“I am both a doctor and a filmmaker. I learned both jobs in parallel: for medicine, I followed the traditional academic route and for cinema, I learned on the job. For a long time, I kept each one very separate from the other, whereas in fact they have quite a lot in common, team work and the collaboration with a wide range of specialists being just two similarities. Hippocrates however focuses on their main difference: the weight of the responsibility borne by doctors, this perpetual feeling of doubt, the loss of a certain carefree attitude that it entails.
I wanted to step away from the clichés of hospital life circulated by TV series and that have seeped into the collective consciousness. One of the things I did was to focus more on the actual workers than on the place of work itself, without betraying the realities of the hospital itself. I aimed to be quite realistic, but also include a certain Romanesque feel. This can only really work if the environment it unfolds in is credible in its most intricate detail: so for the slightest injection shown on screen, I wanted the exact needle to be used. But for all that, it is not a documentary; as a filmmaker I aim to entertain, without slipping into the usual medical thriller template.
Hospitals nowadays don't always look ultra-modern: some are disused, abandoned. The bigwigs are now civil servants who, without being penniless, still earn far less than private practitioners: 30 to 40% of doctors are foreign, and come from countries outside the EU, they are poorly paid and live precariously. I wanted to convey all this without making it too academic, this isn't a political pamphlet.”
Interview by Alex Masson
