Her first feature film, Home, was presented at Cannes Film Festival this year in the International Critics’ Week section. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet and newcomer Adelaide Leroux (Flandres, Seraphine), Home is a mesmerizing film that shifts from fresh family comedy to suffocating claustrophobic thriller and reminds us of Cassavetes, Lynch or Friedkin with a pan-European touch -Ursula Meier is French Swiss but lives in Belgium!

How came the idea of the film?
The idea came while I was driving. There was a house, a trailer, and people eating on a white plastic table. I saw those people, and I saw an image of happiness. I asked myself: ‘how can people live in such a place, or deny reality that much?’ I also saw houses totally shut and I thought: ‘these are two families, two destinies, two ways to deal with this. This led to the idea of a reversed road-movie, an inversed look. I quickly thought I would begin with a family that lives in silence, and then a car would come, then a dozen, then a hundred, then thousands, like in The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock. Very soon I thought and wrote about all the things that could happen in such a case, I wrote a lot of scenes knowing they would not necessarily interest me. All those stories finally went in the film on the Highway Radio. I thought the film had to be more powerful than that, that it had to reach another dimension, that all we were waiting for would not happen, that the danger would actually not come from the highway but from the family itself. The madness is to stay, to hang on, this is what I was interested in. I wanted the film to reveal a family neurosis, which is present straight from the beginning but as they are happy it goes fine. There is a balance.

How did you choose the actors?
I love the casting contrast, I think it tells a lot about that couple without saying too much. And those two bodies, as opposed as those of Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet, it’s already cinema, it already tells something. With him being strong, earthly, and her more fragile, you can imagine things, that he may have protected her, that they helped each other to stand up, that they found their happiness here, they found a balance. This was really one of my bets on this film, to capture happiness. We always thought, with the actors, that this first part would be the most difficult. It’s easy to direct a fight, but how can you explain happiness to an actor?

Did you work a lot with the actors to get that complicity on-screen?
I worked a lot with the kids. The work was also about choreography, it’s sometimes only a question of distance between the bodies, a question of rhythm in directing, it can stand on few things, just looks. Many scenes take place in the bathroom, and I wanted a small bathroom. Since we built the house we could have as much space as we wanted but I wanted to have that narrow place, to have the bodies touching each other.

The physical part is important in the movie.
I like to film the bodies, I like physical cinema, maybe because I did a lot of sport before, I was more on maths and sports than on literature. I feel close to a cinema of bodies, a physical cinema, a cinema of flesh. I feel close to directors like Jean-François Stévenin, Patricia Mazuy or Claire Denis, without mentioning influences like Cassavetes or Maurice Pialat. For me, cinema is bodies, images and sounds. I also direct in a physical way, I touch the actors, I put them on their marks, it’s very animal. I am very much like the film, multiple. I like slapstick, drama, detective movies, I like horror movies, I think there are interesting things everywhere. I love to play with the limits, the frontiers between genres, tones, put heavy metal then Bach or Nina Simone, and look at what happens. I really wanted to mix the genres, to make something singular. Agnes Godard (the cinematographer) often told me we had to avoid every single film reference, that the film had to look like nothing else. We worked a lot on photos. We also worked on the balance between the sound and the images. It’s colourful in the beginning and as it gets quieter for the family when they isolate themselves, the image gets darker.

How did you work with Agnes Godard?
We worked a lot, we pre-cut the shots based on the plans of the house, which was not built. Since it’s a camera, that we are often in the same places, we had to find different ways to shoot, we had to figure how the places would evolve in the ways to show it. I showed her the photos I gathered, we used them on the shooting. Above all, it was a great encounter. We first met in a café, it was supposed to last an hour and we stayed there talking for six hours! We really met on that project, it was obvious. Agnes is not only focused on the image, it’s somebody who knows to look at the actors, who can see if something doesn’t fit in the rhythm, it’s really somebody who has a look on the whole film.

You also worked a lot on the sound.
Sound is really in the heart of the film, it’s what eats the characters. When we said ‘Rolling’, it was really ‘rolling’ and we were launching 300 cars, trucks, bikes and trailers… What I like in cinema is to live a real experience. I want the audience to be with that family on the edge of the highway, I want the audience to hear the decibels, and I want them to suffocate at the end. Some people do claustrophobia crisis at the end of the film and get away from the theater. I’m amazed that cinema can still nowadays produce such reactions. We did tests to see how far we could go on the sound. I wanted people to feel it. I worked while listening to highway tapes, very low to very heavy traffic, changing tracks based on the moment of the film I was working on. It was kind of crazy but it enabled me to feel what the characters were going through. It enables me to feel how strongly sound is already cinema.

