How did you start your career?
It was actually something that had been nagging at me for a while. After high school, I thought about applying to IDHEC, but then I felt I measure up in general knowledge, and especially knowledge of cinema – all that seemed very far away for me, both socially and geographically. Things dragged on, I wanted to tell stories, and so I made do with what I had at hand, and wrote novels – unpublished ones, which were quite bad, actually. I was still interested in making movies; so I decided to write something, without putting pressure on myself. It wasn’t theater, nor a short story; it wasn’t exactly a screenplay either. I sent it to a movie producer anyway, someone named Guy Cavagnac, who had set up shop in Toulouse, and he thought it was good. He didn’t produce it, but he still encouraged me to find the money to make it. I looked around and the GREC (Groupe de recherches et d’essais cinématographiques, or Group for Research and Experimentation in Cinema) gave me 35,000 francs in those days. I learned everything with that, started to look for a crew and shot during my summer vacation – I was a night watchman at the time. It didn’t do well, but it made me want to shoot a second one. Which I did. But I gave up on it – for every project you give up on, there’s another one that succeeds, the whole thing’s rather complicated. And then I made a third short movie, and then moved on to medium-length movies.
My first movie didn’t make it into any festivals, nor did the second one, but I was rather stubborn, and I also enjoyed making them. In any case, I did that during my vacations. It wasn’t my job; I wasn’t even covered by the social scheme for workers in show business… The third short film was chosen for the festival in Pantin, but nothing else… After that, things took off. I did have this feature-length movie I’d written since 1990, right after my first short film. I wrote it based on a book I’d written 10 years earlier, and I was making short films for lack of anything else, because I couldn’t manage to find the money to make anything longer. And then one day, I started earning good money. I was a stage-manager on TV movies, I had some money, and I decided it wouldn’t be bad to write something that, with a short-movie budget, allowed me to stretch it out. I wasn’t thinking of making a 55 minute movie at the time. I told myself I was going to make a 30 to 35 minute movie, something over a quarter of an hour and which I could take my time on, with a minimal budget. So I wrote Du Soleil pour les Gueux. I’m terribly indebted to Thomas Ordonneau for that one: he decided to distribute it even before the movie was shown in festivals or elsewhere. The film was chosen for Pantin and Belfort. I’d already set up all the logistics for Du Soleil pour les Gueux, and then I got money from the CNC – thus hefty funding – to make Ce Vieux Rêve Qui Bouge. So that I wouldn’t let Du Soleil pour les Gueux fall by the wayside, I put off Ce Vieux Rêve for the next year, and it ended up being good timing for me because Du Soleil came out in March 2001 and right afterwards, Ce Vieux Rêve was in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. So a small buzz was created, and at the end of the year, we had the means to put together a first feature-length movie.

What made you want to make movies? Who or what have been an inspiration for you?
Initially, Westerns – Ford, Hathaway, Walsh, the open spaces, obviously – but also Costa Gavras, who was important when I was in my teens, Bunuel for his surrealism and how he addressed social topics, and Costa Gavras for decrying what’s bad in the world. Rohmer too, but when I was 25. The same for Bresson. And I also like to say that my inspiration comes from outside cinema. I’ve found inspiration in comic books, Brecht, Shakespeare, Molière, and Greek tragedy, which has undeniably been an influence. I also like to mention Glauber Rocha: Black God, White Devil had a big impact on me. Moretti’s The Mass Is Ended was also a revelation, as were Almodovar’s first films, which I also went to see – like a lot of French people, I discovered him with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and worked my way backwards thanks to retrospectives. There’s Kaurismaki and The Match Factory Girl. As for French cinema… even Jean Renoir came a bit later. I think that when I saw The Grand Illusion as a teenager, it went over my head, and yet it’s a wonderful movie. Not to mention The Rules of the Game. I discovered Pialat with Police, but didn’t comprehend Pialat’s full range until Van Gogh. Actually, I was raised much more on mainstream cinema, but I was already in the cinema club at Foch, my high school in Rodez. It was managed by the students, and we watched some Bunuel.

