Format: Cinema

Screening on: 14 November 2009

Venue: BFI Southbank, London

Director: Bong Joon-ho

Writers: Park Eun-kyo, Park Wun-kyo, Bong Joon-ho

Original title: Madeo

Cast: Kim Hye-ja, Won Bin

South Korea, 2009

128 mins

Part of Bong Joon-ho retrospective, 2-14 November 2009

Korean Film Festival

1-18 November 2009

Barbican + BFI Southbank (London), Manchester Cornerhouse, Nottingham Broadway

Korean Film Festival website

A dark tale about a mother who will go to extreme lengths to save her son, and a stunning blend of bewildering intensity, daring artistry and storytelling magic, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother was one of the highlights at the London Film Festival in October. Gladly, it is now already back on the big screen in the UK as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival, playing at the BFI, which is hosting a retrospective of Bong’s small but remarkable oeuvre so far. Mother features a striking central performance from Korean TV actress Kim Hye-ja as the vigilant mother whose 28-year-old son, a shy and mentally impaired young man, finds himself framed for murder. Although there is no real evidence against him, the police are eager to close the case, and his mother has no alternative but to get involved to prove his innocence. But how far will a mother go to save her son? And how did one of South Korea’s most promising young filmmakers, who recently smashed Korean box office records with monster movie The Host (2006) approach such a topic?

Pamela Jahn had the pleasure to take part in a round table interview of Bong Joon-ho at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival in May, where Mother had its world premiere in the non-competitive Un Certain Regard section.

Q: You’ve been working on this film for almost five years, yet it seems fuelled with burning passion from beginning to end.

A: Yes, I had the general idea for the story even before The Host and I wrote a first synopsis in early 2004. That was also when I first met the main actress, Kim Hye-ja. And the fact that we could finally work together as director and actress was an unbelievable experience for me. So even while I was working on The Host and on the episode I contributed to Tokyo! (2008), in the back of my head I was already working on Mother too.

Q: When did you make the decision to cast Kim Hye-ja in the lead role?

A: It was not like the usual procedure where after writing the script I start looking for an actress who might fit the role. It’s this actress who really inspired me and got me to write the story in the first place. She is not very well known abroad, but in Korea she is an almost mythical actress, like the ‘mother of the nation’, and I had been a fan of hers since I was little. The first time I met Hye-ja it was a little surreal actually, she was almost like a dreamer. She was completely different from what I had seen on TV. So in reaction to this I wanted to show her in a role that is completely the opposite of her TV appearances and express her personality from a different point of view, looking at the hysteria and madness that lie beneath the surface of her great gentleness and warmth.

Q: How much influence did Kim Hye-ja have in the development of her character in the film?

A: I met her on a regular basis while writing the script, often several times a month, and I took some pictures that helped me a lot writing the story and developing her role.

Q:Did you also have Won Bin in mind for the role of the son while working on the story?

A: No, it was only after I finished the script that I started looking for an actor to play the son. For this character I wanted someone who would fit with her, but also someone who could make her completely mad, and Won Bin turned out to be the perfect match.

Q:In both its tone and narrative structure, Mother is very different from the films you directed before, like Memories of Murder (2003) or The Host. Why this shift in direction?

A: In Memories of Murder I wanted to represent Korean society in the 80s when it was under military dictatorship, and I liked the fact that I was dealing with a number of different themes like the family and the system, and I was exposing Korean society and the military regime by looking into the serial killings. But I got a bit tired of what was mainly a stylistic exercise and a general denunciation. So in Mother I wanted to tell a story that could be seen almost as if through a magnifying glass where the light is so concentrated that it can burn paper. I wanted to find the essence of the story. So the relationship between mother and son is the focus, and every element in the story, from the murder in the village to some other minor incidents, is there to explore this relationship in its entirety. But if you look at the film on the whole, it is not just about motherhood and their relationship, it also hints at something greater again.

