The films of Arnaud Khayadjanian are unique in that they deliberately announce themselves as artifice, and yet they achieve an intense psychological realism. In Bad Girl he attempts to tease out the various ways in which mainstream cinema has infected our collective memories, focusing on the femme fatale clichè. Arnaud, we want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film: how did you come up with the idea for Bad Girl? My actress friend, Mathilde Roux, gave me a play named “Cours Sourds”, literally 'deaf hearts', to read. It's a very realistic text about a group of teenagers, written by Laura Desprein. While reading it, a monologue by one teenager caught my attention because of its purity and brutality. It's like a cry in the night. Based on this monologue I wrote the screenplay, adding a dreamlike dimension, especially by means of the creation of the imaginary 'Monster with five heads' that haunts the young girl. I wanted the screenplay, rooted in reality, to cohabit with completely unreal imagery. In your film the voice of the main
actress is post-synchronized: in this way, you highlight the contrast between pictures and sound, achieving an estrangement effect reminding us of the films by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Fano's experimental soundtracks. Could you introduce our readers to this aspect of Bad Girl? The voice of the main actress is postsynchronized. The intention is to create a distance, a veil between the body and speech. The post-synchronization participates in the surreal aspect of my film. This voice, imposed on a body by means of post-synchronization, seems to float in the air. The viewer immediately becomes unsure of the accord between these noises and the image, to the extent that a sort of distrust seems to arise between image and sound. How did you get started in filmmaking? I didn't know about films when I was a child. I grew up in a small village without any movie theaters. It was only when I was 20 and studying in the UK that I discovered in situ the social realism of Ken Loach. Back in France, I studied film theory at the Sorbonne, where the