Fanny Ardant, Danny Huston Star in 'Trafalgar,' a 12-Day Shoot with No Script

Actor-producer Liam Hellmann shot his feature directorial debut "Trafalgar" in 12 days, with no conventional screenplay and a €1.3 million budget. The film, now in post-production, stars Fanny Ardant, Élodie Bouchez, Danny Huston and Stacy Martin.

Hellmann reteams here with producer Charles Benoin, his partner on "Only What We Carry," the indie drama starring Quentin Tarantino that premiered at Tribeca and screened last month at the Deauville American Film Festival, with cast members Simon Pegg and Sofia Boutella in attendance.

Instead of a finished script, the actors worked from a seven-page outline, drawing on their own family experiences to shape dialogue and characters.

What is the story?

Inspired by Hellmann's own family, "Trafalgar" follows a young man raised in a household dominated by women who sets out to find the father he has never known. The reunion takes an unexpected turn: he must settle his father's debts, forcing him to raise €80,000 in one week. His dysfunctional family rallies to help — and eventually plots a robbery.

The cast breakdown:

• Fanny Ardant plays the grandmother
• Élodie Bouchez plays the mother
• Stacy Martin plays the sister
• Danny Huston plays the estranged father
• Lou Lampros plays the girlfriend
• Khaled Alouach plays the best friend

How did a first-time director land this cast?

Benoin, producing via his company Atlas Pictures, met Hellmann six years ago and watched the project take shape as something "very personal and close to Liam's real life and his family situation." He saw the odds clearly: "At 21, regardless of where you come from, there was almost no chance of getting a film like this made as a directorial debut." The success of "Only What We Carry" changed that. "I told Liam, 'We can do it!'" Benoin says.

Hellmann says he wrote roughly 60 versions of the screenplay before abandoning a conventional script altogether. He settled on a four-page outline "built around situations and ideas," which grew to seven pages after he met with the actors and asked them to share stories about their own families.

"We all have slightly crazy families. Every actor came in with things from their own family and added them to the film," Hellmann says.

That method doubled as a casting tool. "By letting everyone bring something personal, we managed to attract all these actors," Hellmann explains. He recalls a lunch in London with Huston, where he asked about his relationship with his father. "He told me anecdotes that he eventually ended up telling in the film."

The character work ran deep. Hellmann met several times with Bouchez, who plays his mother, before cameras rolled. "Liam sat down with Élodie like four times before filming. He asked her, 'How do you see your relationship with your son?' The idea was to create something halfway between what Élodie wanted to communicate as a mother and what Liam wanted to communicate as a son," Benoin says.

Benoin cites the Coen brothers, Pedro Almodóvar and Cédric Klapisch as inspirations for the film's depiction of family dynamics. "With 'Trafalgar,' Liam really wanted to push the actors out of their comfort zones," he says.

Who paid for it — and what does that change?

The financing model breaks with French convention, which typically blends broadcaster investment, distributor advances and public subsidies. Instead, "Trafalgar" was financed primarily through private investment, alongside French tax-credit support, from "entrepreneurs from outside the film industry looking to diversify into cinema and support emerging filmmakers."

The pair had already tested this approach on "Only What We Carry," and Benoin says it gave them flexibility and speed — a decisive advantage for securing the cast. "If we'd told Tarantino or Gainsbourg to come back in seven months, they might not have been able to block out six days," he says. "The urgency is part of what attracts the actors. Either they want to be part of making the film happen, or they don't."

The unconventional money didn't scare off traditional distribution. Jérôme Hilal's French company Zinc boarded the film before the full cast was assembled and will release it in French theaters.

Executive producers include Alan Ganansia, Théodoros Ornithopoulos, Alain Heinz, Vivianne Vidal de la Blache, Delphine de Causans, Gaspard Madec, Manuel Millet and Orama. French, British and Italian crews worked on the production, with Italian cinematographer Vladan Radovic, camera operator Leonardo Kurtz and costume designer Fabienne Menguy in key roles.

For Hellmann, the film is also a response to what he sees as an increasingly standardized filmmaking landscape. "I think there are a lot of films that look alike today, with the same structures because everyone knows exactly how everything works," he says. "With this film, we accepted from the beginning that we had no control because there was no script. It's about a dysfunctional family, and the film itself is dysfunctional."