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Home , Jacques Audiard, Rust and Bone, See How They Fall, Why Not Productions

J A C Q U E S AUDIARD S E U Q C A J AUDIARD

French director ’s latest feature won Cannes’ Palme d’Or in 2015 and his critically acclaimed prison film (2009) and romantic drama (2012) made him that rare thing: an internationally renowned filmmaker not in the English language. Despite an auspicious personal heritage, Audiard came late to directing, a writer first and foremost. His stories, wildly varying in subject matter, have in common a fascination with the struggle for identity and the reforging of a self after or through trauma. They are shocking, beautiful and have captivated both audiences and actors like and Vincent Cassel. He is soon to make the move to anglophone cinema.

Interview Joshua Bullock

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© Jean-Claude Lother Joshua Bullock: The name Audiard is now well known in the world of I don’t know if it is symbolic or poetic; it’s very natural. I don’t say, “Hey, French cinema. How did you get into the film business? bring me a symbol!” These are the things I do. I did fades. I used to put my hand over the lens and take shots like that. I do the same today. Jacques Audiard: My father was a very well known scriptwriter and director in France who left behind a huge legacy. Cinema for him was JB: There’s a scene where looks in the mirror in Read a job, a way to earn a living. He was of a literary bent. He started as a My Lips and shadows come over the shot. novelist, completely self-taught. For him, literature was a powerful social engine and so too was cinema. After the war, from ‘45 to ‘47, cinema was a JA: Yes, that’s my hand. I put a black glove on. We work with very very powerful medium for a whole generation. These weren’t necessarily sophisticated equipment and I’d like it to be less sophisticated. film-lovers in the strict sense of the word. My father always had certain reservations about cinema. To him cinema was quite interesting, but it JB: Like Charlie Kaufman or Billy Wilder before him, you are a wasn’t a place where one flourished artistically. Early in my life, I had more screenwriter turned director. How did that come about? access through my father to literature than films. It’s as if my father left me a clear field in filmmaking – a freedom. I never felt stifled by him. I have JA: I was a screenwriter for ten years and then I stopped because I found I never written a line that wasn’t addressed to the filmgoer. When all’s said was no longer satisfied by it. A scriptwriter’s craft in France at that time was and done, that has been the outcome. not very rewarding. So, partly due to that, I did my first film as a director. In directing the scripts I wrote, I became much more satisfied with my job JB: You don’t feel then in thrall to his legacy? as a scriptwriter. When I had been a scriptwriter I got no recognition as a scriptwriter. But when I became a director of my scripts, my scripts got a JA: I’m asked lots of questions about my father for obvious reasons, but also lot of acknowledgement. It’s quite strange. because in my films there are lots of allusions to fathers. JB: Tell me about your experiences on your first film and JB: That’s normal. making that change from screenwriter to director.

