La Montre

About the Film

La Montre began as an auteur study, an attempt to replicate Jean Pierre Jeunet’s visual palette and the way his characters build whole inner worlds around small, particular things. Out of that study came a film interested in how much of who we are is actually built out of small, repeated attachments, the objects we keep, the rituals we never examine, rather than anything more deliberate. Louis barely speaks, so the film has to ask its questions about identity through what he holds onto, a watch, a seat at the same cafe, the same walk through the same park, and through what happens to him once someone interrupts that pattern. But the film doesn’t leave him stuck there. By the end he’s still not ready to let the watch go, but for the first time he’s willing to consider it, and that small, unhurried shift felt more honest to me than a clean resolution would have, proof that moving on rarely arrives all at once, only in the willingness to eventually try.

Director’s Statement

My role on La Montre was writer, editor, and sound, and all three pulled from the same Jeunet study, working scene by scene through his films to understand how he builds a heightened reality out of rhythm, color, and sound rather than dialogue alone. Sound design is where I pushed furthest from realism, especially around the mysterious woman. I added small fantastical touches to her, an unnatural chime tucked under her footsteps, a faint resonant hum whenever she entered a scene, to mark her as something slightly outside the ordinary rules of Louis’s world, the same trick Jeunet uses to make certain characters feel like they’ve wandered in from a more magical register of reality than everyone around them. But the moment I’m proudest of happened on set, not in the sound booth or the edit bay. During the pawn shop scene, I realized our planned coverage wasn’t going to carry the weight the exchange needed, so I suggested an extreme, slightly distorted close-up of the shopkeeper’s eye and worked with our camera operator right there to frame it before we lost the light. That single insert ended up doing more to convey Louis’s paranoia than anything we’d storyboarded in advance, and it’s stuck with me as proof that some of the strongest editorial decisions get made in conversation on set, not alone afterward with the footage.