It is not often you hear a director admit that he expects spectators of his new film to vocally express their displeasure.

“Is the film really going to be as bad as all that? ponders Michel Hazanavicius about the audience’s reaction to the first 30 minutes of his new film. During the Cannes festival press conference, he tried to explain the method to his madness. “I am aware that spectators watching those first 30 minutes might become critics dismissing this as a rotten movie. But then I like the idea that we give them this magic trick. The storyline changes, the perspective changes and you become critical about your own initial judgment. Then you think the film is amazing.”

But don’t rush to the conclusion that the Golden Globe and Oscar winner (for his 2011 film The Artist) has questionable faith in his new movie, Final Cut (Coupez!) In fact, he has so much confidence in the work that he bypassed its presentation for this year’s Sundance Film Festival when they had to pivot to a virtual scenario because of Covid. Hazanavicius knew his comedy needed an audience in a theater to fully experience the wild ride that the movie takes. And what better audience than the opening night of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

Based on Shin’ichiro Ueda’s 2017 Japanese film One Cut of the Dead, Final Cut opens as we watch the unfolding of a low-budget zombie movie being made in real-time. Bad acting, obsessive directing, rudimentary special effects, uneven camera work, and inane dialogue (the French actors all have Japanese names and make reference to events that have happened in Japan, not France.) One might question if even Quentin Tarantino would find any redemption in this genre piece. It is now totally logical how the director would testify to the audience’s potential grim reaction. But then comes the twist and for those who brave their patience to stay in their seats, the payoff is inspired insanity.

What we are watching is a movie being made about a movie getting made. As the clock rolls back a few weeks, we witness the arrival of a Japanese producer Mme Matsoda (Yoshiro Takehara), who seeks to hire a French director named Remi (Romain Duris) for her live telecast of a Japanese zombie movie, mainly due to the fact he can shoot cheap and fast.

With a cast that includes Raphael (Finnegan Oldfield), a temperamental young actor, Ava (Matilda Lutz), the emotionally challenged young ingénue, and Nadia (Bérénice Bejo), the director’s former actress wife who is now a Krav Maga trained make-up artist, Remi sets out to film this live event. But what we bear witness to is the cleverness of the film, the behind-the-scenes chaos that ensues during the live shoot.

Hazanavicius rehearsed his actors for several weeks to capture the choreography for the opening unedited sequence. “It’s like an act in a play,” he continues. “But this wasn’t a 2-minute take. It was a 30-minute one and if one person messed up after 27 minutes, everyone had to stop so that’s a lot of pressure on an actor.”

While it might appear simple to sell the film as a zombie movie, Hazanavicius believes that would be a mistake. “It is not the central subject of the film,” he attests. “It is just a line that runs through the film. The main story in the film is the team, a team that is overtaken by events as they are trying to work on this project. They want to succeed but it’s a total disaster.”

Luckily for him, for those audience members who stuck it out, the film is not.