November 12th, 2019 
Jackson Murphy 
Netflix has a major awards season contender on their hands with I Lost My Body. The French animated feature that debuted to rave reviews at Cannes and Annecy this summer is getting an English-language version that opens in select theaters Nov. 15 and streams on Netflix Nov. 29. Co-writer and director Jeremy Clapin discusses his innovative, moving film. (This interview was partially conducted with a translator.)
Jackson Murphy: I Lost My Body is based on the 2006 book “Happy Hand” by Guillaume Laurant. This story really is one of a kind. What initially attracted you to this story?
Jeremy Clapin: I think I was attracted to it by the new POV of the story. [The film] tells the story of a hand – a severed hand trying to reach its buddy through the town. This kind of fantastic irruption into reality brings another way to look at our real world. It’s not only about a severed hand. There are a lot of thematics inside.
JM: And you co-wrote this with Guillaume. How was it for him adapting the book and you bringing your perspective as well?
JC: At the beginning, it was a bit hard for me because it was my first adaptation. I come from short films, and I built my stories with my own universe. And here at the beginning with Guillaume, he wanted me to maybe take more of the lead. And I didn’t want to take it too much because Guillaume is a really experienced script writer. But the story was not going anywhere. So after years trying to find something maybe too close the book, I decided to start a bit from scratch and keep the main things that attracted me to the book: the illustrations of the severed hand. And I tried to build and to bring my own universe – solidarity and poetry into this.
JM: The hand itself has so many different sensations to it. It moves like a creature – almost like a spider, but with its own style to it. What exactly did you study to get the feel and the movement of the hand?
JC: I really wanted to be focused on the hand. I didn’t want to scare people with the hand. It can be very scary, like as a spider. And I had to avoid this kind of feeling because we wanted to give sympathy to the character. We cannot have empathy if we are scared about it. We had to work on the hand moves – to not be too funny, of course, but also not creepy. It was not only about how the hand moved, but also how we staged – how we framed the hand with the camera – how we can get closer to it and to enter its own world.
JM: The hand is trying to get back to its owner, Naoufel, a pizza delivery boy (voiced in the English language version by Dev Patel). And he meets this girl, Gabrielle. I love the scene early on where he’s talking to her in her apartment over the intercom. It’s romantic and mysterious. How did you craft that scene?
JC: This sequence was not in the book, in fact. Naoufel has a relationship with the world. He used to recall a lot of sounds when he was young with his microphone. It brings Naoufel some civility, close to the hand’s stability. It brings me this situation of how we can make someone who can make Naoufel heads up a bit. At this moment, Naoufel is really stuck in his life without any perspective of destiny. He’s a delivery boy doing his same things night and day. But the night is going to be special. He cannot deliver the pizza. There is a kind of intimate dialogue that was not planned… with 35 floors of separation. It brings something unusual in cinema – a kind of simplicity but with a lot of distance between two people.
JM: Yeah, it’s one of my favorite scenes of the year. And you mention sound because it’s very important to Naoufel, when we learn of his backstory as a child and the things leading to where he is now. There’s also some fantastic sound work in this film, especially the scenes where the hand is interacting with pigeons and rats.
JC: When you are in a point of view film, you have to travel with all your senses. This is not only about how you put the camera on the floor with perspective. It’s also how you can imagine little things coming into his world. It’s like The Incredible Shrinking Man, in fact. You see things really bigger. A rat’s scream is not a rat’s scream anymore. It’s kind of ridiculous if you hear a real rat screaming. It’s not very scaring. But with the cinema, you need to really overplay.
JM: There are articles that have been written about this film since 2013. How long was the process of doing the animation itself to getting to the final product?
JC: The script process was kind of long. It took four years. We were waiting for funding, and it was really hard with this pitch to get funding. But we had a lot of time to prepare with the storyboards, so when we got into production, it was quite short for an animated film. It was like 18 months. It’s my first feature film, so it was my longest experience in animation. When I ask friends of mine doing features, [they say] it’s more like a bit more than two years.
JM: Was it daunting to take this on as your first feature?
JC: Yes and no because I was really prepared to kind of struggle with the industry. I come from auteur films, and I knew that it wouldn’t be easy to meet the industry. So I was very prepared to find some area in common – to keep my spaces but also to be able to do other things on time. I was kind of mastering my tools so nothing was able to fall from my hand.
JM: Don’t want to spoil the final act, but this movie has a lot to say about life and fate and purpose and the big meanings. And the film left me kind of breathless. When you just look at the final 10 minutes or so, how does it hit you?
JC: I wanted something really open at the end to let people bring the film with them. There are two stories, in fact, in one story in this film. There is the story of the hand trying to reach its buddy, but also Naoufel trying to get closer to Gabrielle. This is a love story. I choose – because the main things really capture my attention – the situation of this hand and what it can tell about humans. And at the end… I have to decide which subject is my film. And what is not about the hand – it doesn’t belong to us. This is the hand who brings us in… and when the hand is not here, there is no more film.
JM: You had a big summer. You were at Cannes in May, and Netflix acquired it. And you won some big honors at the Annecy International Film Festival as well. How were they?
JC: Cannes was really special because animated movies are not expected here. I was really proud of my team because everyone was talking about the film and not about the technique of animation. And I love Annecy because I was at Annecy 20 years ago. I decided to do animation at Annecy during the festival. So it’s like going back home. So it really moves me. There was no internet, so if you wanted to see a different movie in animation, you weren’t able to do it. There were only TV shows. I discovered all this different [animation] work from all over the world. So it was like a real punch the first time I went to Annecy.
JM: I’m glad Annecy inspired you to get into animation. How do you feel about the Oscar and Annie Awards buzz for “I Lost My Body”?
JC: I’m open to everything. It’s my first feature, so all is new. I have no reference. It’s great right now. Let’s see!
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