Dream On

Yann Gonzalez's debut feature, You & The Night, took its original French title – which translates as Encounters After Midnight – from an unpublished novel by Mireille Havet, the queer-writer-cum-opiate-addict who kept a dream-riddled diary in the 1920s. It's unashamedly about “the night: dreams, nightmares, fantasies, sex.”

Gonzalez is happy to hear its nocturnal, dreamlike tone compared to Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives. “I think [that]'s a masterpiece!” he says, excitedly. “I don't care about the story, to me it's a nightmare and you're just plunging, lost, into this nightmare.”

But where Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling descend into a macho, castration-anxiety nightmare, You & The Night inhabits a queer-friendly space, with its dreamlike airs flights-of-fantasy. It finds Kate Moran, Niels Schneider and Nicolas Maury hosting an orgy whose guests include Alain Fabien Delon, Béatrice Dalle and Eric Cantona. Often hilarious – it's billed as a 'French sex comedy' online – it's just as emotionally overdriven.

“My main goal as a filmmaker is to get the viewer to cry. There's no irony at all. I was never afraid of being too soap-operatic, or melodramatic, because for me that's a way for you to get close to the characters.”

At times, his use of melodrama to anchor the surreal is reminiscent of David Lynch or Guy Maddin, but Gonzalez sees his film as being less stylised, much more sincere. An obvious film nerd, inspired by everything from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to Lucile Hadzihalilovic's dreamlike vision, Innocence, his film a mish-mash of cinematic surrealism, '80s erotic thriller, Italian gialli and rock-opera that resembles none of the above. “I'm in love with genre, but my film is not a genre film. I like directors that play with artifice, with things that look fake, and little by little you start to distrust this fakeness. I like the power of a film that can make you believe in the fake.”

Eloquent and effusive, Gonzalez offers that he likes “to talk about the film in a musical way; there's something very musical in the language.” Fittingly, his film finds pride of place for pop songs from Hype Williams and Molly Nilsson, the dramatic device of a 'sensory jukebox' (which plays tunes inspired by your emotional state) and features an awesome epic-synth score from M83, led by his brother Anthony. “I always had him in mind. And because he's my brother, he was the cheapest option.”

It makes You & The Night a film that sounds as good as it looks. “Music is such an important part of the cinematic process for me. I'm not scared of being too melodramatic or over-the-top with music, just like I'm not scared with being too melodramatic or over-the-top with the drama. There are many films today in France that seem to be scared of emotion, and I hate that.”