Fresh off the festival run of “Only What We Carry,” the offbeat indie drama starring Quentin Tarantino, actor-producer Liam Hellmann is making his feature directorial debut with “Trafalgar,” led by an international ensemble including Fanny Ardant, Élodie Bouchez, Danny Huston and Stacy Martin.
Now in post-production, “Trafalgar” reteams Hellmann with producer Charles Benoin, his partner on “Only What We Carry,” which premiered at Tribeca and played at the Deauville American Film Festival last month, with cast members Simon Pegg and Sofia Boutella in attendance.
The pair have taken an even bigger gamble with “Trafalgar,” assembling a high-profile cast for a film shot in just 12 days, with no conventional screenplay and a €1.3 million budget. Instead of a script, the actors worked from a seven-page outline, drawing on their own family experiences to shape the dialogue and characters.
Inspired by Hellmann’s own family, the film follows a young man raised in a household dominated by women who sets out to find the father he has never known. But the reunion takes an unexpected turn when he discovers that he must settle his father’s debts, forcing him to raise €80,000 in just one week. His dysfunctional family rallies to help him, eventually plotting a robbery. Ardant plays the grandmother, Bouchez the mother, Martin the sister, Huston the estranged father, Lou Lampros the girlfriend and Khaled Alouach the best friend.
“When I met Liam six years ago, he immediately told me about ‘Trafalgar.’ Little by little, the project began taking shape as something very personal and close to Liam’s real life and his family situation. But at 21, regardless of where you come from, there was almost no chance of getting a film like this made as a directorial debut,” says Benoin, who is producing via his company Atlas Pictures. “Then we made ‘Only What We Carry,’ and that gave us the momentum to take on ‘Trafalgar.’ I told Liam, ‘We can do it!’”
Hellmann says he went through roughly 60 versions of the screenplay before abandoning the idea of a conventional script altogether. He eventually settled on a four-page outline “built around situations and ideas,” which expanded to seven pages after he met with the actors and asked them to share stories about their own families.
“We all have slightly crazy families. Every actor came in with things from their own family and added them to the film,” Hellmann says.
That approach helped Hellmann win over actors who might otherwise have been reluctant to sign on to such an unconventional project.
“By letting everyone bring something personal, we managed to attract all these actors,” Hellmann says. He recalls meeting Huston over lunch in London and asking him about his relationship with his father. “He told me anecdotes that he eventually ended up telling in the film.”
The actors also helped shape their characters before cameras rolled. Hellmann met several times with Bouchez, who plays his mother, to develop their on-screen relationship.
“Liam sat down with Élodie like four times before filming. He asked her, ‘How do you see your relationship with your son?’ The idea was to create something halfway between what Élodie wanted to communicate as a mother and what Liam wanted to communicate as a son,” Benoin says.
“We took what we’d discovered was possible with ‘Only What We Carry’ and pushed it further. With ‘Trafalgar,’ Liam really wanted to push the actors out of their comfort zones,” Benoin explains, citing inspirations ranging from the Coen brothers to Pedro Almodóvar and Cédric Klapisch in the depiction of family dynamics.
The production brought together French, British and Italian crews, with Italian cinematographer Vladan Radovic, camera operator Leonardo Kurtz and costume designer Fabienne Menguy among the key collaborators.
The film was financed primarily through private investment, alongside French tax-credit support. Its executive producers include Alan Ganansia, Théodoros Ornithopoulos, Alain Heinz, Vivianne Vidal de la Blache, Delphine de Causans, Gaspard Madec, Manuel Millet and Orama.
Rather than relying on the traditional French financing model, which typically involves a mix of broadcaster investment, distributor advances and public subsidies, Hellmann and Benoin turned primarily to private investors, including “entrepreneurs from outside the film industry looking to diversify into cinema and support emerging filmmakers.” The pair had already tested this approach on “Only What We Carry,” and Benoin said it gave them greater flexibility and allowed them to move quickly into production, a key advantage to secure the cast.
“If we’d told Tarantino or Gainsbourg to come back in seven months, they might not have been able to block out six days,” Benoin said, referring to their experience on “Only What We Carry.” “The urgency is part of what attracts the actors. Either they want to be part of making the film happen, or they don’t.”
The unconventional financing structure did not prevent the filmmakers from securing a traditional theatrical distributor. Jérôme Hilal’s French distribution company Zinc boarded “Trafalgar” before the full cast was assembled and will release the film in French theaters.
For Hellmann, “Trafalgar” is also a response to what he sees as an increasingly standardized filmmaking landscape.
“I think there are a lot of films that look alike today, with the same structures because everyone knows exactly how everything works,” he says. “With this film, we accepted from the beginning that we had no control because there was no script. It’s about a dysfunctional family, and the film itself is dysfunctional.”