It’s your first feature film shot in 35mm, how did it impact the way you direct the film?
I shot my short films in 16 mm years ago, and the two last films I shot were a documentary and a film for television, Des épaules solides, for which I used a very little digital camera -a SONY PD150. The other directors who made films for that series chose to shot in HD but I wanted to try that tiny tool and see what I could get from it. It was a real question about cinema. And as I was going out from that questioning, I was shooting in 35 mm, with heavy sets, with the necessity to lighten the highway with four big balloons… At first I had the impression to have forgotten what it was to shoot on film. But I love it. You have to make choices, you can not wait the editing to know what you will do, you don’t have time for that. There’s something magical about it. I love to lose the control on things, when something I hadn’t planned happens. My first film, at the end of my studies, was very controlled, I wanted to be God almighty. And of coursed it slipped away from me, and that’s what was beautiful. So, for my second short film, Tous à table, I tried the opposite, to see how far I could not control things. Between those two extremes lies the work on direction. I love to prepare a lot, to work with the actors, but I want things to slip away. This is what is beautiful.

Read Ursula Meier’s Pick of the Week.

A côté (Next Door), by Stéphane Mercurio, will be released on October 29 in France. The director gives us a poignant documentary about a hostel for the families of prisoners doing time at the Rennes men’s penitentiary. Familiar with social and political subjects, she builds on a body of work that, film after film, gives a voice to “forgotten people”. She observes carefully and often from a different angle to better reveal the violence of a situation. A côté has won several prizes, including the French film prize and the Audience prize (documentary) at the Belfort Festival.

You studied law. How did you come to work in cinema?
Almost by accident… Director Christophe Otzenberger was preparing a project on refugees and he needed someone to liaise with associations. I was hooked and signed up for the Ateliers Varan (a course on directing documentaries). Back then, Arte used to come see student films. They bought mine and I said to myself, “I’m a director now.” I had never imagined it before.

Your film blends live footage with photographic images. How did you get the idea for this?
During location scouting. At the time, I thought the film would be made at the prison in Fresnes. The women I met told me stories of incredible journeys. They often came from far away. There were a lot of Basques, Corsicans and people on their way to different prisons. One of the first women I met told me in the bus, she’d think about what had been said in the visiting room… I wondered how to capture this. Reenacting the scenes or leaving the tiny world of the hostel would have been meaningless. That’s when I had the idea of photographs. They allowed me to translate the notion of time standing still. We then worked on continuous sound so this bubble of time that is not really on hold would take form. Time for these women means waiting: to go to the visiting room and for the release date.

Your film is called “A côté” (”Next Door”). It seems like this could be a leitmotiv of your work, as seen in Cherche vie avec toit (”Seeking life with roof over my head”), in which you film people when they find a home again so they can best describe what it is like to be homeless.
I think by taking a step to one side, we have to see things differently. On this film, it is what appealed to Anna Zisman (co scriptwriter) and me at the outset: trying to capture the waiting time of prison through women’s imagination. But we did not expect that this setup would be so powerful on the subject of prison itself. When we are with them, we are always wondering what is going on inside. This is why we chose a small prison, where sentences are shorter and visitors are less used to arbitrary decisions. At the same time, the character Chantal shows that you can never get used to it. The first time I filmed her, she had not been able to see her husband. She didn’t know why and she was wringing her hands with anxiety. I realized that after 30 years of visits, the anxiety is still the same. It was overwhelming.

You spent a lot of time on this film: two years of location scouting and ten months of shooting…
First up, we did a huge amount of location scouting all over France to decide which hostel to use. Then, since we had a very small budget, we chose Fresnes, which is nearby. I went there for five months out of two years. But two weeks before shooting started, the prison administration in charge of the hostel, refused us permission. That’s how we ended up at Ti Tomm, in Rennes, a hostel run by an association. At first, I was worried. Fresnes was cramped, very tense. In comparison, Rennes seemed like heaven on earth. I thought we’d never capture the arbitrary nature of prison life that I had encountered elsewhere. But this hostel with its little garden, its many areas where women could tell their stories, ended up allowing something else. It generated more intimate tales. Ultimately, we lost none of the sense of arbitrariness.

