Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu dors Nicole first played in New York City at New Directors New Films, and it felt like a breath of fresh air. The vibrant film stars Julianne Côté as the title character, an insomniac young woman caught in a limbo between adulthood and adolescence, she works at a thrift store where she steals the clothes she likes, thinking that if someone else donated them, they are pretty much free anyway. Her best friend Véronique (Catherine St-Laurent) works for a lawyer and can’t always find the time to spend with her, which leaves Nicole up to her own devices.

Tu dors Nicole takes place during the summer, which makes for a setting that we might think we’re familiar with, yet nothing about the film plays out like you’d expect. It’s laden with rich details, it’s humorous yet compassionate, and profoundly simple, as if The 400 Blows had starred a twenty-something woman instead of a rebellious boy. We had the opportunity to talk to Lafleur on the eve of the film’s theatrical release.

I loved the energy of the film and I really liked the fact that each and every single shot was building up to what we would see next. You also include “silences” in which you fade the screen to black, so with you being a musician as well, I wondered how much did your musical training influence the film’s editing.

Good question. I’ve been working with the same editor (Sophie Leblond) for the past three films and she is also my friend, so we have developed a really close relationship. It’s true though, I work in a strange pace when I do films, as you noticed I’m not interested in storytelling but in atmosphere and mood and poetry, so I try to build my films like that. I’d say out of all my films this is certainly the one in which the final cut was closest to the script, but we moved many things around during the process.

The composition of each shot was exquisite. Do you storyboard as well?

Yeah, same thing with my cinematographer (Sara Mishara), we’ve been working together for the past three films, in fact all of my crew is the same. The way I work is, when I write the script I visualize the film in my head, so I storyboard the entire film, but I know exactly how I want it to look.

The movie is set in the summer and I feel that historically it’s been tougher to convey warm weather in black and white…

(Laughs)

...I mean all the “really hot” movies like Do the Right Thing are really colorful. Tu dors Nicole made me think of To Kill a Mockingbird which also unfolds in a very warm place. Did you think black and white would make it harder to convey the heat?

(Laughs) When I wrote the film it was in color in my head, but then Sara showed me Summer Nights, Walking, a book of photographs by Robert Adams, and those pictures conveyed the mood of Nicole being insomniac and walking at night. The idea of shooting in black and white, and making a film that would feel timeless - you don’t really know when it takes place - came from those pictures. Mr. Adams’ work really inspired us. Obviously I like to control everything in the frame, so it was easier to control everything in black and white, especially because in the summer there is so much color everywhere. We didn’t want to do the classic summer movie with saturated colors, so this was a challenge. Editing the film we realized that the sound design would also be important in telling us about the weather.

Right, many scenes carry over sounds from the previous scene.

Exactly.

Nighttime scenes have a very classic mood to them, like B horror movies in a way. Were you thinking about those films at all?

You know the scene with Martin (Godefroy Reding) carrying a flashlight while Nicole watches a sci-fi movie on TV? I was thinking more about Spielberg. I grew up with films like E.T. and other sci-fi movies, so it’s my homage to them. I also get to do those kinds of films indirectly (laughs)

I loved Martin. How did you develop that character? Who did his voice for instance?

When I was writing the script I knew I wanted a character who would be the opposite of Nicole in terms of his views on life, love and his worldview in general. He was going to be a very mature character. And I also like putting a little sci-fi element in my films, and I remembered this strange moment when I was in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art and I heard this very deep voice only to look around and it was a kid, his voice had changed but his body hadn’t so it made me laugh a lot.  We knew that we wanted to dub Martin, but we had a very hard time finding the right voice. We tried many voices for Martin including actual teenagers but in the end a good friend of mine called Alexis Lefebvre, who is also an actor and does a lot of dubbing for work, ended up doing it.

In both Familiar Grounds and Tu dors Nicole you center on platonic couples whose relationships are shaken by the arrival of strangers. In Grounds it’s an alien, and in Nicole a band. What fascinates you about this kind of structure?

I guess for some reason my three films have been about aimless characters, I don’t know why (laughs) I don’t have any input on that, but it’s what I’ve been doing, to put these ordinary characters in situations that are bigger than them, it’s a fun relationship between the film and the audience in a way. I think that the reason why we go to see films is to make the little part of our brain that is using imagination, so I like using elements that aren’t really possible, but you can use them in films.

The best way I found to describe the movie to people was that it was like Amélie meets Frances Ha. Do people bring up those films too often when discussing Nicole?

Believe it or not I saw Frances Ha two weeks before shooting my movie. The script was written, the idea of shooting in black and white was there and I went see this movie when it opened in Montreal and I was just screaming (laughs). It’s the second time it happens with Noah Baumbach too! In Familiar Grounds there was an inflatable blue thing in my film and he used one in Greenberg too, so if you can get me in touch with Noah let me know. I’d like to ask what he’s working on so I won’t do it again (laughs).

Tu dors Nicole is now playing in theaters.