You might not expect a movie centered on a refugee crisis to be a comedy, but that’s the case with “Meet the Barbarians.” That said, director Julie Delpy worked to make sure she balanced the comedic tone with proper respect for the subject matter.
The film centers on a town in France that agrees to take in refugees from Ukraine — ironically, this script was already written before Russia’s war with Ukraine began — only to be visibly upset when it turns out that said refugees are actually Syrian.
In crafting the story, Delpy wanted to “reflect on our own inability to empathize,” while still keeping a comedic element. According to the director, who stopped by TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design, it took quite a while to get it just right.
“We worked many years on finding the right tone, in bringing in the moving moments, like the scenes where they’re showing what they’ve been through,” Delpy explained. “You don’t want to show too much, because then you go into a state of drama that you can’t go back to comedy ever again.”
“You know, if you show people dying under a bomb, it’s very hard to come back from that, even though, I guess a lot of people are used to seeing that without really flinching,” she continued.
More than anything, Delpy wanted to make sure that she was making fun of the right people in this scenario, noting that “the very last thing I want to do on this planet” is to make fun of refugees or make light of their situation.
“The final decision is really made in the editing room. It’s like, how much do we show, how much do we have her cry?” Delpy detailed. “How much do we see, and not see, to their tragedy, really?”
She concluded, “You have to find the right dosage.”
You can watch TheWrap’s full interview with Julie Delpy in the video above.
