Both warmhearted and full-blooded, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is a winning mix of horror, humor, romance, and a different point of view on creatures of the night. It’s the feature directorial debut of award-winning short filmmaker Ariane Louis-Seize, who has also picked up a passel of festival prizes for Humanist Vampire, as well as last year’s Directors Guild of Canada Discovery Award. Now the Quebecois, French-language movie is coming to America, opening this past Friday in New York and Los Angeles, to be followed by a nationwide rollout.
The titular vampire is “teenage” Sasha (Sara Montpetit), who feels an uncommon empathy for humans and resists following in the family tradition of feeding on them. This causes friction at home, though a solution appears to present itself when Sasha meets Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), a put-upon young man who’s thinking of ending it all. Yet as they travel the nighttime streets of Montreal, aiming to make Paul’s “dying wishes” come true before she puts the bite on him, the two misfits forge a bond that might make it difficult for her to “consummate the relationship.”
FANGORIA spoke to Louis-Seize, who scripted Humanist Vampire with Christine Doyon, following its screening at the Boston Underground Film Festival, where it took the Audience Award for Best Feature.
Where did the first inspiration for this story come from?
I just had this flash. I was walking in a park, and the idea just popped into my head. I’ve always enjoyed indie coming-of-age stories since I was a teenager, like Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Garden State. I love odd characters, and vampire films as well, and I like playing with tones, so it was a mix of inspirations.
I’d actually wanted to do a vampire film for a while. My first short was called Wild Skin; it wasn’t about vampires, but I asked the lead actress to watch vampire movies because I wanted to direct her like a vampire. I had her watch A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and things like that. So it’s a mix of what inspired me as a teenager and more recent influences.
The vampire genre has so many rules and tropes to choose from by now; how did you come up with the rules of vampirism for your film?
What’s nice about vampires is that they don’t exist — I think; I’m pretty sure they don’t! — so we can do whatever we want with them. I’ve watched so many vampire films, and for example, in The Hunger, the vampire can go out in the sunlight. And so I figured we could pretty much do our own thing. What was important was that our mythology had to be precise; we had to stick to the rules we decided on.
For us, the most original one is that our vampires grow, and they age, but they age slower than humans. The reason is that we wanted to start with a young Sasha, and set up that her struggle and the humanist part of her have roots in a childhood trauma.
Putting all the stuff about vampires aside, is there any part of the story that’s autobiographical? Anything about the heroine’s story that you can relate to from your own experience?
For me, it’s about the existentialist questioning I had when I was a teenager. I relate to both of the main characters for different reasons. Nothing in the movie is my story at all, but I always felt that I was a weirdo in the world, and I think we all yearn to bond with people and to be understood. That’s the core of this story, that these two teenagers who think they are so alone in their thoughts find each other.
Also, the first sexual relationships are never really like they are in the movies, so I wanted to create a parallel between the first time Sasha wants to bite Paul and a first sexual relationship, where we don’t know how it works, it’s a little bit awkward, and both people want to be good at it. I also have kind of an atypical mind [laughs], so we created Paul to be on the spectrum. I like characters who think outside the box, and to give access to those people. It’s something very rich, and I can explore my own mind at the same time.
Sara Montpetit is terrific in the lead. How did you find her?
I discovered her in a movie called Falcon Lake, which was her second lead. I saw her in another film as well, and I thought she was born to play a vampire, because she has a unique quality, very mysterious and quirky. But I still auditioned her to find out if she was funny as well, because I was making a comedy, and she was, in the most clever way.
You have a great collection of faces throughout the movie; everyone just looks so right for their parts, so can you talk about the overall casting process?
I like casting non-typical faces, and I was aiming for a specific kind of humor. There were actors I really liked, and I knew they were good with timing and the tone and bringing something offbeat, so I just offered those roles to actors I was really a fan of. And they all said yes, because who doesn’t want to play a vampire [laughs]? It was very easy to cast, even the smaller parts; I decided to offer those to actors I’d worked with in my short films. They all have this very clever way of approaching humor, and are good at deadpan comedy.
Humanist Vampire also has great visuals. What kind of budget did you have, and how did you land the financing?
We had $3.3 million Canadian, and it was all Quebec government funding. There are times when people find private funding there, but it’s really, really rare. I put in the application, and I was very lucky because usually how it works, because there are many people who want the same money, it takes a couple of shots to finally get your financing to produce your film. And both of the biggest institutions gave me the green light on my first application. I was not expecting to shoot it that fast, so easily like that.
You have a lot of scenes out on the streets of Montreal at night. Were there any challenges in shooting that stuff?
Oh yeah, of course. We had 47 locations, and only nine confirmed before we started shooting, so it was crazy. The first challenge was creating the schedule around this incomplete scouting of locations, and we spent the small number of weekends we had just working to find other places to shoot.
And the thing about filming at night was, we had to have permits to block the street and put up our lights, and we had many nights when we were working at three or four locations. So it required a bigger crew to be ready to shoot and be more efficient. Those 47 locations over 29 days of shooting were a big puzzle, so we all put our creativity into being more efficient.
It was important, though, to not let that change my way of shooting, because the mood of the film was important to me. One of the solutions we came up with was, because most of the film is set on one night with a lot of locations — and in October, there are some nights when it’s sure to rain and we had no weather contingency — we decided to wet down the streets in every shot. It catches the light very nicely, and I like the look of it, but it was also our insurance that the continuity would be OK during the whole shoot.
Suicide is always a touchy subject to tackle in a film, so how did you approach that side of the story?
The way Christine and I approached our writing was to try to find some light in a darker subject. We believe that comedy can come from that when you are not in the position of making fun of people, and we put so much love into every character. We are two very empathetic people, so that was natural. We didn’t put too much thought into it; we weren’t walking on eggshells writing the script, we just tried to be as genuine as we could, and managed to make it work.
At the end of the writing process, we did contact an organization that works with people who have suicidal thoughts, and asked them to read our screenplay to see if it was okay. And it was, and they guided us here and there to adjust some little things. It was not something we were calculated about; it was more a matter of writing with our hearts, and liking all our characters.