Did you set limits on what you would film or not film?
There were things I knew I had to film from the time we spent preparing. Afterwards, time allows you to develop relationships. This way, certain situations can be filmed without violating privacy. When Séverine (one of the film’s main characters) breaks down and I film her, it’s because I have already seen her come back from the visiting room in the same state three or four times without daring to pick up the camera. This time, I said to myself that I couldn’t not film her, even if it wasn’t easy – especially for me. I literally didn’t know what to do with myself. Then I went over to her. She said “Of course it has to be in the film!” I think it’s only indiscreet when permission is not given.

If people say you make militant or political films, does it bother you?
No, the terms don’t bother me, though I prefer “political” to “militant”, which gives the impression you’re providing answers, when my films, on the contrary, raise questions. But political, yes, absolutely. By that I mean that I talk about the collective via individual stories. My work is the opposite of what is done for television these days, which is all about psychology, taking lives out of their global context and the fact that individual destinies are the result of the choices societies make.

There was no funding from television for this film…_Why?
Because they weren’t interested in the film! We started looking for funding from traditional audiovisual sources. No luck. After the Fresnes prison administration refused us permission to film, the producer decided to apply for a “box office advance” (avance sur recette) subsidy. We got it. Then we had to do the rounds of TV channels on the cinema side. That didn’t work either, probably for the same reasons. But I trust my producer to go after them again once the film is released!

For your next film, there is a change in tone - it is about Siné, who is also your father…
I have no idea what the film will be like. It is a film with no budget, which does not make it easy, especially since the archives cost a fortune. I started work on the project before the Charlie Hebdo affair (Siné was fired from the satirical weekly newspaper by the editor in chief Philippe Val for an article deemed anti Semitic in which the cartoonist mocked the President’s son, Jean Sarkozy). This affair changed the film. Up until then, I was making an intimate film, a family film that also dealt with older affairs. Now, I’m filming a man in action…

By Emmanuelle Mougne on October 18, 2008.

Read our review of A Coté.

You come from Winnipeg. What does that city mean for you, for your inspiration and all your work for nearly 15 years ?
Winnipeg means “Muddy waters”, because it is built on two rivers, which are very muddy, you can’t even see your hand when you stick it in it. For me, it’s been my town for my entire life and it’s a very strange and enchanted place right in the middle of the continent. But it’s very isolated, it’s like the middle of a doughnut, there’s nothing there, nothing and everything. All my emotional memories, all my history, everything that defines what I am come from this hole, this nothingness, and it’s kind of a muddy nothingness, like muddy waters. I think, when I was put down for my very first nap as a baby I never quite entirely woke up, my life has always been like a slightly confusing dreamy experience, which I feel tangled up in my pyjamas all the time, I can never quite get untangled, I can never quite do the right thing for more than two days in a row. So it’s been a bit of a struggle for me. Luckily, when I started reading books as an adult I started to discover all the writers with similar experiences -Dostoievski and Kafka-, people that always seemed to struggle to do what they really wanted to do, I learnt that I wasn’t alone in the world and I decided I wanted to be a writer. But I was a good reader enough to know I would never be a great writer but I discovered really exciting primitive filmmakers experimental filmmakers and I gave up the idea of being a writer and I decided to try to be a filmmaker. In the last twenty years I made nine movies since Tales from the Gimli Hospital was completed in 1988. Just in the last couple of years I made Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg and I made countless shorts, I don’t even know how many, sometimes I make a short just because I get lonely, I invite people to a dinner party and I shoot. All the movies have been based on my experiences, my lousy experiences, or dreamy experiences with love or death, and they are dreamy experiences assembled using a filming vocabulary both ancient and modern, I just always believed that I could not use as a filmmaker just contemporary vocabulary, it would be like using only one colour for a painter. I’m always switching my vocabulary around in my films and I’ve been telling really autobiographical movies, not that I’m thinking I’m so fascinating but I think of it as a way of making people find themselves in me, I think I figured out a way of framing myself as an every person. Every person is really interesting, every person is a genius, and awful, brave, a real mixture of things.

