Graduate First (Passe ton bac d’abord) by Maurice Pialat (1979)

“I saw this film again when I was preparing for Les liens du sang because it is set in the same period. It’s a film by Pialat called Passe ton bac d’abord that I first saw when I was in senior high. It was a shock because I felt like it had been made in my school and that it was about my friends and me. I was no great film lover yet it had a huge impact on me. I discovered a different side of cinema. I saw films could really talk about people and their lives in a raw, real and passionate way. It was a shock that triggered something off in my mind. It is not the best known of Pialat’s films but it still holds up well today. It is really a beautiful film.”

Read the interview

You’ve just finished shooting Liens du sang. How did the project come about?

The project started 7 years ago, when Nos vies heureuses was released. I was looking for another film to direct and I had really liked an American novel about two brothers called Blue River. I tried to get the rights to it but they had already been sold to American television. By chance, I came across a pile of books including Deux frères: flic et truand, the true story of the lives of two brothers, one a cop and the other a crook, in the 1970’s. I bought the book, read it and immediately asked my producer to buy the rights. I questioned Bruno and Michel Papet in-depth to find out more about their lives and I worked for a long time on the screenplay to move away from the anecdotes of their lives but trying to keep the spirit and the part that interested me in the book. The film took a long time to finance because it’s a detective story set in the 1970’s… It wasn’t easy to find money.

Despite your casting? When was it finalized?

Along the way. The hard part is when you want to make a costly film, you have to call on actors that are bankable. It’s a vague and volatile notion. Between the time you start work on a project and the time it’s made, actors can gain or lose in bankability. So it was a fortunate set of factors that led me to François Cluzet and Guillaume Canet. Initially, Clovis Cornillac was supposed to play the role played by Guillaume Canet but scheduling problems meant he couldn’t do it. Since Guillaume was free and we’d already almost worked together on Nos vies heureuses that he couldn’t do because he did La plage, it was an opportunity to catch up. He’d just worked with François and he was frustrated at not having been able to act with him. It all came together because there was the success of his film and the Césars. Things picked up speed and in the end, I think both of them are great.

Over the last few years, French cinema has seen a rise in the status of detective stories that had become unfashionable as a genre. Do you consider yourself part of this movement?

I’ve always loved detective stories in books and films, so I was happy to make a film that was like my earlier intimist films about families but with a film noir element. I was betting on the two aspects working well together. I don’t feel at all like I’m part of a movement but it’s true that some things are in the air and you feel the influence. There are ideas that several people have at the same time. There’s Mesrine and Spaggiari. My project looks at more modest characters. I don’t really know. I don’t feel I’m part of a trend. It’s more a question of chance. When I started the project, people were harder to convince. As time went by, my project stayed the same but it became sexier and more appealing to decision makers. It’s strange and something you have no control over.

What were your references in your approach to the genre?

The two films I showed people who were working on the project were Un mauvais fils by Sautet and films by Pialat. There were no real references to detective stories, even though Pialat had made Police and Sautet made Les férailleurs. It’s more in that vein: a story above all about people who find themselves moving among cops and crooks.

So the characters interest you more than the genre itself ?

Exactly. It’s not a real genre film. The idea was to sit on both sides of the fence.

We find a lot of people you’ve worked with before in Les liens du sang.

The crew was mostly those who made Nos vies heureuses and Froid comme l’été. There was a core including the sound engineer, the cameraman and the editor and then newcomers, especially in sets because for the first time, I was not making a contemporary film. 1979 is not that long ago but a lot of things have changed and it was an opportunity to work on that aspect. I don’t have much distance yet from the result but it was a great experience.

It seems like your personal project turned into a “major production.” Were you overwhelmed by the scale of the project?

This film has a bigger budget that my other films, with two stars, but working with the same crew in the same spirit meant I didn’t feel like I was changing categories. Both François Cluzet and Guillaume Canet really adapted to my way of working. We had a budget that wasn’t really that enormous so it had a lot in common with my earlier films, even if it was a little bigger. In the end, it wasn’t that different from other shoots.

Yet it turned into a film that people had big expectations of…

You never really know what people’s expectations are but it’s true that following the César (Ne le dis à personne by Guillaume Canet), a lot of people dropped by the set: television people, journalists and so on. But it didn’t really change the way we worked. I think it’s good because making a film is complicated enough but it can be even harder to get it seen. From that point of view, it’s positive because it means the release will be guaranteed to go well. Otherwise, it didn’t change much.

There wasn’t a “ César effect” in your relationship with the production team, for example?

No because the film was already well underway. We were already shooting so once you’re in that context, you can’t suddenly change your attitude. People are just even happier to produce it. The partners feel vindicated in their faith in the project but not much changes in how it’s made or the means available.

When will it be released?

The film will be finished pretty soon because I have other projects coming up after it. It will be finished in late September. For the release, I don’t know what their strategy will be. Will we go to festivals? Which ones? How? I think it will be released in the first semester of 2008.

What are your next projects?
I’ve written a film for Canal+ that Lucas Belvaux is going to direct. It’s two times two hours on the ELF affair. I wrote the screenplay and co-wrote the dialogues with Anne-Louise Trividic. I was supposed to direct it but it overlapped with my feature film and I had to choose, which wasn’t exactly pleasant. I think it will be screened in December.

It seems like people don’t often tackle contemporary history in France. Was it complicated dealing with a subject like this?

At first, I wanted to make a fictional film because fiction allows you to simplify a certain number of things. When Canal+ read the story, they were very enthusiastic but since it was similar to the real affair, they wanted me to use real names and that made writing much more complicated. The project ended up being pretty close to the initial idea but I spent two years on the screenplay because I had to check all the information and make decisions that simplified the story yet made it more straightforward, since it took place over several years, with loads of ramifications. It had to be clear without saying things that were wrong or defamatory or disrespectful of people’s privacy. It was very complicated and so it took me a long time to write a good screenplay. I thought it would kill me. And when it was done, I found out I couldn’t direct it…
I also have another project that is partly financed, to make a film along the same lines as Froid comme l’été, for Arte. It is a contemporary film called Un singe sur le dos about a guy who gives up drinking.

Pesented in the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard selection, the new Harmony Korine movie (eight years after Julien Donkey Boy) depicts the life of a solitary young american wich lives as being a Michael Jackson double. In Paris, performing in a rest house, he meets a Marilyn Monroe double, working there too. Feeling well together, she invites him in a small Scottish town where she lives in a big house with her husband, Charles Chaplin, and their daughter, Shirley Temple, but also Madonna, James Dean, Abraham Lincoln, Sammy Davis Jr, the Pope or the Queen of England… We’re invited once again into the poetic and personal universe of Harmony Korine, made of characters as colourful as tragic, incarnated by many of his comedians/directors friends : Werner Herzog, Léos Carax, Denis Lavant, and the really moving Samantha “Marilyn Monroe” Morton and Diego “Michael Jackson” Luna. Before discovering this movie in theaters, (re)discover Harmony Korine’s movies : JULIEN DONKEY BOY ( 1999 ) and GUMMO ( 1998 ) available on DVD.