For a quarter of a century, Bertrand Bonello has been building an oeuvre which has heralded him as one of the most daring names in contemporary French cinema. From exploring the transactional margins of 19th-century sexuality (House of Tolerance) to subverting stereotypical horror tropes (Zombi Child) and charting the life of French designer Yves Saint Laurent (Saint Laurent), Bonello has the inimitable ability to imbue each project with an ethereal sense of realism. This is felt more than ever in Bonello’s latest genre-bending cinematic offering, The Beast. Loosely based on Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in The Jungle, in which a man is paralysed by his neurotic conviction that something awful is about to happen to him – Bonello transforms this internal strife into a sprawling tale of two individuals reincarnated across past, present and future.

Opening with an ambiguous green screen prologue introducing us to Léa Seydoux’s character Gabrielle taking directions from a presence off-camera, an unsettling tone is distilled and swiftly carried through to Belle Époque Paris in 1910, a slasher-esque vision of contemporary Los Angeles and a soulless trip to a technology ruled 2044. Starring opposite Seydoux is George MacKay, whose shapeshifting character morphs from an aristocratic gentleman to an Elliot Rodger inspired serial killer fuelled by a burning hatred for women, creating an ideal foil to Seydoux’s seemingly unchangeable Gabrielle. An impending sense of doom hangs in the air as the century-spanning romance unearths the ugly truth of emotion and the imposing threat of AI, unmasking the universal ‘beast’ at the heart of Bonello’s sci-fi fable as a fear of love itself. We speak to the filmmaker below.

Ella Joyce: The Beast is loosely based on Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in The Jungle, can you tell me a little about the decision to use that as your starting point and your relationship to the work? 
Bertrand Bonello: It’s a novel I read a long time ago three or four times, I always loved it. It’s brilliant and heartbreaking but I never thought of doing an adaptation. When I started to write The Beast I really wanted part of the film to be close to melodrama and that drove me back to the book because I knew I could not find a better argument than the one in Henry James. In a way I was very faithful to the book in the argument, most of it is in the long scene in 1910 at the party, and most of the dialogue is from Henry James, I’m very faithful at that level. Then I became very unfaithful by exploiting everything through time and ages. The novel is about the fear of love and I took these two words ‘fear’ and ‘love’ and tried to push them as far as I could.

EJ: Fear and love are such symbiotic emotions and the shifting timezones prove the universality of those two things, how did the idea of telling the story through the time periods of 1910, 2014 and 2044 come to be? 
BB: These two feelings go very well together. It’s weird how ideas arrive, at the beginning, I didn’t know what film to do. I made notes on a piece of paper but not about a story, I don’t really care about stories or the characters, desires are much more important to me. I wrote down words such as ‘melodrama’, ‘slasher’, and ‘Elliot Rodger’, and I was hesitating between doing a contemporary film or a period film – I decided to do both. [laughs] That’s why I started to write this story. 

EJ: One thing that remains a constant in each of those time periods is a catastrophe of sorts, be it a flood or an earthquake. I wondered what the inclusion of those signified for you. 
BB: In each period I wanted to mix the intimate catastrophe with a more collective catastrophe. The idea of a catastrophe is very present in the novel – something terrible is going to happen, which is genius from Henry James because we don’t know what it is but you’re expecting it and the characters are expecting it, it’s about the invisible. 

“In each period I wanted to mix the intimate catastrophe with a more collective catastrophe.”

EJ: Léa Seydoux and George MacKay take on your leading roles and I wanted to talk to you about their characters; George shifts so distinctly in each time zone while Léa remains somewhat the same. How did you go about building these roles with them? 
BB: You’re totally right. It’s not something that I decided, it just appeared like that. You cannot imagine two more different people than Léa and George in the way that they work. George is someone who needs to prepare himself a lot, he didn’t speak French before the film so he had to learn and he asked me tons of questions over email like, “When I enter the room, how do you want me to walk? When I say this line, is there a different meaning behind it?” He wants to know everything, then he disappears and works on his own so when he arrives on set he is very ready.

On the contrary, Léa doesn’t want to know anything, she wants to discover the feeling of a scene while she’s doing it. Sometimes she would arrive on set not knowing what we were going to shoot, so I’d say, “Today we’re going to do this,” and before action, I say three or four words that have to ring a bell for her so she can really abandon herself in the scene and sometimes when she doesn’t understand she says, “Anyway Gabriel [Léa’s character] it’s you, just the play scene for me and I’ll do it for you.” [laughs]

EJ: I wanted to delve a little deeper into George’s character in the 2014 section of the film. You touched upon Elliot Rodgers earlier and I found the resemblance to that case quite intriguing. Can you tell me a little bit about that section?
BB: In 1910 it’s very obvious that she is the one who has a fear of love, she cannot abandon herself and when she is just about to she says, “No, I can’t.” He says, “You can’t or you don’t want to?” And she says, “Both.” Then they die and we’re in 2014 where George is saying, “No woman wants me,” so it’s the result of past lives and things like that. Mainly I was trying to switch the characters to a more contemporary period, where the man has a fear of love. I remembered these videos from ten years ago of Elliot Rodger in 2014 and I was very obsessed with them, not only because the guy was a psychopath and he killed girls and killed himself but the videos themselves, the words he uses, the tone he uses. We reproduced that and George is imitating Elliot in the videos, he says, “No one wants me, so I hate them, so I’ll kill them.” But there is maybe something he doesn’t say because he’s not conscious of that is, “I am afraid of love, so no woman wants me, so I hate them, so I kill them.” It’s a way of taking the fear of love and putting it in a more contemporary world, where technology is so important and creates so much loneliness.

