It all comes from one image, stuck in my mind for nearly 20 years : Aurora and her long blonde hair, the pure Princess of Disney's Sleeping Beauty, pricking her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel. Transformed, doomed, getting "dirty" all of a sudden.
Mysterious, scary, but fascinating.
That's when PINK ZONE began.
It stuck with me for quite a time as I was going through (myself) this awkward, weird, chaotic time called teenage years, hearing the same dark and gloomy stories from the girls of my age, over and over again. I listened.
On march 2013, when I had to start working on my UCLA thesis film, I knew it had to be a teen movie. I immediately thought of a high-concept movie : "What if boys could kill girls with a kissing virus ?".
Very 1980's. I had found my aesthetic.
I immediately thought of John Hughes' movies, of Molly Ringwald and Emilio Estevez in The Breakfast Club, of young men and women stuck in a social and emotional no man's land. A place where teenagers have to please the community by conforming to an archetype. I realized I had to show these archetypes in their rawest form and, maybe, try to bend them.
As the characters became more and more alive, I knew I needed to go further with them. The transformation would only be complete if the girls could get rid of the boys. Which meant PINK ZONE would also become a female vigilante movie.
PINK ZONE had to be punk and pop and the sci-fi genre would allow me to capture what these girls go through on a daily basis, trying not to judge them. Emily, the Princess, the brat, changes so much. She has to lose everything to become an agent of change.
This movie is about the transformation of a Princess into a Witch, killer of men.
And then, I finally understood what the PINK ZONE was : a place, a state of mind, a prison. But a prison with no frontier. Where everything hurts but nothing matters.
At the end of the day, we all wake up, asking ourselves "How did I get here ?".
