You composed the soundtrack for Hyenas before the film was made ?
My brother, who was a great music-lover, really wanted food - symphonic food, as he liked to call it. For him, Hyenas was truly a symphony in his heart and mind. He wanted me to work between the lines of the screenplay. We often hung out in bars. My brother liked bars. It’s no secret. His office was in bars. That’s where he worked. That’s where he found the connections that sparked his creativity: in a place where people talk, where wine flows, not that he necessarily drank that much. He was not a big drinker but his natural environment, in the poetic sense, was in the seedy part of town. That’s where you find precious gems. He wanted me to give him the film’s basic themes that I had worked out on the guitar. I gave them to him on a Walkman so he could listen to them on headphones in bars and keep telling himself his story. When Djibril talked about the screenplay of Hyenas, it was even more incredible than the film. He used his discussions to plan his shots and bring it together.

The album is already the fruit of your musical travels and encounters.
Yes, that was also my brother’s influence. I have a bit of a background in cinema. I worked with him as an assistant, painter and little brother. We shared this pretext that was very important to us because it let us respond to things we loved: images, Africa. He was already so into music both as a listener and someone who wanted to create. We had a group from when we were kids and of course he was the leader. I took over when he dropped out because he realized he had better things to do. He was very literary. He wrote beautifully. He was a poet. Brian Eno once said you make ONE album in your life. I don’t know what gave him the authority to say that but he was right to say it because it’s the truth. And this is really my album. This album is the foundation, the lifeblood, of everything I can hope to contribute.

How did cinema come into your life and your brother’s?
Djibril was a storyteller, someone who observed society. He always acted like a judge. He had a costume and it was his favorite outfit. He even wore it to cocktail parties. He walked up the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival for this film in a magistrate’s robe, a black robe. There is a link between this costume and his outlook on life. The robe is worn by people who judge. What does the robe mean for someone who is not a magistrate? He wasn’t trying to get a reaction. His eye was truly a camera, like a judge examining the facts. He always judged people, good, bad, poets and crooks. When he read La visite de la vieille dame, in which a society is judged, he said it was for him. Before this film, he had already written a screenplay called Katchapan, about a woman who came and handed out money every Friday in the bars in a Muslim town. The starting point for our interest in cinema was fascination. It was a fascination with the stories people tell and fascination for outdoor theaters. Movies were magical in neighborhoods that didn’t have electricity.

You worked in cinema very early on as an actor.
My first appearance in a film was in 1968. I was at primary school and I skipped classes to come in front of this object that I had never seen before: a camera. I saw it made a noise, that it was on a tripod, that it had a battery that hummed. It was fascinating because in my neighborhood, there were still those old western cameras where you had to cover your head so light wouldn’t seep in. We used one in Hyenas. Hyenas was Djibril’s western. He liked wide, open spaces, horses that gallop from the horizon toward the camera and the dust. He liked the lyricism of westerns.

How would you say cinema influences your music?
I make panoramic songs. My songs are screenplays. They’re films with no images. I think we all come from somewhere and it’s difficult to move away from what you really are. When I integrate the songs I’ve written, they’re films. An English journalist said to me the other day, “I listen to your album and from the first song to the last, I feel like I’m in a story. I close my eyes and I’m in the same story from start to finish.” I was really happy an English woman said that to me, someone far from Dakar, from an Anglo-Saxon background. It backs up my impression that there are images in what I do. I get that from always hanging out on Djibril’s sets, finding props, building sets, watching people, finding compelling faces, directing them, holding them in a frame, framing shots and playing with colors. Later, when I got into music, I took all that with me. Maybe that explains why my songs are used in movie soundtracks, even in Hollywood. Until I walked on American soil, I said to myself, “No, you’re dreaming,” but when it was used in a big American film (Thomas Crown (1999) by John McTiernan) I realized I am truly a musician for cinema. Even when I write songs, I make movies. And this was because of the constant contact with my older brother and our conversations.

You wrote a screenplay yourself 20 years ago. Is it something you still want to do?
I no longer say I want to so I don’t get frustrated with it. Making films is expensive. You have to not mind waiting and I’m not someone who waits. I get impatient. When I finished my last album, I wanted to make a film and I wrote a second screenplay, Le Taxi Jaune. I found a producer in Paris. We signed a contract. We had lunch all the time. I think film producers spend more time drinking wine and eating than making films! (laughter). With the rewrites, the meetings, the introductions, I really believed it was going to happen. When I got work in the United States, I went there but for three years, I had put music on standby, saying to myself I was going to make a film. In the end, he didn’t find the money and I didn’t want to wait any longer.

Did the music for Hyenas launch your career?
Before Hyenas, Wasis Diop didn’t exist. I was just a musician, composer and producer. But after Hyenas, my name was on an album. It had nothing to do with me. By chance, Universal Music heard a few numbers. They came to see me and bought what I had done. I wasn’t planning a career. It’s not my thing. It happened by chance because they heard it and they wanted it. It’s always worked that way for me.

Was it the same with Thomas Crown? One day the phone rang and Hollywood was on the line?
Honestly, that’s how it happened. When they called to get my permission to use it, I was in a train and I gave the number of the hotel where I was going. I was playing in the countryside and I found a fax when I arrived. I didn’t know what it was about. I didn’t understand a thing they said. I knew they wanted to use a song from my album. I signed the fax and sent it back and never heard another thing about it. Three months later, a friend said, “Wasis, I don’t get it. I’ve just watched a film and you’re in the soundtrack!” Cinema and me, we’re like old lovers. We watch each other from a distance.

You’ve worked with very different types of music. You’ve often confronted different sounds. Where do you get this taste for mixing things?
I’ve always loved the world. When I was a kid, I was by the sea and I watched the horizon. Beyond the horizon, things happen. For me, Africa cannot be a closed continent. Africa has to be at the avant-garde of the world. It is Africa’s mission to save the world and Africa has to go beyond all that. It’s like Djibril, who made a film based on a book by Dürrenmatt because he thinks the story has a universal significance. My parents never went to school but they’re intellectuals. My parents are into nighttime, stars, beautiful stories, myths and legends. They made us and they handed down that innate universality. We weren’t looking for folklore through that opening. We didn’t want to replace the folklore by another folklore. It wasn’t romanticism either. It was simply humanity. We always felt we had relations all over the world. We believed what our parents told us about the cycle of births and deaths. On that front, we were close to Buddhists. We even said we had Chinese relations, brothers, who had gone to live on the other side of the ocean.

Interviewed by Olivier Gonord in August 2008.

Read the Pick of the week by Wasis Diop.