"I've wanted to make this film for years, but I felt I needed to be more mature and more experienced," she said when TT met her during the Cannes Film Festival in 2025.
Her first feature film, "Raw," depicted a young girl who developed a taste for human flesh. "Titane" was about a woman who had sex with a car and the consequences. In "Alpha," we meet 13-year-old Alpha who gets a tattoo that leads to her contracting a virus that slowly turns her body into marble.
More body horror
Time for some more body horror - it's not surprising that Julia Ducournau feels a kinship with body horror king David Cronenberg.
"I've had the good fortune to meet him many times. I don't know if I am, as he has said, his spiritual daughter. But there's something there when we meet. Our brains definitely work the same way."
Alpha lives with her single mother, which is important to the film.
"It's one thing to talk about liberation from a father. But it's something completely different when we talk about liberation from a mother. Then we're talking about tearing yourself away from the body you came from, from the symbiotic fusion," said Julia Ducournau.
"Too boring"
The subject was so tough for her that she didn't think she would be able to make the film until she was 60 or 70.
"Then circumstances made me shoot it now. I wrote another film, but it was too comfortable and too boring. So I threw everything away and started with 'Alpha.'"
She believes that the big difference from the two previous films is that "Alpha" contains more dialogue.
"It was awful, not only writing the dialogue but also directing those scenes. It requires different skills; I had done it a little before but not this much."
Commentary on the epidemic
Alpha is played by newcomer Mélissa Boros, her mother by Golshifteh Farahani, and her drug-addicted uncle by Tahar Rahim. The film is set in the 1980s, and many have interpreted the virus as a commentary on the AIDS epidemic.
"Epidemics happen in all generations. Now we are giving our children a world that is destroyed; epidemics are part of that. Although I am not bringing a message, I am just showing what I feel and how I personally see it."
Age: 42 years.
Family: Boyfriend.
Lives: In Paris.
Occupation: Screenwriter, director.
Previous films in selection: "Raw", "Titane".
Current: With "Alpha" which has its Swedish cinema premiere on April 24.
