Two French films currently in the news were shot entirely abroad: Julia, a feature film made in Los Angeles and Mexico by Erick Zonca and Young Yakuza, a documentary about the Shinagawa neighborhood in Tokyo by Jean-Pierre Limosin. The two are very different, made in financial and shooting conditions that have little in common. Nonetheless, a shared attraction for the faraway brings them together, either in their curiosity for a culture that is impenetrable to us, or the seduction of elsewhere, with its images that fill our theaters. It is in this outlook that we went to talk to Jean-Pierre Limosin, Erick Zonca and his producer François Marquis, as well as Bruno Dumont whose film-before-last, Twentynine Palms, was set in Californian deserts and who has a new “American” project.

French cinema getting out among foreign countries is nothing new. From Méliès to Ophuls, from Renoir to Demy, filmmakers did not wait until the end of the century to work outside France. But most of the time, it was emigration, a lasting integration into another system, or even an exile. American cinema was born of these imports, particularly Germans such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Siodmak and so many others.
Yet it was collective history, one of wars and dictatorships, of exiles as well as commercial opportunities linked to the economic potential of an art that was still new. Of course, this history is not over, but in the majority of cases, it is now about individual stories, personal challenges and specific esthetic proposals. Contemporary filmmakers were and are viewers, especially in France where American, as well as Japanese cinema was discovered and analyzed, stimulating many vocations. The strong appeal of America and Asia for European cinema of course has its roots in the love of cinema as it developed in the 1950’s. American cinema is still in the sights of the youngest of French filmmakers and not only in the form of a parodical relocation or simple homage: Le Tueur by Cédric Anger, for example, showed how American imagination could serve a rigorous description of Paris.
But going overseas is an opposite journey. It is precisely about going to meet, not a type of cinema, but a territory. Is it to dissipate the aura of images that have so seduced these filmmakers? François Marquis explains that Erick Zonca was drawn to two things: “American mythology and the desire to shoot in the United States. Reality imposed itself with the subject.” He put the image and the legend to a reality test. Zonca and Dumont admit that it is the territory, landscape or border that initially appealed to them. “The desire to make sense of the images that are sent to us,” sums up Dumont, “to go to the places where most American films are shot.”
According to each of the filmmakers interviewed, making sense implies losing one’s bearings. Dumont speaks of impressionism. Zonca admits to tying himself to the speed of a thriller. Limosin describes the impenetrability of the world of the yakuzas represented in his film, and Japan in general, where he shoots regularly, along with the feeling of something “direct” when immersed in a foreign country and language: “what I like every time I work there is that I don’t have an interface with the Japanese. There is something very direct,” sensations “that don’t allow simulation.” Paradoxically, the partial or complete loss of direction caused by the confrontation with a foreign language is an advantage, a more direct way of grappling with the signs of a culture, the material of a language, the presence of a body and the expressivity of a face. But this loss of bearings, as Limosin reminds us, does not give access to transparency and naked truth. It is rather the opportunity to work on the interface between the filmmaker and the world. This interface is of course the image and we understand that inventing a way of being in a foreign country means inventing an image. The means accepting Takeshi Kitano’s suggestion of being inspired by accents heard in the street, of indicating the presence of an interpreter or an automatic translator and of reinforcing or removing the obstacles standing between meaning and sign.
Of course all this does not happen without problems of production or distribution and difficulties working with foreign crews, mentalities, systems and audiences. It is inevitable that globalization can represent an advantage (the multiplication of financial resources) as well as raising a range of problems, given that the systems, expectations and conceptions of cinema are so different. Erick Zonca, François Marquis and Bruno Dumont describe them in detail in their respective interviews. Only Jean-Pierre Limosin worked with a French crew, of course due to the more flexible format of a documentary. But they all agree on one point: going abroad is going in search of unknown resources and the capacity to adapt to reality. It means shaking up one’s own system to make images that have cast off habits and clichés.

Bastien Hader

Read the interview with Jean Pierre Limosin
Read the interview with Erick Zonca
Read the interview with François Marquis
Read the interview with Bruno Dumont