Produced by the NatioNal Film board oF caNada

PRESS KIT

The film

Like a dream in the morning mist, a mighty ox

emerges from the rain-soaked earth dragging

the remnants of an old cart. A prisoner of its

yoke, the great beast pulls its heavy load,

which carries within it a greedy and angry na-

tion of people—a hungry parasite that saps

its energy and consumes its body and soul.

An allegory of mankind heading for disaster,

Bydlo is a tragic vision inspired by the fourth

movement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an

Exhibition. Drawing on the composer’s bril-

liant ability to evoke work and labour in

his music, Patrick Bouchard brings the earth

to life through animated clay sculptures,

creating a concrete and terrifying world, a

tactile nightmare in which man is his own

slave driver.

Meaning of the title

The word “bydlo” is Polish and means cattle.

It’s also the title of the fourth movement of

Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite for piano in

10 movements composed in the summer of

1874 by Modest Mussorgsky, inspired by an

exhibition of paintings by his friend Victor

Hartmann, who had died the year before.

Only six of the original 10 pictures survive

today; unfortunately the one titled Bydlo,

most likely a depiction of an ox pulling a

heaving cart, is not one of them. Maurice

Ravel’s orchestration from 1922 helped the

work find a larger audience.

In Poland and in certain regions of Central

Europe, the term “bydlo” is sometimes used

to belittle the poor and those members of so-

ciety forced to do manual labour, relegating

them to the status of beasts of burden. 2

PR

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Patrick Bouchard Filmmaker

Born in Saguenay, Quebec, in 1974, Patrick

Bouchard studied at the Université du Québec

à Chicou-timi, where he made his first film

with puppets, Jean Leviériste (1998), as part

of an interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts. After

impressing NFB producer Pierre Hébert,

Patrick began work on his first professional

film, The Brainwashers (2002), a comic but

chilling look at a musician tormented by his

overactive imagination. This ambitious pup-

pet film won the Jutra Award for animated

short film. Dehors novembre (2005), based

on a song by Les Colocs and scripted by

Marcel Jean, also won a Jutra, and screened

in competition in Annecy. Working again

with scriptwriter Martin-Rodolphe Villeneuve,

his partner on The Brainwashers, Patrick

followed up with a third puppet film, Subser-

vience (2007), about a society suffering from

bourgeois selfishness and the foolish passivity

of its servants. At the Off-Courts de Trouville

festival in 2007, he made Talon d’argile, a

very short film that was created in 24 hours

featuring clay figures that constantly mutate.

This experience revived a teenage dream of

his to make a film inspired by the fourth

movement of Russian composer Modest

Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. He

has teamed up with the NFB for the fourth

time to make Bydlo, which explores a new

aesthetic using Plastiline modelling clay.

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Julie RoyProducer

Julie Roy has been a producer at the Anima-

tion and Youth Studio of the National Film

Board of Canada (NFB) since April 2007. She

holds a master’s degree from the University

of Montreal in Film Studies and has also writ-

ten widely on women and animation film. She

has been invited to several festivals as pro-

gram organizer. Before becoming a producer,

Julie Roy was responsible for marketing some

60 short animation films made at the NFB

between 2000 and 2006, as well as heading

the high-profile marketing campaign for the

NFB’s 65th anniversary, coordinating the pre-

sentation of a Norman McLaren retrospective

that ran in several countries and overseeing

the release of the DVD box set Norman

McLaren: The Master’s Edition.

Most notably, she produced Hungu (2008) by Nicolas Brault, which won three awards; The Necktie/Le nœud cravate (2008) by Jean-François Lévesque, winner of 10 awards; and

Mamori (2010) by Karl Lemieux, which won the Grand Prix of the 25 FPS Festival in Zagreb. Working closely with emerging film-makers, she is in charge of the Cinéaste recherché(e) competition, which seeks to showcase new talent, and also heads the animation department of the ACIC (Aide au cinéma indépendant canadien) of the NFB. She has also co-produced short films with France’s Folimage studio through its Résidence d’artistes Folimage program, including Rosa, Rosa (2008) by Félix Dufour-Laperrière; Rains by David Coquard-Dassault; and The Banquet of the Concubine (2012) by Hefang Wei. Her most recent productions include Here and the Great Elsewhere (2012) by Michèle Lemieux, Bydlo (2012) by Patrick Bouchard and the international co-productions Kali the Little Vampire (2012) by Regina Pessoa and Edmond Was a Donkey (2012) by Franck Dion.

