Julia Ducournau’s Guide to Cinematic Worldbuilding

Words: Jenn Lehwald and Rob Corsini

Make it stand out

If you were to traverse the cinematic worlds of Julia Ducournau, you’d find flesh-eating sisters, transhumanist women who have sex with Cadillacs and diseases that turn those they infect into statues. The ideas of her worlds are big, and yet it takes only a few scenes for an audience to be grounded in them, and for the realms that she has created to feel real. 

Ducournau’s newest film, Alpha, releases in the UK on November 14. Here, an unnamed disease - one which causes the bodies of those infected to turn into marble, a fate which is beautiful and yet ultimately fatal - is sweeping France. After Alpha, the film’s protagonist, receives a tattoo with a needle that may not be sterile, we see the world shift around her, as the biases and prejudices of society are released onto her potentially sick body.

Julia’s universes feel simultaneously fantastical and grounded in a lived-in reality, but more than anything - they feel real.  Below, she puts her experience into words with her guide to building your cinematic world:

There is no Eureka moment

I don’t believe it when I hear someone say there’s one idea that pops into your head and you go for it. It never happens like this - if it did, the film would be really terrible. There is no start, it will be something that’s been lingering within you - sometimes for years.

When the time is right, you’ll know

How do you explain why a certain haunting comes up at one moment more than another? When an idea is haunting you, you might not immediately have the language to create it. By language, I mean the images, the desires, the emotion that you want to have, that you need to channel.

Connect the dots

I don’t believe that the ideas within you are there by coincidence, but you do have to do the work to understand why they’re there and why they make sense together.  You don't have the full cohesive design right away, not at all. What you have at the beginning is splashes here and there that are completely independent and separated. The moment you start connecting the dots is really a lot of staring at the wall. It’s a lot of time. 

Stay at your character’s level

The first, and almost the only way, to make your world feel real is to stay at the emotional level of your characters - that is one thing on which I am adamant. It’s not about the details or the iconography you create - the set design, costumes, sound - that dose have it’s important - but later on. As long as you can relate and organically feel what the characters are going through, you can set it in any world.

Let your characters lead you

A good path is when you feel that your characters are leading you instead of you leading your characters. This is when your characters start surprising you, doing things that you had not expected - but it would not feel quite right for them otherwise.

Start with an ending

I always start with an ending - where my characters will end up, how they will end up that way, and at what stage of mutation they’re going to end in - as mutation should continue after the film. Where they’ve reached, by the end of the film, is the first thing you need to know - and the second is how you want your audience to feel.

Push yourself to go further

Honestly, it goes with the job, I don’t see it any other way. I would get bored trying to reproduce the same recipes over and over again. I like to dig deeper and discover new zones of the unknown. I’m constantly teasing myself in my head: you think you can't do it, okay well, I’ll put you through it. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t - we’ll see.

Know that your world is bigger than you

Your film should not be your script. The directing should transcend the script; the editing should transcend the directing. And in the end, what you have is the finished object. Your film is something that is so much bigger than what you had in mind originally that you almost have a sense of otherness. You should look at it and think: I did this? You're surprised in many ways. But the truth is that you didn't do it. You did with your crew and with people that you trust.