Gilles Lellouche hits the substantial screen at the Toronto Film Festival on Wednesday as the star of Cédric Jimenez’s high-octane, sci-fi thriller
Gilles Lellouche hits the substantial screen at the Toronto Film Festival on Wednesday as the star of Cédric Jimenez’s high-octane, sci-fi thriller Dog 51, which makes its North American premiere as a special presentation after a Venice debut.
Adapted from the 2022 novel of the same by Laurent Gaudé, the movie unfolds in a dystopian near-future Paris, in which social order is controlled by a mysterious AI entity called Alma.
The French capital has been divided into the three zones comprising Zone 1, for the elite; Zone 2, for the well-heeled professional and entrepreneurial classes, and Zone 3, a crime-riddled area where people struggle to make ends meet.
Lellouche stars as unlikely hero Zem, a disillusioned Zone 3 cop with an idealistic militant past, who is teamed with haughty, high-flying Zone 2 officer Salia, played by Adèle Exarchopoulos, after a leading politician is assassinated in Zone 1.
Dog 51
Chi Fou Mi
Dog 51 marks actor and director Lellouche’s fourth film with Jimenez after The Collection (2014), The Man With The Iron Heart (2017) and Netflix acquired The Stronghold (Bac Nord).
“It’s a joy to be reunited with Cédric, a director with whom I’ve been building my career for 15 years now. We’ve followed one another and grown together,” says Lellouche.
He says a substantial draw to the film was the challenge of working on a sci-fi film, a genre that has rarely been tackled on a substantial scale by French filmmakers.
“It’s field that neither he nor I had in common,” says Lellouche. “The film also offered this very beautiful possibility of talking about a utopia within a dystopia, that really spoke to me.”
He also relished the opportunity of taking on one of the most grueling action roles of his career, spanning more than 80 credits across all genres from thriller, to comedy to romance.
“With my age starting to show… I’m 53… roles that are this physical and tough don’t come around as often anymore… I also love opportunities to change universes and go into very different worlds… I loved being able to dive into an action film, in the same way I love working with directors on films that are more humble, smaller, and modest, and with maybe spikier topics.”
Dogs 51 is produced by Hugo Sélignac at Chi-Fou-Mi Productions in coproduction with Studiocanal, which is gearing up for one of its biggest French releases of the year with the film on October 15.
The company is also theatrically releasing the film in Germany, Austria, Poland, Benelux, Australia and New Zealand and handling worldwide sales.
Jimenez suggests in his director notes that Lellouche’s character of Zem, brings together elements of Franćois Civil’s loose-cannon Marseille cop in The Stronghold and Jean Dujardin’s elite antiterrorist officer in his 2022 film November.
Lellouche reveals that he tapped rather into Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver as he constructed the character.
“Zem is very alone. I was looking for this kind of solitude, although many of those scenes were cut, so what I’m saying doesn’t make sense,” says Lellouche.
“But in any case, an aspect of the character that was important for me was the weight of solitude, which I think is a bit the evil of our age… as human beings, we’re desperate for connection but instead we’re only disconnecting… Zem represents the quintessence of this contemporary solitude.”
Dog 51 also reunites Lellouche with Exarchopoulos, who he recently directed in his sweeping star-crossed 2024 love story Beating Hearts.
“We had a very small scene in The Stronghold, but it’s the first time we’ve played opposite one another… She’s an artist who I love deeply, and above all a huge actress, who’s instinctive, overwhelming and stunning,” says Lellouche.
“She is a formidable talent. I saw this when I directed her and felt it even more strongly when I acted opposite her.”
Dog 51
Chi Fou Mi
After traveling to a near future for Dog 51, Lellouche’s next role takes him back to World War Two.
He is currently gearing up to play French resistance hero Jean Moulin opposite Lars Eidinger, as Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, in French-language biopic Moulin, directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker László Nemes (Son of Saul).