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Interview with the filmmaker

What are the origins of Bydlo?

It’s an old project whose roots go back to my

high school days, when the music teacher was

introducing us to different musical genres. The

teacher chose a movement from Mussorgsky’s

Pictures at an Exhibition entitled “Bydlo,”

which means cattle in Polish, as an example

of a symphonic poem. She asked us to close

our eyes while listening to it and try to imagine

an ox pulling a cart. It was an experience that

affected me deeply.

I learned afterwards that Mussorgsky had

been inspired by 10 paintings done by a friend

of his, Victor Hartmann, who had died the year

before, and that he had composed Pictures

at an Exhibition very quickly, in a state of cre-

ative frenzy. The version we listened to in class

had been orchestrated by Ravel (the piece

had originally been composed as a work for

piano), and so it was this version that stayed

in my memory. I became very interested in

Mussorgsky, and when I later saw Fantasia I

discovered that Disney had animated Night on

Bald Mountain.

Night on Bald Mountain also inspired Alexandre Alexeïeff, the inventor of the pinscreen.

Yes, it was a film I only discovered later on,

once I had already started doing animation.

Alexeïeff also created a film that was inspired by Pictures at an Exhibition. Have you seen it?

I didn’t see it for a long time. It was only as I

was getting ready to shoot Bydlo that I had

the chance to see it.

Given that you first had the idea so long ago, why did it take you so much time to get around to making Bydlo?

Over the years, I kept thinking about it, but I

couldn’t see how to transform it into a script.

I could see an ox pulling a cart appearing on

the horizon, moving closer and passing just

in front of the camera and then moving into

the distance. I could see the mud mounting

the wheels of the cart, arms in motion, and

hammers, but it refused to take shape. There

was not enough there in terms of dramatic

content. Soon after making The Brainwashers

I had spoken to producer Alain Corneau

about the project, but nothing came of it.

Six years later, I spoke to producer Julie Roy

about my idea and she immediately grasped

its essence, even though there was still no

real script. She suggested that I work with

screenwriter Cynthia Tremblay, something

which really kick-started the whole creative

process.

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You’ve worked with a screenwriter on every one of your films. Has the process been fairly similar in each case?

No. For The Brainwashers, Martin-Rodolphe

Villeneuve and I would brainstorm together,

and I would say that in the end each of us is

responsible for half the ideas that found their

way into the script and eventually onto the

screen. Dehors novembre was based on an

original idea and script by Marcel Jean, while

Subservience was based on an idea and

script by Martin-Rodolphe Villeneuve. In both

cases, my contribution came at the moment

of creating the storyboard, when I adapted

and transformed ideas found in the script to

make them technically feasible.

In the case of Bydlo, I needed to find a way to

unblock ideas that I had been thinking about

for a very long time. And this came about

thanks to a series of exchanges with the

screenwriter. It was through working with

Cynthia Tremblay that we came up with the

idea of an ox that emerges out of the earth,

which was the key to the script. It seems so

simple, but we started with the idea of an ox

that appears on the horizon and moved to an

ox that emerges from the earth. It’s not the

same thing at all; it has a completely different

meaning. Although it was my idea, without

Cynthia’s help I would never have got there.

She was a bit like a midwife who helps at a birth?

What’s clear is that I needed someone’s help.

I would never have been able to come up with

the idea without it. Because for me, every-

thing is first and foremost visual. I work based

on my intuition, and so I need someone to

put words and order to the images. As soon

as the idea of the ox emerging from the earth

appeared, I knew that we had the essence

of the film. But it took us several different

versions of the script to get there. At one

point we were even thinking of talking about

child soldiers... It’s a powerful and emotional

subject, but it just didn’t feel right for me.

Why not?

I’m not a very political person. I’m more inter-

ested in human nature and the human condi-

tion than I am in current affairs. I think about

man in the context of several millennia,

though obviously I have my own share of

fears and worries. In the end, it is this more

personal vision that you see reflected in my

films rather than an analysis of the intrica-

cies of current events.

For you, what does the ox represent?

For me it’s the strength and force of nature.

