Chris Evans and Anya Taylor-Joy started most of the time to film their new film, “Sacrifice”, hiking on the side of a volcano in Santorini, Greece.
“You just look at the majesty of the world,” explains Evans about the panoramic view. “It is easy to get lost completely, as you would not if there was not a shooting team capturing each of your movements.”
But, of course, Evans and Taylor-Joy were not there to admire the landscape. “Sacrifice”, directed by Romain Gavras (“Athena”) of a scenario with which he co-wrote Will Arbery (“succession”), is a daring shipment of celebrities, wealth and radicalism. In this document, Evans embodies a film star who knows an existential crisis when he is exploited by the cult leader of Taylor-Joy to be sacrificed to make a prophecy to prevent a volcano from bursting. It is an outer premise – daring, original and, to borrow a term from Taylor -Joy, a little “eccentric” – which left the actor, who had been confronted with a serious case of anxiety of climate change, reflecting on his own fears on the planet.
“I became a real disappointment during the holidays,” explains Taylor-Joy. “And the script came and I achieved, like:” Oh, that’s what you do with big feelings. You leave and make art. Even if it might not change the result of what bothers you, it allows you a different way to release it. »»
Taylor -Joy says that the shooting of the film – shot over 10 weeks in the bowels of caves and caves in Greece and Bulgaria, as well as at the top of the volcanoes mentioned above – has attenuated some of his misfortunes. “It put me in a better place. Having all this time outside gives me a lot of peace. To know my scale, to be in landscapes which have long been there before me and which will be there long after me, which relaxes me. ”
Evans and Taylor-Joy did not know each other well before making the film, which is presented at first at the Toronto Film Festival on September 6. They met once at a party, where they played a play of Charades in progress. (“He takes this shit seriously, with whom, as a ram, I connect,” says Taylor-Joy laughing. Evans agrees: “I am a big game fan.”) Then, when the two were approached with the “sacrifice” script, they continued to bang during Hollywood events. Evans thought: “Maybe there is something more in the fact that we continue to cross the paths; maybe it’s fate.”
The actors quickly signed to play and execute the project – an independent production of iconoclast, Media Media, film 4 and Heretic – working with filmmakers to refine history, where fate – or rather, faith – is the central principle.
Evans, whose filmography is filled with superhero films, was impatient, not anxious, to play a role that struck closer to his home. “What resonated with me is that he was not an actor struggling with his industry,” said Evans about the star of action playing a star of action. “He was an actor who, at his nominal value, was doing very well. But when something unexpected happened – his dying father – it threw his sense of stability in a flesh, and all of a sudden he became unrecognizable for himself.” It is Joan de Taylor -Joy – a ferocious radical leader, operating with childish faith – who tracks the awake. “The second where she crashes, it seemed that Joan was an allegorical representation of Mike’s soul. When your soul pierces the noise to save you. It’s captivating.”
It is a deep story wrapped in visually explosive pop packaging. The action takes place in the middle of a star gala at an environmental summit organized by a billionaire of pragmatic cold (Vincent Cassel) and his glamorous wife (Salma Hayek Pinault). Sam Richardson as Mike’s agent, John Malkovich, as Joan, Jonatan “Yung Lean” Leandoer, as Joan’s brother, as well as “Mother Nature” and “Daughter Nature”, who interpret a radical hymn of Joan, are Mike’s agent.
“There is this yin and the yang of drama and comedy in each scene, which reflects life enough,” says Evans about the border between allegory and absurdism.
The actor considers the “sacrifice” as a Rorschach test, with his complex themes revealing more the public psyche than the intentions of the filmmakers. “It is the beauty of that. It is one of these films that, let’s hope, people will take different meanings,” he said. In the spirit of Evans, it is an allegory of the death of the ego.
“The volcano represents transformation,” he says. “Abandon. It is peace. It is freedom. It is to realize that the real liberation does not come from money, from power or even from control; It comes from the abandonment of things which, in our view, define us. ”
Like Taylor-Joy, Evans felt changed after filming. “Sometimes you make films that really speak to your soul,” he says. (“And sometimes you do not do it”, he quips, interrupting his own thought.) But “sacrifice” was exceptional: “We were able to throw ourselves into this project which actually required many of us every day, and that was found with a product with which I am deeply proud, and a role with which I deeply connect.”
