Interview with Guil Sela, No Skate! director

What were you up to during the Paris Olympic Games? Far from the grand and widely publicized events, Isaac and Cleo do their best to promote swimming in the Seine. They wander through the Parisian crowd, slaloming between various tones, ranging from warm romantic comedy to absurd slapstick. Winner of the 2024 edition with Montsouris, Guil Sera and his two wonderful actors create an irresistible improvised board game adventure, improvised and filmed with a hidden camera, following one single motto: absolutely no skateboards! 

Interview with Guil Sela 

Filming the Olympic Games… from afar 

Paris has been photographed and filmed so many times that it is tricky to tell something new. That’s perhaps why I was excited at the idea of having the Olympics here, it finally made me see my city in a new light. It is important for me to leave space for the audience, not to decide what they should look at or not (which is why I hate blurred backgrounds). Positioning myself at a distance from the action and shooting with a long lens places the audience in the role of witnesses, gathering whatever they can from the situation. I believe it is the way people observe life. 

Improvised dialogues

I was lucky to work on this film with two amazing, funny, and generous actors. When I had doubts about this new film - less formal, harder to make than Montsouris - I would find refuge in working with actors. In my short experience, I have always found that a script sounds false and imprecise when simply placed into the mouth of actors. We have improvised a lot during rehearsals because I believe instinct writes better dialogues than reason. Then, I decided to shoot the film with a digital camera to enable the actors to improvise during the shoot. It is the first time in one of my films that so many improvised moments made it through the ruthless editing process. There are moments I love that I wouldn’t have dared - or been stupid enough - to write. We also used earpieces for some scenes, especially the one where the protagonist works among the crowd. 

A comedy with political subtext

The Paris Olympics found themselves at the center of many political debates, which left me feeling  torn, because I have been passionate about sports since childhood, but I cannot deny the harmful aspects of the Paris Olympics: the environmental impact, the displacement of homeless people during the games, and even more unexpected issues that the general public does not necessarily think about, like the one I chose to address through comedy: the replacement of karate with skateboarding. I wanted the political context to linger at the edges of the story - in the graffiti, the anti-Olympic posters our production designer scattered here and there, and the sandwich-board jobs  - men and women hired by city hall to propose this absurd political promise of swimming in the Seine - and the small (but oh so deeply felt) and so Parisian grumblings that open the film.  

And what about skateboarding in all this? 

I must admit that I am growing more and more fond of the sport. I admire skaters - they spend their days falling down, and their childhood outdoors, talking to everyone. Honestly, I think I would have loved to be a skater.