Théo Jollet's Meet Doug is now showing exclusively on MUBI starting July 12, 2023, in the series Brief Encounters.
I've always been fascinated by the spaces where I grew up, wedged between the average town and the countryside. I spent my teenage years around municipal football pitches, snack bars and other multi-purpose halls. The way that these human traces, concreted and poorly maintained, come in direct contact with forests, rivers, and peat bogs, all form the ground that nurtures the imagination of my films.
Later on, I met Martin Maire and Thomas Trichet, with whom I still work actively on a number of projects, including Meet Doug. Together we discovered works such as Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher trilogy, and shows such as The Wire by David Simon and Ed Burns, or The Sopranos by David Chase. These early inspirations gave rise to Doug, a young loser, delinquent through petty crime, initially in the form of drawings and comic strips. He reminded me of some individuals who gravitated to these in-between spaces that inspire me so much. He also represented an opportunity to create a work that would relocate the figure of the French thug from the Parisian suburbs to the countryside while working on a vernacular universe. Doug belongs both to a young generation with very specific codes and to the category of gangster characters, both of which are often portrayed in a binary way in French cinema. Indeed, the thug characters generally belong to dramatic intrigues implying a lot of violence, and rare are the mainstream films that seriously consider young people's language, culture, and humor. Meet Doug was made to represent these aspects as we have been perceiving, living, and witnessing them, through characters who are flawed, but profoundly creative, smart, and funny.
In 2018, in the middle of the process of writing the film, I was an exchange student in Cincinnati, in the United States. While there, I discovered a branch of rap that I had never heard of before, which my friends defined in their own way as “crimewave”: a genre based on horrific universes, using musical samples from Z series, video games, or midnight movies. I then had the idea of giving the film a musical direction by casting rappers. This opened the door to many ideas and themes. Indeed, Meet Doug is indissociable from slang that is directly connected to rap. The mystical and supernatural aspect of these influences also guided us towards the creation of the character of Alukah, who upsets the strong and sometimes misogynistic male personalities of the film. A synthesis of both their fantasies and their fears, Alukah allows us to invert the symbolism surrounding the rapper, who is frequently portrayed as all-powerful in music videos. The reactions to this encounter allowed us to develop our characters and their ambivalent feelings and attitudes towards Alukah, but also towards their very own group of friends.
Finally, Meet Doug was first and foremost a fantastic collective adventure. We worked through an original writing process in collaboration with young artists from the French contemporary music scene: VVS Babyface, Buzz, Kiala Ogawa, and OGRask (all the songs from the soundtrack can be found on the film's mixtape, available on Spotify). We also worked organically on set, starting from a script while embracing new ideas, allowing us to mix documentary systems and improvisations. It was this joy, combined with the freedom of a universe without frontiers, that guided us to create this facetious little world—which we hope you will enjoy!
