The Beast director Bertrand Bonello: ‘The question is how not to give in to fear’

Screen adaptations of Henry James have traditionally been on the decorous side. The Beast (released in France as La Bête), the new film from French writer-director Bertrand Bonello, is inspired by the 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, and accordingly has its finely toned salon scenes. But the devoted Jamesian might well shudder at other elements: underwater peril, disco scenes set in the near future and a streak of “home invasion” thriller, with the heroine in peril in Los Angeles. 

Such counterintuitive strokes are characteristic of Bonello, whose recent films include the political thriller-cum-lifestyle satire Nocturama and oblique quasi-chiller Zombi Child. In The Beast, a mix of genres — thriller, period romance and sci-fi dystopia — results in a film that is not merely a hybrid but a sort of exotic cinematic monster.

“If you call a film [The Beast], there’s likely to be some monster in there,” says Bonello, musing over coffee in his Paris apartment, where we meet. His film’s three genres, he says, “contaminate each other — I wanted to put horror into a love story, and love into a slasher movie. The problem was how to make not three films, but one”. 

The original James story is about a man convinced that an undefined life-changing event is waiting to pounce on him, like a beast. In Bonello’s gender-reversed version, the apprehensive protagonist is played in three different periods — and three different personae — by France’s current art-cinema queen and sometime 007 star, Léa Seydoux. 

“The reason the story is so good for cinema,” Bonello says, “is that there’s this element of the invisible — this anxiety about what’s waiting off-screen, the fear of impending catastrophe. Everyone expects something to happen and wonders what it could be. The story was very modern when James wrote it, but it’s even more contemporary now, when our anxiety is so much greater.” 

The film’s lovers Gabrielle and Louis, played by Seydoux and George MacKay, first meet in 1910, a moment that for Bonello represents a spell of undiluted optimism before the historic storm. “It’s a fascinating period. People entered the 20th century convinced that it would be an age of peace, progress, without disease or war — and it turned out to be atrocious. Perhaps one of the worst eras, along with what we’re going through now.”

The couple, or their future avatars, also meet in 2044, in a world bled of human emotion. In contrast, there is only too much emotion — fear, rage, loneliness — in the film’s third section, set in 2014. Here, Bonello draws on the so-called “Isla Vista killings” committed in southern California by a young man named Elliot Rodger, who posted a notorious YouTube video advertising his intention to avenge himself on women for rejecting him — thereby becoming the first prominent representative of the malign tribe of misogynists known as incels. 

“When I saw his videos 10 years ago,” says Bonello, “they really struck me, but not because he was a psychopath. It was the words he used and this very gentle voice that made it more terrifying than if he’d been like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. There are incels everywhere, and femicides all around the world, but that way of presenting himself, filming himself, seems very much a product of American culture.” 

Quite how Louis morphs from drawing-room beau to troubled loner to opaque denizen of a high-tech future is down to MacKay’s elegantly protean performance. Opposite him, Seydoux’s Gabrielle is first a classical pianist and socialite, then a struggling actress at a loose end in Hollywood. Seydoux previously played support roles in two Bonello films — 2008’s On War and the very non-hagiographic fashion biopic Saint Laurent — but this is the first time the director has worked with her since she achieved international stardom. 

“Actresses have really changed in the last 20 years — there’s more demand that people should be able to identify with them. But there are very few actresses now who inspire viewers to dream, the way Deneuve or Bardot might have done. Léa still has that element of mystery. You can film her for hours on end, but you don’t know what she’s thinking — and that’s really exciting for the camera.”

In no way a conventional director, even by European art-cinema standards, Bonello is more a conceptual auteur. His stylistically polished works are less about stories than ideas: young urban terrorists hiding out in a department store among luxury brands (Nocturama); a confrontation of period and modern ideas of sexuality in the opiated confines of a fin-de-siècle brothel (House of Tolerance); the philosophical exploration of teenage online culture in 2022’s Coma, the lockdown feature inspired by his daughter Anna.

Bonello may embody a commitment to auteur cinema at its most challenging, but he entered the film world belatedly, from another field entirely. Born in Nice, he was classically trained as a pianist and had a successful career as a keyboard player, recording and touring with major French pop artists including Françoise Hardy and Daniel Darc. “It was a time when records were selling — there was a lot of money around, we were really well paid, there were concerts all the time. Today, I have no idea how musicians can live.”

You imagine that this period, rather than a string of oblique art films, explains Bonello’s spacious flat in central Paris, near the Palais Royal. We’re sitting in the kitchen, liberally stocked with flowers and bric-a-brac and, neatly lined up on a sideboard, what looks like a lifetime’s collection of sunglasses. There’s a volume of Victor Hugo on the table alongside some more current French fiction, and a vintage Nokia mobile: Bonello may be a cinematic futurist but he is averse to smartphones.

Wondering how much further music could take him, he moved into film in the mid-1990s. In his teens a fan of genre directors such as John Carpenter and Dario Argento, he admits, “I didn’t really know cinema but I thought it would be a new territory to explore. I’d just done a huge tour and saved half my salary, so I financed a short for myself. That was my film school.” He is one of those rare directors, like Carpenter, who write and perform their own scores: on The Beast, he collaborated with his daughter Anna, now 20, who lives in Canada and is studying film. Her mother is the director’s ex-partner, acclaimed cinematographer Josée Deshaies, who has shot several Bonello films, including The Beast. 

Earlier this year, Bonello ventured into new territory again, mounting his first stage production: a concert/theatre performance with the Orchestre de Paris, dedicated to the life and music of Arnold Schoenberg. The Austrian composer and arch-innovator is often considered the forbidding voice of Modernism, but that is a misconception, insists Bonello. “Schoenberg was a great Romantic, and even his later works have to be played romantically — if you play them with cold intellect, you’re missing the point.” 

Bonello is something of an outsider in the French film world, he says. “I feel fairly isolated — there are some filmmakers I’d regard as cousins, like Leos Carax, but I feel disconnected from the main concerns of French cinema. You have to cultivate your individuality, even if it gets harder all the time.” 

And these days, as even commercial productions struggle to perform theatrically, it is especially hard. “Fear is contagious and everyone is getting nervous — distributors, producers, everyone. The question is how not to give in to fear — which in a way is the subject of [The Beast].” For directors such as Bonello, the question is also how to survive while maintaining your individuality, when your commitment is to cinema’s endangered wilder fringes.

“The margins are getting more and more fragile,” Bonello says. “And the margins are where you find the real beauty.” 

In UK cinemas from May 31

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