Holy Motors

Before the production of Holy Motors, Carax had tried to fund a big English-language film for five years. Financiers were reluctant to invest, so Carax, whose previous feature film was Pola X in 1999, decided to make a smaller French-language film first, with the aim of regaining prominence in international cinema.[7] Taking inspiration from the omnibus Tokyo!, for which he had made a commissioned short film (Merde, which featured the original appearance of the character Monsieur Merde), he wrote a cheap film intended for his regular collaborator Denis Lavant. Carax was able to sway potential investors concerned with the film's budget by switching to digital photography, a process of which he strongly disapproves.[4]

The spark for the film came from Carax's observation that stretch limousines were being increasingly used for weddings. He was interested in their bulkiness, saying: "They're outdated, like the old futurist toys of the past. I think they mark the end of an era, the era of large, visible machines."[4] From that grew an idea for a film about the increasing digitalisation of society, a science-fiction scenario where organisms and visible machines share a common superfluity. The opening scene was inspired by the E. T. A. Hoffmann novella Don Juan, about a man who discovers a secret door in his bedroom that leads to an opera house.[4]

Holy Motors was produced through Pierre Grise Productions for a budget of €3.9 million, which included money from the CNC, Île-de-France region, Arte France, Canal+, and Ciné+.[8] It was a 20% German co-production through the company Pandora, and received €350,000 from the Franco-German co-production support committee.[9]

Of the lead role, Carax said: "If Denis had said no, I would have offered the part to Lon Chaney or to Chaplin. Or to Peter Lorre or Michel Simon, all of whom are dead."[4]

Édith Scob had previously worked with Carax on Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, but was then almost entirely cut out, so Carax felt he owed her a larger role. He also thought Holy Motors was indebted to Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, in which Scob starred, and decided to give an explicit nod to the film by casting her.

The character Kay M. came from a canceled project that was supposed to star Lavant and Kate Moss and follow the Merde character from Tokyo! in the United States. Eva Mendes was offered the role after she and Carax met at a film festival and agreed to make a film together.

Carax discovered Kylie Minogue after Claire Denis suggested her for a canceled project.

Michel Piccoli's role was originally intended for Carax himself, but he decided it would be misleading to cast a filmmaker. When Piccoli was cast, the idea was to make him unrecognizable and credit him under a pseudonym, but news of his casting reached the media, so that plan was dropped.[10]

Principal photography took place in Paris. Filming started in September 2011 and ended in November.[11]

The music in the film includes Minogue performing the song "Who Were We?" by Carax and Neil Hannon, as well as Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 15 and the track "Sinking of Bingou-Maru" from Godzilla. There are also songs by Sparks, Manset, KONGOS, and R. L. Burnside.[12]

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 92% based on 196 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10; the website's critical consensus reads: "Mesmerizingly strange and willfully perverse, Holy Motors offers an unforgettable visual feast alongside a spellbinding – albeit unapologetically challenging – narrative."[16] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average of score of 84/100 based on 34 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[17]

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian rated the film five out of five and wrote: "Leos Carax's Holy Motors is weird and wonderful, rich and strange – barking mad, in fact. It is wayward, kaleidoscopic, black comic and bizarre; there is in it a batsqueak of genius, dishevelment and derangement; it is captivating and compelling. ... [T]his is what we have all come to Cannes for: for something different, experimental, a tilting at windmills, a great big pole-vault over the barrier of normality by someone who feels that the possibilities of cinema have not been exhausted by conventional realist drama."[18] He later named it one of the year's 10 best films.[19] Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph gave the film five stars, writing: "It is a film about the stuff of cinema itself, and is perhaps the strongest contender for the Palme d’Or yet."[20] On his "Views From The Edge" blog, Spencer Hawken wrote: "Holy Motors is a mind-boggling movie, with oodles of character; it’s funny, emotional, and surprising. It has images that will stay in your head, most notably the accordion interlude, which comes completely out of nowhere, and really takes things up a gear."[21] William Goss of Film.com wrote: "In terms of pure cinematic sensation, Holy Motors stands as one of the most delightfully enigmatic movies that I've seen in quite some time."[22] Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called Holy Motors one of 2012's 10 best films.[23]

The film placed fourth on Sight and Sound's critics' poll of the best films of 2012,[24] third on The Village Voice's annual poll of film critics,[25] and first on both Film Comment's[26] and Indiewire's[27] year-end film critics' polls. French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma also named Holy Motors the best film of the year.[28] In 2016, it was chosen as the 16th-greatest film of the 21st century by a worldwide group of critics polled by the BBC.[29] Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund named it one of his top ten films in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll.[30]

Holy Motors was on numerous critics' and publications' lists of the best films of 2012.

It was also featured on many critics' and publications' lists of the best films of the 2010s:

According to They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, Holy Motors is the 11th-most critically acclaimed film of the 21st century and the 283rd-most critically acclaimed film of all time.