Marion Filmmakers on Tangling with Stampeding Bulls, Awards Buzz and Hollywood Royalty

“Dig in!” Joe Weiland commands, gesturing to the pint of Stella Artois in front of me. It’s a crisp autumn Saturday afternoon in New York City, and I’m tucked away in a booth of a bustling SoHo restaurant with Weiland and Finn Constantine, the young British directorial duo behind Marion, an unusual, compelling 13-minute tour de force that has found some powerful supporters, especially Sienna Miller and Cate Blanchett (who both rushed to join the film as executive producers immediately after seeing only a first cut) and is now making the rounds on the film festival circuit, having premiered at none other than the famed Venice International Film Festival. And it’s easy to see why: The lyrical short film fictionalizes the captivating story of Caroline Noguès-Larbère, France’s only female bull-jumper, as she prepares for her first performance in a packed French arena. The film blends real-world stakes with a tightly constructed narrative, and its intimate, visceral style mirrors the tension of Caroline’s life—juggling motherhood, navigating the patriarchal structure of her sport, and risking it all in the bullring.

But this afternoon, we’re just drinking beers. Or, really, there’s only one beer, and we’re trying to decide who gets to drink it. Both Constantine and I had ordered a Stella, but to my horror, only one actually made it to the table. I repeatedly insisted that Constantine take it, attempting in vain to hold onto any semblance of manners. Weiland is having none of it: “Come on, drink your pint.”

Constantine bursts out laughing, infectious enough to make both Weiland and me follow suit. “Dig in? Drink your pint? Why are you yelling at her?”

“Off the record!” Weiland hurriedly cuts in, punctuated with a wide grin. (Other things that were jokingly declared “off the record” throughout our hour-long chat: my crack about doing interviews mostly for the beers, Constantine accidentally spilling some water on his menu, Weiland almost mentioning Marion’s award trail trajectory until deciding he doesn’t want to jinx it, all three of us shitting on Weiland’s distinctly peppermint-tasting ginger tea until he caves and gets a beer too, and so on. The phrase “off the record” became such a running joke that, in the interview transcript, it shows up no less than 24 individual times—on the record.) “Come on, there’s no manners here!”

I finally relent, grumbling with mock reluctance, and take a sip. Weiland and Constantine both cheer.

The conversation flows so easily, buoyed by the easy chemistry shared by the two life-long friends (as Constantine put it, “We met in nursery school, so we’ve been kicking it for going on 25 years now”) and, perhaps, a pint or two, that I keep having to remind myself that, not even twenty-four hours prior, I was two seats down from Naomi Watts at the film’s New York premiere. There, at a glittery, festive reception and screening hosted by Sienna Miller at Neuehouse Madison Square, many of New York’s creative elite watched Marion play across the big screen, utterly enraptured all the while. The pair and their film are already amassing Oscar buzz, but you wouldn’t know it from their demeanor; I’m here to interview them about their film, and yet they keep asking me about my own life. We spend 10 minutes discussing our favorite poets (Eliot for Weiland, Yeats for Constantine) after I tell them I study English. They’re so easy to talk to that it’s a little disconcerting.

To be fair, the whole “internationally acclaimed filmmakers championed by Hollywood A-Listers” thing is all rather new for them as well. Mind-bogglingly, this is Constantine’s very first venture into narrative filmmaking; prior to Marion, Constantine primarily focused on shooting music videos, working in art and fashion, and building Plaster, the art magazine he founded in 2020. And although Weiland had, impressively enough, already garnered a BAFTA nomination for his previous short, 2023’s “Gorka”–making him the youngest director in the BAFTA short category–the degree of international attention Marion is starting to receive is on a different scale. “When we were working on the film, we really had no idea there would be a response like this,” Weiland says. “We were just focused on making it, bringing the story to life. But that’s kind of how it always is, right?”

Marion filmmakers Joe Weiland and Finn Constantine with producer Sienna Miller at the film’s Neuehouse Madison Square reception.

The story of Marion begins, improbably enough, in a bathtub. “I was watching this documentary about La Course Landaise,” Constantine says, referring to the traditional French sport of bull-jumping. He immediately sent the doc to Weiland, although not necessarily as inspiration for a film of their own—it wasn’t until they discovered Caroline Noguès-Larbère, France’s only female écarteur (bull-jumper), that the story truly took shape. Specifically, stumbling upon a striking quote from an interview with Caroline—”I don’t face the bulls, I face the men”—became the spark that ignited their creative fire.

“Of course, the sport was intriguing and beautiful and amazing, and was enough for me to get out of the bath and speak to Joe about it, but there wasn’t a film for us within the sport on its own,” Constantine explains. “But when you discover Caroline, and her story, then that’s when it becomes something else—becomes a story, a really worthwhile one.”

