Francois Séguin
Set Designer
François Séguin studied set design at Collège Lionel Groulx in Montreal from 1971–1974 and began his professional theatre career working for François Barbeau and other leading lights of the Montreal theatre scene at prominent companies such as the Théâtre du Rideau Vert, La Nouvelle Compagnie Théâtrale (NCT), Les Grands Ballets Canadiens and the Théâtre de Quat’Sous. His first assignment as a set designer came in 1976.
He went on to work on a variety of theatre and opera productions in Canada and abroad, notably at the National Arts Centre (Ottawa), Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui, and NCT in Montreal with André Brassard. He has worked with ZED writer and director François Girard before, designing the sets for a production of an oratorio called The Lost Objective, a contemporary piece presented in New York by a collective called Bang on the Can, and a double bill staging of Bertoldt Brecht’s The Lindberg Flight/The Flight Over the Ocean and The Seven Deadly Sins, which played in Edinburgh and in Wellington, New Zealand.
“Some people would say that when I'm designing a movie I’m theatrical and when I'm designing a theatre set it's more cinematic,” says François Séguin. “It’s true, sometimes I make a very emotional set for a movie but when I do stage I'm trying not to be so emotional. ”
His most notable film credits include Silk (2007) and The Red Violin (1998), both written and directed by François Girard, but he has also worked on a large and impressive array of features for other directors, for example: Lucky Number Slevin (2006), The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005), Les Invasions Barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) (2003), Afterglow (1997), Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), Love & Human Remains (1993), Léolo (1992) and Jésus de Montréal (Jesus of Montreal) (1989).
“To establish the set design concept, I started with a form inspired by the astrolabe,” says François Séguin. “I also wanted to fill the whole stage as if it were a frame from a film. In terms of aesthetics, the design evokes the Renaissance and the Mechanical Age. "