How did you start your career in cinema?
I started off in cinema with an important encounter that meant a lot to me, when I met Roberto Rossellini. I met Roberto Rossellini at the Cinemathèque thanks to the cashier; at the time I wanted to write about Thomas Müntzer, a pastor who opposed Luther during the Peasants’ War in Germany in the 16th century. I was interested in how religious discourse was becoming political discourse, and this opposition between the party of peasants and the party of princes was at the center of my thought process, based on what I’d read in Engel, of course, about the role of violence in history and in Terence Bloch’s book, Thomas Müntzer. So I met Rossellini at the Cinémathèque and told him about the subject. At the time he was in his period of making movies about history, he was very keen on the project and proposed I write up the story for him. I didn’t know anything about cinema and thought that when Rossellini wanted to make a movie, he made a movie. I then discovered that he was actually pretty much banned from cinema everywhere except in France. And so I worked in vain for two or three years. It was funny: I asked him especially about dialogues and he told me, “Let’s shoot the movie and we’ll see about that afterwards.” So I wrote this huge thing which remained dead in the water, so to speak, and the irony of the story is that when I directed my first movie with Nicolas Philibert, La Voix de son maître, we got an advance on box office receipts during the same commission that allocated an advance on box office receipts to Rossellini for the film he wanted to make about Marx. That was the last time I saw him in Paris, and I told him I thought it was ironic that a filmmaker of his caliber and two novices like us would end up in the same commission, but he found it normal – he knew a lot about cinema, and I didn’t know much at all. And that’s how it started.
Before that, what was your relationship with cinema like?
I’ve always been a moviegoer, but not a movie buff. Cinema was a pleasure for me. I went often: on Saturday evenings with my aunt and Sunday afternoons with my father, and on Thursdays we had cinema at school – we’d always watch the same two movies, Way out West with Laurel and Hardy, and Bim – I knew them backwards and forwards –, with a documentary about African boaters that was interesting. I loved cinema, saw a huge number of films, discovered the Cinémathèque and became an insatiable moviegoer, meaning that we’d go… I say “we” because there were several of us around the same age who’d go from 3 pm to midnight and watch whatever they’d show. That was my taste for cinema as a moviegoer, but that was all. I hadn’t thought about being a filmmaker, or about what cinema meant. Either I’d like the movies or I didn’t, that’s all.
What part did cinema play in structuring your political thinking?
The movies that played a part in structuring my political thinking were essentially documentaries. A lot of things I thought about actually came into sharper focus through documentaries: I was better able to see and analyze them. And it was all essentially through documentaries or the imitation of documentaries – I’m thinking of the strong impact Peter Watkins’ The War Game or The Battle of Culloden, with a different approach, had on me when they were released. Also, all of Rossellini’s work on history, on how to show History and do critical work through cinema was extremely formative for me, and it’s true that the movies that had a real effect on me intellectually and emotionally were documentaries, whether they be Van Der Keuken’s first films, or films by Richard Dindo, by Pierre Perrault in Canada, Night and Fog, Resnais’s documentaries, Shoah, of course, and Fred Wiseman’s work as well. I’ve always enjoyed that a lot, and I still do. I think documentaries, with their inventiveness both in terms of narrative and thinking, are always more satisfying for me than fictional cinema, even though I like actors immeasurably. I think there’s always more disappointment with a fictional movie than with a documentary.
How do your writing and your filmmaking complement each other?
There’s an expression by Stéphane Mallarmé I like a lot when he’s talking about dance and poetry, and he says, “Dance and poetry for me are lit from reciprocal fires.” I’d like to say the same thing for me about literature and cinema: cinema and literature for me are lit from reciprocal fires. Meaning I don’t feel any gap between the way I make films and the way I write. Let’s simply say that as an artist, I can sometimes express myself via literature, and sometimes via cinema, which is a rare privilege. It’s actually a rather old tradition in cinema, whether it be Jean Cocteau, Pasolini, Robbe-Grillet, Pagnol, the Prevert brothers, etc. You could name dozens and dozens of examples. I’ve often thought that if Emile Zola, who was a good photographer in his day, were alive today, he’d necessarily be a filmmaker – I can’t see how he couldn’t be a filmmaker. It’s simply a form of writing that’s perhaps my most contemporary form of writing, and since it’s available to me, I don’t see why I wouldn’t take advantage of it.
When Notre part des ténèbres was released, you stated in the newspaper Humanité, “The writer must first talk about what’s wrong, and what’s wrong is what is real.” Do you think you can extend this literary approach to cinema?
I think I definitely can, but I think there are obstacles, which are ideological in nature and translate into financial obstacles. Basically, it’s because in France there’s a negative bias as soon you want to film or approach the working world. It doesn’t seem interesting. There’s one excuse they always come out with: Ken Loach. As soon as you try to do something about the working world, you’re told, “There are Ken Loach’s movies,” and that’ll do once and for all. It’s also true there’s pressure from TV affiliates who are in the business of selling dreams: describing what’s wrong isn’t mainstream, and so they refuse to do it, even if from time to time they’re willing to do a “charity” film or a made-for-TV movie about some issue or other. My work as a writer could very well extend into the field of cinema and television, provided I manage to overcome the ideological and political hurdles that at the end of the day are financial hurdles. You’re told it’s too expensive. When I shot Billy Ze Kick, one of my arguments to René Cleitman, who was my producer, for shooting it all in a studio was to say, “But if I shoot it in subsidized housing, the ceiling is only 2.3 meters high, and Michael Lonsdale is 1m 93cm tall. Where am I expected to put the projectors?”… it’s too expensive to film where the workers live, we’re forced to shoot in a studio… reality’s too small! As for the way of approaching these issues in French cinema, I may be one of the last representatives of the last generation who have done something else before making films, who have had jobs, for example. I worked as a printer, as did Yves Robert for that matter. Our experience and the experience of others such as Jean-Pierre Thorn, people who, like me, are 50 or 55 years old… a lot of us, before doing cinema, worked in companies, and that completely changes your vision of the world. The problem is, cinema and television today have become more or less what the seminary was to the 19th century. A son who couldn’t become a soldier became a priest, and now the son who can’t get into an elite business school becomes a filmmaker. If you’re good at nothing, you can always do cinema. That makes for a movie industry – which doesn’t mean it’s done without talent – which, sociologically, is represented primarily by people from the middle class and very often from the upper middle, whose concerns are therefore those of their class and who look first and foremost at themselves and their own problems, with the proverbial lover hidden in the closet. You could take practically all French films and find a hidden lover, or an introspective man staring in the mirror. It’s rather discouraging, because in a certain way, cinema should, to the contrary, be fighting on all fronts of the French economic and political context, and render a vision of society that television, especially, and to a large extent the press try to mask from us with illusory images. Cinema should serve as a spotlight on the world, but it almost never does.
