Struggling to write a script for a film he was commissioned to make, French artist Baptiste Penetticobra, channeled his frustration through his actors, by having them take over the film and refuse to be in it.

Clutching white Styrofoam cups and fidgeting with plastic straws, the actors in For Real tho (2016) addressed the camera, fully aware of their artificial environment, obscuring the line between fiction and reality. Penetticobra has always questioned the limits of fiction in art — and the world — reflecting this curiosity through several films, photographs and instillations. Now, three years after For Real tho, he offers a window into his more recent works, Home, Hood, Hills and Untitled (Juice), delving into his unrelenting fascination on how fiction affects the world.

How do you come up with the concepts for your work?
It varies. But, I'd say, it starts mostly with images and places. I start to obsess over a place (lately, it has been the "Rainforest Café"-- insane places) and then, I want to do something with it.

Can you tell us about your most recent work Home, Hood, Hills?
Home, Hood, Hills was made while I was in residence at the MAK Center for Arts and Architecture, a museum in Los Angeles. I lived there for 6 months between 2017-2018.

What inspired Home, Hood, Hills?
I originally was thinking about doing a short film. I even started the casting process, posting ads around for a film named "Lawn and Sprinklers", even though I didn't know what the film was going to be about. I did auditions at my studio and met some crazy people. Then I realized residencies are better spent taking a break from your usual medium/practice. I decided to experiment a different things (photography, object, installation, writing) to explore Los Angeles' relationship to fiction, image and myth. Being in Los Angeles felt both threatening (it has been filmed and photographed so much) and like being home. I decided to work around that.

Which places in LA did you go to for inspiration?
It ranged from quiet residential streets, to places with more of an alleged "movie magic" . I was quite intrigued by "Venice High", a high-school near Venice beach, which has been used a lot in films (most notably in Britney Spears' Baby One More Time music video in 1998). It became, through its compulsive representation in film and image, sort of the "universal" high-school archetype. I hung out there a lot during Christmas break, when it was empty. I eventually got to meet an English teacher who introduced me to the art teacher there. He let me spend a week in his class to conduct interviews with the students. I was interested in how those kids perceived the place – their own mundane environment – compared to how famous and fictionalized it had become. Those conversations helped me define the project, and more broadly, a comprehension of the city.

How, in your opinion, has LA - and its strip malls and less glamorous areas - been shaped by the fiction as opposed to places like Hollywood, Disney, etc.?
Los Angeles (and the U.S. as a whole), have been photographed, filmed and described by fiction so much, that they eventually became fiction themselves, even down to the most ordinary element. Places like Hollywood and Disneyland are streamlined, versions of that. The back of Hollywood Boulevard is a residential area with schools, garbage trucks and nail salons.

Can you tell us about Untitled (Juice)?
Untitled (Juice) was commissioned by KENZO, it came out in 2017. They asked me to do a film about anything, as long as it was talking about the current state of the world. "Anything" sounded like a challenge, so I chose the most mundane subject. I wanted to write about a fairly dull and simple object: a cup of orange juice, the kind of orange juice sold in McDonald’s. I wanted to see what could happen by exploiting the theme as far as possible until the film’s discourse became relatively abstract, using the small and insignificant as a starting point and eventually deviating to something larger and rather obscure.

A pervasive theme in all of your work is the often-blurred line between fiction and reality. How did this fascination come about?
I think it was always there. I think it's only natural to question your own medium and film naturally balances fiction and reality. Exploring the fringe between the two felt logical but not that conscious.

I noticed both For Real Tho and Untitled (juice) have similar patterns: Filmed at night, the use of white light, foam cups (or cups in general), and characters speaking directly to the viewer. What’s the significance?
They are mostly archetypes that come from a mainstream imagery. I tend to set my films in what I call "non-territories", structures and places that have become generic and that are charged with shared significance in the collective imagination, like a parking lot, a rest area on a highway or a backyard. The props have their significance as they are clear and primitive signs that describe those places, but also signal the viewer that what they are watching is fiction. Foam cups are not a standard object in France, yet, we know them through fiction.