JA: Yes, I think it’s normal. After all, it was the same for the Greeks. What’s JA: I was forty-one years old when I made my first film. I’d been writing strange is that my second film, A Self-Made Hero, is a historical film that scripts for ten years; I’d been an assistant editor for five or six years. I had is about a lie, a deception told by a man who claims to have been in the edited some shorts. I had done a spell in theatre as a writer and as a lighting Resistance during the Second World War. In my films there is often this director. I had been an assistant at some time or another for everything. theme of a second life. The Beat That My Heart Skipped is like that. ‘I want That said, it was a distinctive experience when I directed. I felt capable in to get out of this life. Have I got the right? Will I get another? What will it certain places and in others a bit wanting. I didn’t find it too much of a cost me?’ A Prophet is the same. Rust and Bone is kind of like that too. When problem. I felt I just knew how really. It could be hard with the actors, with I analyse these themes – fathers, lies – they come from my belonging to the technicians, and on the financial side too as we didn’t have any money. a certain generation, the generation born between 1940 and 1955. I was But I felt I knew how to do it. born in 1952. The theme was that we as a generation had been raised on a lie. A young French person in the 1960s and 1970s realised they had been JB: Rust and Bone was based on Craig Davidson’s book of short stories lied to. Vichy France had collaborated with the Nazis, helped deport Jews. by the same name yet you heavily adapted your source material in the There were 1,000 heroic guys with De Gaulle in London. In 1968 people screenplay. Why was that? were marching in the street, saying “CRS = SS”. [The CRS were a branch of the police infamous for violently controlling protests]. Where did that JA: What interested me about Craig Davidson’s stories was that they come from? Who was it aimed at? It was meant for parents, I suppose – involved the economic crisis, stories about poverty, about dog-fights, those who had fought in the war and those who hadn’t. about porn films, about the lumpen proletariat. On the other hand, I had just come from A Prophet in which there were no female characters, set as JB: So what were your major influences in film and literature as it was in a male prison. I had a fanatical wish to have a female character, to an adolescent? tell a love story or tell how love could return. So it became an adaptation of two short stories that I wove together. JA: When I was a child, I was sent to boarding school from the age of twelve to seventeen. I hated it so the only thing I did was read. I read JB: Presumably, writing your own films means you’ve made fewer films. everything! So much so that I was forbidden to use the library. What fine educators they were! It wasn’t really a problem, they were fools. I went JA: Absolutely. One day I’d prefer to direct a film for which I haven’t from being a voracious reader to having a greater eclecticism. I really written the script, but that opportunity hasn’t come about yet. I wrote a enjoyed noirish writers like James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Raymond script before making Dheepan. I reread it after and I found in the interim Chandler. I’m still a big reader generally. I started making films when I that the experience of making Dheepan had changed me considerably. My was a teenager. I had a Super 8 camera and I made experimental films desire for cinema had moved on. So when I reread the script I had written where there was an intimate relationship with the image. A big part of my eighteen months before, I no longer recognised the desire I had to make taste was the Coen brothers, Stan Brakhage, even the Canadian Norman that film. In the end I was forced to rewrite it. McLaren, who made scratched film. But if I’m completely honest what has left the biggest impression on me these last ten years has probably been JB: So how does a Frenchman write and direct a film almost entirely in contemporary art – Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, people like that. I Tamil like Dheepan? am much more affected by this work of false stories and image-making than by film. Things that I used to do, the plans I used to make when I was From top: Dheepan (2015) © Paul Arnaud/; Dheepan (2015); The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) © Jean-Claude Lother/Why Not Productions eighteen, now I do them with a bigger camera. I always need that in films,

