When she was preparing her documentary Fire Of Love (which opens in theatrically the UK on July 29), Sara Dosa took inspiration from François Truffaut’s New Wave classic Jules et Jim. Her film is also about a love triangle, the passion French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft felt for each other – and their romantic obsession with volcanoes themselves. The film world-premiered in US Doc Competition at Sundance 2022.
The director came to documentary not through film school but having studied Cultural Anthropology, and she believes her academic background also influenced the way she approached Fire Of Love.
“I still very much love anthropology and it does very much guide my filmmaking practice,” Dosa reflects. “I’m endlessly fascinated by how humans make meaning of the natural world…that very much guides my approach to finding the stories I want to tell as a filmmaker.”
In particular, Dosa is intrigued by how humans look for meaning in nature. “Fire Of Love is about volcanoes but I do really think it is about relationships. It’s about power. For myself and my filmmaking team, it was so important to find a way of representing volcanoes that felt so alive…not necessarily through the lens of science but [that] can speak more to these cultural tropes that imbue volcanoes with a mythical quality.”
In making the documentary, whose world rights are handled by National Geographic Documentary Films, Dosa was able to draw on the fiery, mind-blowing footage of volcanoes shot by Katia and Maurice, often in the most perilous circumstances imaginable.
It helped, too, that they were such a glamorous couple with a very Gallic sense of style. Maurice smoked a pipe. Katia had an elfin quality. They’re the type of characters you could easily imagine turning up in a Wes Anderson film like The French Dispatch.
Dosa speaks admiringly of the trend among French explorers of the 60s and 70s (including Jacques Cousteau) to dress in natty outfits. “I do think they were very savvy in understanding that what they were doing was unique. They did set themselves apart in this way, how they dressed,” the director says, adding, “[but] they were incredibly practical. They only carried what they absolutely needed.”
Given that they carried around 14 different cases of equipment on a typical trip to a volcano, the couple had limited space for personal outfits. And not all of their clothes were stylish. Close to the volcanoes, they’d often wear “very clunky” aluminium suits.
Dosa first learned about Daria and Maurice when she was researching her previous film The Seer & The Unseen (2019), which was shot in Iceland.
“The more we learned about them, the more we fell in love with them,” Dosa recalls.
By chance, at a workshop, she met British volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, who had featured in legendary German director Werner Herzog’s 2016 documentary Into The Inferno (which also included references to Maurice and Katia). Oppenheimer helped Dosa and her team track down the Kraffts’ archival material, which stretches to over 200 hours.
Fire Of Love has a voice-over narration performed by American writer, singer and filmmaker Miranda July, who is known for her quirky sensibility.
“I wrote the voice-over along with my two editors and one of my producers. We always wanted narration from the very beginning but we weren’t quite sure who would be our voice,” Dosa recalls. “Once Miranda’s name entered our brainstorming process, we all instantly said she is perfect, she is our dream narrator. We felt like we had somehow been writing for her all along.”
As a filmmaker, Dosa possesses at least some of her subjects’ daredevil spirit. “I wouldn’t quite say I have the kamikaze feeling but that’s one of the things I love so much about filmmaking. I feel I constantly get to go on adventures and get to be led by curiosity, passion and deep collaboration. That is something I admired about Maurice and Katia – the way they worked in tandem, and also brought out the best sides of themselves in order to pursue this dangerous but deeply meaningful passion that they shared. I definitely have a strong element of risk taking!”
And, yes, the director thinks her film will both work as a ‘dating’ movie and will appeal to the scientists. “Seeing the film as a date movie is very much in line with how we wanted the film to be received…an unexpected date movie that does have an element of science and adventure. For me, I see it first and foremost as a love story.”
Dosa was initially nervous about how the volcanologists would react to Fire Of Love? Would they smoulder at its romanticism or erupt with fury at its overly-lyrical style? In the event, most appear to have enjoyed it enormously. (Some of the Kraffts’ relatives traveled to Switzerland when Fire Of Love screened as the opening film at Visions du Réel back in April).
How does the director feel about volcanoes after making the film? Does she anthropomorphise them? Does she regard them in an emotional or scientific way?
“I really see Maurice and Katia as my guides to understanding volcanoes and they did often anthropomorphise them,” Dosa says. “There is that section in the film where Maurice talks about them being like a sick patient and having to diagnose their symptoms to understand when there was going to be an eruption.” Volcanoes, she continues, all have their own personalities.
There is a fair chance that Fire Of Love will be made as a dramatic movie – a love story with a fiery and tragic end. “I don’t feel territorial in the slightest,” the director insists she would have no problem with this. She even has some ideas about who might be cast Maurice and Katia: maybe John C Reilly and Tilda Swinton or Gerard Depardieu and Helena Bonham Carter.
“I feel like Katia and Maurice’s legacy is so expansive that there must be many stories about them. I hope my film will just be one in a number of films which utilises not just their [film] archives but their writings…”
This is an updated version of the article first published in BDE, March 2022.