Q: Did you feel a lot of pressure while making the film given that it was your follow-up feature to The Host, which was the biggest box office hit in Korean film history?

A: To be honest, I am a little bit uncomfortable with that, and I really hope that there will be a Korean movie coming up soon to break the record. But it didn’t bother me while I was making Mother because I started working on the project way before The Host came out in Korea, so I could maintain the tone that I had intended for this film in the first place.

Q: Mother is very distinctive in style, especially in the way attention is paid to colour and locations, but there are also these wonderful moments when the mother somehow becomes isolated from the background. What was the main focus in terms of the aesthetics of the film?

A: I wanted to put the character in an extreme situation and find out how she would react. That was the most important thing for me, so everything had to fully focus on the mother character, including the style and look of the film but also the music. We had some wild discussions with the art director about the clothes that she wears and what colour could best describe her character and her thoughts. I think that the opening scene shows this very well – her madness and the feeling that she is completely out of this world. She is wearing these weird purple clothes and she is hiding her hand in her pocket. Then we hear the sound of her cutting herbs and we see blood on her finger… so, basically, it’s all in there: the fate, the tragedy and the madness. These are the main elements I tried to express in that first scene, but they also stand for the film as a whole.

Q: How is your relationship to your own mother? Did she serve as an inspiration here?

A: Well, she didn’t kill anybody [laughs]. Actually, she hasn’t seen the movie yet, and I am very excited but also a little bit worried because she also has a tendency to obsession. I mean, I am 40 years old and she is still constantly worried about me. So, yes, in some way my mother also inspired me in making the film I guess, but not primarily. And don’t tell her I said that.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Release date: 13 November 2009

Venues: Greenwich Picturehouse, Odeon Panton St, Ritzy (London) and key cities

Distributor: Dogwoof

Director: Ondi Timoner

USA 2009

90 mins

What do you do next, once you’ve won a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival? Well, if you’re Ondi Timoner, you make another documentary and you win the Grand Jury Prize again (making you the only individual to have won the gong twice!). The first of those two films, Dig! (2004), charted the mixed fortunes of two bands, Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. While she was making it, Timoner was also working on her latest award-winner, We Live in Public, a documentary shot over many years about the antics of Joshua Harris.

You probably won’t have heard of Harris, but some believe he predicted the future of the internet, not just by creating one of the first live streaming web channels, Pseudo.com, but also by conducting experiments on exactly what people would be willing to sign away for their five minutes of fame. One such experiment featured in the film was set in an underground New York ‘bunker’, where more than 100 people agreed to live in the month leading up to the millennium. The bunker was packed with cameras that followed every move made by the dwellers, who were also subjected to regular humiliating interrogations. Electric Sheep‘s Toby Weidmann met Ondi Timoner to find out more…

Toby Weidmann: How did you first meet Joshua Harris?

Ondi Timoner: I had worked at Pseudo.com for a little while on the Cherry Bomb show, just to pick up some extra cash while I was making Dig!. My initial impression was that he was something of a buffoon, that he was a businessman trying to buy his way into the art world. I certainly didn’t know whether he was a visionary or not – time is required to prove that. He didn’t sit around making verbal predictions either – he didn’t know what he was doing himself. But I did think he was somebody who spent his money in very extraordinary ways and I appreciated that. He affected people’s lives in that way – he was out buying bunkers in the middle of Manhattan when other people were buying houses, and that’s cool. But I didn’t know what to think of Josh…

TW: Did you have any inkling at the start how the story would pan out?

OT: I follow my subjects like I followed those ‘choose your own adventure’ books as a kid. That’s how I live my life. I have a gut feeling about certain things at certain times and so far I have been lucky enough to be picked for the gig…

TW: You are part of this story though, because you were there in the bunker, weren’t you?

