You worked as a critic for Cahiers du cinema. How did you start?
When I was in High School, I started a magazine I sent to Jean Douchet, Serge Daney and Alain Bergala. Douchet and Daney answered to me. On a day he was introducing Pickpocket (by Robert Bresson) in a theater, Douchet advised me to write in Cahiers. I went to Paris on the year of my graduation, he introduced me to Thierry Jousse and I started to work for the magazine by the end of 1993. I left them six months later to work as the assistant director of André Téchiné on Thieves and on other movies and I went back to Cahiers at the beginning of 1995 when a new staff was taking charge of the magazine.
I wrote there till 2001 when I directed my short film Novela.
One of my last texts was about Kubrick when he died. Or something about cardboards in silent movies. At this time, one could quite write what he wanted in the magazine. I was writing about the dead and of course about some American directors like Brian De Palma for Mission To Mars or European ones like Fassbinder. It became harder to write when I started to work on scripts for Xavier Beauvois on To Mathieu and Bad Faith (Le petit Lieutenant in French).
I came to cinema thanks to American cinema, precisely through Once Upon A Time In America and Taxi Driver. And even more precisely through its actors, De Niro and Pacino. Through Once Upon A Time In America or Raging Bull, which are very stylished, you can be aware of the direction at the age of 13 or 14. What is funny is that you don’t see it at first sight.
And it’s through these directors that I came to French cinema, through the French New Wave Scorsese talks constantly about in his interviews. Then the French made me discover another American cinema, the one of Nicholas Ray. You start by reading and then you see the movies.
The playful way the French New Wave makes films -and that I have always enjoyed- is also in American cinema. Even in minor directors like Soderbergh, the pleasure is there. It’s a way to make cinema you could find in the New Wave -in Shoot the Piano Player as well as in Band of Outsiders. In a way, in Fassbinder’s cinema too, in that desire to make Hollywood movies in Europe. Not Hollywood in the historical way but in today’s way: work on the representation above all. At Cahiers, I loved Coppola for that and Kubrick too, who was not liked very much. In the seventies, even in minor directors’ works, you feel the desire for fascination like in the silent era. We try to fascinate again.
How does your relationship to Hollywood differ from others French directors that are inspired by that model?
I don’t really know, we have the same taste. But I don’t try to copy, to make American films in France. Americans make a cinema prevailed by accepted biases in their scripts, through mise-en-scène, lighting or music. It’s a cinema that is not afraid to emphasize its choices but that can play them down for balance purpose. Naturalism is maybe too overwhelming in French cinema -or not well-thought enough, even in good movies. It can sometimes be as brilliant as extreme stylisation. The direction in Pialat’s Van Gogh is quite like Fritz Lang’s or Mizoguchi’s. Naturalism is a strength that can also suffocate French cinema. Directors often kept from this naturalism the TV aspect only -a simplicity that masks the formal system. But in Renoir’s cinema there was a system, nowadays it’s not always the case. French cinema lives through under Pialat’s influence but only for his way to catch the instant whereas the art of Pialat is rather mainly the frame.
To me the main legacy of American cinema is in the writing. The New Wave understood it. The American screenplay is in the break-up, it doesn’t seek unity. I don’t mean to go against the French model. Something I like in Melville for instance is his love for American cinema and the way he manages to save its biases in his own films. I would like to re-use his way to resort to characters as ghosts. The Red Circle has a Murnau side: characters are dead, they must be buried. You can definitely find those biases in French cinema but the naturalistic tradition often suffocates them. I became aware of this when working on the English version of The Killer: translators told me there were twice or three times as less words as in the average French film. It’s very important not to make a screenwriter’s film when you started, like me, as a screenwriter. What I’m interested in is mise-en-scène. I want to be able to do without dialogs in an entire shot. That kind of experience is more frequent in American cinema than in French cinema.