In Brand Upon the Brain! the family and the autobiographical part seems more present than ever.
It’s getting very specific, the more I think about my family, the more I realize what a strange grand-guignol and melodramatic family I’ve had. And so in the last few films I just used entire episodes, changing only a couple of names just to keep my family from suing me and I just put them in. In Brand Upon the Brain!, the main story is my older sister hitting puberty and my mother, who’s very puritanical, trying to prevent her from being a sexual being, most of the movie trying to push my sister’s breast back into her chest and pushing her pubic hair back into her pelvis, trying to reverse the whole adolescence process. And I’m right behind my sister, growing my own pubic hair and watching with great interest and compelled by feelings I don’t understand, compelled by feelings I need to obey, and there is so much hornyness and heart-sickness in this battle between my sister and my mother I choose sides of my sister. Hard things happened to my sister, she fell in love with a young boy when she was about 14, a boy who turned out to be a girl.

Really??
Yes, and I just put it in the movie. My sister went mad at me but we sort of made peace about it. It was very embarrassing for me to mention it now, after all these years, but these were pretty exciting times. I wouldn’t trade my teenage years with anyone because there was such sexual excitement in the air -having a boyfriend and then discover it’s a girlfriend!- and then I got a crush on her boyfriend/girlfriend, I don’t know, it was a weird threesome turning to a foursome.

In this movie you mix a lot of genres, grand-guignol, teen detectives…
Teen detectives are just so sexy, they’re always sneaking around, after the dark, going places they’re not supposed to go, always pressing up against each other so they can feel each others hot breathe on their necks, things like that. Teen detectives are the best. And I always liked grand-guignol, I always liked lighthouses, one of the grand-guignol plays I read years ago was called ‘Orgy in the Lighthouse’ and then I saw it in San Francisco about a year ago, it looked really good, there’s a lot of nudity in this play but the actors said they take their clothes off if the crowd’s big enough, so I was lucky the night I went, there was a pretty good crowd. I’ve always loved childhood reminiscence movies, there are two French movies of this kind in my favourites: Zero de conduite by Jean Vigo and Jeux Interdits. I love those two movies. I’ve always wanted to make a child recollection movie. I think silent films still does some things better than talking pictures because silent films are just one big step away from literal mindedness and a step towards fairy tales and the way you remember and misremember things. It’s most important the way we misremember a childhood because we found myths about our own childhood and the basic way we understand the world is founded upon the way we made mistaken models when we were very young. And every now and then we repeat mistakes we made as children without realizing it because we started thinking of the world in a wrong way and never quite corrected ourselves entirely. I like the feelings childhood recollection cinema give when they’re working. We all watched movies when we were children and so the feeling of watching movies and of being a child are connected, and then you get older, there’s not so much wonderness left in your life but there still is cinema. Even if my movies are very adult themes, and they always are, I always try to get that sense of childhood wonder.

This is your first film made out of Winnipeg, was it something important for you about it?
Yes, it’s my first foreign film. I went to Seattle, I had been there as a 6-year-old for the Seattle World Fair in 1962 but I hadn’t been back ever since. I got offered to make a feature film by this strange utopian not-for-profit film company and the conditions where that I had to use a Seattle cast and a Seattle crew of helpers and I had to shoot it in Seattle. And so I just landed off an airplane, back to a city I hadn’t been to since early childhood and made a childhood recollection film. It was shot on shores near Washington but it looks exactly the same as in my childhood, it’s crazy, the water looked the same, the beach looked the same, it’s really incredible. That was something when I had the actors react certain episodes from my childhood, it was very disturbing for me, because they got it. It was very emotional sometimes, I once even broke down and cried, I had to excuse myself and go to a far corner off the studio. Then I realized I wasn’t actually upset because of my childhood memories, I was crying out of pride, I was so proud of being so clever (laughter).

Is it easier for you to work like that or with a more professional casting like in The Saddest Music in the World with Isabella Rossellini?
I actually really enjoy working with both experienced actors and newcomers. With newcomers you never know what you’re gonna get -so unpredictable- and other times it’s just nice to have someone that looks great on film and who is very professional. I’m happy with either.

