What is the legend of the "Baie des Anges?"

The bay around Nice is called the "Baie des Anges," the bay of angels, because it was used to be the home of a species of shark called "anges de mer" (angels of the sea). The legend says that the two huge rocks that are shaped like fins once protected the bay from invasions from the sea. But eventually invasions became so rare that the angel sharks turned on their masters to satisfy their need for blood. To maintain the peace, the princes of the bay agreed to sacrifice a child to them. I wanted the characters in the film to have the same grace and cruelty as the sharks of the legend. I also liked that the legend is an allegory for the idea of a polished, beautiful Riviera that hides a troubled, chaotic interior.

It's a very surprising picture of the South of France...

In the film there's a combination of the natural beauty of the region, the Riviera as Garden of Eden, and then grafted onto that paradise is a sort of criminality. Not criminal in an urban way, but in the way of drifters that exists in the South, where you come across numerous recent immigrants, from Eastern Europe for example--Yugoslavians and Albanians arriving on the Riviera and wandering through this picture-postcard setting. It's that combination that interested me. I wanted to reinvent the legendary South. The film revisits the myths of bad boys and the dream of the Riviera, it's a sensual encounter of these two worlds. I wanted the film to a have a timeless, mythic quality, to have the appearance of a fairy tale. Soccer stadiums, the Grand Prix, Carnaval, the American sailors, are all legendary elements of the Mediterranean that the film incorporates. Every element is chosen to recreate a Riviera that never really existed. We had to build a very complex puzzle and shot all along the Mediterranean coast from Marseilles to Rome, not just within the Riviera. Sometimes in a single scene the shot would show Nice and the reverse shot would be of Marseilles.

The film paints the Riviera as a very lush natural world.

I wanted to recreate a profound sense of nature, the lightness of the beginning of summer, like the South in Matisse's paintings, very pure. Christophe Pollock, the director of photography, and I studied the way the sun hit the settings at different hours. We made a sort of map of the light and the colors. We organized our shooting schedule accordingly--we ran after the light. It was like an open-air movie studio, where every detail was controlled. But at the same time we were constantly fighting against the elements since nature is essentially uncontrollable--we even had an earthquake at Portofino. I wanted the film to have that particular feeling of being on the run, the strangeness of the air and of colors and sounds, that at times approaches the fantastic. When you're on the run, the world has an extraordinary color: you notice everything, you're part of the world, there's a sense of great lucidity, beauty, solitude; your experience of everything is heightened and at the same time you feel like you're about to be swallowed up in it.

This is the first time any of your actors have performed on screen. How did you find your cast?

The casting was actually the most work we had in preparing the film. The casting directors, my assistants and I spent a year in the streets searching for our young actors--around France and abroad, in the streets and the stadiums, on the beaches, around the toughest housing projects, in gypsy camps. We met 15,000 kids! I loved that part of the work. I wanted to find kids with the vigor and the sense of being outsiders that only comes from the street, kids who were fiercely proud. We didn't start out with any sociological aim, but we quickly realized that the kids who interested us, who had something wild or indomitable or antisocial about them, were all under the supervision of the courts. So we went directly to juvenile prisons or correctional facilities in France and Italy to find our cast. For the Americans, we used a similar method: since we couldn't pay actors or bring anyone over from the US, we had to find them too, in the streets and the bars. We even brought back some tough Irish guys from Dublin for nothing, so they could give us the necessary atmosphere for our American base. Frederic, who plays Orso, comes from just north of Paris, he lives in a caravan of Russian gypsies in the middle of the woods with eight other people. He's a poor kid from the country, with a lifestyle from another century--no water, no electricity, no money. Nicolas, who plays Goran, is from the city, but also extremely poor. In his fifteen years, he'd spent ten of them in foster care or social services, and was an inveterate thief. He had the face of an angel, but at the same time he was a tough kid. So here were two kids with hard childhoods who the film took in, and who were helped out by being in the middle of this lush, benevolent natural world of the South. When I watch them in the film, I can almost see it happening in their faces. Nicolas grew eight inches during the shooting, and Frederic was transformed too: he grew more assured, became more socialized, and both of them started to learn to read.

Vahina Giocante is a real discovery.

The casting director, Marion Gervais, spotted her on a beach at Marseilles. I had her do some screen tests which were incredible. She was thirteen and a half and knew how to act anything. She had a rare beauty, the real character of a girl from the South, and she was also a dancer for the Marseilles Opera. We had already seen 7000 girls and then she showed up, like an extraordinary reward for our work. I wrote and improvised a lot of scenes with Vahina during the shooting because there, surrounded by the Americans and by all the tough guys of the Bay, she became unbelievably cheeky and imaginative.

