"Trafalgar," shot between Paris and London," marks the feature debut of producer-actor Liam Hellmann, who stars in the film opposite Fanny Ardant, Élodie Bouchez, Danny Huston and Stacy Martin. 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.
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. 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. 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. He recalls meeting Huston over lunch in London and asking him about his relationship with his father. Hellmann met several times with Bouchez, who plays his mother, to develop their on-screen relationship.
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. 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.
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