You also had experiences with opera, in Berlin for example.
Brain Upon the Brain! played in Berlin a year and a half ago at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, a 1800-seat opera house, sold out, there was a 33-people orchestra playing the score of the movie, Isabella Rossellini was narrating, most intriguing of all perhaps was the sound effects artist performing over 600 sound effects of the movie. They were wearing a black coat uniform and rubber boots, it was very intriguing to watch, the eyes going back and forth to the movie, the performers and Isabella Rossellini, the orchestra, the sound was very good and it just went over really nicely. It’s more relaxing for me to watch it with the pre-recorded sound track but I’ve grown to become a bit of an excitement junkie and the terror makes the beer really taste good after.

Jean-Jacques Rue

Read Guy Maddin’s pick of the week.

Read the Brand Upon the Brain! review.

You started as an actor, you directed theatre productions, how did you start to direct films and how did those prior experiences nourish your work as a director?
I felt all the time that I was going to make a film, I played in a lot of them and I felt more and more the need to do it myself. When I did my first film I thought “This is who I wanted to become”. You are asked this question all your life “what do you want to be ?” I never really knew but I found it and that’s why I’ve stayed there. I occasionally play as an actor and I do theatre once in a while as well ; this background gives me a different perspective on the storytelling. I’m mostly interested in characters and telling stories through characters rather than using the plot as a way to hang the characters on them. I don’t mind doing action or little effects if it’s needed -I’ve done stunts or stuff like that but it’s not what gives me a great close-up on characters or human behaviour, this is what gets me excited. I’ve been offered to do big Hollywood movies, it’s not because I’m against them, it’s just that they don’t get me going, I couldn’t do it well, I would need viagra to be able to direct these movies, my interest has to come from the inside.

Why did you choose to turn this bestseller into a movie?
First of all, when I bought it it was not a bestseller, it was the first book in line, he [Arnaldur Indridason] had made a couple of books that were not successful, this one was the first to become successful but I bought it before that. I read it and I thought it had very strong premises: it takes place in Iceland, it’s about characters, it talks about the old times in Iceland in a certain way -without going backwards but it’s connected to that- and how our modern society is going in another direction, maybe too fast, and the science of being able to find out your grandmother’s secrets when she was a young woman -probably playful like most of the young women like we want to have them but then you don’t want to know about that when it’s your grandmother! This is a fantastic story to work with but it took me a lot of time because it didn’t work straight from the page. It’s only when I found this new way of structuring it that it could work as a film. It took me six years to do that starting from when I bought the title -by that time the book had done really well. But it has no importance, the film has to work on its own.

How did you work on the screenplay? What was the adaptation work like?
I didn’t work linearly from the novel because the story is told from the point of view of the investigator finding a corpse until he finds the man he is looking for. Then you have the flashback of his story and then it continues. This didn’t work for me, it was just not interesting. Not until I kind of figured out it was the drama of two fathers losing a child and then I decided to tell their two stories in parallel, then I got really excited about this idea ; I tried to find other movies that were made the same way but I couldn’t find any. My co-producers thought it would be too difficult, that the people who had read the novel would not like it, that this would kill the movie, so I said “then I won’t do the movie”! It ended up my way and I think it was the right think to do. For some people it’s too complicated but you can never please everyone. I’m more worried about having people ahead of me in the cinema instead of a little bit behind, that’s ok, then they will have to go again to definitely figure it out! (laughter)

Did you want to make it easier for the audience by deciding with your cinematographer to use strong dominants to mark the different time periods?
This was always in our mind but I probably pushed that a little bit more in the post production. That came naturally from the story but I also wanted to hold people a little bit backwards, it’s a little different but people don’t realize it right away, it’s a part of how things come together and you understand it. I have been making films in studio, bigger budgets, but I wanted to do this one on location: no studios, no tricks, make it also for as little money as possible, the bigger the movies become, the more conventional they have to be. I wanted also to put a test on myself. So I used Fuji film, which is the cheapest. Not only for money but also for the colours: I really like its green tones and it’s more true to Iceland than Kodak. Kodak is more Hollywood -more yellow-, Fuji is greener, that’s why it wanted it. Then we decided to use old lenses and shoot it on 16mm but the wider shots are shot on 35mm -we used an old camera and it’s fantastic because we decided to use no tricks, it’s the best school I had as a director.

