Morade Aïssaoui: “I wanted a film where the camera becomes a passenger”

Carried by a trio of teenagers, N121 locks around ten passengers in a night bus and follows the escalation of simple incivility towards tragedy. Morade Aïssaoui looks back on the genesis of a tense, immersive and human film.

In N121a simple commuter bus trip turns upside down when three young people, caught up in their daily lives, find themselves involved in an incivility that degenerates. The film, shot almost entirely on a bus, appears as a nervous, immersive closed-door experience, where every gesture can derail the situation. More than a social thriller, N121 explores the mechanics of prejudice and how a series of micro-reactions can lead to tragedy.

For his first feature film, Morade Aïssaoui chooses a refined staging, stuck to the bodies, designed so that the spectator himself becomes a passenger. Ten years of maturation, filming carried out in a hurry, a cast of almost unknown young people: Aïssaoui tells how he shaped this film, tense, intimate and deeply anchored in reality.

N121 is a project that you have been carrying out for a long time. How was this desire for a first feature film born?
Morade Aissaoui: Yes, this project has actually existed for ten years. We signed him at the time with Sandra Karim and Julien Madon. We took the time to write, to adjust, because we knew that this film had to be precise. And then it was difficult to finance: a first feature, a running bus, thirteen actors permanently in the field, and a deliberately little-known cast. The success of Pax Massilia unblocked things, Carjackers followed, and N121 was able to leave.

When you say “millimetre”, are you talking about the scenario?
Yes. The main ideas were already there ten years ago. What has evolved are the nuances: the emotions, the intonations, the psychological trajectory of each character. We wanted something realistic, even if it remains a fable. And then I matured, I understood the real constraints of a budget. All this made my staging evolve towards something more contemporary.

The film is behind closed doors. Does that mean that you left a real place for the actors in the writing?
Yes, it was essential. At forty, we write dialogues for seventeen-year-olds: we can’t pretend to be them. I gave them a lot of freedom, as long as the meaning, the emotions and the subtext remained there.

However, the staging is very structured and very immersive. Was this immersion, with a very fluid camera, planned from the start?
Not totally. A strong idea arrived along the way: the camera had to be a passenger. If the characters are on the bus, the camera stays inside; if they come out, it comes out. But never these back and forths towards characters outside the stage. We called it, between us, “the aquarium effect”. I wanted total immersion.

When you talk about modern staging, what do you think of?
In the way of embodying the subject. Shall we put the camera down? Do we do long tracking shots? Very quickly the answer was: no. We only asked it twice, in the first and last scenes. The rest of the time, it’s on the shoulder, between the seats, in impossible positions. A documentary, journalistic style… but without sacrificing cinematic aesthetics.

That’s to say ?
I didn’t want a raw, flat documentary look. With Ludovic Zuli, the cinematographer, we composed each shot: optics, lighting, complete cutting of the film. We keep the impression of an on-board camera, but nothing is improvised – except for a few happy accidents.

You shot digitally, but with a rendering very close to film…
I never had the chance to shoot on film, but it’s my dream. Here it was impossible: too expensive, too heavy, not flexible enough. The filming was done in a form of collective emergency that the film would have broken. But today, certain cameras make it possible to approach an organic rendering close to film. We chose a very sensitive camera to manage the nights, and we completely reworked the bus light to give it realism, but cinematic realism: fake broken neon lights, cold areas, details in the dark…

The prologue, in which you introduce the main characters, is very long. It’s very surprising in an action film and it gives real density to your main trio…
I fought for this. You really get on the bus at the sixteenth or seventeenth minute. But for me, if you don’t like the three boys before you get into it, the film no longer works. We would choose a side, and I definitely didn’t want that.
And then I wanted to install the spectator in an imagination that he knows: the “city”, the codes of the neighborhood film. It’s voluntary. I feed the cliché to better distance myself from it afterwards. Even the music – a totally unknown Kazakh rapper – participates in this.

We think of Hate and the first Spike Lee, but this intro is precisely softer, more naturalistic.
Yes. In Spike Lee or Kassovitz, there is frontal anger. I come from Lower Normandy, from a small town. When I arrived near Paris, I found things in the city very similar to a village: everyone knows each other, helps each other, judges each other very quickly… I wanted to integrate this distance, this gentleness, into the film. I have always refused to judge others, because I have been judged a lot. It creates a form of optimism which, I believe, infuses the film.

Another thing struck me: on the bus, the characters never react the way you expect them to.
Because this is real life. We all prejudge, all the time. You see someone for a second, you decide who they are. The film plays with that: it shows how false our certainties are.
N121 was born from a real event, much less dramatic, but which already posed this question: how can simple incivility escalate into something serious? And how, in certain situations, especially when you are racialized or young, injustice is almost automatic. I have relatives who were handcuffed while trying to defend someone. It marks.

Between the authoritarian excesses of the United States (with the murders in Minneapolis for example) or the rise of violence in France, we have the feeling that your film falls into a burning context.
Yes, even if we are not the United States – and I hope we never become one. But some questions resonate. I even had an actor who turned down the film saying, “No, it’s too cliché, it wouldn’t happen.” » Two weeks later, the Nahel affair broke out. Sometimes reality goes beyond the cliché.

Official synopsis: Oscar, Simon and Aïssa, three childhood friends, go to Paris to celebrate good news. But on the night bus that takes them home, the N121, an exchange between passengers escalates and the situation gets out of hand.

By Morade Aissaoui. With: Riadh Belaïche, Bakary Diombera, Gaspard Gevin-Hié… The film has been in theaters since February 4.