OT: Yeah. Josh called me and asked whether I wanted to document cultural history. I said: ‘Always, but what do you have in mind?’ He said: ‘I can’t really tell you that, I can’t articulate that because I don’t actually know. It’s kind of unfolding, but I’ll provide you with whatever resources you need to do the job right.’ So I walk over there and they have these men moving all this metal into the building, which they were using to build the ‘pods’. Inside, there’s a guy hanging surveillance cameras from the ceiling. I asked what he was doing and he said he was putting 110 cameras in this place. And right there, I was like, ‘I’m in’. The first thing I did was to get a multiplex system so we could put all the cameras through one machine, allowing us to record the cool images, from the living pods you see in the film to the four ‘walkie’ cameras I had going, so we could ‘walkie’ out what was going on in different spaces in different rooms. We used this system as the eyes of the place. That was crucial but we still had no idea what it was all about.

TW: The film nearly wasn’t made when Harris pulled the plug on it after you edited a rough cut of the bunker material in 2000. How did it get back on track?

OT: After we won at Sundance for Dig! in 2004, I got an email from Josh asking if I was interested in finishing the film, and I really wasn’t because by then it was less relevant. But he wrote to me a few months later, and he said he would give me 50% ownership and full creative control. I thought that was a pretty good deal, and I also felt it was an opportunity to finish what I’d started – especially with no end date attached to the project. So I caught up with those who were in the bunker, and with New York post-9/11. But I still didn’t know what the film was about until I saw Facebook and read my first status update. Then I realised the bunker could be a metaphor for the internet. The only thing I was having a hard time with was the neo-fascistic elements of the bunker, because the internet doesn’t feel that way – it doesn’t feel like you’re under interrogation, it feels like you can be yourself. Then I realised that that part of the metaphor was crucial because Josh was testing the limits of how much people would be willing to give up to be a part of this. They would answer 500 questions, they would submit to these interrogations, and that became like the terms and conditions that you just accept on the internet. You never read them. Facebook owns all our content. As Josh says in the film, ‘everything is free except your image – that we own’.

TW: Are you a fan of the internet?

OT: Yeah, sure, but as powerful as it is for good, we’re paying a price. I think we’re only just becoming aware of that now. The film is definitely a dark vision of it, but it’s important to present the dark side. For a lot of people the film serves as a wake-up call. It’s a shock and it provokes all sorts of reactions. I wouldn’t have told Josh Harris’s story if it wasn’t a metaphor for all of us. There are incredible aspects that the internet brings to our lives, but our identity and our relationships are changing, and a lot of it is more superficial because we can communicate with 500 times the number of people at one time, and we can’t possibly communicate as deeply. Are your Facebook friends your friends? I don’t know, maybe you should go have coffee with them and find out. I really dislike that term – ‘Facebook friend’ – and I think it is dangerous to call them that. If that’s what friendships have become, then we have a problem.

TW: It’s being released theatrically and on DVD, but will it also be available for download? Given the subject matter, it seems well suited…

OT: It is going to be available to download, but it has to be available for the Oscars and they are old school [ie, it needs to be released theatrically first]. We feel it’s an important film, but maybe it’s a little edgy for them… We’ll see. We’re at least going to give it a shot. Dig! was disqualified from the Oscars because it went on TV too early, so we can’t put the film on the internet until then. But it should be a huge stunt when it does happen and it will be exciting to see how it does. There is a potential for We Live in Public to blaze a trail.

TW: What are you planning on making next?

OT: The story of Robert Mapplethorpe as a narrative. It’s perfect for me, right? I’ve met the Mapplethorpe Estate and I have the exclusive rights. Eliza Dushku, the actress, and I are producing it. It’s about him and his relationship with Patti Smith and about how he acted as a cultural lightning rod, pushing the boundaries of art, even beyond his death. I’m really excited about it. It’s called The Perfect Moment. I’m also engaged to make a documentary called Cool It, about the controversial environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg. He wrote a book called Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming about global warming and economics and what we need to prioritise. It’s more of a political documentary and very different from the other films I’ve made.

