Producer Matěj Chlupáček on “Living Large”

Before Annecy, we caught up with producer Matěj Chlupáček, who talked us through the making of Living Large, Kristina Dufková’s coming-of-age feature premiering in the Contrechamp strand of the gathering.

The story follows 12-year-old Ben, a budding chef from a divorced family, who struggles with obesity. Motivated by his crush on Klara and supported by his family and his friend Erik, he starts a diet, ultimately regaining his zest for life and mending his friendships.

How did the idea come about?

Our director came up with the idea to adapt Mikaël Ollivier’s La vie, en gros after reading it to her young daughter back in the days. Her daughter is now 21 and the film is finally done, after 12 years in the making. For us, it’s a universal story of friendship and self-acceptance, which also depicts themes that are becoming prominent today, such as obesity and finding a healthy lifestyle.

What challenges did you face?

Crafting the puppets and their ‘magnetic’ mouths was surely one of the challenges we faced, as Kristina insisted on having a perfect lip-sync and delivering the right emotions with each character. We also struggled with money, as our film was made on a €2.5 million budget, so planning the whole shooting schedule and stick to the resources we had was very hard, yet possible. In this sense, I must acknowledge the great efforts put by my line producer Jiří Holan and unit manager Lenka Dvořáková.

How did you split tasks with your co-producers?

It was developed and shot here in the Czech Republic with Slovak talents boarding the project. In France, we were creating all the 2D animation, Ben’s inner world. The French co-producer also provided one of the top animators. We handled sound post-production in the Czech Republic and visual post-production in Slovakia. But apart from the technical split [and deciding] where to do what, Kristina and the three of us producing spoke ‘equally’ about creative aspects.