With Silence&Conversation, Isabelle Fauvel offers an alternative approach to film-project development, as a reaction to the growing industrialisation of training and the moulding of stories.

Cineuropa: After 32 years at the helm of Initiative Film, you chose to launch Silence&Conversation. What developments in the training programmes, workshops and labs available prompted you to offer a new approach?
Isabelle Fauvel: Initiative Film, which I founded back in 1993, has explored every facet of development over the years. In parallel, I was involved in a significant number of workshops and labs, which proved to be an incredible experience, and one which was complementary to my work as a consultant for producers and talents around the globe. Over time, however, I have witnessed a progression towards practices that I would define as increasingly “corporate”. Among these are team building and “compulsory topics” to tackle, even when it does not align with the nature of the selected projects. As I failed to see any real benefit contributed by these methods to the selected projects, I decided to step away from the spaces where they were enforced and remain only where I felt I could still steer clear of them.

It felt natural to think of different, alternative tools and approaches when I realised that while industry professionals and cinephiles alike mourn figures like David Lynch - and rightly so - very few labs or funding bodies nowadays would subsidise their scripts if the name of an emerging talent were attached to them. At best, the talents would be compelled to rewrite to fit the mould, and at worst, they would simply be left out.

You have highlighted the growing risk of talents and projects being shaped to fit a mould. What would you say are the most visible signs of such “formatting” in today’s film production scene, and how does Silence&Conversation intend to solve it?
The signs are fairly obvious. From a technical point of view, scripts are, in fact, better written, yielding more or less of their own accord to the same rules. Screenplays end up with a common grammar that often makes the stories predictable and blander, a standardised grammar that's especially unsuited to projects whose imaginary structures cannot adhere to these insistent, or even imposed, rules. At times, certain themes are excluded, traded off for more consensual ones.

It's not my place to claim that Silence&Conversation can fix an entire system - all the more so, since many are clearly happy with it. The intention here is rather to open up another avenue, to offer alternative paths, as a few initiatives already do. I believe the most important thing is to put directing, the mise-en-scène, back at the heart of the development process, to be at the service of a vision.

As much as I respect screenplays and screenwriting as a craft, these days, mise-en-scène is scarcely heard of, so overbearing is the obsession with the “perfect script”. It's a so-called perfection often evaluated in terms of the technicalities (readability, clarity, the empathy felt for the characters, etc), rather than wondering if the screenplay corresponds to what the directors actually need in order to birth the film they carry within them.

In a nutshell, I have had the feeling of late that we now support talents to meet the demand of the industry, rather than the organic needs of a project itself - and yet, the projects that give in to these new diktats do not appear to perform much better with audiences.

Why did you decide on the name Silence&Conversation for this new company?
Our contemporary world leaves little room for silence, yet silence, although it can be a little unsettling, is at the core of creation. We ought to listen to the inner voices of the talents before leaving each and every one to express what the talents could, or should, do. And the notion of conversation stands here as a counterpoint to the parasitic idle talk that saturates public spaces.

Silence&Conversation is the name of the first workshop I designed in response to the tyranny of opinion, the unbridled tendency towards interventionism, which so often creates a kind of cacophony, eventually swaying both content and modes of storytelling.

I have come up with four other workshops that are light, bespoke initiatives that can be set up almost anywhere. One revolves around cooking to feed the creative process, and another initiates connections between playwrights and screenwriters. We are still looking for venues and institutional partners to bring them to life. Marianne Khoury’s magical setting at the foot of the pyramids of Dahshur in Egypt should host the first Silence&Conversation-branded workshop at the end of the year.