Some projects move forward in a straight line, and then there’s Very Nice Day, made in a spirit of meandering and searching. The film arose from an impulse, driven by a desire to create something atypical, at the risk of creating something imperfect. Tired of the usual production schedules and not wanting to lose our creative spontaneity, we developed a basic screenplay, a canvas we could use to start shooting. We felt no obligation to follow it; instead we were trying to trigger accidents, keeping an eye out for lucky flukes.

Very Nice Day appropriates the neo-noir genre. It’s my way of examining our solitude, our personal and digital identity and our relationships with other people. I wanted to explore the underlying paranoia of online culture and derealization syndrome. Jérémie embodies that social disorder. His perception of the world is coloured by the idea that reality doesn’t exist, like a fantasy of being Neo in The Matrix (1999) or Truman in The Truman Show (1998). At the same time, we discover the loneliness that plagues Élyane, a professional Instagrammer with thousands of followers. We notice the contrast between the way she presents herself online and the loneliness of her everyday life.

That free creative approach immediately gave rise to the idea of using a cellphone camera to make the film. Aside from its technical flexibility and the fact that we always have a camera in our pockets, the phone became an essential, central part of the screenwriting approach. In the way we conceived our directing method, it becomes an extension of a person. Throughout the story, Jérémie (Guillaume Laurin) and Élyane (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) have one glued to their hands as a kind of technological extension of themselves, with their eyes constantly riveted to the screen. As we put the film together, we wanted to maximize its use. Right from the beginning, I could picture characters moving around in a crowd or in the Metro and us tracking them without attracting attention. Those are the staging ideas that built the screenplay as the shoot went along.  

There were usually between two and seven people on the shoot. Since there were so few of us, an atmosphere of collective creation arose, with the same feeling as when I played with my punk band in high school or made my first films with my friends from CEGEP.

Guillaume Laurin, Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse, Marc-André Grondin, Marc Beaupré, Christine Beaulieu, Mathieu Dufresne, Sandrine Brisson

DIRECTING: Patrice Laliberté

SCREENPLAY: Nicolas Krief, Guillaume Laurin, Patrice Laliberté, Geneviève Beaupré

PRODUCTION: Julie Groleau, Fanny Forest (Couronne Nord)

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Christophe Dalpé

SOUND: Ilyaa Ghafouri

MUSIC: Marc-Antoine Barbier

EDITING: François Lamarche