Lellouche reveals that Nemes approached him to play Moulin a year after he had to turn down the offer of playing the resistance figure in Antonin Baudry’s upcoming two-part Charles de Gaulle biopic.
“For scheduling reasons, I couldn’t do it… when I was contacted by László Nemes, I thought it was a sign and that this role was probably for me… I’m obviously fully aware of the weight this character carries, but I’m determined, with the greatest humility, to do justice to this great man,” says Lellouche.
“What is interesting about Jean Moulin is that he wasn’t predisposed to be a hero… he was the son of a schoolteacher, who had ideals and would have preferred to die rather than betray these ideals,” he adds. “The idea of the collective, the idea of being able to sacrifice one’s life for the lives of others, for freedom, for an ideal world, I think that’s something that’s increasingly rare, unfortunately.”
A transport strike in France, which has also impacted flights, combined with the impending start of the Moulin shoot in Hungary this weekend, means Lellouche has had to skip a slated trip to Toronto with Dog 51.
“I couldn’t take the risk of not making it back in time,” he says.
The actor notes, however, that he has special affection for TIFF where he enjoyed one of his first outings on the international film festival circuit with Guillaume Canet’s Little White Lies in 2010.
Gilles Lellouche and Guillaume Canet at TIFF in 2010
Getty Images
“There are two films that brought me luck in Toronto: The Connection and Little White Lies,” he says, noting that 2010 marked the year when his acting career really took off.
“It was an important year for me… There was Little White Lies which was a big success in France, and wider Europe, the thriller by Fred Cavayé, Point Blank, which was my first starring role, and then Cédric Kapisch’s My Piece of the Cake, in which I also starred… They established me as an actor.”
Prior to 2010, Lellouche had been juggling directing low movies with secondary acting roles in films such as Canet’s early film Mon Idole and breakthrough film Tell No One, as well as Jérôme Salle’s Anthony Zimmer and Jean-François Richet’s Mesrine Part 1: Killer Instinct.
Lellouche recounts how he started making low films after taking acting courses at the Paris drama school Cours Florent.
“I realized that no one was waiting for me, like almost all the young actors of my generation, and I didn’t want to wait for the hypothetical phone call from someone who was going to want me from one day to the next, it wasn’t going to work,” he says.
“I understood I had to take matters into my own hands and that the best way to get into acting was to have myself act. At first I directed to act, but then these short films, opened the doors to the world of music videos.”
Lellouche would end up being attached to the Paris-based original agency Partizan, alongside the likes of Michel Gondry and Quentin Dupieux, in whose Smoking Causes Coughing and Daaaaaali! he would later appear.
Around the same time, Lellouche also connected with now long-time collaborators, producer Alain Attal and Canet. Attal originally contacted Lellouche after his 2002 low Why… Coz? won a peripheral prize at Cannes.
“He suggested the subject for my first feature-film Narco,” says Lellouche, who co-directed the film starring Canet as man suffering from narcolepsy.
“I’d go to Alain’s offices to write. Guillaume Canet was also there writing his first feature film Mon Idole. That’s how we all met. At a certain point Hugo Sélignac joined as an intern, he must have been about 17 years old. We all grew together and 20 years on, they are among my closest friends and collaborators.
Lellouche, who has since also put his name to Sink or Swim and Beating Hearts, says directing remains his passion.
“It’s something that drives me and makes me feel extremely alive. Alongside being lucky enough to be an actor, I really enjoy being the initiator of my own world and universe, with my own words and sensitivity. It’s something that nourishes me a lot.
He is mulling future feature directorial ideas but has nothing concrete as yet.
“I can’t tell you exactly what it is but I do know that it will be a kind of exploration of, let’s say, personal journeys, personal dreams, dreams that we tend to bury a little too deeply,” he says. “In this very dark period we’re living through, I’d like to make a film in the vein of Robert Altman Short Cuts, but with a more positive vibe.”
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