Interview by Toby Weidmann

Director: Momoko Ando

Based on the manga by: Erica Sakurazawa

Cast: Hikari Mitsushima, Eriko Nakamura

Japan 2008

Screened at the 17th Raindance Film Festival

Part of a Raindance strand on Japanese Women Directors

Date: 30 September-11 October 2009

Venue: Apollo Cinema, London

Raindance website

Kakera – A Piece of Our Lives is an effervescent debut from first-time Japanese film director Momoko Ando. An exploration of sexuality and youth, the film follows the intense relationship between two girls as they partly fumble – and partly hurtle – towards adulthood. Meeting Ando in a Soho coffee bar during the Raindance Film Festival proved a similarly madcap and engaging experience for Electric Sheep‘s Eleanor McKeown. Punctuated by cigarette breaks with her mother and Ando’s views on the sex drive of the elderly (apparently it’s better news for the fairer sex…), the discussion of Kakera was long and lively, and the director gave a passionate explanation of the film’s ideas and aesthetics.

Eleanor McKeown: One of the best things about Kakera is how you capture the intensity of the relationship between the two young girls – how did you prepare the actresses for that?

Momoko Ando: The interesting thing is that the girls who play Haru (Hikari Mitsushima) and Riko (Eriko Nakamura) are completely opposite characters in real life! Riko, for example, is really slow and really sweet. I wanted to do that kind of casting because I think girls have both sides inside themselves, both really shy and outgoing. I thought if I could bring out the actresses’ deep characters, it would probably be stronger than using how they already are in real life. I tried to ignore Hikari completely and make her really depressed and lost throughout the whole process. She got really angry and shouted at me, but that’s exactly what I was waiting for. Haru is supposed to be someone who doesn’t know what to do in her life.

EMK: Halfway through the film the character of Haru starts to gain confidence…

MA: That last shot of Hikari looking through the window at the birds during the blackout, that’s what she’s really like! I told her, you’ve already got that energy, but in the future, you will probably have to play characters like Haru, so you can’t let all your energy out all of the time, or people will think you can only do that kind of acting.

EMK: The film comes from a comic book by Erica Sakurazawa. How much of the book did you change to make it into a film?

MA: It’s a really simple story. I changed probably 80% of it. The characters had really nice dialogue and things they wanted to say in the comic book so I picked that up. I struggled quite a lot to make it more interesting because the comic book doesn’t really explain what the characters are like or their background at all. Riko isn’t a prosthetic artist, for instance. There are just two girls, a middle-aged woman and the boyfriend. So the characters are there but you don’t understand what they are.

EMK: How did the author feel about her book being made into a film?

MA: Well, the comic book is quite old. She wrote it 10 years ago, and it’s not very long, so she was quite open about it being made into a film. We got on very well, I explained to her how I felt about the comic and she felt very comfortable, I think.

EMK: The film is very intense but there’s also a certain amount of distance when dealing with the central relationship. How close did you feel to the material and characters?

MA: I was drawing on painful stuff from my past when I was writing the script and directing the film. I was definitely engaged with the whole thing, but at the same time I didn’t want to make it too deeply connected because life’s sometimes not like that. At that age, you’re probably not connected that much with life and reality because you’re too young to understand people and how deeply they feel things. I wanted to create that weird, surreal mood of youth.

EMK: The film has a really strong visual identity, especially for a debut feature. How did you plan the aesthetic?

MA: The look was really important to me. As it was my first feature film and I was only 26, I thought it would be more interesting if I worked with a cameraman who was older, probably like my dad’s age [Ando is the daughter of actor and director Eiji Okuda] – someone who makes films in a proper, old-fashioned Japanese style. If I’d worked with a young cinematographer who feels exactly the same as me, that would be more common. I decided to work with this cinematographer who’s worked on many 70s and 80s low-budget movies. He’d never worked with young film directors, especially not female filmmakers… We both thought that would be a cool plan. That’s probably why the film looks quite traditional.