When they shoot in the US or when they aim at the US model, French filmmakers often seem to be one step behind, as if all they had learnt was about Seven by David Fincher whereas Fincher has already moved to something else…Yes, Fincher seems to have become an unavoidable reference. But more because of the screenplay twists than for his work on the surface and the lines –which is the reason why I personally think Zodiac is his most accomplished film. This said, it is nevertheless normal to refer to the previous decades. Today’s French cinema refers to 70s American cinema the same way the New Wave referred to 50s cinema -and not 60s cinema-, to Aldrich and not Frankenheimer. Look at Kiss Me Deadly and Shoot On The Piano Player: the two films are very close. There’s an hallucinatory side, a desire to tell stories through fascination, by keeping up with a pace. For The Killer, one of my own desires was to slow down. We had few acknowledged references: for the caresses and the spirals, Vertigo. Flor the slowness and the hypnosis, Taxi Driver…
What about Ferrara’s influence?
Not consciously. I like Ferrara a lot, especially Christmas because of the work on the cross-fades. That’s what I like a lot in the American cinema that does not seek a naturalistic description of the city but an attempt to describe it from the sensations it brings about. What does one remember from a ballad in Paris? It was important that the killer of the film, Kopas, doesn’t come from Paris. He visits Montparnasse like Disneyland.
When did you start writing with Xavier Beauvois?
When I was still working for Cahiers, we met on holiday in Italy. By chatting, the idea of To Mathieu came to us. He had just completed two very personal projects -North and Don’t Forget You’re Going To Die- that had to do with a time of his life. He told me he didn’t really know what to tell next. He had children by then and was bound to lead a bourgeois life. He had the impression he made it through -which he could never have imagined five years before. I told him to tell that story: that of a guy who’s going to discover comfort, a bourgeois life, luxury and who will enjoy it. It’s also the framework for Lorenzaccio: a guy that has a vengeance in mind and when he meets a woman the vengeance gets impacted. To Mathieu has thus become a personal story, which also depicts his relationship with his father. Xavier doesn’t like writing very much, so I did but I had no idea I was going to be his screenwriter.
As far as Le Petit Lieutenant is concerned, we met together a policeman and attended questioning sessions and arrests. But at the end, the same thing happened as for To Mathieu. Rather than seeking a murder plot, he decided to tell what we saw: the story of someone that joins the police and discovers his colleagues’ everyday lives with also alcoholism and dependence as underlying subjects. He really needs to start from that kind of autobiographical or documentary material. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t really need to exorcise things. I have thousands of questions about cinema. There are obviously personal things but that I don’t need to translate into autobiographical material.
Was that precisely a problem to you? Isn’t exorcising a youth or a past part of the New Wave mythology?
The origin of the New Wave is mostly middle-class anyways apart from Truffaut. People mixed up things afterwards: they didn’t see that Jean Eustache’s films for instance were genre films. Same with Desplechin’s films. People from the New Wave or who inherited from it did not generally need to exorcise things so much.
Before I got the story, I had scenes ideas -that of the Chinese gallery or of the opium den. I remembered that Ernest Lehman told about his screenplay of North by Northwest that before he wrote the story Hitchcock wanted something that would connect the United Nations, the plane in the corn fields and the guy hanging on Lincoln’s nose on Mount Rushmore. I kind of followed the same process: connecting a Chinese gallery, snow and the arrival of a killer in Paris. Then you have to find a story to show all that.
Having lived between the 12th and the 13th district of Paris impacted the film a lot. It’s a neighbourhood where I enjoy walking around. We wanted to avoid above all the Parisian stereotypes -Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Montmartre, les Champs-Elysées. I wanted a bind with a newer architecture, which would provide me with lines rather than walls. Next to the ‘Grande Bibliothèque’ neighbourhood, there are places where there is just nobody. It’s pretty fascinating, you wonder what it hides. I saw a genuine opium den in the basement of a building in the 13th district. It was interesting to show it wasn’t the killer that was going to such place but the target, the bourgeois character. It’s the killer who eventually gets into the movement of his target. The idea of the film was not to highlight the action and the suspense but the spiral of a killer that ends up possessed by his target. Those are things I like in 70s American cinema, like in Apocalypse Now: a man, vampirized by another, becomes that other. Of course we had a subject but in France we are precisely generally too conscious of our subject…
By Bastien Hader on January 3, 2008 in Paris.