What were your influences while shooting this kind of genre movie? Were there clichés you wanted to avoid?
First of all I wanted to avoid as much as possible the clichés and pitfalls of thrillers, all the fake surprises. What I wanted to do is to build the tension inside, from the inside of your brain, not from sound effects. In my films, especially while working on this one, I want people to be able to watch it again and that everything makes sense too. It’s very easy to make the tricks ; there are movies that trick you and when you watch them again, you see the trick is not believable because the character wouldn’t be doing that at that time. I wanted to make the story slowly built up to raise tension, I’m not tensed in cinema with somebody running and shooting guns, there must be something else, something about relationships, about the things possibly happening more than when it happens. This is the kind of energy I was thinking about. There are also two ways that have become very overused in cinema today, like in old horror films: you use things to shock people for no reason, just to make it disgusting. On smaller films, more arty films, they have to create the cliché of only the reaction, you don’t see what you see, this has been done endlessly, it was original when it started but now “ok, you’re using that trick”. Like you do in theatre -it happens off-stage. But I really wanted to show when there was a reason to show. And then show it all. Not like hide for the old ladies because they can’t take a dead body, I really wanted people to smell the film, feel the film, almost taste the film, that’s why I never shy away.

The most disturbing thing in your film may be the scene when Erlendur eats his sheep’s head.
It’s exenstialistic -the death, the meat, the rotenning, this is life. When you go into a hotel like the one we are in now [Murano hotel], they try to hide the life, you sleep in a bed and feel like nobody has ever slept in it but of course people slept and had sex in it. But they’re hiding it, which is culture. It’s interesting in a film to embrace it. This is the thing these people eat and the actor loves it, it’s no faking there, it’s his favourite food. It’s like the old style of food and when the movie came out, it was on the cover of the biggest paper in Iceland that sheep heads sales had gone three hundred per cent up!

You said once in an interview that you were “sick of these Icelandic films with endless beautiful landscapes”. In your movie the landscapes are used to mark a frontier between a modern urban Iceland and a more archaic one?
The thing about landscape is that it’s almost like sex for me, if it’s not used for a purpose to tell you something it’s useless. In Jar City, it’s the memory of the cold wastelands, the endless distances between people and little villages, and sitting in your car on the road to visit your grandmother, sitting in your car forever and there’s nothing to see, it’s a different beauty, it’s also a way for me to show Erlendur’s emotions without having to give them verbally. You get his emotions through those pictures. It’s lonely, it’s almost biblical, he’s almost like a missionary, trying to correct things on his own.

Family relationships are at the heart of the movie, like it was in 101 Reykjavik and The Sea, is this something particularly important for you?
Relationships between parents and a child is something that you are one side of in the beginning of your life and then you go to the other side of it -or actually in the middle of it when you have your parents and children-, it’s something that is one of the biggest part of the journey through life, and when your child becomes your friend and stop being your child but is still your child, you have to learn as a parent not to interfere with your child’s life at a certain point -this thing nobody taught you, nobody taught you to be a parent. This is a journey you’re going through and part of that, in my case, is to tell stories about that. I think the brightest happy end I ever made is in Jar City, which is about him opening up to his daughter and sharing his thoughts with her instead of opposing and she actually caresses him. She really feels she needs to help her father, this is a turn in relationships, and for me an opportunity of growing from there. It’s not the end of the book, we decided in the editing room it should be the end.

Why did you choose the Police Choir for the film soundtrack?
This came for the fact that in a lot of films policemen are portrayed in a very negative way. But when you check the basis of the job, it’s actually very beautiful, it’s to help human beings walking through life without bumping too hard into each other, and when it happens: to find a solution. The basis of the job is very beautiful and I also started to talk to them, to investigate things and they were really close: “How does this affect you?”, “Oh we have no problem to deal with that” and then they start opening up and you realize they actually carry it up. All those family dramas they walk into ; they didn’ tell me but this is a unique thing in Iceland that the police sing, this is a big choir, they travel into the world to sing, and my understanding of that is that it’s a way to do something beautiful together. They’re always arresting people, fighting, and twice a week they sing together, in harmony. It’s not in the book but it’s something I really wanted, they’re like singing for all of us, trying to help us. It shows the police in a different perspective.

Interviewed by Olivier Gonord in Paris on September 5, 2008.

Read Baltasar Kormakur’s Pick of the Week.

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.