The yoke suggests the idea of labour and

working the earth. The arrival of the humans

transforms the ox into an object to be exploit-

ed, and emptied of its essence. I also see in

it the nobility of nature, of the environment

(it’s an ox made of earth), of labour...

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So there’s an environmental subtext to the film?

You could interpret it that way. But I’m not a

filmmaker with a message. Let me be clear,

Bydlo is not a film about current affairs. It

can be interpreted as being about global

warming, overpopulation, overconsumption,

the exploitation of nature and of others, or

you can make it be about war, but its interpre-

tation remains open and this is the way I’ve

always wanted it.

This was something that it took Cynthia and

me a while to agree upon, because like all

good scriptwriters she was looking for a way to

limit and focus the meaning of the film, while I

wanted something that was more open-ended

and allowed for a variety of interpretations.

Your earlier professional films all used marionettes moving around in a set. Then in 2007, at the Off-Courts de Trouville festival, you made a short called Talon d’argile in 24 hours, working with a block of clay to create animation. When you made Talon d’argile, was it a way of experi-menting with a new technique that you wanted to use in Bydlo?

Not in the least. I’d wanted to try the tech-

nique for some time and the Off-Courts

festival was a good time to do so. Thanks to

the festival I had the resources to do so,

including the chance of collaborate with Yan

Lanouette-Turgeon on the editing.

Between major film projects you also sometimes do short film exercises, like Talon d’argile, using more artisanal techniques. For example, I remember seeing some short films that used pixillation.

Yes, and I don’t think I do enough of them.

Each one of these film exercises helps me

with the work that comes after. These projects

take me further. And in fact the difference be-

tween a major film project and a film exercise

is the freedom they give me. When you work

on film exercises no one expects anything

from you, and you do it for yourself alone, and

with a degree of ease and pleasure and a

certain purity of action that does me a lot

of good. You can’t compare the quality of

Talon d’argile with Bydlo, but making Talon

d’argile was a completely joyful and nourish-

ing experience, while the making of Bydlo

gave me pleasure, but it also involved a lot of

suffering and hard work and took an incredi-

ble amount of energy. That’s why I think I

should allow myself to do these film exercises

more often.

What were the biggest challenges in making Bydlo?

Each film has its own technical challenges,

and in Bydlo they were linked with my choice

of Plastiline modelling clay. It’s a material

that is not easy to manipulate, and one that

tends to tear or break easily when you work

with it. It’s much less malleable than other

types of modelling clay.

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So why choose it?

The main reason was that you can melt it

and use a mould to create your characters.

Because we had literally hundreds of charac-

ters in the film, it was essential to be able to

use a mould and not have to model every

single one of them. The second reason is that

unlike the latex that is usually used in mould-

ing, there is an earthy quality that fits well

with the film’s subject, because I wanted the

film to have a tactile quality, so that viewers

could see the traces left by my fingers. Once

moulded and cooled, Plastiline reasserts its

original texture, so that you can see the

traces of the animator’s touch, just as you

would with clay.

Is this tactile quality important to you?

It’s a reflection of all the work that has gone

into the film. It’s part of the beauty of the

technique. I am not interested in so-called

“realism.” I don’t want people to think that

my characters are real, that they are made of

flesh. I want to celebrate the materials I use.

Another of the qualities of Plastiline is that

you can easily make a patina. It has a very

greasy surface, so you can make anything

adhere to it: tar, dust, straw, shards of wood.

How much Plastiline did you use to make the film?

At least 500 kilos. The main set we created,

which was four metres square, was entirely

covered by Plastiline. And then if you include

all the characters and the different versions of

the ox, it all adds up. It’s a very dense material

and weighs about twice as much as butter, so

that a block that is about the same size as

a 500-gram block of butter actually weighs

one kilo.

Did the laborious nature of working with Plastiline force you to make any concessions?

Constantly. Throughout the making of the

film I had to re-evaluate what it was possible

to do. I wasn’t able to reach the degree of pre-

cision in creating the characters that the

script demanded. Because the characters

became more stylized than we had originally

envisioned, the effect was to make the story

more allegorical and less real.

Another challenge for me was that we filmed

a lot of sequences starting with their end-

ings. Which meant that sometimes there

were four or five different shots that had to be

edited together, each of which had been

filmed starting with the end. So it sometimes

took a considerable mental effort to work on

the editing because we were going against

everything that felt logical and natural. 8

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In making Bydlo you worked with another animator for the first time. Was this challenging for you?