84 85 JA: I didn’t speak a word of Tamil. We had a translator so the actors or her on, I know why we work together but in terms of that piece of understood the script. Well, they understood some things but what’s work, it’s all spent. There is another I’ve worked with twice: , interesting is that while there is a difference in language, there is also a real the father in The Beat That My Heart Skipped. I would be afraid of an actor difference in culture. In the script, the Tamil actors would come across like John Wayne, the ‘Big Cowboy’, or Jean Gabin. things they didn’t understand in the context of human relationships and in their characters. As a director, normally when one works in one’s own JB: The kind of actor who comes on set carrying too much baggage. language, that language plays an important role in the scene. The way actors perform: you will go back over things with them – ‘you don’t say things JA: I need every film to be a kind of closed entity, completely tight. Since like that’, ‘you pause there’, ‘you soften there’. Without that possibility, A Prophet, I have worked with actors who are either little known and have direction becomes much more of a musical consideration. It’s what I worked very little, or who are not actually actors. Why? Because at times perceive between the phrasing, the musicality of the thing and their looks, I get weary of the French casting process. I like French actors very much, their attitudes. When I am filming in my language, I don’t do lots of takes, working with actors I love, but at times it seems I’ll get a representation four or five at the most, after that I can’t really see things straight. On of a single kind of French humanity. When I open the door of the rue Dheepan I did twelve to fifteen takes because I was discovering things de Bagnolet in , that’s not what I see. I need something else. Saying as we went along. that is not only a sociological statement, that the French casting system is too French. It’s about my willingness to work with another system JB: How would you describe yourself on set compared to the Jacques of expression, other kinds of looks, other ways of smiling, other ways of Audiard sitting with me now? behaving. As a lover of music, something I appreciate is being in a sound environment where the things expressed are not necessarily understandable. JA: I think I am very different. I have seen a ‘Making of’ featurette about A It’s almost poetic. In Ajaccio, I hear Arabic spoken, or half-Arabic half- Prophet and in it I watched myself directing actors, not recognising myself or French. I find that environment where you won’t understand everything my voice. It was very strange. I don’t like being observed much. both complex and buzzing. That for me is modernity, a kind of Tower of Babel. JB: Being a director is a strange role because it mixes the general imaginative properties of the artist with the absolute dominance and single-mindedness JB: Stories that you tell and the characters you create might be called of a field marshal. ‘realistic’ in as much as they are visceral and rove the spectrum of class and nationality. But you don’t make documentaries. Your films don’t exist JA: Yes and the skills of a linguist. I think that very often directing an actor to describe the immigration found in A Prophet or Dheepan or the deafness is about learning the actor’s language and the actor learning mine. That’s in Read My Lips. They are fiction. how it works. When I speak to Niels Arestrup I speak a bit of ‘Niels’, when he speaks to me he speaks a bit of ‘Jacques’. With Tamil actors it was slightly JA: Yes, they are fiction. They are in a fictional setting. As a filmgoer, I like different but still in the natural, instinctive sphere. cinema when it addresses reality in another way: more understandably, clearer. Anyway, I wouldn’t know how to make a documentary but I still JB: Orson Welles said that actors should be treated like cattle but you need a film to come from a source that I have studied carefully. I’ll fix my don’t subscribe? attention on something I don’t know. My focus will be particular to me. I know myself, I don’t know you, but I feel I do. There are two or three JA: Hitchcock too, he spoke about them with contempt. I think it’s that degrees of separation, not much more so you don’t interest me as a subject. kind of director who thinks actors are livestock – they are the grand But I will definitely look elsewhere. I’ll definitely go elsewhere and perhaps formalists. They have their opinions. They put pawns into their machines. it will be a somewhat extreme place, but it will interest me. For me, it’s the opposite. The machine will only exist if actors are present. If there are no faces to film I’m not sure what else there is left to film. JB: What do you think of the arrival of documentaries now as a powerful and commercial form of entertainment? JB: Similar to your methods with actors, there’s also a closely cropped intimacy to the camerawork in your films. JA: We’re in such a period of transition in cinema that cinema needs to re-establish itself. It needs to re-establish its relationship with what JA: I think it’s quite varied. Dheepan is different for example. What interests is real. To my mind that’s been lost. The moment cinema no longer has me is to film close up and to follow a subject in order to exclude what is exclusivity over how what is real is represented is the moment it is forced outside – so that the shot exists almost independently. It creates a type of to question how it can re-establish itself. So it will re-establish itself through airlock around the character so that when you open the door you’re not documentaries. With green screen we no longer need what is real to sure what’s behind it, such that it keeps a kind of opacity. That’s something make pictures. In the 1980s we had a kind of deep epistemological break that has guided me for a while but I’ve done that now and I’m changing. in cinema and we act as if this break never happened. We always use the Actually, Dheepan was a bit different; the characters are in a universe that term ‘cinema’ to refer to what we think is the same thing. Now it’s no you see more of. longer cinema so we need to change the term. We could use ‘imaging’ perhaps, whatever you want, but cinema is not that. In its original essential JB: You described there a sense of evolution as a filmmaker. Is part of this definition, cinema has to have the elapse of time and light. If you don’t that you rarely use the same actor twice, being the have one or the other, there is nothing; the silver salts will not be exposed exception that proves the rule? and developed.

JA: When I finish a film, it feels like I have ended a closeness with JB: I spoke with Werner Herzog about his views on 3D, and he told me From top: A Prophet (2009) © Roger Arpajou/Why Not Productions; A Prophet (2009); See How They Fall (1994) © Page 114 those actors. A film is very intimate. It’s exhausting and I feel that I have when a person watches any film there is a line of experience that can be exhausted the relationship with this or that actor. I know why I took him called the film’s narrative, and another line of experience in that person

