I was a mess. My life was spiraling downward. I felt like the ground was slipping from under my feet and I didn’t even know why. But deep down, I did know: I was impulsive, sexually reckless, aggressive and self-destructive, always chasing excess. My death drive was just the flipside of an equally intense will to live. I was fueled by this deep need to exist for something, and this craving to be loved that helped me keep up appearances. I wasn’t afraid of suffering. On the contrary, I spent my whole life believing in this dumb idea: “If you’re suffering, you’re in the right place. Keep going.”Obviously, I was upside down. And I would only come to realize later that the important things in life, like self-love, don’t work that way. BOA came to me in the midst of that chaos, as a story that would turn out to be a strange mirror of myself.At first, I was too lost in my own darkness to understand what my subconscious was trying to tell me. But it was this tension, the duality between body and mind, that pushed me to write. At the time, I was channeling my anxiety into intense, physical workouts. It made me feel better. It made me feel less miserable - more desirable…
Feeling my body change gave me the sense that some new force had taken hold of me, like I no longer fully belonged to myself. It was both exhilarating and disturbing. I had never really been in touch with my body before, the experience was profound. I wanted to tell the story of a guy reconnecting with his body, discovering the power it holds.My isolation at the time made me feel like a hermit...
The aesthetic clash between monastic life and gym culture quickly imposed itself as the film’s visual world.With Léonide, I created a character in the grip of a psychic fever triggered by the raw aesthetic of the body, and fed by a symbolic framework he knew well: religion. In his madness, he twists it to justify his actions. Pretty quickly, genres began to merge in my head: horror, thriller, psychological drama, even psychosexual themes. All of it spoke to the sensory overload my character would go through, and that I wanted the audience to experience as well.This allowed me to push Léonide’s imagination to the forefront, and merge it with his subjective perception of reality. I wanted to create a visceral experience, a slow-building pressure, like a boa constrictor tightening around its prey. These uncontrollable urges, the clash between instinct and reason, this loss of control, I wanted to explore all of it, because I knew it intimately.By the end of the film’s creative process, I found myself feeling compassion for Léonide, despite what he does. I didn’t want the audience to judge him, but to step inside his experience, to feel what it’s like to be consumed by these forces. It was crucial for me to leave the film suspended in that ambiguity: will he make peace with his own impulses, or let them devour him?

Alexandre Dostie