BAFTA 2025 shorts nominee interviews
Finn COnstantine on Marion
Joe Weiland and Finn Constantine
Getty/Dave Benett
In this interview series, we speak to some of the brilliant BAFTA short film nominees across the live action (which includes documentary) and animation categories. We should point out that of the five live action nominees, there is only one woman filmmaker, and the same is the case for the three animation nominees. Overall, that’s just two women filmmakers across a selection of eight films selected for the shortlists. And this is before we even discuss race, class, disability and queerness.
Many people are involved in the making of a film, and so we know that there are racialised and marginalised people in roles that aren’t necessarily listed in an award nomination. However, for there to only be two women directors named across eight nominations in the shorts category isn’t good enough. We hope to see this change in the future.
Marion
Writers/Directors: Finn Constantine & Joe Weiland
Producers: Marija Djikic, Noémie Lisbonis
Marion tells the story of the only woman écarteur in France – a bull jumper in the sport course landaise – as she prepares for a performance in the ring. The titular lead is played by Caroline Noguès-Larbère, the country’s real-life first woman écarteur, for whom Marion is her debut acting project – her teammates in the film are also her real-life team.
Course landaise is similar to Spanish bullfighting, but with a bit less fighting and quite a lot more jumping. In a particularly impressive scene in Marion, one of the écarteurs does a somersault over the bull. Practised in French communities close to the Spanish border like Gascony, the sport involves a cuadrilla (team) who each take turns feinting and twisting their bodies, often artistically and gracefully, to avoid the charging bull.
Finn Constantine, co-writer and co-director of Marion, speaks to Molly Lipson about the challenges of filming the key performance scene, the process of two male directors telling a woman’s story, and how Caroline was scouted for the lead.
Molly: How would you describe your film?
Finn: I’d say it’s a fictional film based on real life that tells a true story with the real person at the heart of the film. It's a sort of quasi documentary, but stylized. It's about endurance, a woman in a man's world, and it's about motherhood. [Marion’s daughter turns up just before her mother’s performance and watches from the sidelines.]
Molly: How did you discover Caroline’s story?
Finn: Joe and I came across the sport and its beauty and pageantry really blew us away. We started doing a deep dive and came across Caroline in our research. Essentially the whole film stemmed from this one article we found where Caroline said, “I don’t just face the bulls, I face the men as well.” The sport is one thing, but at its heart we knew this is what the film had to be about.
M: How did you develop the script and the story?
F: A lot of internet research! We wrote the script having never met Caroline, seen the sport live, or been to the region of France where it takes place. We really had to put ourselves in her shoes. Then, once we'd written the script, we had to try and find her.
M: And how did you do that?
F: It actually happened by chance. Joe and I had moved to Paris to work on the script and one evening Joe was at a bar and started chatting to someone. He was explaining the story of the film and this person told Joe she actually knew people in that region of the country and could probably help find Caroline. About a week later, Joe, this person Noémi, who became a producer on the film, and I were on a train to Caroline’s house. We rang on her doorbell, told her we’d written a script about her life and asked if she’d read it – and be in it.
M: How did that conversation go?
F: Very well! At first I think she was a bit confused, but she was very welcoming. With Noémi translating for us we explained what we wanted to do, and how inspired we were by her story and her life. She sat and read the script quietly and then looked up and said, “It's like you've been living inside my mind.” It was pretty amazing to hear that, obviously, and so then we asked if she’d play herself and despite some initial hesitation, she was super up for it.
M: Why did you feel it was so important to have Caroline play herself in the film?
F: The film had to feel dangerous and it had to feel real. It sits in this limbo land between fiction and documentary, and we felt we could only achieve that with Caroline playing herself.
M: You are two male directors making a film not only about a woman or with a woman lead, but specifically about what it feels like to be a woman in a man’s world. How did you approach making this film given those gender dynamics?
F: The one thing that we always go back to is that you can never shirk the research. We worked with a lot of women who helped us and gave us notes to make sure it was never cliche or from a man’s perspective. It was really important that that extra level of work was there because we ended up with something closer to the truth, rather than from our perspective. I hope people watch the film and think that the director could be a woman.
M: In the final scene, Marion takes her turn in the ring and, without giving away the story, it’s a pretty terrifying watch. How did you pull off filming that?
F: We felt there was no option other than to shoot a live performance. Once we'd decided that, it became a conversation about technique – how can we be unintrusive and voyeuristic, but it still feel like cinema? We took inspiration from the film Zidane by Douglas Borden and Philip Perino and put six cameras around the arena. So essentially we were shooting in a documentary style, but then having enough footage in the edit that we knew we could find the narrative and make it look like the first half of the film. You can't direct a bull as much as you would love to, and you just have to be ready to capture whatever happens. It took us two days to set up for those shots, and only thirty minutes to actually film them. We didn't have a say in how our film was going to end, which we loved. I think it speaks to the realness of it and to that walking the line of reality and fiction.
M: The colours play a huge role in setting the tone for this film. The first half is generally quite dark, but then Marion puts on this brilliantly vibrant costume for her performance.
F: Yes, we spent so much time on the colouring. You digest color without even thinking about it. We wanted to convey some kind of emotion in that changing room immediately without any action even taking place, so we needed the colors to be deep. We also wanted to pull everything down to speak to that feeling of the world being up against her – the world she inhabits is macabre and gritty.
M: What’s next for you two and this story?
F: We’re adapting the short into a feature, which is really exciting. We’re also going to screen the film in the arena where we shot the performance for the community there.
M: And will Caroline be making a return for the feature?
F: Yes we hope so!
M: And how has she responded to the film’s success?
F: When we speak to her about how she’s feeling about all this, she seems thrilled. That’s the biggest thing for us – if we can make her happy and make her feel proud, for her and people around her to have an emotional response to the film, then we consider our job done.
