Pussy Boo

Loving grandparents Paulette and Roger struggle to find the perfect birthday gift. But when Paulette’s and Roger’s ears meet their grand daughter’s favourite rapper...

In Depth with the Director - Remi Parisse

Tell us a little about yourself and your background in filmmaking
Hi, my name is Rémi Parisse, I'm 34 and I live in France. In 2008, I began to work as a 3D animator for small studios in Paris. Then I worked for 5 years on bigger projects such as Despicable Me 2, Minions, The Secret Life of Pets, Sing... at Illumination Mac guff, a well known animation studio in Paris. This period on big animation feature films was a valuable experience for me to learn how to tell stories. So I wanted to make my own projects, and in 2015 I began to make music videos and small projects in live action. Animation is a very long process and you often need a team with specialised artists. That's why I began with live action with a small setup. I needed to experiment by myself and to see the result quickly.

How did Pussy Boo first come together as a project?
The starting point of this project was a short film contest with a theme : Generation. I was listening to Kanye West very loud in my car, singing a lot of F*** words, and M*****F****** words, and suddenly I was questioning myself as to what I was actually saying. Rap lyrics appeared to me as an interesting topic. I needed a cool situation with conflict and contrast. My grandma was a good embroiderer. When I was teenager she used to make me T-shirts with metal bands' names embroidered on themm. Of course she had no idea what she was doing. I mixed those two ideas to write this scenario. I pitched it to my friend Thomas Bouvard, production director, he loved it and helped me to produce it.

You had to create the persona of an over the top vulgar female rapper, and you even went as far as to shoot a full music video for her. How did you create the character of Pussy Boo?
I needed to find a real English speaking rapper to have a credible and fiery character. Tracy de Sa, who is a real rapper living in France accepted to play this role, and we built this character together. The main idea was that it’s socially accepted that male rappers talk crudely about sex and women, so what about female rappers ? Let's be hardcore! Tracy recognizes herself in Pussy Boo's feminist values and was ok to push the limit that far and to be really provocative. The idea of making the full music video came from Thomas Bouvard. We had to shoot a part of the music video for the short film, so why not shoot the full version, just in case people look for it on the internet.

There is an incredible amount of heart and emotion painted into just a few short minutes. What were the challenges in fitting your story into such a tight run time?
Thank you very much. Indeed, I had to elaborate the script with a lot of ellipses in order to set the story quickly. The film could not exceed 3 minutes, so the staging had to be minimalist and clear. That's why I've chosen to keep the same framing for the 3 birthday scenes. I think it's helping the audience to quickly understand what it is going on because of the repetition. Another difficulty was to understand that the girl, Emilie, is growing old. She doesn't move a lot, and almost never talks, so we had to be precise with her body language, her hair, makeup and costumes.

The film deals with misunderstanding between generations of people. Why do you think so many people connect with this theme?
Maybe because a lot of people deal with it in their everyday life. No matter how old you are, you have to interact with younger or older people around you, it automatically creates conflict... Language, food, music, hobbies, politics, tastes in everything. Time flies and everything is moving fast. Sorry I'm pushing at open doors (laughs).

What projects are coming for you in the future?
I'm writing a new short comedy in live action. I'm also developing a visual art film about rap in 3D animation.

Do you have any message for our Melbourne audience?
We had a lot of fun making this film, I hope they will like it and connect with my characters. This is the first time that Pussy Boo is shown in Australia, thanks to the Pigdon Street International Film Festival for giving us this opportunity.