The Refuge

Having made his name with perverse tales of strange relationships in Under the Sand (2000) and Swimming Pool (2003) and dazzled audiences with the all-star 8 Women (2002), French director François Ozon is back with The Refuge, a low-key, meditative story that follows Mousse (Isabelle Carré), a drug addict who finds she’s pregnant after her lover Louis (Melvil Poupaud) dies of an overdose. Against the wishes of Louis’s mother, Mousse decides to keep the child and goes away to a house by the seaside for the duration of her pregnancy. There, she is briefly joined by Louis’s brother Paul (played by the singer Louis-Ronan Choisy), a fragile-looking homosexual man, who stops by to visit her on his way to Spain. The Refuge originated from Ozon’s desire to film a pregnant actress and became possible when Isabelle Carré, pregnant with her first child, agreed to play the part of Mousse.

Virginie Sélavy talks to François Ozon about wanting to challenge preconceptions about maternity, his interest in identity, and the unexpected reaction of the French right-wing press to the film.

VS: The Refuge seems much more luminous than your previous films. Do you feel your work has evolved in some way?

FO: There is necessarily an evolution, but it’s not something I’m aware of and that I control. Each story calls for a different treatment. What I wanted to do here was to start with darkness, violence, cruelty, and go towards light. I wanted all the narrative elements to be there at the start, almost to get rid of them, to go towards something that would be more about sensations and emotions, something more contemplative.

Your work is often concerned with fluid, ambiguous sexual identities and this is present again here in the relationship that develops between Mousse and Paul. But here it seems to have a more tender aspect than in your previous films.

I’m interested in identities that are not defined yet, that are gestating. That’s what I want to do in films, I want to show things that are not finished, that are being constructed, and to participate in, or rather follow, the construction of that identity. Here it’s the intimate as much as sexual identity of a young woman whose pregnancy has absolutely nothing to do with the desire to have a child, but is a means to survive an intense emotional shock after the man she loved dies.

Why did you choose to focus on a pregnant woman?

I was interested in going against the dominant idea of maternity today. I wanted to link pregnancy to a survival instinct, but not to the desire to have a child. Mousse decides to keep the child, and you could wonder whether it’s a gesture of opposition against Louis’s family. But for me, it was more about the idea of preserving life. It’s a bit like in Under the Sand, a woman who is in an extremely painful situation and finds a slightly twisted way, an oblique way, of coping with the pain of the loved one’s absence. In Under the Sand, Charlotte Rampling’s character imagined that she was living with a ghost, that he was still there, to the extent that other people thought she was mad. Here, the character of Mousse decides to keep Louis inside her through this child. It’s about continuity.

Your previous film, Ricky (2009), also revolved around the evolution of a couple after the birth of a child.

In Ricky, it’s the second phase. The Refuge ends with the birth of the child whereas Ricky starts with the arrival of the child. Ricky looks at how everyone finds their place after the appearance of an exterior element. But it wasn’t just the child, it was also the character of Sergi López. It was about how the family unit can be disturbed when you add a new person.

Was it difficult for you to make a film about an experience that is exclusively feminine?

Sadly, it’s something that I will never experience in my own body, so it’s very mysterious. In the film, I feel close to the character of the man who picks Mousse up, who is attracted to her sexually, but finds himself cradling her like a child in a hotel room, unable to understand what is going on.

Did Isabelle Carré contribute to the script?

She gave her opinion. She was a source of inspiration. For instance, I wanted the scene with the man who picks her up to end in a strange way. I asked Isabelle if she had an idea about what her character could ask the man to do that would have nothing to do with sexuality. She had just returned from a haptonomy session and her consultant had said that she should ask her husband to cradle her, so that’s what we did. What’s funny is that Isabelle was so tired that day that she fell asleep, and I filmed her, so it was a bit accidental.

There is a very interesting relationship between fiction and reality in this film.

That’s what interested me. I set it all up so that at one point the film would become a documentary on Isabelle Carré. Even though Isabelle was going through her pregnancy in a completely different way, I think there are things that I managed to steal from her, even just physically, because a pregnant woman goes through changes, her skin, her hair, her weight change. The film captures that moment, which is very precious because it’s not something that we usually see in a film.