EMK: You studied at the Slade College of Art in London before moving into filmmaking full-time – how do you think that influenced your visual sense?

MA: It’s something that’s quite difficult to explain, like describing a smell! You’d have to say it’s like a rose but if you don’t know what a rose is, it’s quite difficult to know what the smell is! I never really felt connected to Japanese culture. I always felt like I stood out, not always in a good way. It’s probably the same in any country but I felt more confident when I came to England, I just felt so comfortable… Also, I liked punk music.

EMK: How did you work on the soundtrack?

MA: Well, I was a crazy, huge fan of the Smashing Pumpkins when I was living in London and I happened to meet James Iha. It just worked out perfectly because what I wanted for the film was something similar to what I used to listen to when I was a teenager and James wrote the music! I knew he would write really beautiful music. It’s never depressing, always really touching and beautiful. James worked with the drumbeats first. We decided what sort of tempo we wanted for the movie and that’s why it feels like it’s all connected, always with the same beat.

EMK: How did you write the script? Did you write it as a linear story? Did you work on the dialogue first or visuals?

MA: It was definitely much more visual. I’m writing the script for my next project at the moment [which follows a female home-help drawn into becoming a prostitute for elderly gentlemen] and it’s completely original. You might think I’m weird, but I remember my dreams when I wake up and I just write all those things down. I always have bits of weird stuff in my notebook. Then I start to read it back because I kind of forget what I’ve written. And I think, ‘Oh, this is quite interesting stuff I’m writing!’ Then I decide on the concept for the next movie, what I really want to do in the film, and I start picking stuff, adding, omitting… like in cooking!

EMK: Do you think of Kakera as a woman’s film? How consciously did you decide that you wanted to treat gender? Did you have something specific to say?

MA: Yes, of course! I always dreamt of becoming a filmmaker who was quite masculine and was able to make movies like the Coen brothers – very manly – but I just found that impossible because I’m a woman and the way I think is female. Once I’d decided to make a very female film, I had so much to say. I was so conscious of gender. I had one positive message – it really doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, it’s more important how you live your life as a human being. In Japan especially, I think young girls and boys aren’t really conscious of who they are or what they are like… I was just so frustrated looking at these people: I believe you should think about how you should live your life as a good person. It’s not about being a good woman or good man.

EMK: What are your plans for the future?

MA: I’m going to be promoting Kakera because it’s going to be opening in Japan in Spring 2010. I’m halfway through my next script so when I finish it I’ll start looking for funding. Kakera is only my first film and I think that if you can’t keep making films you’re not really a director. I hope I can carry on making films. That would be amazing!

Interview by Eleanor McKeown

Format: Cinema

Release date: 23 October 2008

Venue: Curzon Renoir (London)

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Director: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

Writer: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

Based on the novel by: Emmanuel Dongala

Cast: Christophe Minie, Diasy Victoria Vandy

France/Belgium/Liberia 2008

98 mins

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s extraordinarily powerful Johnny Mad Dog finally gets a long-awaited UK theatrical release. Set in an unnamed African country, it opens with a shockingly brutal, surreally violent scene in which a pack of frenzied, coked up, brainwashed children attack villagers before walking away dressed in stolen rags, bizarre headgear and a wedding dress, brandishing guns and rifles. By adopting the point of view of the child soldiers, Sauvaire makes us experience the war through their eyes, plunging us into their perception of the senseless chaos and madness of war, avoiding any simplifying, worthy platitudes about the situation. They are both terrible victims of the war and terrifying murderers, childish and vulnerable on the one hand and capable of the most chilling acts of violence on the other. Virginie Sélavy talked to Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire about why he chose to film in Liberia, how he worked with former child soldiers and what sort of war film he wanted to make.