Where does your interest in Christianity come from?
The work Jérôme Prieur and I do on Christianity is entirely focused on literature and history. What got us started on this very lengthy work – in the end, we’ll have dedicated fifteen years of our lives to this work, and will have produced thirty-six hours of film – is the fact that it’s written. So the texts of the New Testament have to be seen as literature. And why these texts? Simply because, whatever our religious convictions may or may not be, we are a part of history. When you get married in the town hall with two witnesses, these two witnesses don’t come out of the blue; they initially come from Deuteronomy, where there must always be two witnesses in order for testimony to be true. And then you see it represented millions of times. When you show the crucifixion, you show two other people being crucified, one on either side of Jesus, not because historically there were two other crucifixions, but because in literary terms, you have to have two witnesses for the testimony to be true. So if you want to assure the reader that Jesus was really crucified, you add two other people being crucified who are witnesses to the crucifixion. This constant relationship between history and literature is exactly the work Jérôme and I do together, outside of any religious or confessional concern, with a totally atheistic or agnostic perspective, and solely limited to the field of literary and historical criticism.
What is the creative process for these films – Origin of Christianity, Corpus Christi and the upcoming Apocalypse?
The process is, we first define a small object, which will be the object to be studied. Corpus Christi is twelve hours of film, which reflect upon six verses from the Gospel According to John, thus a very small object, and not the entire New Testament; obviously, that would be impossible to reflect upon and approach in a cinematic way. Simply studying this little object in its complexity, in depth, with any hypotheses that could come out of it, makes it possible to read the rest. It trains you how to read in a certain way. For Origin of Christianity, we worked in exactly the same way on one or two verses from Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians. That was our starting point because it was a hot spot. For the Apocalypse, we started from a study of the last two sentences in the Book of Revelation, and thus from Christians expressing their expectation that the “risen one” will return and pronounce judgment, with the end of time. So it’s from just a few lines. That’s always the starting point for our creative process, with a very close reading of a small object, because we’re not arrogant enough or stupid enough to believe we can include everything, and examine everything. So you have to get across something on a specific point. From there, we meet all the researchers who we think can speak about the subject using this little object as a focal point. And starting from this focal point, we can go quite far, but we always come back to the focal point. And starting from there, something emerges. It’s always enjoy it, and are internally pleased, when we read in the press that we’ve simply filmed some researchers, but it’s extraordinary they don’t realize that what we really do is the essence of mise en scène. These images are extremely complex, since on the one hand, each researcher is filmed in a different way, even if you have the illusion that they’re all in the same place, and on the other hand, these images are combined with sound, because for the foreign researchers, there’s a voice-over that is slightly shifted in order to hear the translation. Subtitles appear in order to identify the person, to highlight a word. In short, there’s a complexity, image by image, and a very unusual narrative complexity. Our narrative model was Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, meaning, with a story that moves forward only in facial expressions. That’s where the creative process lies: in recognizing cinema in its purest and most intimate form. I really like what Giacometti said when asked why his sculptures were so gaunt – he said, “I remove anything that isn’t necessary.” I believe Jérôme and I remove anything that isn’t necessary, and indeed we end up with only the researchers confronted with the texts. And suddenly, in such an apparently barren thing, come the story, reflection, thought, intelligence, and the performance, a performance of intelligence, which is something fabulous. We see great minds thinking out loud and it’s absolutely unforgettable, a pleasure for a filmmaker that’s as intense as what you experience when an actor does a successful scene.
How do Jérôme Prieur and you work together?
Jérôme and I are lucky enough to have exactly the same main interests, but at the same time we also have radically different approaches to the texts and the way of examining them. We’re thus completely complementary and at the same time always in a relationship of dialogue, a dialectic relationship on how to understand and how to approach things. And we have fun too, which is crucial. This aspect is also important, but once we’re working together, we agree entirely on esthetics, on the way to conduct the interviews, the way of listening to people, because that’s what’s essential. At the end of the Apocalypse, there’s an absolutely amazing section with a catholic researcher who teaches in Jerusalem, which is a totally remarkable moment of cinema, because she can’t manage to say what really separates Christians from Jews. As luck would have it – luck, or craft or presence of mind –, neither Jérôme nor I tried at any point to help her finish or interrupted her; she’s struggling, and it’s amazing. For that, you obviously have to have a close intellectual relationship and the ability to feel the same way about what’s really happening in front of the camera. Otherwise, it’s like working in a yeshiva, with one in front of the other. And we discuss, we write and we shoot the films that way. But once again, because we don’t step on each other’s toes intellectually and artistically, in a certain way we’re not exactly on the same side.