After Battle Cries, Made in the USA and Stormy Weather, in which you worked on more “serious” subjects (even if it didn’t exclude a light tone), nobody expected you back on the side of the screwball comedy. How was born the idea of Back Soon?
Jean-Luc Gaget, my co-writer, and I had spent two years working on a script that never became a film -Patrick Sobelman, my producer, was the one who introduced me to him. Jean-Luc had just finished the writing of a TV movie produced by Patrick’s company and directed by Lucas Belvaux. Working with Jean-Luc is like playing ping pong: his thoughts help me progress and vice versa. So, we thought: let’s do something totally crazy where we’ll have fun. I actually wanted to let myself go in an extravagant script, have no limits and rush totallt fearless, write for people I love. I imagined roles for people I had met, especially some musicians from the Icelandic scene I met in Reykjavik. I took pictures, talked with many performers, actors, musicians, writers… and little by little, each one of them brought something to the script of the movie. Also, I wanted to make people laugh. In my previous features, people were often moved and they would come after the screening to talk to me about their emotions. Here, I wanted to hear their reactions, to hear their laughs. It’s the first time I work with this genre even though I shot many “comic” documentaries: Barbara tu n’es pas coupable (Barbara You’re Not Guilty), Nobody Move! etc… I think I want to keep on telling funny stories that are also sad in a way because it’s what life’s made of in the end.

The movie is an ode to Didda Jónsdóttir, whom you directed in Stormy Weather and even portrayed for the series Faces from Europe. Did you write the movie for her? Is Anna actually Didda?
Didda isn’t Anna but what they have in common is an energy, a strength and an enthusiasm that move people who surround them in a way only Icelandic winds can do. I met Didda five years ago, in a bar in Reykjavik. She ended up playing Loa, co-starring with Elodie Bouchez in my previous feature: Stormy Weather. She had never acted before, yet she won the Icelandic Academy Award for Best Actress for this role.

The characters of Back Soon look a bit like Northern “cousins” of the women burglars from Nobody Move! -some kind of “nice outlaws”. You seem to share a genuine tenderness for people living outside the social system.
Since always… Seeking inside a person, who seems far from us, what is, deeper inside, the same reason they are close to us. To connect. Maybe it’s because my origins are so “fragmented”, plural.

The movie seems to be very spontaneous, were the actors able to improvise or was everything already written?
There was an original structure as far as the script, the plot and the dialogues were concerned. And then I allowed myself some time at the end of the sequences to let improvisation jump on stage. For example by not cutting right away or by saying “I have what I need but let’s make one more shot, in which you guys can let yourselves go”. Even if these “free” shots are not always shown, this method provided a real drive during the shooting, a joy of being there.

How was born the idea of the musical theme?
It was one of the very first ideas, which was developed with Martin Wheeler, who composed the score of almost all my features.
Whether with my documentaries or my fictions, Martin follows the films as from the writing stage to work on the soundtrack. Not to emphasize the image but to move along with it, to trouble it, to disturb it, to make it vibrate.
The original idea of the soundtrack of Back soon was to weave different sound elements that will little by little assemble to create the final song of the film, an Icelandic/Jamaican song, a piece of Scandinavian reggae music, written and performed by Sigurdur Gudmundsson and his band Hjalmar…
Those different elements (voice, drums, bass line, etc.) spread out into the film space. The very notion of space is important because the movie is partly a road-movie, and the characters are displayed in large landscapes, where the road and the cloudy rainy skies contribute to the rhythm of the story.
The goal of this work is to create a very specific atmosphere around the main character, Anna, according to the principle and the rhythm of a pregnancy. So, that music we hear all through the movie will give birth to the Icelandic reggae song of the end.
I think that that desire to “gather”, for each film, musicians, whose roads wouldn’t have crossed otherwise is linked to my “fragmented” origins (Iceland, USA, Central Europe). The fact that those meetings and understandings are made concrete in a song played live in the kitchen where the different characters of the movie get together embodies that desire.

Olivier Gonord

SYNOPSIS
Anna Hallgrimsdottir a poetess, dish washer and marijuana dealer in her late thirties lives in Reykjavik with her two sons, Krummi and Ulfur. Anna is tired of her lifestyle and the coldness of Iceland and wishes to show her sons more of the world.
Finally she decides to do something about it, move on, and somewhat change her lifestyle. The first step in her revival is to sell her business which consists of her mobile telephone which includes her big list of clients.
The sale is an unusual one and the potential buyer promises her the asking price within 48 hours.
During those 48 hours Anna gets into all kinds of “Icelandic familial adventures” as her kitchen fills up with customers/friends, partying, while waiting for her to come Back Soon.