Virginie Sélavy: The film was adapted from the novel by Emmanuel Dongala, which is about the civil war in Congo. What made you want to turn it into a film?

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire: The book is not really about Congo. Dongala is from Brazzaville and he used his experience in Congo, but he mixed it up with other things to create a fictional story. It is about the fight between the Dogomani and the Manidogo, he’s set the book in a generic Africa. I wanted to do something on child soldiers because I made a documentary in Colombia [in 2004] that I couldn’t complete the way I wanted. It was meant to be fiction but I turned it into a documentary called Carlitos Medellin, about the kids hired by Pablo Escobar to kill policemen and politicians because they’re minors. We received threats and I realised that we couldn’t make a documentary during the civil war in Colombia. I came across Dongala’s book and I found the story really interesting. I liked the journey of the two teenagers – in the book there’s a chapter on Johnny and one on Laokole [a young girl with a parallel experience to Johnny’s], so you follow the boy and the girl, which provides two different points of view. I found the situations described in the book very convincing, realistic and interesting.

VS: Why did you decide to film in Liberia?

JSS: At first, I thought I’d make the film in Kinshasa because I know the place better, but it’s a big city and it’s a complicated country politically. Also, the problem of the child soldiers has affected West Africa, in particular Liberia and Sierra Leone. It was important for me to film with former child soldiers and when I met them, they said not to make the film in South Africa or Senegal, which was what the producers wanted initially because Liberia had just come out of war and they didn’t think we would get insurance to film there. It was a difficult project to set up, so by the time we arrived in Liberia, it was exactly the right moment, in 2006, just after the elections. The government supported the project because internationally it showed that the country was peaceful and that you could make a film there. At the same time, they’d just come out of 14 years of war and they wanted to talk about it because it was a way of exorcising the past and avoiding doing the same thing again.

VS: How did the filming go with the children? Was it traumatic for them to relive those events or was it cathartic?

JSS: It was therapy. I spent a year doing the casting, looking for the 15 kids who were right for the film. I lived in a house with them and we started working on the film, talking and improvising. I explained cinema to them, showed them films, and they told me what happened during the war. It was always playful. They found stability there because most of them were street children who had no family left and had never been to school. With us, they had a place to sleep, and food every day. When they didn’t feel good, they would talk about what they had experienced. After that, they really started working as actors with a coach, but it was still always through games. I was worried some of the games were too simple but they loved it, they were like two-year-old kids! That was the amazing thing with them: they had the maturity of adults because they experienced things that they shouldn’t have, and at the same time they were like little kids in need of attention. As it lasted a whole year, by the end of it, they’d become actors. I made a documentary about them where you can see their evolution. It starts with the casting where the kids talk about horrifying things, which they never enacted in the film, not even in the improvisations – they never recreated the most violent things they went through.

VS: There is a documentary aspect to the film – it ends with images of real child soldiers taken during the war in Liberia between 1990 and 2003. But at the same time, you don’t set the story in a specific country and you don’t give any information about the political situation. Why did you choose to make a sort of universal fable rather than analyse the problem of child soldiers in political and social terms?

JSS: The book was already like that, it was situated somewhere in Africa and I liked that universality, to not anchor the story in a historic reality, in a war that is over and that no one cares about anymore. I remember feeling this way when I saw Hotel Rwanda: on the one hand, it’s important to show what happened, on the other hand, it happened 10 years ago and it no longer affects us. So I didn’t want to anchor the story in Liberia in 2003, with Charles Taylor – although I hesitated for a while. But ultimately, child soldiers are a universal and international issue. For me, it was about saying it happened, but also that this is still happening. It was more about what it’s like to be a child soldier than about offering a historical narrative – it was also about provoking the audience. I wanted to keep the documentary aspect but also make a fiction film to keep the emotions of the kids, and the chaos and intensity that they must have experienced.

VS: Did you think about making a documentary instead of a fiction film at any point?

