ALOUETTE is my first short film. It’s a thriller, lasts about eight minutes, and was shot in August 2010 in my seventh-floor flat in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, with one actor (the very wonderful Madeleine Bongard) and a crew of one (me). We’d always planned to have more people help out, but this being August, in Paris, everyone who had offered to participate turned out to be out of town. But we went ahead and did it anyway.

The videocam packed up almost immediately, at which point I was ready to throw in the towel, but Madeleine refused to give up and bullied me (in the nicest possible way) into continuing. So we ended up shooting on a combination of my Canon Ixus camera and Sony Ericsson K800i and Madeleine’s Sony Ericsson W910i. Hence the variable quality. The sound recorded sur scène was unusable, so we dubbed in the dialogue and added sound effects afterwards (and our friend Charles popped in on his way to the railway station to sing the title song and provide some other sound effects), with results that are a little impressionistic – though not altogether unsuited to the story.