From the beginning, the duo knew the film would only work if they had Caroline (who, it is worth emphasizing, had no prior acting experience, which makes the effortless steely vulnerability of her performance all the more impressive) playing herself in the lead role. This was both because her sheer resolve and quiet strength were the catalysts for the entire endeavor in the first place and because, put simply, no one else could possibly do what she does. After all, what kind of auditions could one possibly hope to hold for a role that requires the actor to jump over a stampeding bull? Not as a stunt, but as a legitimate recreation of the sport? Caroline was the only option—which means, naturally, that Marion had an astonishingly small chance of actually being created.

What followed was a whirlwind of risk and reward. Armed with nothing but a translated script, an unflagging determination, and a dream, Weiland and Constantine moved to France to bring their vision to life—with quite literally no idea whether or not Caroline herself would be even remotely interested in the idea. They tracked her down, hoping she would not only approve of their story but also (improbably enough) star in it. “We had no idea what we were doing,” Constantine admits with a laugh. “We just showed up at her farm one day with this translated script.” To their astonishment (and immense relief), Caroline loved it, even going so far as to say they had somehow captured her experience as if they had lived inside her mind.

“It really is kind of incredible,” Weiland reminisces. “The fact that we came up with this script in an entirely different language, having had no prior knowledge of the sport itself, and it just so happened to feel real to Caroline, to speak to her experience.” Of course, it’s not as if the fortuitous outcome was just a stroke of luck—the pair had spent months doing as much research as they could about the sport, about Caroline herself, about the experience of being a woman in such a male-dominated field. But even so, it is not hard to imagine any number of worlds in which she simply said no.

I ask what they would’ve done if her reaction had been different—if she decided she didn’t like it, or if she had no interest in acting in any film, or if she had given any other combination of entirely feasible responses. Weiland and Constantine simply look at each other and shrug. “That would’ve been it,” Weiland says through a small grin, almost sheepish. Those months of work, that entire script, the move to France—all erased in the space of a single hypothetical shake of a head. “Yeah,” Constantine concurs. “I mean, what can you do?”

It’s crazy, and I tell them as much. Weiland just shakes his head and says, “Well, I think risk is the most important thing in filmmaking. If you’re not taking risks, not pushing those boundaries or taking chances, then what are you doing? What are you doing it for?”

Without missing a beat, Constantine picks up where Weiland leaves off (which they do a lot, actually; presumably, finishing each others’ sentences comes with the territory of being friends since nursery school, but it’s impressive nonetheless). “Not just in film, but in anything. If you want to do anything worthwhile, there are going to be a million ways it can go wrong at any point, and you have to know that, and you have to do it anyway.”

I almost ask if there was ever any consideration of moving on with the film had Caroline said no, but think better of it; if one thing has been made evident throughout our conversation, it’s that nothing, not even Marion itself, came before the truth of Caroline’s experience and her own comfort level. “The entire thing is really just about Caroline,” Weiland had said earlier. “That was what most of our work came down to: putting in the work to understand her experience, and making sure we were completely in line with it every step of the way.” Constantine nodded: “The most important thing was making sure that we felt honest.”

But Marion is not a documentary, despite the doc-like verisimilitude that pervades the film and the directors’ approach to its central subject. As Constantine puts it, “It’s treading the line between documentary and fiction.” The titular bull jumper is undeniably based on Caroline, but it’s not a one-to-one representation; it’s a narrativized rendition that uses fiction to better evoke the visceral feeling of her lived experience. For one thing, Marion has a daughter that ends up playing a central role in the short’s latter half—although that character only came into existence toward the end of the process. “We introduced it quite late,” Constantine says. “We were all ready to shoot, the script was locked, and then … it just kind of hit us. So we presented it to Caroline, asked if she’d be okay with us introducing the daughter character—because this is her story, and we wanted to be respectful of that, so we wouldn’t have added the character had she felt uncomfortable with it—and she said yes.”

The addition of the daughter makes tangible the thematic throughline of the film. “The whole thing is about the price women have to pay for their passions, their responsibilities—the prices that men typically don’t have to,” Weiland says. “The daughter becomes a sort of reflection, a manifestation, of that.”

“We can also personally speak to that, too,” Constantine adds. “We have mothers and we’ve seen that relationship. You see these things happen. You see those little sacrifices that have to be made, and how nuanced they are. It gave us another foothold on the story to really dig into.”