86 87 watching it, their imagination, that runs parallel to it. 3D disrupts and makes that you will in two hours. When I started in the industry as an editor, a those lines converge because the audience member is made to participate film was about one hour forty minutes; now it’s two hours or two hours and is aware of themself as imperfectly between those two states. ten minutes. The film industry is forced to counter this with a change of format. It’s something I experimented on with my co-writer Thomas JA: They put you in it. Bidegain when we did A Prophet. We knew we couldn’t depict six years of a life in one hour forty minutes; we knew our film had to be two and JB: Yes, 3D wants to be real, but it’s not real. a half hours. And that’s very hard to split up into ‘acts’. You can’t divide it up, especially in something as monotonous as prison life. So we had to find JA: Yes, it is completely fake, completely synthetic. Yes, you’re right, the a format much more fit for purpose. I think you can see this when you industry seems to crave being in the vanguard technically and at the back watch A Prophet: it’s almost divided up into the episodes of a series. That conceptually. It’s a form of ideology. Before this change I spoke of, cinema division also has titles, music, a cliffhanger. It’s thought out as three units was a chronicler: whether it was Méliès or Orson Welles or Godard, of fifty-two minutes. whatever was in front of the camera really existed. There was some light and an exposure of one-sixtieth for two seconds and a flash of light. JB: And conversely, a master of superlative TV drama like David Chase has The actress’s tears really did flow; she really pretended to weep or actually gone on record saying that he treated each episode of The Sopranos like a wept. It was real. Today that’s not the case. Now we’re in an atmosphere mini-film. of wariness where an audience suspects this is all a con. As a case in point, there was a gunfight in Dheepan and in reality I only filmed 50 per cent JA: A 52-minute mini-film is not a one hour forty minute film – of it. It’s frightening. that’s what I mean. I’m not saying it’s easier, it’s just different. There’s a lot to admire in The Sopranos, that’s for sure. It is realistic, but there is a JB: Would you ever turn to documentaries? condensing effect.

JA: Yes, why not? But you know, cinema takes up a lot of my time and JB: What’s the project you are planning next year? I find that documentary also no longer fulfils the function it once did. Lumière sent photographic operators all over the world and suddenly JA: It’s a Western. audiences saw pictures of the imperial palace in China, things like that. And it was real. In black and white, but real. I have a lot of memories safeguarded JB: A Western? by film. When I watch a French film of Gilles Grangier from 1956 to 1958 and I see a Paris street, I say to myself, “Yes, I know that exact street there, I JA: It should be! It’s a very good book, The Sisters Brothers by Patrick have seen it.” I know that cinema no longer has the purpose it did for our deWitt. In fact John C. Reilly, the actor, came to me having acquired the parents or grandparents, a generation educated though cinema. I think that film rights to the book. He asked me to do the adaptation, which I will. I kind of cinema still exists today – I know when I have had news about Iran think we’ll film in the US but we’re not sure. it’s thanks to Iranian films. I knew Taiwan before going there thanks to Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-liang and filmmakers like that. When I go to JB: Will this be the same process – another language, other actors? Hong Kong I understand what Wong Kar-wai said to me. JA: Yes, of course. What attracts me in the US are the actors, not the system. JB: Do you find the film industry in France and elsewhere is geared to Even if the system, in my opinion, is an efficient model and still has its helping original, independent voices onto the screen? virtues, I can’t film on too tight a leash. But what it will look like, I’ll only know when I’ve finished writing it. JA: I think so. I don’t how long it can go on for, but touch wood. The French film industry is alive. For example, when I see a film like Mustang, JB: What’s the story? directed by a Turkish-born filmmaker, representing France at the Oscars, then I’m proud. It’s great. I wouldn’t have said this ten years ago but there JA: It’s about two brothers. It takes place around San Francisco in 1850 is a generation of male and female directors, a whole body of filmmakers during the first gold rush, the one that travelled from north to south. It’s who are really talented. I have a lot of confidence in them. Really. about two brothers, two hired killers who talk a lot. It’s a picaresque novel.

JB: What about the changing environment of film distribution with JB: When will you begin filming? secondary markets like Netflix and Amazon Prime? Does that empower this new generation? JA: I would like to film this summer or next summer. But I’ll have to do a huge amount of work and I haven’t had the time unfortunately. Dheepan JA: For me, that goes back to what we were talking about just now. took up lots and lots of time. When we talk about film or cinema are we talking about the same thing? A question that worries me, are we still film producers, still film distributors? I feel we still have these models but the models are old ones and no longer fit with the viewer’s belief in the essence of ‘film’. They are now watching it on a computer. The most important element to this for me has happened in the last five years and is often overlooked, but I think I understand it because deep down I am a screenwriter. The big, big change in storytelling in the last few years has been the transition to the 52-minute episode. The 52-minute format has caused the viewer’s experience to move From top: Rust and Bone (2012) © Roger Arpajou/Why Not Productions; The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) © Jean-Claude Lother/Why Not Productions; on. You are never going to construct the same story in fifty-two minutes Rust and Bone (2012) © Roger Arpajou/Why Not Productions

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