Claire Denis Dialogue with Eric Hynes, 2012 Eric Hynes: We’re at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for a Regis Dialogue with Claire Denis. Tonight’s program is called “Claire Denis: Unpredictable Universe,” and we’ll talk with Claire about her remarkable career as a film director. From her first film, Chocolat, to her latest, White Material, Denis has explored the human costs and political perversions of colonialism, inhabiting African landscapes with both a physical intimacy and psychic estrangement. Eric Hynes: And in films like Nénette et Boni, and 35 Shots of Rum, she approaches the domestic sphere with an equal degree of mystery and expansiveness, approaching the everyday with curiosity, sensuality, and rigorous humanity. And with her masterpieces Beau Travail and The Intruder, Denis pursued abstractive narratives of seductive tactility. They pulse, and breathe, and invite the viewer to inhabit them as much as see them. Eric Hynes: She shoots for that sweet spot with film form, contemplates consciousness where the advancing present instantly retreats to a remembered past, and where what’s literal overlaps with what’s imagined. I’m Eric Hynes, a New York– based writer and critic. Now, we’ll begin our Regis Dialogue with Claire Denis. Claire Denis: Good evening. Eric Hynes: Hello everybody. So, I think we’re actually going to start with a clip to begin things. Well, it’s actually the first sequence of Claire’s first film, Chocolat. Video: [foreign language] Eric Hynes: Well, before I even start then, do you feel a connection to the filmmaker still who made that? Claire Denis: Yes and no, because me, I’m not the same of course, and this country Cameroon is not the same either. I would certainly not feel that easy nowadays. And the only thing that makes me feel it’s me, it’s to see Issach’s face because I’ve been working with him since, and to see that 24 years ago, I mean it’s really ... It’s good. Eric Hynes: Well, he’s gorgeous. So, I mean— Claire Denis: Yeah, he’s gorgeous, but he’s also got this ... I don’t know. In that film, some people are dead now. And Issach is ... I know him, I still work with him, so it’s sort of a continuation of something that reminds me that I was there too. Eric Hynes: Well, my first prepared question, and, because of that clip, was if you could talk to us a little bit about how much of your childhood and your life made its way into the character France. I mean, I know that it’s somewhat based on your own life, but at the same time I know that it’s a fictional creation. And when you look back on it, do you think of your own life or do you think of the film? Nov 17, 2012 1 Claire Denis: I think a character like that is not completely fiction, even the white parents because it’s the thing I remembered not only from my own childhood, but from the context of my childhood. It was not through melancholy that I wanted to go back to those years. It was as I thought if I make a film, the first film, I should do it to mark it at ... I am who I am because I grew there. So, that was important for me. Claire Denis: And the second thing maybe is that I didn’t want to make a film with a sort of message that colonization was terrible or whatever. I just wanted to speak about this character of Issach is interpreting of someone who has not a bad life, but is in a situation where he’s permanently humiliated by nice people. People who will never want to harm him. Claire Denis: Just the situation is like that. But the child herself, as I remember while writing the script, she was not existing really. She was like the thread for the flashback, and while we were writing the script, she was a bore. I thought, “Oh my god. I will have to direct her.” To find a kid. Claire Denis: And then it was easy in the end, but I thought it was going to be much more difficult. Eric Hynes: Was there an aspect of something about the character that Issach is playing? Is it something about that figure that was unresolved for you that you wanted to go back and actually look at the character of ... I mean, did you know people that way that you said that as an adult, you actually were ready to start interrogating what that life was like? Claire Denis: No. But if I was looking ... It was not like remembering or watching my family, still photographs of my childhood with my family. There was always the boy there or the gardener or the cook, and they had names that we remember because children were at ease with those ... They were young men normally. Claire Denis: And we were probably more at ease with them than our parents. And I think also there was a book, famous book written by a Cameroonese writer, who is dead now long ago. He started as a boy, and he wrote, his first book is called The Life of a Boy. And I remember reading that when I was a teenager, and suddenly reinterpreting a sort of guiltiness I had since I was very small. Claire Denis: Not a guiltiness. Guiltiness is maybe too strong a word, but a vague feeling of when a plate was presented to me. I knew that when I went back to see my grandparents, no one was washing the dishes but my grandmother. Things like that suddenly was so strange that when I was going back to where we’re supposed to live in Africa, whether it was in Cameroon or Burkina Faso, we were living like in the 19th century. Claire Denis: That was very weird. Eric Hynes: Maybe when you said this sort of Life of a Boy is the memoir, that it’s referring to the fact that it’s actually called Boys. Claire Denis: In fact, in that book the boy has stolen something I guess. In the end, he’s dying. It’s a very tragic story, but it’s started on by being humiliated. It takes place in the ’40s I guess. Nov 17, 2012 2 Eric Hynes: When you go back to Africa now, do you feel that it’s home or do you feel like a tourist sort of, the way that France answers that question? Claire Denis: I don’t feel like a tourist, but I must say that I never felt like a tourist nowhere. I don’t know. I’m too curious. Even if I go to a place I’ve never been before, I don’t want to look like a tourist. I don’t want to feel like a tourist. Maybe I look like a tourist, but I don’t want to feel like a tourist. Claire Denis: And of course, I’m not like France, but I think it’s not home. It’s a place that I’ve known at different periods, and it has connection with me physically because of the smell or the food, all the things that come back from childhood. Even some schools I remember and still exist, some houses, and a feeling of that quality of heat that I always feel good with, but it’s not home. Claire Denis: It was never home. We were raised by reasonable people. We were never raised as if it was home. So, thank god. No, I mean, we were not raised with brutality. We were raised trying to be sane things. Eric Hynes: I’m going to read a bit of dialogue towards the end of Chocolat to talk about. It’s the father talking to France who’s a diplomat. Is that correct to say or— Claire Denis: No. In the film, he’s like an administrator, which is a civil officer. Eric Hynes: Civil officer. Okay. Claire Denis: There is a big difference with diplomat. Number one in the time of colonialism, there was no diplomat because there was no diplomacy to be made. Eric Hynes: Sure. I’m very sure. Claire Denis: And also, my father was a young man, as a civil officer it was not an important person. So, they would send him to the bush and small places, and it was not grand. It was like ... That’s what I wanted to say. Eric Hynes: So, he says, and this of course refers to the first thing we see in the film. “When you look at the hills beyond the houses and beyond the trees, where the earth touches the sky, that’s the horizon. Tomorrow in the daytime, I’ll show you something. The closer you get to that line, the farther it moves. If you walk towards it, it moves away. It flees from you. I must explain this to you. You see the line, you see it, but it doesn’t exist.” Eric Hynes: And it seems to me that horizons keep coming back in your films. Do you feel like you’re still actually chasing that horizon? Claire Denis: I am ashamed of those lines. Nov 17, 2012 3 Eric Hynes: Oh really? Claire Denis: I wish they were not existing. I think one day I felt like writing a sort of interesting piece of dialogue, and I honestly think it’s really bullshit.