Shepherds, hunters… how did the mythological world emerge in your films? And do you find that expression accurate?
Yes, that’s what I’ve tried to do. There’s my desire to stay faithful to children’s dreams, while still talking about their adult anxieties and preoccupations. Yes, a mythology exists somewhere between Tintin and Oedipus, and Grimms’ fairy tales and Perrault’s. I found naturalism tempting for a while, the desire to talk about my own life and how it fits into today’s world. Fundamentally, I do want to talk about myself, and myself in the world, but at the end of the day, my own little life is very banal; I believe it’s even of no interest at all. I’ve also constructed myself pretty much in opposition to things I’ve seen. I started out in the 1990’s and fought fiercely against a “nasty trend in French cinema.” My director’s note for Du Soleil pour les Gueux was written along those lines: I felt that people often lost sight of the working class in French cinema, the countryside too. The movies were set in 3 or 4 districts in Paris and were very much confined to four walls. I found that even Paris wasn’t filmed the way I saw it, except maybe by Carax. Paris does have its open air and its perspectives. Also, if cinema isn’t there to sublimate reality, why is it there? I also wanted to elevate our poor condition to something higher, another dimension, something grander, maybe also more tragic. And indeed, it’s true that talking about me as a type of Raskolnikov in pink tights running on the Larzac plateau was a cooler image. Cinema is based on reality, but at the same time it isn’t real, nor is it a dream. It’s about defining a common ground for everyone; for that reason, it may involve demagogy, but it can also be done in other ways.

Would you accept to direct someone else’s screenplay, some big project they bring to you ready to shoot?
Yes. In fact, I’ve just shot a TV movie for France 3, which I accepted without reading the screenplay. I was very much looking to direct something I hadn’t written and do the whole screenplay thing. Well, I did reorient the writing a little at one spot because I felt that, technically, it just didn’t work. I also don’t think I accepted something I’d be ashamed of, I didn’t dislike the story I was telling, but I was interested in directing something I hadn’t anticipated beforehand, and was even interested in staying in the small, TV format. I also accepted it because I knew they wouldn’t force a specific cast on me. I’m not saying I’d refuse to do something even if they did force the cast on me. I’ve relaxed a lot about the idea of directing and about the profession of the director. I think you can take a very bland, or even crude, screenplay… well, you have to get rid of certain things, but I think there’s a way to make something good out of it. You just need some leeway.

What are you plans now?
I’m preparing a new film for which I’ve written the screenplay.

Do you write alone?
Generally, I bring a solid base to it by myself, nothing totally finished, but something solid, and I rework it with someone. Not someone who writes, strictly speaking, but rather someone who intervenes more on the structure, gives me feedback, someone I can question and who I can have a real exchange with. For the feature-length movie, I need that. I’m looking for funding. I’ll rewrite the screenplay – up until it’s shot, I’m always rewriting –, but I think I’ll start the prep work at the beginning of July.

The dialogues in your films are very literary. Do you leave the actors any leeway?
No, there’s no improvisation. On the next one, I’ve deliberately come back to a much more contemporary language, more spoken, so that the actors can be a little more at ease. I’m no longer using that really refined language you find in Voici Venu le Temps, you’ve got to get up early in the morning to fit in sentences like that, but it corresponds totally to that phase of my life, in the 90’s, when I was sort of reacting to that trend in French cinema which has people speaking poorly. With “fuck” and “you piss me off” all over the place, it doesn’t render anything – just the crudeness. It’s not that kind of realism that interests me. I wanted to come back to that really refined language I first used in La Force des Choses and then continued with in Du Soleil pour les Gueux and Ce Vieux Qui Bouge. It’s a bit like Madame Lafayette among the plebes. For the next movie, my idea is to bring out something fairly political based on the working class’s everyday experience. I’m not sure how the whole thing will come out, but I feel like finding sets that aren’t necessarily beautiful, but taking them instead as I find them and seeing if there’s a way to flesh out something beautiful from them, to try and see if we can magnify all that. I’m not saying, though, that I won’t come back to crooks and a very refined language. I also have a project on the Cathars, which I kind of put on stand-by when I learned that Jean Pierre Denis had a similar project.

You already introduced this medieval world in Voici Venu le Temps.
Yes, and you can also read it in a post-nuclear way. I think Voici Venu le Temps is first and foremost an attempt at making the world right in cinema, and an observation that no matter how much you try to make the world right, you only ever end up reproducing what’s already been done. So I played around with it a lot, trying to reshape clichés, reinvent the relationship between the characters. What interests me a lot with the Cathars is that I can bring together the whole “bad versus good” aspect of it: the bad who aren’t all that bad, and the good who aren’t all that good either. There’s also the political side: it’s the end of the world, of an art to living, one that the Inquisition fought against. I’m not so much interested in the crusade as I am in the ending, the last Cathars, when they fled to Catalonia because they were being chased by the Inquisition, that whole end-of-the-world business, and the end of a society. In addition, I think there really was a Cathar utopia. And then you have the shepherds…