Did the fact that Isabelle Carré was eight months pregnant cause problems during the making of the film?

It was a real risk for the production because the insurers did not want to insure us, so we had to make the film with a very low budget, in HD, with a small crew,, for three weeks over the summer, and we made the rest of the film after she had given birth.

Was it difficult for her psychologically to play a character who is going through a traumatic pregnancy?

Quite the contrary. Isabelle said that she was so completely different from Mousse that there couldn’t be any confusion between what she was experiencing and what her character was going through. The only thing she asked for was that the child she gives birth to at the end of the film should not be a boy because she was going to have a boy in real life and she didn’t want the film to create any confusion later and for her son to think that that was his story. The only scene where we cheated is the one where she dances in the club because she couldn’t do it and we couldn’t take the risk of her being hit in the stomach.

Why did you choose to focus on drug addicts?

I wanted to challenge clichés about drugs. I wanted to show it in a very realistic way, to go against idealised views of it, but also to show the well-being it can give and the love that can exist between two people who take drugs together. It’s a sort of refuge, they live in a closed space, cut off from the world and reality. And Mousse goes from one refuge to another in the film.

How was the film received in France?

Fairly well. But the right-wing press attacked it in a way that we really didn’t expect. The Figaro said that it advocated homosexual adoption. I had to re-read the article several times… If people want to interpret the film in this manner, why not, I have nothing against homosexual adoption, but it was absolutely not the aim of the film! They reacted as if the end of the film was a political message, which was not the case at all. But a film escapes you once you’ve released it, and everybody can interpret it as they wish.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Mother

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 2009 and screened in London again a month later as part of the London Korean Film Festival. 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, 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.
Bong Joon-ho: 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.

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

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

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

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?
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.

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?
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.

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?
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.

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

The Illusionist

Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist is based on a script written by Jacques Tati, which he had kept in a drawer until his death in 1982. It tells the story of a past-his-prime stage performer, who is forced to accept questionable engagements in dubious venues in order to make a living. When he performs in a remote Scottish village, he meets little girl Alice, who is convinced that his tricks are truly the result of magic, and she follows him to Edinburgh. Delighted by her enthusiasm for his art, he rewards her by ‘conjuring up’ ever more generous presents, ultimately allowing himself to be bankrupted by the constant giving. But while The Illusionist is stunning to look at, it is a little more unkempt when it comes to the story it wants to tell and the story that’s behind this quite remarkable pairing of Tati and Chomet.

Pamela Jahn took part in a round table interview with Sylvain Chomet at the Berlin Film Festival in February, where the film had its world premiere before opening the Edinburgh Film Festival in June.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about how you got hold of the script, because there seems to be some controversy over it.
Sylvain Chomet: No, there has been no controversy at all, but some very bad journalism was done in the UK. When I was working on Belleville Rendezvous I contacted Jacques Tati’s daughter, Sophie Tatisheff, to seek permission to use a segment of Jour de Fête in the film. To get her authorisation we showed her the material, small clips we had ready at the time and the script of Belleville Rendez-Vous, and she really liked it. All this rang a bell, and she remembered she had this script from her father. She knew that it was connected to her, because it is obvious that it is a letter from a father to his daughter. Tati wrote the script over quite a long period, three or four years, and Sophie was 13 when he started working on it, so he saw her change into a woman. She gave us permission to use the clip from Jour de Fête and she mentioned the script, but that was it. She died shortly after our conversation and so, unfortunately, we never met her. One day I contacted the estate of Jacques Tati, Jerome Deschamps and Mikall Micheff at Les Films de Mon Oncle, and they passed me the script – and I fell in love with it. I really loved the simplicity of the story and this very strong, beautiful relationship between father and daughter. It also felt very close to my relationship with my own daughter, who was five years old when we started the film and who is now 17. We bought the rights to make the film and Deschamps and Micheff were both very happy with it, so there is no controversy.