More details about Back Soon: http://www.zikzak.is/back-soon

ABOUT SOLVEIG ANSPACH
Sólveig Anspach was born in Vestmannaeyjar (Iceland) from an American father and an Icelandic mother.
She graduated from French film school FEMIS in 1989.
She directed many documentaries, among which Nobody Move!, Made in the USA, Faux tableaux dans vrais paysages islandais (Fake Paintings in Real Icelandic Landscapes). But it’s Battle Cries starring Karin Viard and Laurent Lucas that contributed to her international notoriety in 1999. In 2003, she directed Stormy Weather starring Elodie Bouchez and Didda Jonsdottir, which was selected at Cannes Film Festival in Un Certain Regard section.
Sólveig Anspach is currently shooting Louise Michel, a TV movie for France 2 starring Sylvie Testud, and also writing Soon Coming, the sequel of Back Soon.

ANGER Cédric, Director
BIDOU Jacques, Producer (JBA Productions)
BRISSEAU Jean-Claude, Director
CAUSSE Jean-Max et François, Theater Manager and Owner (la Filmothèque du Quartier Latin, Paris, France)
CAVALIER Alain, Director
CHODOROV Pip, Director and distributor
DUMONT Bruno, Director
GONZALEZ Annie, Producer (C-P Productions)
GUIRAUDIE Alain, Director
HARLAN Jan, Producer
LIMOSIN Jean-Pierre, Director
LORENZ Juliane, Editor and Rainer Fassbinder Foundation President
MAILLOT Jacques, Director
MARIGNAC Martine, Producer (Pierre Grise Productions)
MARQUIS François, Producer (Les Productions Bagheera)
MORDILLAT Gérard, writer and director
OSSANG F.J., Director
PAUL-BONCOUR Vincent, Theatrical and Video Distributor
SENA Nuno, co-director of IndieLisboa Film Festival
SOLANAS Fernando, Director
TEMPLE Julian, Director
WAKAMATSU Koji, Director
ZONCA Erick, Director

How did the project for Julia come about?
I wanted to write about a woman. With Le Petit Voleur and La Vie Rêvée des Anges, I wrote about people who were 20 years old, and I wanted to move on to an age closer to my own. The character is in her mid-40s. I’d read a character in a book who caught my attention, a woman who was a bit alcoholic. That’s how the character came about, but I moved away from that. In the first version, it was an English couple who came to Siberia to kidnap the grandson of a Russian oligarch. My co-screenwriter and I thought to ourselves: they need to speak Russian, it would be complicated, we’d never been to Siberia and we couldn’t afford to go for a visit. We then moved the location to New York, the woman was a prostitute, but a story like that in New York boxed things in. I wanted to have colors, like in Marseilles with Le Petit Voleur. So I thought, why not Los Angeles? Then we dropped the male role, and it became this woman who was initially a prostitute and who drank, whose life was a mess. And little by little, we moved towards this “normal” woman, integrated into American society, whose life falls apart because of alcohol and who doesn’t have enough money, which in the United States can quickly lead to your downfall. With her life in disarray, she jumps at the opportunity to make some cash when she gets the offer. She needs to believe.

You first thought of Siberia and New York and ended up with California. Is it a story you couldn’t make in France?
No, I couldn’t. In my opinion, it’s very hard to do fiction in France because it always gets mixed up with social reality. Audiard manages to do it. With this character, I needed space for her to run away. If it had started out in Paris, she would have run off to Orléans – the imaginative appeal is much less effective. Also, there was Mexico, a border to cross and a very different country from the U.S., with a different culture of violence; poverty pushes people to extremes. Since she’s American, others see her as someone with money, someone who can be shaken down, and I needed this violence to trigger a boomerang effect – she herself is violent with the child. When she crosses the border, at the moment she gives the child a little breathing space, she’s hit hard by the violence of the Mexican mafia, and by her lie about the child as well, since she has to make people believe she’s the mother and put her head in the lion’s mouth to get the child back. In France, we couldn’t have done that. I liked the idea of the motel, like a cramped prison, coupled with the prison of the Californian desert, which we shot in Mexico. And where’s there a desert in France? Except Ermenonville perhaps…
(Lire la suite…)

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.
(Lire la suite…)

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.
(Lire la suite…)