J A C Q U E S AUDIARD J A C Q U E S AUDIARD French director Jacques Audiard’s latest feature Dheepan won Cannes’ Palme d’Or in 2015 and his critically acclaimed prison film A Prophet (2009) and romantic drama Rust and Bone (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 Marion Cotillard and Vincent Cassel. He is soon to make the move to anglophone cinema. Interview Joshua Bullock 82 83 © 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 Emmanuelle Devos 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 See How They Fall 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/Why Not Productions; 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: Niels Arestrup, 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.