“AI took the power and solved all the problems, but at the same time, the world that is shown is terrible.”

EJ: You touched upon the idea of past lives earlier and I remember one of the first lines George says to Léa is, “It can be very dangerous to bring someone back to who they were a few years before.”
BB: Yes! That comes from the novel, I really love this line. 

EJ: It encapsulates the reincarnation of past lives so well. The scenes set in the future have a relatable quality to them, it feels as if it’s the behaviour of people that has changed as opposed to the environment they’re in, which I found interesting as it’s a different approach to sci-fi. Can you tell me a little about building that vision of 2044? 
BB: 2044 is tomorrow, I like this period because it’s very close. I didn’t want to go into something abstract, I wanted to have a feeling of concrete. The world itself didn’t change that much, it’s just behaviour. I realised that doing science fiction is imagining the future but above all, it’s talking about your fear of the present. There is something very weird in this future that shows humanity has failed and AI took the power and solved all the problems, but at the same time, the world that is shown is terrible – it’s very cold and feelingless. Is that the price to pay to get out of all the catastrophes around us? I like this contradiction in the way of seeing the future, there are no more problems but it’s awful. [laughs]

EJ: Those kinds of modern anxieties are very prevalent, I read that when you were making the film you weren’t aware that AI would be such a big problem so soon. 
BB: I was aware of many ethical, political and moral problems surrounding AI but for me, I thought it would be in ten years. When I presented the film last year in Venice, AI was at the heart of so many worries and discussions. The strike in Hollywood was during the Venice festival, and the use of AI in art was really important in negotiations. Above cinema, all the newspapers and magazines talk about the dangers of AI, the guy who created AI said, “I created something more dangerous than the atomic bomb,” so it made the film more contemporary than I thought. This relationship between technology and humanity is very scary because technology is a tool and you have to be the master of the tool, if the tool is the master of the human then it’s freaky.

EJ: In spite of the shifting time zones in the film, birds and dolls are seen throughout each period as a warning or a message of sorts, what do those signify for you? 
BB: I like to have some elements that you find in three periods, it rings a bell if you see something in 2014 that you had in 1910. There is an evolution of the doll, I really like dolls, there are dolls in a lot of my films. It’s an object which is always related to childhood but she’s very freaky at the same time, right?

EJ: They’re scary! [both laugh]
BB: I really still don’t understand why we give dolls to little girls, it’s freaky. When you look at a doll or film a doll, you don’t know what’s in her mind and I really like that. One of my favourite scenes in the film is a close-up of Léa Seydoux because the shot is quite long and for a couple of seconds, you think, “Oh she’s pretty,” and then after a while you think, “Wow, she’s freaky. What is in her mind?” And pigeons, I personally hate pigeons and I think they are a reincarnation of the devil, but I like to use something very familiar that is around us because there are pigeons everywhere, but film it in a way so you then start to watch it with worry.

EJ: Music plays into the story’s narrative, it defines some very key moments and I wanted to talk to you about how that feeds into your filmmaking process. The club scenes that recur throughout are really interesting. 
BB: I start to think about music very early when I’m writing, either the songs in the clubs or the original music, which I create myself. If I start to write a scene that I think will need some music, I stop writing and go into my studio to record some stuff, then I go back to my desk. The idea is that the music is not just illustrative, it has to be narrative and it has to say something about the scene or the character as much as the dialogue or a description. For me, a scene is not finished being written if I don’t have the music.

It has to work together, it’s not like you have the writing, shooting, editing, and then the music, I try to think about everything at the same time and say to myself, “You must not write a script, you must write a film.” I really like scenes in clubs and scenes in which characters are dancing because it says a lot about the character. When the actor dances, they give something of themselves, and if you know how to shoot it, it’s amazing. It’s very emotional for me. 

EJ: Finally, at the root of the story is a fear of love because people believe there is a ‘beast’ of some sort waiting to destroy everything and we see that realised by Léa’s character in the final scene. What is the significance of leaving the audience with that realisation and what parting emotion do you hope the audience is left with? 
BB: It’s quite close to the novel, at the end when the character realises that it is too late and that the beast itself was the fear of love, he throws himself on the grave of the beloved person. The scream of Léa is, for me, the same kind of heartbreak, she realises that it is too late, which is the worst feeling you can have. It was too late, it was here but she didn’t see it. 

The Beast is out in cinemas now.