What inspired you to make Twentynine Palms?
I was struck by the landscape, and by the impression it left on me. I really started off from a feeling. I thought it would be interesting to make a film which started from that point, and wasn’t first built on an idea or a story. I had this project that began to drag along a bit, and I was interested in making a film with very little screenplay, to make an essentially impressionistic film. I was scouting locations for a movie I’d already written, we had a little money to begin development, someone had suggested this natural park, and I so went there to scout the location. I was a bit in the same situation as the protagonist of Twentynine Palms; I was looking for places, and it was a bit like a leisurely tour.

And for the original project, what brought you to America?
It was justified by the screenplay – most of the movie took place in a desert in America. I’d also scouted locations on the West coast, I spent a week in the park and I spent a month in Los Angeles.

What was your relationship with the open American space?
It was linked to American films I’d seen; so I was a bit in dumbstruck by the vastness. All of my frames of reference were very affected, and I was very impressed by the scale of it all. It really hit me hard. I had no experience with deserts; I didn’t try to understand it, and took it as it came. There’s also the collective American imagination, which has a force in the collective imagination of audiences throughout the world; so I wanted to go there. And wanted to give… to give meaning to the images that are shown to us, and so I wanted to go where most American movies are shot. I enjoyed the idea of making a trip there.

Was it hard to put together the financing for this film shoot abroad?
Yes, it was very difficult. We started off a bit naively with the idea of a purely French production, with money from France. Initially, the screenplay was about an American couple, and Canal+ and the CNC refused to back it if the movie wasn’t 50% in French. So I had to revise a bit what I wanted to do. I thought I was going to make a movie in English, I’d already started casting Americans and since I’d already found the actor, I started looking for a French actress. I came back to Paris, I looked for the actress in France and I couldn’t find her. I’d met Katia Golubeva, who seemed right, but she had to speak French, so we had to give her lessons, and ended up with a sort of gibberish. But I like that, I like going with whatever comes up; I had no problem with that. The movie becomes whatever it is with the means you have. I don’t have the money to play around with things; so I do what I can. I don’t believe too much in what I write; so I enjoy being corrected by external elements that arise. We found ourselves shooting with a Russian and an American – that wasn’t at all what I’d written, Katia didn’t match in the slightest and I realized things weren’t working out with her. I re-did the character from scratch to make it fit her and take her as she is. If you look at the movie closely, it shows. Her acting is reluctant. But that works for me. I don’t fight it.

What did you have to cope with while shooting?
The heads of the crew were French, but all the other members of the crew were American. There was also a ranger who told us where we could place the camera and where we couldn’t. For us French, it was rather restrictive to adapt to the American way of doing things. It was straightforward; so it was rather pleasant during the preparation, but we had a lot of problems with the American producers, who always asked for stuntmen during the fight scenes, which I refused. So we’d get into a lot of arguments with the American producers about the way we, the French, work, which for Americans seemed extremely casual, and at the same time didn’t respect the rules of an American production. We saw a place to put the camera and put it there; we didn’t worry about whether or not we had the right. At the same time, we had a real exchange, really shared something, with the Americans. It ended up being mutually enriching.

And administratively, how was it working with American unions?
We were on a small budget, so we didn’t have any problems with unions because we were under the price level. We got together with a New York production company quickly, Seventh Floor, who worked with us, and we adapted to their constraints. We had to have a certain number of American technicians, so we got them, especially an American first assistant director. I didn’t speak English very well, so the first assistant would liaise with the actors and everything went OK.

The Flanders war scenes were shot in Tunisia. How did things go over there?
At the beginning, I wanted to shoot in Afghanistan. It was complicated. We wanted to go to Lybia, but there was a problem at the UN with France, so we were thrown out of Libya. We fell back on Tunisia because the producer had a contact with a Tunisian producer and the safety conditions seemed much better. I went to look for locations in Tunisia, it didn’t correspond at all to what I’d written – there were oases. I eventually added them in and wanted them. I added the oases and shot them. I adapted.

How was Twentynine Palms received in the United States?
It was very well received in American universities. Some people get up to say it’s a tremendous movie, but three-fourths of them are ready to punch me on the way out. The reaction’s quite intense, at either extreme. It was rather well received by the press, but it isn’t well received by the average moviegoer, who can have a rather violent reaction. The film is rather violent. Some reject it when they’ve just seen the movie, but are calmer about it after several days. In France the reaction was the same. The violence in the movie provokes a rejection, but I was very well received in college movie houses.

There’s also this distorted view of open American spaces…
The movie goes to landscapes you know, and at the same time it’s twisted. It starts out as a leisurely ride and ends up in absolute horror. That doesn’t correspond to the typical romance in the American collective consciousness, but there’s nevertheless a whole category of American horror films that are made along the same lines.

And the project for The End? Is it still happening?
Yes, it’s still happening: the screenplay’s written and we’re looking for American actors. It’s called The End because the idea is sort of to remake an American film once it’s done, using its codes. Twentynine Palms is done a bit in this way, using the images, the places, the social relationships, the individual relationships…, all the American codes, and make them spin out of control very quickly. That’s what interests me, to start from the viewer’s desire to watch this type of movie, and go elsewhere. Twentynine Palms was intentionally experimental. I knew I was putting narrative rules at risk. I wrote the screenplay in two weeks, while I usually take more like two years. I wanted to neglect the story and return to impressions. The subject wasn’t important.

How is the project for Hadewitch going?
I’ve started shooting. I’ve just finished shooting the part that happens in winter and am waiting for nicer weather to start on the following bit. It’s being shot in Flanders, in Paris and in Asia, but I don’t know where yet. Flanders and California are the same thing: in terms of landscape, they’re extreme, but if you think of a line as a circle, they’re close to each other. Like the actors. I find they have a star quality, they have a certain nature, a concentrated nature, and that corresponds to the idea we have of a star; it’s tangible. I’ve just shot in Paris and it’s not easy, these places have been filmed a lot, but that interests me. I’m changing the format and am shooting in 1.66. It works well with the subject matter. I went looking for locations with my viewfinder set to cinemascope and it wouldn’t fit in. It was too wide. Now it’s much narrower, it’s easier, it makes me simplify things, and that’s good. It’s more about verticals. I like having a new constraint. At first, I wanted to shoot in 1.33, but it’s not possible anymore: you can’t show it in movie theaters. But it’s really good; it’s extremely simple. I’ve just shot for a week, it’s really easy, as simple as it gets. With cinema, you have a technique, technicians, lenses – as Bergson used to say, the tools necessarily translate a mystique. You can’t film mystique – no matter how much you try, it’s pretentious – so you have to use mechanics. And I think when you take an interest in the format, you realize the format ends up framing something that is perhaps spiritual. I wait for something spiritual. All I can do is frame the image, so I film trees, I film people and hope something will happen, but I can’t call up something spiritual: that sounds ridiculous to me. And this frame is somewhat ascetic, which means I can’t pick up big landscapes on the right and the left. It’s always a bit narrow. But the narrowness contributes to the humility, to something ordinary, which is a constraint I need to impose on myself. I like it.

Is the idea to get physically closer to the characters?
I used practically no wide-angle shots, but I didn’t necessarily realize it. With cinemascope, I pick up a lot on the right and the left, but not here. I’m betting that it will contribute a lot to the movie itself, but while you’re shooting, you have no idea, you’re not aware of what you’re doing. Same for the sound: in Twentynine Palms, there’s a lot of direct sound, we hear the generator, something a bit grimy that I like a lot, something impure. I don’t mind impurity: if it creaks, it creaks; if an actor’s stomach grumbles, his stomach grumbles. What’s interesting is to give shape to all that.

The project’s very written, as opposed to Twentynine Palms.
Yes, but I muck it up a lot. I write because I think I have to write, but at the same time, I let go of the script. The subject’s very tricky; it’s the Way of the Cross, and has been done and redone. You’re never far from a cliché, it’s rather difficult, so I need to break all that to ensure I end up with something ordinary. The screenplay isn’t necessarily ordinary. I think what I’ve just done is rather ordinary. There’s something humdrum about it, which I like a lot. The character is in a close relationship with the landscape, with the elements, the animals. What I did two weeks ago I made fairly humdrum: it doesn’t look like anything. We had special effects, with people who brought birds. It was screwing up all the time – it was great. I was really into the imagery. The actress was very simple, doing almost nothing, she had trouble being filmed, was very fragile, but it’s not bad. If I’d given that to an actress, she would have hammed it up. I manage to find what I like in a sort of deconstruction. And I think it’s the long-run that counts: a movie blossoms, and you need to start out humbly. What I shot is really ordinary.

So for you, shooting a film doesn’t consist in obtaining a preconceived image in the screenplay, but rather in being inspired by what you get.
I look for something that dazzles, but what’s dazzling is the film itself. It’s not a shot – beautiful shots scare me; music scares me. Even though this time I said I was going to put some in, I’m already having trouble getting it to fit. It’s very rudimentary, in fact. We manage to make things out of little pieces of wood, the actress does something else and we realize it’s not bad. At the same time, you have to keep an eye on it, there’s a screenplay, but I believe the movie will be less than the screenplay. That’s good. The screenplay is a mindset, it’s constructed by a mind. Making a movie with my mind doesn’t interest me at all. When I hear the dialogs I ask them to do from time to time, I find them pretentious. So I prefer for them to say nothing. I realize it. I talk to her, but often she’s looking at me, she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. The result is rather surprising. I shot a scene with a page of dialog; in the end there was only one word. The little word at the end is really good because it came out of all those failures. You have to listen, go through the dialog, realize they can’t manage to say it, that it’s over-written. And anyway, they’re all printed. When people say my films are taciturn, it’s simply a result of the takes. At the beginning, there’s a lot of talking and we remove things until it’s very simple. When I shoot, I’m terrified, it’s cold, there are a lot of people, we’re expecting this thing that doesn’t happen, so you’re better off embracing what comes along and giving it shape rather than fighting to force something to happen that will happen anyway. When I prepare a movie, it’s a composite of all the elements; the screenplay can’t be too good, nor the music too beautiful, nor the lighting too beautiful; it’s a balance. The screenplay isn’t that important, but it’s for the industry. It’s not the movie. The screenplay can’t be too strong, other things must come to life as well, there’s the sound, the frame, the camera movement – it’s a balance. But we work with a screenplay which is a determining factor because the financing comes from there. People swear by it.

And that’s why you refuse to give the screenplay to your actors?
If you give it to the actors, they read it, work on it, and what interests me is rather what caused the screenplay. What interests me is that the film I’m making is what caused the screenplay I wrote, and not that it’s the result of it. That’s why I hope it’s going to be much simpler, much more ordinary, especially for a subject like this one.

The idea of returning to pure intentions…
Purity. God, love, these words are so… You can write them down, I’m not afraid to write them down, but when you have a face in front of you… Love can come out of a footstep, a noise, a branch, it can come from anywhere, so you have to be careful to grasp it when it happens.

Paris, 2008 March 4, by Olivier Gonord.