But as you mentioned before, there has been some discussion in the media about the script and your film.
I received a letter from a man called Richard MacDonald, who said he was the grandson of Jacques Tati. He told me the story that Tati had met someone at the Lido in Paris during the war and she became pregnant with a little girl. But Tati was married at the time, and he didn’t want to take responsibility. After I received this letter I decided to meet with this man, because I was interested in the details of this story. But when we met he became very aggressive and accused me of provocation and all that, and I said: ‘Look, if you are telling such a strong, emotional story about a father and a daughter you have to live with your daughter, you have to experience that. And that’s why I don’t see any reason why this script should have been dedicated to this girl he never lived with and who he didn’t see growing up.’ So I told him that if he had any problem with that, he should go speak to the estate of Jacques Tati. And he went off and I never saw him again. Then one day, there was this article in The Guardian saying all these terrible things about the film by a person who had never actually seen it.

[Note from the editors: Vanessa Thorpe at The Guardian quotes Tati's grandson, Richard McDonald, as saying: ‘The sabotaging of Tati's original L'illusionniste script, without recognising his troubled intentions, so that it resembles little more than a grotesque, eclectic, nostalgic homage to its author is the most disrespectful act.’]

Was there a moment when you worried about adapting this script because of the pressure of using the work of a distinguished director like Tati to make your own film?
There were two driving forces for me. One was Sophie, his daughter, but not because the script was all about her, rather because the story is about this father figure who is seeing this girl growing up like his daughter and who is trying to tell her something about life. When I read the script for the first time, I thought I should do something with it because otherwise it would have not gone anywhere, because Sophie Taticheff didn’t want this to be filmed in live action. She didn’t want somebody else to play her dad’s role in the film. And the other thing that was very important to me was that it was a very different film compared to Jacques Tati’s other work. I think if he had made the film at the time his career would have taken a completely different direction. The film takes place over a long period of time and in many different locations, and there’s a lot of travelling, which is all very unusual for Tati. So for that reason, because it wasn’t another Monsieur Hulot, I thought it would be really nice to do it. And the challenge for me was to make the script and all the emotion that’s in it work in animation.

Do you think Tati would have approved of an animated film?
I don’t know. I knew he was fascinated by drawings, and I think he was quite frustrated that he couldn’t draw himself. And in his films there is always a strong connection to childhood. If you look at the end of Play Time, for example, the world he describes in the film is very ugly. It’s sad, it’s grey, it’s uniform, almost robot-like. But at the end, you have this beautiful scene with the carousel of cars and it all becomes very childish. I think that is a beautiful way of looking at life. He’s got a lot of this in his films, like the relationship with the little boy in Mon Oncle. That’s why for me the ending in The Illusionist is not sad. It’s an evolution, I’d say. Father and daughter are both going their separate ways. She’s young, from a different generation, so she’s going to live her own life within her own culture. And he is an old man, but he’s also going to carry on and do something else. And I think it’s actually very redemptive when they meet in the end. But to answer your question, I don’t even know if I would have wanted to meet Tati to get his approval. Because most of the time when you have heroes like that it’s actually better not to meet them!

Why did you decide to include a live action scene with Tati in the film again, as you did in Belleville Rendezvous?
I felt I needed to put it in there so he could have a little look into the film. So you have the animated Tati and then you have the real Tati, like a mirror, and they look at each other and say ‘Do you want to stay?’, but they say ‘no, no, no’ and they leave. I think he needed to be there, if only for a moment.

The film is very different to your previous work.
Yes, exactly. Belleville Rendezvous went extremely well and a lot of people came to me and said: ‘Oh, are you going to make another one like this, this was really nice’, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to do something completely different. And here was the challenge, because this script wasn’t made for animation, it was made for live action, but I was convinced that it could work. I read the script when I was on the train to Cannes. The film is a voyage also, and I felt that it had something to do with the gentle balance of the train. I think I needed Jacques Tati to help me be a bit simpler in the way I use the camera and things like this. But that said, it was amazingly difficult, because nothing is more complicated than trying to do things very simply, and to make them look simple.

Was it also a challenge, or rather an attraction, for you to do something in 2D at a time when everything is going 3D?
Yes, but this was also a problem for us, because most of the really good animators are into 3D at the moment. And a 2D animator needs to know so many more things than 3D animators, because 3D basically means you have puppets without the strings, it’s a virtual world, so you have to be good in volumes and sketches and make them move. But a 2D animator is someone who can draw ‘classically’, who can draw fast, and someone who knows anatomy. You need to know the motion of animals and humans to make it work, and you need to know how to act as well.