Did your conception of the two main characters change after the parts were cast?

At the beginning, Orso was supposed to be older, more of a developed criminal. But the choice of Frederic, who was fifteen, and of Vahina, only thirteen and a half when we began production--both still very much children--made me modify their characters. In the end, however, that was the right direction to take, and their childlike qualities helped light up the film. Orso is very secretive, he comes from an unknown place, crossing the Bay of Angels looking for a gun, but he's betrayed by another kid like himself. Marie plays with her seductiveness. She's the "little sister" of the gangs, but she wishes she weren't so young, she wants to meet older men. The American sailors, Larry, Jim and the others, are a sort of dream of Marie's, like the young woman in the villa is for Orso. Like any 15 year-old girl, Marie wants to hone her charm--the more she exercises it, the more "famous" she'll become. One person isn't enough for her, she wants to be unanimously desired. But each new conquest only leaves her more bored or disenchanted, until she meets Orso. With him, she takes off her mask of seduction for the first time and can be herself. Marie and Orso live a kind of uncertain, tentative love story--they meet, push each other away, find each other again. Orso is arrested and put in a detention center, and Marie is rejected by the Americans. They're like two wounded, fallen angels and it's through this that they come to understand each other. They realize they're like brother and sister, they're similar. I wanted to show a kind of adolescence that is free, wild, animal, one where attachments are just as quickly formed as broken, speechless, without psychology. Some teenagers seem to have a kind of natural cruelty, a casual insolence that they're free from love, yet at the same time they are constantly seeking love. I find very young couples to be very touching, and I wanted to explore that with Orso and Marie in their life on the island: the playing at life as a couple, the clumsiness of situations where their youth disturbs their attempts to be adults.

The film takes place in an unspecified time, an eternal adolescence of sorts.

Through these characters I think we're also speaking about today's youth. I wanted to touch on the things that don't change, for the Riviera as much as for the characters. Adolescence expresses itself through a difficulty in loving, in connecting with people. Marie and Orso are practically never in the same scene together, which explains the dyslexic aspect of the style of the film. I wanted to capture a real vitality that belongs to adolescence, and in the South there is a physical vigor that is even more pronounced. Even if you don't have any money, you always have the privilege of the ocean, you can take over the bay and the beaches and the grand villas in the off-season. The scooter rides, swimming, singing on the way to the stadium--I wanted to show something different than a picture of depressed adolescence. These kids who have awful pasts have an incredible optimism and love of life. I wanted to show the beauty that's in their pride. Their families have fallen apart, but they've made their own new families, which gives them something that's very independent, and ultimately, very adult. They don't ask for anything from anyone.

"At fifteen, you can do anything," like Marie says.

Exactly. Something I didn't realize, but the kids made me aware of, is that, because the film never shows the world of adults, it creates a sort of kingdom of adolescence. It shows adolescence triumphant. The film doesn't follow a standard form of narration--the editing and structure emphasize disorder. It captures fleeting emotions in the heat of the moment, as if you were looking through a teenager's diary. For this first film I was very excited by the stylistic possibilities of cinema and I wanted to seize the emotions of the story without using a classical, reassuring sort of narration. There had to be an impatience at the heart of the scenes, a kind of joy, a game of confronting the characters and their lives in motion, in the rush, with a sort of drunken editing so that one scene would recapture the imbalance of another scene. I wanted to make a puzzle of a film with several overlapping stories, to play with visual effects that would open a panorama of emotions and feelings, even if it made the film difficult to follow. You have to watch this movie in a more emotive way than other films. I also wanted to return to a kind of cinema that could, through the purely visual, capture raw emotions through sensuality, colors, beauty and lyricism. The film moves quickly because the kids were impatient, they had moments of concentration and sudden bursts of violence, and we had to work like that. I attempted to copy their language of noises, colors, shouts and emotions. "Marie Baie des Anges" has a rhythm of violent scenes followed by gentle ones, fights next to kisses. We did this through the improvisation of scenes, the euphoria of filming scenes cut short, without transitions, since the kids' patience had its limits and after a few hours of concentrating, they were going off in all directions. I let myself be carried along by the drunkenness of scenes and moments like that, and I wasn't afraid when I'd lose track of the storyline for a moment. I felt like you'd come back to the story in a bit, and you'd be enriched by the confused but real emotion of those moments of freedom.