Les Films Hatari presents A real life (original title: Au Voleur) directed by Sarah Leonor with Guillaume Depardieu, Florence Loiret Caille with special appearance by Jacques Nolot & Fejria Deliba, Benjamin Wangermée, Rabah Naït Oufella, Bruno Clairefond Running time: 96 minutes FRENCH RELEASE: September the 30th 2009 35 mm — 1 : 1,85 — DTS SRD — France — 2009 — Visa n° 112 292 Download press kit & photos from www.shellac-altern.org Publicity Karine Durance French distributor Shellac tél. 06 10 75 73 74 tél. 04 95 04 95 92 | [email protected] [email protected] programmation salles : 01 78 09 96 65 synopsis Isabelle is a teacher. Bruno is a thief. Together, they start believing they could find happiness. The day the police tightens the noose round him, Bruno runs away, taking Isabelle along with him. In the heart of the forest, they hide and love each other, timelessly, in an ultimate attempt to keep the violence of the world away. interview with Sarah Leonor by Isabelle Potel A man and a woman are on the run. They land up on a small boat, drifting away in the heart of a forest. What is the subject matter of this experience ? Going down the river, Bruno and Isabelle return to themselves until they reach something primitive, something primeval, something childlike. All idea of time vanishes, play and reality merge together, an eternal present emerges. They experience a limitless freedom where there is no longer either past or anticipation. I am not referring to a lost paradise, but rather to an experience that potentially lies inside every one of us, an experience that simply is to be rediscovered. Beyond these considerations, it is the couple that interests me, this particular couple. How Bruno initiates Isabelle to the present, how Isabelle offers him her energy and her desire for happiness. But this state of grace inevitably reaches its limit. Probably even more than Bruno, Isabelle is aware that no couple can be self-sufficient. I don’t hold a romantic vision of love at all. It is important for me to remain clear-headed about this ! (laughter) When looking for locations, I took Laurent Desmet, the movie’s director of photography, into that forest. I remember we got lost. Although it is a rather small one, this forest is a real maze of dense vegetation, strewn with streams and ponds, where there are no paths. Closely following the map’s directions, we were looking for a specific place I had already spotted before, yet we were going round in circles. The place seemed to have disappeared. It was a very disturbing experience. Laurent named this forest Brigadoon, in reference to Minnelli’s movie, in which villagers from another time reappear every 100 years. In that movie, two worlds, two temporalities coexist in the same place. The same kind of thing happens in A real life: Bruno and Isabelle reach a new time dimension. Who are Bruno and Isabelle? Isabelle and Bruno live on the fringe of our society, in which people behave as if it was still possible to believe in progress and economic development. They live on the outskirts of a small town, in a kind of disused urban area where no one ever stops, where trains pass at high speed without slowing down, where the never-ending traffic of the motorway constantly carries people somewhere else. Bruno’s primary relation to the world is to take. He has devoted himself to becoming invisible. He breaks into wealthy houses with confidence because of his experience. His response to living in an economically-neglected area is to steal, not to get rich but to survive. Exhausted, he has come to the point where life is nothing but a rather sterile repetition. Isabelle is in the same situation. It seems she cannot feel anything but boredom and distress anymore. She is a German teacher, yet being only a supply teacher — a filling-in role, never permanent— she remains detached from society. What happens between them has nothing to do with a classic Lady and the Thief storyline. Though she has been to university, Isabelle comes from the same social background as Bruno. They both have more or less found a noble escape, one by mastering the art of stealing, the other through the adoption of a foreign language. I wanted Isabelle to teach German because it is a language often rejected by secondary school pupils. It is an unknown world to be discovered, the attraction of an ‘elsewhere’ that she tries to communicate to her students. Noble, yet Bruno and Isabelle are still going round in circles in their cage, like the panther in the text by Rilke that Isabelle reads to her pupils. The poet had observed this animal deprived of freedom in 1902 at the Garden of Plants in Paris. Bruno and Isabelle’s energy is compressed, suffocating between narrow walls. How did you conceive the first part of the movie that takes such an unexpected turn ? Its structure follows a musical pattern rather than a strictly dramatical one. It features themes that respond to one another, that work as echoes and that suggest a muffled tension which can only lead to a violent rupture. I depict a static world, suddenly awoken by desire. A chain of events, notably the police chase, forces Bruno and Isabelle to run away. But it is rather their increasing desire for something new, as well as their mutual attraction that leads them to go through the looking-glass. Their only way to survive is to reject everything. This is the turning point: a diversion, a crossroad, a running away. The urban part also shows that the transmission between generations has stopped working. Three different ages are represented in the small community surrounding Bruno: Bruno himself, his elder friend Manu (played by Jacques Nolot), who has just got out of jail completely worn-out, and his young neighbour Ali, who is clumsy and needs to learn. Apart from a certain form of affection, nothing much passes between them. Each one of them is locked inside his own solitude. We are a long way from the traditional film concerning a fraternity of thieves with its ideas of dynasty, hierarchy and initiation rituals. The movie is constantly taking cover, it cannot be categorized. Which genre do you feel it relates most to ? The script could give an impression of a dark movie with no way out. During the shooting, I was always looking for restrained emotions, a counterpoint to the dramatic elements. During casting, I felt Florence Loiret Caille’s instincts, Jacques Nolot’s subtle elegance and Guillaume Depardieu’s overwhelming physical presence would avoid any superficial affliction, keeping my characters at an appropriate distance. The characters in the movie carry their own despair with high-spirits and remain alive all the way. This is what matters. For A real life, I thought a lot about classic films noirs: Nicholas Ray’s They live by night, Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra, in which a couple on the run keeps fleeing further and further into the wilderness. I also kept in mind Terence Malick’s Badlands, though my characters are older and their running away is less violent. Maturity is a key element in the movie. Undoubtedly, Isabelle and Bruno must have been angry and excessive when they were young, but they are now post-anger, post-disillusion, even though they have not become cynical. In the end I only kept the framework of film noir: thieves, robberies, policemen, a car chase. I don’t feel the need to relate to a specific genre. You need to create your own language, regardless of genres. I would say that A real life is a bright film noir. A film ‘noir’… but also green and blue. I wanted to use colours but in contrast to the initial reality of the characters. The story takes place on the abandoned outskirts of a small town in the East of France (its name is not mentioned but I was thinking of Mulhouse). Such a setting should not necessarily imply the use of dull colours. When looking for locations, the colour blue came to me when I found the place where Bruno lives. I was looking for textures, flaking paints, plain flat colours, and spaces deprived of horizons. This sharp blue unifies the urban part of the movie and contrasts with the shrouding green of the forest. A real life treads a thin line between naturalism and stylization, this balance imposing itself instinctively during the shooting. I have the feeling I found a cinematographic language that suits me, condensed and intense. You made some quite original choices in terms of music. I wanted to start from the origins of folk music, that is to say American music, with anti-establishment and primitive accents. I played Woody Guthrie’s Grassy grass grass to Frank Beauvais, my music consultant. This song underlines the turning point of the movie, the escape into another world. Having read the script, Frank prepared a selection of several hundreds of tracks, which ranged from traditional chanting through rock music, crossing different continents. Like the characters, the music in the movie goes back in time, from the contemporary to the primitive, like Algerian percussions and a pygmy chant. In the urban part of the film the music is narrative, it is the music played in the places where the characters go; in the forest it is the interior music of Bruno and Isabelle that can at last be heard. It is the music of the couple inventing themselves.