It’s 2044 and society has found a nifty solution to stop human emotions from leading to conflict and lack of productivity: to eliminate them altogether. For those willing to conform to the rules of this frigid world, all it takes is to step into a bathtub full of a black goo reminiscent of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and take a disorienting trip through memory lane, purging the body and mind from recollections that might reignite strong emotions.

Bertrand Bonello’s adaptation of Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle is far from your conventional sci-fi. It follows the equally unconventional love story between Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay), two lovers who never were, doomed to find and lose each other in three different historical eras: in 1910 during the French Belle Époque, 2014 in the modern United States and the soulless future of 2044.

The Beast is a sprawling investigation of human connection and the threats that loom ever closer in a future where the artificial becomes the norm. Jaime emphasizes the anxiety-inducing quality of such musings: “If you ever wondered what a film about the experience of being terminally online would look like, Bertrand Bonello came up with maybe the scariest film anyone could ever make about it.” Muriel, on the other hand, remains hopeful, beautifully preaching that “if we’re able to inherit anything from another lifetime, let love be one of those things. If the future is doomed because of AI let us at least have something they don’t: love.” Douglas keeps things brief, handily labeling Bonello’s latest as “Tenet for gay people.”

The danger of artificial intelligence was present when I met the French filmmaker following the world premiere of The Beast. The director had just walked the glitzy Venice Film Festival red carpet without his stars due to the Hollywood strikes that were fighting for, amongst many other things, an industry with control over the expansion of AI. The strikes may have ended as his star-crossed epic arrives in cinemas in the US, but the conversation surrounding AI in Hollywood is only in its gestational phase. Below, Bonello talks about how technological frigidity thwarts creativity, the elusive nature of love and creating a sci-fi rooted in the earnest beauty of melodrama.

When we talk about the eradication of emotions, we are also talking about the death of creativity. How do you feel about technology becoming more and more prominent within filmmaking?
Technology is a tool, not a goal. At the moment, we’re not sure if it’s a tool or an entity. If it’s a tool, it’s great because you can do things you weren’t able to before. If you have a hammer, you can put a picture on the wall, but you can also kill someone—it’s about what you do with the tool. With a hammer, you’re the master of the tool, but with AI you don’t know who the master is. It’s like that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when David asks Hal to open the door, and they reply with “If I open the door, you’re going to turn me off.” That’s what’s happening—not a physical death, but a mental death, and today everybody’s scared of that.

How did you work with Léa and George on the physicality of the film, especially this idea of impotence turned violence that permeates the 2014 chapter?
The process was very different because they were very different. George is someone who needs to work in advance, so for two months before the shoot he kept sending me long emails full of questions about how I envisioned the character in each specific moment of the film, how I wanted the dialogue to sound like… When I arrived on set, 95 percent of the work was done. Léa doesn’t want to know anything. She doesn’t want to prepare. Sometimes she arrives on set and doesn’t even know what the scene is going to be.

The words you use while speaking to an actor in advance versus in the moment are very different. I don’t want my actors’ heads to be filled with new information on set, so it’s about finding the perfect word or gestures. Léa will sometimes ask me to play the scene for her. She believes me to be a good actor and thinks I know the character better than she does. I will do it, and she will imitate me. It’s something we’ve done a lot.

You originally envisioned a Frenchman for the role of Louis, but ended up casting George MacKay. How has the seesawing between languages affected the film?
I thought a lot about language and how speaking in your own language versus the language of the other affects your sense of security, and how sure you are of yourself. I am, of course, more precise in French than in English. George is very British when he talks, and he talks very fast, so sometimes it’s actually about slowing it all down to understand each other. On set, everyone was switching between French and English—it’s quite pleasant. Language is alive.

The production design took longer. I wanted to escape the direction of high technology and a post-apocalyptic look. We took stuff out of the world we have now instead of adding to it, like with the data centers—the ones we have now are so cluttered that ours became quite small. As for the bath, it was my set designer’s idea. All the machines we had in mind looked like scanners, and then my set designer thought about having it be a liquid, which quickly evolved to something that exists between liquid and solid. We ran tests for weeks to find the perfect texture for it.

Was there any part of the experimentation process you found particularly fun?
Figuring out the bath was really fun, but it was a little scary because when you are making a science-fiction film that doesn’t cost dozens of millions of dollars, you are always a bit scared the visuals are going to look cheap. Another thing that was really fun was having Paris without any cars and figuring out the sounds of that time. We scanned animal sounds and pure nature sounds. I’m not just concerned with the images; I’m also concerned with the sound landscape.

As an artist, do you ever go through moments of hopelessness about the future of your art?
Yes, sometimes I lose a little hope. It’s getting more and more difficult to finance films, and if I was to start the finance for The Beast today I wouldn’t be able to make the film. I began financing for it in 2020, but I wouldn’t be able to today. Of course, the gap between the successes and failures of film is getting bigger and bigger and I think there is a loss of curiosity in spectators.

That’s why festivals are so important and are becoming more and more important. We are going through a huge mutation of cinema and it’s impossible to know where this mutation will drive us in even five years. Are streaming platforms going to eat everyone or are they going to crash? The current state of film is becoming more important than films themselves. But maybe it’s just a period.

How do you find the hope to keep on going?
By dreaming. Daydreaming. I love making films. The set is the place where I feel best, where I am protected from the real world, which I fear deeply. So I still have the desire to make films. When you close your eyes and dream of an image, you find the strength to keep going because you want these images to exist in the world. When I lose faith, I go back to these desires.

Has the reaction to The Beast appeased some of those anxious feelings?
I was so, so, so nervous during the first screenings because I worked so hard. Especially with a film like this, which is quite special, I wondered if people were going to receive it in a good way. I was so happy in Venice because, from what I read, people understood the film. The articles that came out were not only positive but they were interesting, too, as if the film pushes the critics to write interesting things, to think, and to go beyond analyzing just the story and the format. This is very pleasant for me.

Since we are talking about the lines that unite art and emotion, has any piece of art moved you lately?
I just finished a book that really moved me. It’s called Karoo by Steve Tesich. It was written in the ’90s, and the author died just before it was published. A very heartbreaking book.