When asked about the challenges of telling a story so deeply rooted in female experience, Constantine leans forward, his brow furrowed in thought. “If we treat the subject with as much sensitivity and nuance as we can, then we’re doing our best, right?” he posits. “It was just about making sure that every time we put pen to paper, we’re trying to tell the story, we’re doing our best and not being lazy, not cutting any corners or playing into clichés.”

And they really couldn’t afford to be lazy, either—the production process itself was rife with challenges, not least because none of their actors spoke English (and only Weiland speaks any French, although not fluently). But, as Weiland says, “By the end of the shoot, it became this funny thing where Caroline started speaking English and we started speaking French—it became this sort of communication through movement. It just boiled down to the raw emotion. Like, when you’re having a visceral reaction to words you don’t understand, then the acting is doing its job.”

The directors leaned into this rawness, stripping away dialogue to let the visuals do the heavy lifting. “The whole goal, for us, was for it to feel as real to her life and experience as possible,” Constantine says. “And that drips into the style, right?” So, like, if we had shot it on Steadicam, all of a sudden it would become a very different feeling. The only way we wanted to shoot it was, like, on-the-shoulder, shaky, real, direct—to get that feeling of her story, rather than it feeling like a film.”

The directors’ commitment to realism was evident in every choice they made, from the jittery handheld camerawork to the absence of subtitles in the locker-room scenes, which intentionally alienates their (predominantly English-speaking) audience. “We did a version where we subtitled it,” Constantine explained. “But it doesn’t matter what they’re saying. It’s about the feeling, the emotion, being in that space.” It’s a choice that forces the audience into the same disorienting headspace as the film’s protagonist. Marion, like Caroline, understands the men around her, but their words—and their world—remain inhospitable.

As much as Weiland and Constantine made a concerted effort towards realism in the short’s first half, the remainder of the film—the part that takes place in the ring itself—didn’t leave them much of a choice in the matter. Originally, they had scripted the action scenes, but, as Constantine explains, “when you go and watch the sport live for the first time, it changes your whole perception of everything you had written before.” Weiland is a little blunter: “I mean, you can’t script a bull!” All you can do is set up cameras (six of them, in Marion’s case) and get the shot as it unfolds in real time. The results are remarkable, especially given the constraints—Blanchett even called it “Ridley Scott-level direction on $2.15 in three days.”

But as action-heavy as those arena sequences are, the directors were adamant that they couldn’t just feel like ESPN highlight reels. “Our main thing was to make it feel like a piece of cinema as opposed to just a portrait of the sport,” Weiland says. “It has to feel like an extension of the film you’ve seen beforehand. So we really worked, especially in the edit, on cutting it to make it really feel like it’s still from her perspective—there’s still that narrative going through it, and you’re seeing the sport through that lens. At the end of the day, the story is king. So as cool and amazing as the sport is, our real interest always lies in Caroline and her story. The sport feels secondary to that. We never wanted to lose sight of her humanity throughout the film; we didn’t want it to become just a spectacle.”

As Marion continues its festival run, with stops in Venice and Toronto already under its belt, Weiland and Constantine find themselves on the precipice of something greater. Whispers of award season buzz are beginning to circulate, with the short showing potential as an Oscar contender, and there’s even talk of expanding the short into a feature-length film. “The first thing everyone says after seeing the short is ‘I want to know more,’” Constantine says. “And we know there’s more, because we know Caroline. People seem to want it, and we know we want to do it, so why not?” They confirm that they’ve spoken to Caroline about it, and she’d be on board. So would the film’s famous backers, Sienna Miller and Cate Blanchett, the latter of whom said to Deadline that the film is “off to the races … It’s such a powerful film in and of itself, and there’s so many tentacles off it that could develop into a feature.”

Although the short was able to capture a feeling, a moment, a feature would offer the opportunity to explore the why of it all. “It would just be really character-driven,” Weiland explains. “We want to explore why she does bull jumping in the first place, how she started it, what keeps her going. That would just give us so much texture, and allow us to do so much more with the themes already present.”

At the same time, though, Constantine emphasizes that “It’s important that the short film doesn’t get overshadowed. Because, ultimately, we set out to make a short film, and we achieved what we wanted to do.” Marion was never intended to be a stepping-stone to a feature film; it’s a work of art in and of itself, a thrilling and moving example of what the genre of short film, at its very best, can accomplish.

Eventually, we get the tab (three Stellas and one horrendously mediocre ginger tea) and step outside into the bracing chill of mid-November. The wunderkind duo are only in New York for a day or two more, and then it’s back to London, then L.A., then, really, everywhere that the awards trail takes them. Regardless of what happens on it, one thing is clear: for Joe Weiland and Finn Constantine, Marion is surely only the beginning of a long, lustrous career.