world unconsciously. Marina is from the upper-class and she has some cultural appreciation. When they meet, she thinks something could happen between them. For Willy, it’s about the world that opens up – he is not from her social class. It’s not about love or sex; it’s more than that. When Jojo tells Willy his secret [that he is gay], it’s not that something bad happens, it’s more that this is someone close to him and this is important and cool, and Willy is becoming more open-minded. 

I trust in Bourdieu’s social determinism, [how education, class, and place are linked to opportunity] and the social determinism of Willy is really strong. His family is lower class, and they don’t have access to Rothko and Glenn Gould and art. “Good taste” as we say. I come from this region, and we have no culture and have no chance to know things about art. Even in school they stop you at 12, 13 years old and you go do manual work. There is a force of political/state violence in this world.

The film is very much about issues of masculinity. Can you talk about creating the men in the film and the qualities they have.

I like showing this kind of [male] character with nuance. With every character, you can love them, you can hate them, but at some point, you have to feel empathy. I love Jojo, but he sometimes says things I disagree with. And Willy does things I disagree with. Teddy and David too. It’s like in life. It is not because you are making an auteur movie and are militant. You have to be close to reality, and have stupid characters, and bad ones, and good ones. They all have a dark side. That was a really important point for my cowriter. Jojo does not agree with David at all, but in the end, he has an attitude that touches me. Same with Teddy. He is the quintessence of poor masculinity, but at one point, you feel sadness for him. We tried to invest all the masculine characters with this empathy that shifts on and off. 

Block Pass

You put viewers in a situation that makes them feel as uncomfortable as the characters. Can you talk about confounding expectations?

We tried to go against expectation and what the audience would imagine. You think the film will go right, and we go left. It is really important for me to show the violence – like in revenge porn. In Oussekine, for example, I showed how Malik [the character played by Sayyid El Alami] has been beaten by police in real time. We have to feel it and be scared like the characters. We have to show this violence and how the politics of that impact people to understand what it means when someone dies for real. We have to change things, so you have to watch it and be impacted to change your mind. 

What decisions did you make regarding the presentation of the tragedy in the film?

You have to show it to understand it. Sometimes it’s too much and too hard, and in one sense, it’s catastrophic. It was quite acrobatic script-wise and direction-wise, but I wanted to take the risk. If I do it and do not change minds, I’m done. This kind of rupture can affect the audience. We did a screening in Nance and there were two parents who came to me in tears. The father said, “I was violent, but if I had seen the film before that I would have changed.” I want to change things. I am doing this for people who don’t understand the world we live in in 2024.

Can you talk about depicting the world of motocross? 

Visually, of course, it’s really interesting. I wanted to show all the drama around this. In France, motocross is the sport where most people die – about 8-10 a year. It’s really, really violent. I’m not a real fan of motocross but this sport gives me the opportunity to show how men can be violent. This toxicity with the mechanic and the father who wants his son to be the best. Script-wise, it was perfect for what I wanted to show about male toxicity. 

As for the form of racing, I wanted to make the two races in the film distinctive. The first race allows for people who don’t know anything about motocross to see how it is. The shooting is quite normal. The last race is done with empathy and conveys Willy’s sensations. We thought about how we could make these races different and stick to Willy’s state of mind for the audience to feel intensely what Willy is going through. 

What can you say about creating the film’s visual style? The film is told from Willy’s point of view save one 15-minute sequence where Jojo takes over the narrative. Can you talk about this approach? 

The film’s point of view is from Willy, but I allowed myself to switch with Steadicam and show other things, like what collective violence does at a particular moment. It was of primary importance for me to follow the story through Willy’s experiences. 

What can you say about your approach to making Block Pass? 

It’s quite simple. I observed my nephew and my family who still live there. I listened. In most of the film, there is a real border between realism and naturalism. Maybe it’s thin. But most of the time, naturalism is a bourgeois movement. They want to show a world or areas that audiences don’t know. They don’t understand or care who these people are, or how they react. They want to show us as people who are stupid, have no nuance and are ugly and behave badly. We have a people who don’t know Rothko, but they know a lot of things and they do think. I want to be in realism and not in naturalism. I want my cinema to show people as they are. I recreate their world. I’m not stealing any stories or characters. I’m listening and twisting things to show what my reality is and the reality of my people. For that reason, we are not going through the cliché coming-of-age trajectory. I always try to move away from that. 

It reminds me of writer Edouard Louis’ work.

Exactly! There is a lot of condescension. Edouard Louis shows that in his books. People say, “Look what you did!” Or folks tell me, “You speak well for a man who comes from your region.” or “I never met anyone like you from your region.” Louis really saved me. He was one of the few guys from our class who goes out to Paris and makes it. Literature and cinema are bourgeois art. So, Louis’ books were really important to me. 

What observations do you have about depicting class in the film?

I now live in Paris and the auteur cinema here is really bourgeois. It’s made by the bourgeois and for the bourgeois. They have a single-minded way of thinking. My reality has more multiplicity than when a bourgeois filmmaker tries to tell a story about the region I grew up in.