High Spirits and Standards with Fleur & Manu

Inspired more by Japanese anime and the films of Miyazaki than the lumbering VFX giants of Hollywood, their groundbreaking trilogy of videos for M83 have put French duo Fleur & Manu ahead of the pack when it comes to creatively visualising music. Since then, they’ve been wooed by Hollywood and made award-winning spots for INPES, Renault and Lacoste. David Knight meets two self-styled masters of the imagination.

Fleur & Manu have high standards. When it comes to directing, the purity of the image – and the emotion it inspires – is all-important. After all, they are successful ex-art directors who won a D&AD with their first ever commercial, went on to make a succession of acclaimed music videos and ads, and habitually employ superlative post production effects to make their ideas come to life.

So they are not too impressed when your correspondent casually likens the special children in their hugely successful trilogy of music videos for French electro-pop band M83 to the X-Men, just because (like the X-Men) Fleur & Manu’s kids practice telekinesis in a special school and can move large objects with the power of their minds. The directors have a rather more eclectic, and frankly more interesting frame of reference than a bunch of Marvel-cum-Hollywood characters. “Village of the Damned, Akira, Princess Mononoke…” reels off Fleur. “We wanted to do it more like a Japanese way – more spiritual. It’s less about the effects and the huge machines.”

“X-Men is more about the genetics, about science,” continues Manu. “What we are trying to develop with M83 is more like a Shaolin spirit. The name of the M83 album [Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming] was really important – the starting point to creating something.”

Subscribers to shots.net can read the full interview here or in the new issue of shots magazine, issue 144. To subscribe to shots click here.