Pierre M. Trudeau joined us at a time when

there was a lot of animation to do, and lots of

different characters to create. It was my pro-

ducer Julie Roy’s idea and I’m grateful to her

for it. I couldn’t have worked with just anyone,

because like everyone else I have my own

ideas and ways of working, but Julie suspected

that Pierre and I would be a good fit and she

was right. Pierre is a talented and experienced

animator who is also a director in his own

right. At the same time, he’s also very

discreet and non-competitive and is good at

taking direction from another filmmaker. He

believed in the project and so it was easy for

me to trust him. In fact, communication be-

tween us was so good that at times we were

even able to communicate directly through

our characters. Pierre adapted himself to my

style, which is different from his, in a way that

was truly remarkable. He is also an excellent

sculptor, and he arrived at a time when I was

taking a few days off and immediately found a

solution to a problem I had been having with

sculpting the ox emerging from the earth.

How did you decide which of you would animate which characters?

It all happened very smoothly. There were

certain characters that I could see very clear-

ly in my head, so once we were on set, I sim-

ply told him I was going to work on those

ones. We divided the remaining characters

between us. I gave Pierre certain directions,

and he offered some suggestions and then

we went to work!

Would you work with another animator on a different project?

Yes, if it was necessary for the project. But

there is something very personal about the

act of animation and so it’s not always easy

to share the process.

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Team

DIRECTION, ANIMATION Patrick Bouchard

SCRIPT Cynthia Tremblay

BASED ON AN ORIgINAL IDEA BYPatrick Bouchard

CONSuLTANT Marcel Jean

SOuND DESIgN Olivier Calvert

EDITINg Alain BarilStéphane Lafleur

VISuAL EFFECTS AND TEChNICAL SuPPORTBenoît Chagnon

ANIMATORS AND DIRECTION ASSISTANTSPierre M. TrudeauChantal Masson

SET BuILDERDany Boivin

MODEL MAKER Jean-Philippe Morin

MOuLD MAKER, ChARACTERS Claire Brognez

Ox ARMATuRE CONSTRuCTIONDominique Bédard

PROPS MASTERSAndré-Line BeauparlantDiane Gauthier

MuSIC Robert Marcel Lepage

ORIgINAL MuSIC AND ADAPTATION Original music and adaptation of “Bydlo” by Modest Mussorgsky, © 2011 National Film Board of Canada (SOCAN)

ELECTRONIC ARRANgEMENTSNicolas Borycki

FOLEY Lise Wedlock

RECORDINgGeoffrey MitchellLuc Léger

RE-RECORDINg Serge BoivinDolby (Digital)

DIgITAL IMAgINg SPECIALISTS Pierre PlouffeSusan Gourley

ONLINE EDITINgDenis Gathelier

ShOOTINg SPECIAL EFFECTSDIRECTOR OF PhOTOgRAPhY Pierre Mignot

FIRST CAMERA ASSISTANT Carla Clarke

SECOND CAMERA ASSISTANT Jimmy Medellin

ChIEF ELECTRICIAN Daniel Chrétien

KEY gRIP Stephane DeErnsted

DIgITAL IMAgINg CONSuLTANTJacques Lévesque

TEChNICAL COORDINATOR Julie Laperrière

WITh ThE PARTICIPATION OF ARTE FranceFilm Program Unit

ShORT FILM PROgRAM MANAgERHélène Vayssières Logo ARTE

LINE PRODuCERFrancine Langdeau

ExECuTIVE PRODuCERRené Chénier

PRODuCERJulie Roy

BydloFrench ProgramAnimation and Youth Studio© 2012 Office national du film du Canada / National Film Board of Canada

nfb.ca/animation

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Press

PuBLICITY

Nadine Viaun.viau@nfb.ca514-496-4486

See the trailer of the film:nfb.ca/film/bydlo_trailer/

consult the making of:nfb.ca/film/bydlo_creative_process

download high-resolution images:onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/salle-de-presse/galerie-photo/

Distribution

INTERNATIONAL SALESChristina Rogersc.rogers@nfb.ca310-399-4519

FESTIVALSÉlise Labbée.labbe@nfb.ca

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