JSS: Not really. It would have meant interviewing the kids after the war, so their stories would have all been similar, and it doesn’t affect you in the same way. The other alternative would have been filming kids in the middle of the war, and that would have been complicated. So it had to be realistic fiction. A war film has to be violent otherwise it is not doing what it should be doing. If you want to denounce war and the violence of war, your film has to have a minimum of violence, without descending into butchery. In Johnny Mad Dog, there is no blood. The violence is more psychological and is connected to the children, because a child with a gun, that’s already violent. The kids had a certain approach to things, a sort of energy that was quite violent.

VS: The film reminded me of Lord of the Flies, especially the scene with the head of a pig on a spike. Was it an influence on Johnny Mad Dog?

JSS: I like both the novel and the film very much and I re-read the book because there is something similar in the way the kids recreate society. But I don’t remember the scene with the pig. In the film, the kid just started kissing the pig’s head of his own accord, it wasn’t planned.

VS: I also thought of Apocalypse Now because it goes beyond other war films and really conveys the madness of war and the descent into hell it represents.

JSS: That’s one of the war films I like best, I find it more realistic than others even though it operates on a more oneiric level. I often used it as an example when people were saying to me, ‘you’re going to make a war film in Scope with beautiful images, you’re going to glorify war’. I don’t want to glorify war, but I also want to make a beautiful film. Just because you make a film about war doesn’t mean that you have to use shot-on-the-spot video images. I’m not comparing Johnny Mad Dog to Apocalypse Now because Apocalypse Now is a great film, but I never found it shocking that it was beautiful, and so I decided to use a more dream-like approach to tell the story, rather than a completely realistic one.

VS: You seem clearly more interested in the way the children perceive the events than in a straightforward chronicle of the events themselves.

JSS: Absolutely. It is about how they feel, what they have been through and how to experience it through them in a manner that is much more visceral than narrative. There are three war films that have influenced me a lot – Apocalypse Now, but also Full Metal Jacket for its realism and Come and See, a very beautiful Russian film from 1985 that inspired Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. In each case, we’re very close to the characters, we’re inside their heads, and I’m more interested in human films about war and people lost in the chaos than in seeing war from outside as a series of action scenes.

VS: The ending seems to suggest some hope, but it is destroyed in the very last scene, as if it was impossible to escape from the tornado of violence that has been unleashed on the country. I thought it was a very appropriate ending. Why did you choose to end the film in this way and did you think of any other possible endings?

JSS: The ending was complicated. In the book, the ending is similar but there is more hope. I didn’t like it, symbolically all the child soldiers were killed and Africa was rebuilt with the ones who’d been to school. The child soldiers are victims as much as anyone else, so I didn’t want to end it in that way. I’d written a happier end where the children all go to school, but I found it hard to film. It didn’t fit. These kids are now on the street, so I didn’t see why we’d shoot an ending where they go to school and everything ends well, because that’s not the reality. What interested me was the violence that comes out in the other main character at the end, as a result of everything that’s happened.

VS: How was it, filming in Africa as a European?

JSS: I think the story is universal and I never saw this as a problem and never encountered any. Liberia is a very peculiar country because it was created by the Americans to return black slaves so it’s the only African country that wasn’t colonised by the whites. So there’s never been this colonial relationship and there isn’t the tension you can feel in other countries.

VS: Were you accepted from the start?

JSS: Yes. Matthieu Kassovitz [who produced the film] said, ‘be careful, when I made La Haine on the estates, people were asking what I was doing there’, but I never felt that. I made the film with the people from the country, I didn’t bring a script and tell them to learn their roles, it’s a film we made together. They brought their experience of the war and I brought my experience of filmmaking. I spent two years in Liberia to really immerse myself in the country. Everybody got deeply involved, even the extras. I’m still in touch with the children because we established the Johnny Mad Dog Foundation for them. It was a beautiful adventure.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy