How did Erick Zonca present the project of Julia to you?
A long time ago, he told me the story of a woman flanked by a gang who was going to kidnap the child of a finance magnate in an Eastern European country. There were only two pages. It was 10 years ago. Two things titillated him: American mythology and the desire to shoot in English in the United States. Reality imposed itself with the subject. We couldn’t find an equivalent to the border that was intrinsic to the story and which was inconceivable in Europe. We didn’t know where to locate it, where to find a contrast as extraordinary as the one between the United States and Mexico. He talked about it to me and then time went by. He was busy. He got proposals from America, from Fox and others, which of course he had a hard time resisting. They didn’t come to anything but inevitably, they took up his time. Later, he came back to this idea with another producer, with some changes, making the gang leader into a loner.
How did you present the project to your financial partners?
There were two difficulties that surprised me. The fact that Erick hadn’t made a film in seven years made everyone panic. The second problem was the language, which was a big worry in the system of French subsidies. I realized at that time that protection of the French language sometimes goes overboard. Julia is hardly even considered as a French film. The compensation in choosing to shoot in English is that it will supposedly reach an international audience. But as an international film, we had narrowed down our audience because the film is pretty dark. I have to admit that what I got out of television channels was perfectly honest in terms of what they could do and what they’re used to doing for this type of film in English, but it was longer and more complicated for the rest of the financing and for the mandates.
You worked with the American company Seventh Floor. How did you come into contact with them?
The film was supposed to be fifty percent financed by Americans. We met American producers who introduced Julianne Moore to Erick because they considered her bankable enough. The idea was to have a share of financing in distribution with a fairly large minimum guarantee for the US and even for the world and then additional French financing with television sales, etc. When I took over, I kept in touch with the American producer, who, on paper, was ideal for the project. He kept championing the idea that we’d get an American distributor with a subject like that and with Julianne Moore and once everything was done, we discovered that he couldn’t find a distributor or an investment fund and we couldn’t get the financing together. I hadn’t thought of financing the film with Americans but I thought they’d put up thirty or forty percent. I put together the whole project with this American percentage. When it all fell apart, first I had a hole of forty percent in my budget. Then the actress saw we didn’t have an American distributor for the film and she backed out. It became complicated for her to find dates, to find enough weeks… We were at a dead-end. So we opted for Tilda Swinton and had to re-convince all the partners and so we made the same film with three million less. We lost another three or four months while we waited on answers from everyone and set off again with a budget that not only lacked the American share but also had a reduced European share. We set out with a budget of around four and a half million in cash to make it. We no longer needed an American producer but we looked for a servicing company. Seventh Floor is a service provider that charges for doing anything that required an American producer in the United States.
What is the difference between shooting abroad and shooting in France?
I don’t know what it means to shoot abroad. Shooting in Mexico is a little crazy because they work in the same way as Americans in terms of crew size, organization, hierarchy and so on. Beyond that, a film is a film and we soon understand each other. Then, depending on the people, there are loads of problems. There was another way of working, with other methods, but once we worked through it, they’re very efficient, with lots of experience. The Mexican film industry is very prosperous, essentially thanks to Americans. They release forty or fifty Mexican feature films every year, but alongside that, there are a hundred and fifty American shoots.
You worked with Italy on La folie des hommes
I was the French delegate but the Italian director-producer was in charge. For me, it was fundamentally financial. Working methods in Spain, Italy or Germany are pretty similar. The Anglo Saxon system is very different in terms of the spirit and motivation of the crews, union problems and even concerning the role of the director. It is really another culture and another way of working.
Erick Zonca told us that the week of shooting in Los Angeles didn’t go too well.
We got through it. We had people who were not really motivated. You have to put it into perspective. If an American crew shows up in France to shoot for a week and picks up French technicians for the film, they’ll face the same problem. They’ll get mercenaries who are not motivated by the project. We were working in conditions that made it impossible to have people who were really committed to the film. At the same time, we couldn’t extend the shoot for budget reasons. It was extremely expensive compared to the rest. It’s very unwieldy, very complicated and very inconvenient. The costs are very high in staff and in overtime so they shoot so fast that you wonder how they handle the role of the director in that system. There is a sort of standardizing of American films and they give an impression of competence and talent even in independent films or first films because they have no choice. The director is necessarily a technician over there. He has to go to school and learn the ropes because he has no time to think about directing. At first when we were talking about an independent film taking ten weeks, American producers looked at us like we were crazy. Over there, it’s six week maximum. And there was no interest in whether the screenplay was one hour and twenty-five minutes or two hours. You have this much time and you work it out. It’s your problem if your screenplay goes for two hours. When you’re working in absolute luxury, you can go up to seven weeks. Eight is unheard of but ten! It’s crazy. Either you shoot with people who work with their friends, with crews outside the system and you enter into a European-style production. Or you make a traditional American movie with a major or as an independent but with a small budget and the pressure of time is absolute. The system of hiring actors is not the same as in France, based on a fee. You’re paid for ten sessions. You get so much per session and you’ll be paid here, here and here and after we’ll work something out. Over there, it’s all about first dates and last dates. You get paid between the two whether you work three days or twenty-five. For work schedules you obviously take this into account. There’s no way you can blow out an actor’s schedule. Directing is secondary. The idea of shooting chronologically and calling on the actor in the first week, the fourth week and the seventh is totally out of the question because you have to pay him seven weeks. The union minimum per day is not high but if you have to pay twenty-five days to shoot four, it gets totally out of hand. The whole system is based on an incredibly rationalized use of time, much more so than in France and it determines the way you shoot and the way you work. You can be more flexible in Mexico.
Did you learn something from this experience?
I hated it. It’s grounded in a logic that has no room for art. At some point you have to make a compromise between what you create and a budget you have to create it. There, it’s just an economic question. In France, you can reconcile the two aspects. The highlight of all this was the Mexican shoot, working with people who are movie professionals but with all their assistants and interns who are not professionals. It is not a milieu that is socially homogenous. Some people are not very well paid, to put it mildly. They get a decent wage but no more and they work really hard with incredible enthusiasm and kindness. For eight weeks, we did difficult things with a demanding director, with all the usual shouting and exhaustion. The days were long and they worked six days a week. Every morning, when we arrived for breakfast, the whole crew was smiling. They were enthusiastic and maybe they were being polite too because I don’t think they were as passionate as all that, but they were incredibly kind.
It is a French film in English shot entirely on the American continent. What place can it occupy in the landscape of French cinema?
An original place, like the one all films should occupy, that’s all. There is inevitably some exoticism in a film given all the wide open spaces in Mexico. There is no escaping it. But the subject is audacious. Its treatment of the character is uncompromising and does nothing to make her more pleasant, more appealing. It keeps the distance Erick wanted to let the character develop. And the film’s second strength is letting the film develop at the same time as the heroine, who moves from destructive drunkenness to a point in time when she has to grapple with reality, which has caught up with her, making the film suddenly function differently. That’s how we can justify the shift from a psychological portrait to a thriller. It’s not a desire to make two films in one. It is really the idea of making the film follow the same shift as the heroine. Obviously, it is a problem for viewers. Some prefer the first half. Others prefer the second half. Some think the move more or less works. Those are the narrative issues of film. I’m proud of that, of trying things out. On paper, something that is a little borderline like that is scary. You fear you’ll get to the end and find you’ve got it all wrong. From my point of view, we didn’t. Its place is to be an original object, like most films should be, theoretically. We’re supposed to make cinema, not TV shows. They should be unique prototypes.
What did the distributor think of the film?
We had a real problem with the film’s length that was unsolvable. We all agreed that it would be much better at two hours. That wasn’t the issue but there was a story that was written with maybe a problem that wasn’t addressed during writing and I think we went as far as we could with what we could cut out. We cut a lot and at some point, you feel it’s as good as it can get because you’ve compromised anyway. We were in conflict with the distributor over this, which meant we had a marketing problem. We tried to make it as short as possible but in respecting the film and we were up against someone who was not at all in that frame of mind.
Does the film have an elusive side as a French thriller shot in the United States, ten years after La vie rêvée des anges?
There’s something very elusive because everyone was scared of it. We didn’t get the theaters we wanted. The release is touch and go. I understand that people don’t know where to put the cursor. Either they judge the film on the criteria of a purely foreign, American product and in that case, how do they position it as an art house film? Is the fact that it’s made by Erick Zonca, a well-known director, going to increase its value in light of that commercial norm or on the contrary, pollute its image? They’re all lost. I’d like the first week in theaters to reassure them a little. I can see where they’re coming from. The conclusion you come to is that today, the notion of trust, of taking risks, is completely meaningless. On a certain type of film, like this one and plenty of others, there is a zero risk approach. Which is badly calculated because it’s calculated by people who know nothing and think they hold the key. Maybe their calculations are good overall, at their level, product by product… The calculations are ridiculous because it doesn’t stop them coming to grief with some films, probably less on ours, given how little they put out!
Paris, 2008 March 6, by Olivier Gonord.