EXCLUSIVE | 'Red Rooms' actress Juliette Gariépy: 'I usually get casted as the girl next door or a sex creator trying to...'

Red Rooms is a 2023 film that has premiered at the Red Lorry Film Festival. In an exclusive interview with Firstpost, the director Pascal Plante and actress Juliette Gariépy spoke about the film, the idea, the characters, and a lot more.

Edited excerpts from the interview

The film premiered at the Red Lorry Film Festival. What’s the excitement like?

Pascal: It’s very exciting because it’s always amazing to see that our Quebecois film is reaching so much and reaching new territories and having new other people, other cultures discovering the film. So, of course, it’s very exciting. Though for me, it’s really strange because it’s been a long journey. We shot it in 2022. Like, come to think of it now, it’s almost mind boggling. And, and it somehow has so many lives and keeps, like, rebirthing everywhere here and there. For me as a filmmaker, having new territories opening up like this, it’s like, this film is a gift that keeps on giving for me.

Juliette: In India. I mean, that’s great. It’s so fun. And it’s the biggest film industry in the world. Like, it’s huge. And to have  the possibility of the Indian community that knows if they appreciate it or not, I think it’s very fascinating.

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Pascal: But the film, I think, also, I guess, could appeal to pretty much everyone because for better or worse, Internet culture is very it’s kind of the same everywhere. Of course, maybe the language changes here and there, but English is the language of the Internet and everybody kind of has access to the same things. And there’s this weird shift where it kind of is the great equalizer in culture, the Internet culture, let’s say. And, it seems to strike a chord pretty much everywhere. So I’m really glad about it.

How did the idea of Red Rooms come about?

Pascal: So it’s funny because the film literally has the title Red Rooms, but that whole thing, the folklore of the Red Rooms and what it is and the idea of interactive crime online and this and that is something that came later. The idea came first from just wanting to understand the fans of killers. I was watching a lot of true crime shows or thriller films, horror films, and all of that. And it felt like a lot of the films that dealt with serial killer as a whole felt either about the investigation or about the killers themselves, but it felt even during the pandemic, kind of as a lot of people more and more people was binge watching true crime shows, it felt like there’s another, vantage point that was not really addressed in in narrative film, which was, I guess, the fandom or, like, the satellite fascination around the killers. So the idea came from the Juliet character, for instance.

They came from me trying to figure them out and researching what we call the groupies. I don’t necessarily love that word, but for lack of a better word, I’m going to use it anyway. And so I was researching the groupies first, and then, I came with the narrative necessity to have her as active as possible as a character in the film. Because her just looking was interesting for a certain amount of time, but it felt like at one point, we might need something more out of a feature film. And I was researching the killer and trying to shape that fictional killer as much as possible and stumbled across this phenomenon of interactive crime, criminality, basically.

And so this was kind of a stroke of genius for me in the sense that it could create this, a para-social communication link between the killer and the fan, let’s say. So that’s what led me to that very gruesome research of interactive torture.

What were the discussions that happened while casting for the film?

Pascal: I did not audition that many people. I’ll let Juliette answer also from her vantage point. But I was pretty confident in Juliette pretty early on. So I saw a few people, but not much. On the other hand, the Clementine character for some reason was very hard to find because I think we put people in boxes very quickly in our brain. And I wanted her to be an annoying character at first, but a character that wins people over and you almost want to hug her at the end. But her end is halfway in the film, some place, like maybe two-thirds in the film. So she has a limited amount of screen time.

And it was really hard to find an actress that could actually annoy us and but really, has enough warmth that we still want to get closer to that character. And I did lots of casting for her and I also did a call-back casting to see the chemistry between Juliette and Laurie.

Juliette: I agree that it is but for me, it was a very special, the casting experience since I usually get casted in the Girl Next Door, Loudmouth, sex creator that’s trying to roll the main character in and ruin his path. Anyway when I first read, I could because Pascal sent me the whole script.

Pascal: That’s also what I do. I don’t ask actors in addition just super quickly, but I don’t ask actors to prepare key scenes without understanding the context. I’d much rather do less scenes during the actual audition, but send them the whole screenplay. I know it takes a while to read the screenplay, but I also know that learning a few scenes takes as much time for sure. So I would rather have them not prepare, let’s say, apart from really reading the screenplay as a whole. So they knew what they were getting into wholeheartedly, completely.

Juliette: And I really appreciate that. And, you know, it makes you feel like you’re a part of the whole thing, and you’re taken seriously because, you can’t understand the whole script. Is she able to cry? Can she cry? And I remember reading the script the first time it was during the summer, and I was sitting. I was working at an old island in Quebec, like, far away, and it’s beautiful. And it’s this summer, and I’m reading the script under the tree, and I’m like, oh my god, it’s really intense. It’s really dark. And I was very surprised to see, oh, it’s actually not judging any character. It’s not judging this woman for liking weird stuff, and it’s not judging this other woman for also liking weird stuff.

Anyway, I felt like it was a complex female character that I hadn’t been casted in for forever, and I don’t have that many examples that I can say, oh, that’s a lead role with a female that’s not just relying on her love life or her capacity for having a career and children, for example. So it really stuck to me how the story was built around her, her intellect, her capacity to stay calm in stressful situations. You know, it’s little cues that I value and that I rarely see in female characters.

So preparing for the audition, I mostly read the whole script, but I remember also journaling about, writing down a few scenes and drawing like, a character, what made me feel like there’s a lot of red, obviously, but, you know, like, trying to build something off with a few information that’s creative, that’s personal to me, create a world of who is this girl, and I remember not building a backstory, but trying to imagine, she grew up kind of in Quebec like me.

What did she use to do when she was young? Not necessarily like, oh, she had this trauma when she was young, but who is that person? And maybe she spent a lot of time on a computer, and she became really good at it. And I did that too. I was doing different things on the computer, but I’m trying to just imagine her as a real person because I didn’t have that one scene, that practice over and over again and shoot it when you’re there. And I remember before the audition, before I went to Pascal’s office, I was sitting just in front.

There’s a little table, and I don’t know. It’s a little spot, and I just read my notes that I wrote, and I was super stressed out, obviously. But I read my notes, listened to my music, and got there, and it was obviously a great experience because when you read the whole script, you can talk about the movie with the actual person and talk about pieces. What we like, we like movies. We don’t know, it’s not like we’re trying to force feed a character to someone at the opposite. We just love cinema.

Pascal: This is the only way that makes sense because when I ask someone, I want to have meaningful conversations with them in the process. I want to. I don’t just cast their face, their body, their talent even. I cast their imagination and their insights as well. Their intelligence, I guess. And and I rely on that because, while I’m on set, I do so many things and it’s actually comforting to know that the actors really are in control of at least their character or understand these scenes and really inwardly and really well.