Only at Dawn

Céline Roux is difficult to schedule and easy to find. She works in the hour after first light, and only then, which means her call sheets read like tide tables. We met at five in the morning on a theatre roof in Marseille, where she was shooting the last pickup of her fourth feature, Meridian, and watched the sky do the thing that her films are famous for.

Pakistan Actors: You have said the first hour of daylight is the only honest light. What does that mean?

The light at dawn has not decided anything yet. By ten in the morning it has opinions. It is bright, it is hard, it tells you where to stand. At dawn it is still asking questions. You put an actor in it and you can see them think.

Pakistan Actors: Does that make life difficult? Crews, permits, actors.

Yes. Everybody hates it and then they see the footage and they forgive me. The budget person forgives me last, usually after the festival.

Pakistan Actors: Meridian is your first film with almost no dialogue in the first act. Was that a reaction to anything?

It was a reaction to my own habits. I write dialogue the way some people eat: quickly, and to feel better. This time I wanted to see how long I could keep a room together with faces and weather. It turns out you can keep it a long time. Audiences are far more patient than the industry believes. What they cannot forgive is being lied to.

Pakistan Actors: You have never used a second unit.

A second unit is a confession that some of your film does not need you. If a scene does not need me, why does it need to be in the film? I would rather lose the scene. This is why I am expensive to employ and why the films are short.

Pakistan Actors: Your films are also famously quiet. Almost no score.

Music tells the audience what to feel about the time they just spent. I want them to decide. If they leave the theatre feeling nothing, at least the feeling is theirs and it is true. That is the contract.

Pakistan Actors: What do you want an audience to carry out of Meridian?

One image, maybe two. Not the plot. Nobody remembers plots. They remember a woman on a roof at the wrong hour of the morning, and they do not know why it stayed with them. That is the whole job, to make an image that outlives its explanation.

Meridian opens the festival circuit this autumn. Roux is already scouting for a film about rivers, which she says will require her to shoot at night, and which she is dreading.