Jacques Audiard is a French film director and is best known for his 2005 movie The Beat That My Heart Skipped. That movie received 10 nominations at the Cesars and picked up 8 awards. Audiard's new movie, A Prophet, is released on Friday.
To celebrate the release we're bringing you an interview with Audiard where he talks in depth about A Prophet and discusses his experiences as a filmmaker.
At the Cannes press conference you spoke a little about the irony in the title of 'A Prophet'.
Because this dimension is real but apparently it isn’t evident. The film could be called Little Big Man for example. The title acts as a sort of injunction, obliging someone to understand something which isn’t necessarily developed in the film, namely, that we’re dealing with a little prophet, a new prototype of guy. Originally I wanted to find a French equivalent of You Gotta Serve Somebody a Bob Dylan song that says that we are always in the service of someone. I liked the fatalism and the moral dimension of this title but I simply never found a satisfying translation, so it stayed A Prophet.
How did you come to tell the story?
What interested both myself and my co-writer Thomas Bidegain was to ask how we could begin with the subject by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit and create a pertinent cinematic story. We had to find a manner to make A Prophet resonate in a contemporary way. We wanted to create heroes from people that we didn’t know, that didn’t already have an iconic representation in cinema, like the Arabs for example. In France the tendency in cinema is to put them in representations that are naturalistic or sociological. So we wanted to do a pure genre film, a little in the manner of a western that spotlights people we don’t know and transforms them into heroes.
What made you want to cast the angel-faced Tahar Rahim in the role of Malik El Djebena?
I was always attracted to certain masculine prototypes that weren’t necessarily characterised by their levels of testosterone. In more than one way, I could make the connection between Matthieu Kassovitz with whom I worked with several times and Tahar Rahim. Not necessarily in that one makes me think of the other, but both are male prototypes to which I am sensitive.
Was it also a way of allowing the spectator to identify with the character?
I have problems projecting identification beyond myself but, of course there was that desire. I found it more pertinent than the usual prison film cliché of having the place full of super virile men. The convicts in my film aren’t muscle men, they’re not made for this environment but paradoxically, they go to develop the qualities that permit them to rise above and dominate.
Through the character of Malik, the film conveys the idea that the knowledge and know how give access to power.
Yes, and it’s this that I find the most interesting. This type of person breaks the mould, he’s not your usual hooligan. Following Malik, we see his mind at work, a mind that shows phenomenal adaptability, that this character will use for any opportunistic possibility, at first to save his skin, then to survive and improve his lot, and finally to reach another level of power.
This dimension of the film evokes another of your characters, Dehousse in 'Un Heros Tres Discret'.
Yes, you could say that these characters are models of a certain type of education. The initial principal is to introduce these people their greatest destitution then giving them an opportunity, a possibility to construct an heroic personality. The story of A Prophet, depicts someone who reaches a position that he could never have attained had he not gone to prison. Here lies the paradox.
How did you structure this desire to turn Malik into a Hero?
In part from following the image of Arabs in cinema which is either stupid – and sees them represented as terrorists or simply naturalistic, in a sort of social realist context. It was this that brought me very quickly to the question of the choice of actors. For the role of Malik, we needed someone extremely polymorphic who would correspond perfectly to the theme of identity in the film. A young man, who has no history, yet will write one before our very eyes. From early on we knew this role couldn’t be filled by a known actor precisely because it’s a story of a rise to power, to visibility.
Was there also the desire to decompartmentalise French cinema?
It’s inherent in the project. I don’t have a long filmography, I’ve only directed five films. I’ve worked with Matthieu Kassovitz, Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris, and other actors of formidable talent but after The Beat That My Heart Skipped, I wanted to work with unknowns. This idea went hand in hand with the feeling that cinema should have a strong social inscription that if it doesn’t recount the world as it is, as it plays out, then what use is it ? When i say that, it’s not a polemic, it’s just my way of registering fiction into what would seem to be reality.
I think that in France today, cinema is incredibly reductive on this point of view. I don’t know of which reality French cinema speaks of. Therefore the film was to break down this idea of casting as much as it was to take into account the fact that the world changes and that heroic figures must evolve. In my mind there are new mythologies to build on new faces and new routes to follow.
Malik seems to have a detached and opportunist rapport with his identity.
The Corsicans consider him an Arab and the Arabs as a Corsican. He is permanently between the two camps. However he will naturally lean towards his community. It’s here that he will discover something he has been ignoring. The same as he’s a particular kind of hooligan he’s also a particular kind of believer.
In all of your films, there is a point where the image is totally obscured leaving only one detail.
Yes, its a little effect I call ‘La Mano Negra’ which I did for my super 8 films and, now I do it on a larger scale, it’s an expensive special effect. In fact, its just because I find sometimes that there is too much image, too much light, too much ‘field’, that its too open and it needs to be reduced. These are completely fetishist relationships I have to the image. I am always amazed by the image of silent films which come to us after generations of inter-positives and inter-negatives. They seem to emerge from such a far away world.
Is it a form of signature?
No, and I would have to stop if it seemed that way. I do feel that I have to stop with the film and chemical tools. It’s a relationship that’s too fetishist which can be imprisoning. I no longer know if its a good tool for looking at the world .
It?s something we can only imagine in cinemascope.
I tried lots of different material for this film. HD, 16mm, ultra-light cameras a whole lot of things which failed to impress me. Of course I thought of scope but I didn’t retain the idea because scope means I was obliged to define too much. I though I’d be really unhappy after two weeks because the story and the set design was creating real antibodies in me… I tested a few stylistic things on the side which would never have really worked. But finally it was the film which dictated it’s own aesthetic, an aesthetic that was set in stone.
Would you like to shoot more often?
Yes. When everything goes well, I make a film every 3 to 4 years. I would like to shoot more because it solves a number of problems – most notably the fear. I think that I’m too apprehensive, that I write for too long. We took 3 years to write this script
– that’s too long.
You don't want to write any longer?
No, it’s really clear for me. I cant do it any more. All these themes that begin to interest me but hang on me like an old pair of trousers. On set, the script, ends up being boring for me, I have the impression that I know it by heart and I doubt myself. I want it to happen a different way. One evening during the shoot the script assistant came to see me and said ‘You have to stop doubting the script’, implying that I was hitting a brick wall. I think that if I wasn’t so implicated in every stage of the script and if I shot more often, I would feel much more free.
'A Prophet' is released in cinemas on Friday 22nd January 2010.
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