How do you think children see your films?
I’ve never aimed my films at children as the main audience. I think you restrict yourself when you do that. But on the other hand, I was very surprised that a lot of kids actually watched Belleville Rendezvous, and they all loved it. My own daughter, for example, was never forced to watch the film. She actually has a lot of Pixar movies at home. But one day she saw the DVD and asked if she could watch it and she loved it too. For kids, I think, it’s all real… A lot of people are still fascinated when they see animation. It’s magic.

Terrorism Considered as one of the Fine Arts

Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts marks the welcome return to filmmaking of Peter Whitehead, the documentarian who captured the historic first meeting of American and English beat poets with Wholly Communion (1965) and the 1968 student rebellion at Columbia University that occurred in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King shooting with The Fall (1969). In recent years, Whitehead has been active as a cyber-novelist, and through his website has published the Nohzone trilogy, of which Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts is the first instalment. After attending a tribute to his career at the 2006 Viennale Festival, the director decided to shoot the self-financed film version on location in Vienna and developed a fragmented narrative that follows the attempts of Michael Schlieman, an MI6 agent who has gone rogue, to make contact with the elusive Maria Lenoir, an eco-terrorist who is wanted by the British government. Schlieman has come to identify with Lenoir, but finds it difficult to navigate the elaborate network of contacts that surrounds her, even with the assistance of Sophie, the alluring archivist at Vienna’s Third Man Museum. Although this summary suggests a relatively straightforward conspiracy thriller, Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts is a defiantly non-linear experience as voice-over, imagery and on-screen quotations serve to deconstruct cinematic time and narrative form in a disorientating manner. Peter Whitehead spoke to John Berra about the development of the film and the multiple readings that are presented by his unorthodox approach.

Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts is the first film you have made in 32 years. How had the landscape of independent filmmaking changed in that period?
I knew absolutely nothing. I had not paid any attention to independent filmmaking since 1973; I have no idea about what has been done, I never watch films, I only write novels. The film is based on my novel, and that is the only reason I decided to make it. I was already starting to think about making a film, I was going to finance it myself and it was going to be based on my three novels that are on the web, the Nohzone trilogy. I attended the Viennale, where I had some fantastic dialogues, and I met Samantha Berger; she was sort of a Peruvian anarchist filmmaker, and I decided to take the first of my three novels and make it in Vienna with Samantha.

How did the narrative and themes develop in collaboration?
The film is clearly a homage to my great hero Jean-Luc Godard, who is a very difficult person to have as your hero; I had a publishing company in the 60s and I published all of his screenplays. I didn’t set out to do a ‘Godard’, that was provoked as much by the people who I became involved with to make the film. A lot of my films are made in collaboration with actresses, which is very Godardian. I made Daddy with Niki de Saint Phalle, and I made Fire in the Water with Nathalie Delon, so I like to be inspired by creative females, it energises me in the sense that I can make a documentary or semi-documentary. It is documentary in that it is about the person, but it’s more often about their fantasies, their ideas, their relationships. So I started making the film with Samantha, who was a correspondent for a magazine in Peru called Godard. I told her that I was making a film of my novel Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts and that it has a character who becomes a terrorist and it’s about an assassination. I then met Nina Erber, who is the bass player in Who Killed Bambi, and I thought she would be great as Maria Lenoir and I thought I had the perfect situation because, as I got close to Nina, I discovered that she was also a total Godard freak. Unfortunately, I have a bad gene that leaves me prone to an auto-immune disease, which I had in 1968, and I was struck down for a second time in Vienna, so I had to get back to England and it took six to nine months for me to get better. When I went back to Vienna, I found Sophie Stroemer, who I had met at the Viennale, and discovered that she was working in the Third Man Museum, and she gave me what I needed, which was the narrative of a disappearing Maria Lenoir. The film became entirely what it is due to my relationship with these three different girls.

Although the film uses a third-person narration, it also plays with aspects of first-person filmmaking as it is shot largely from Schielman’s point of view. He encounters several physically similar femme fatale characters, and it is suggested that they all could be Maria Lenoir because he is capturing aspects of their personalities that he believes to be facets of the woman he is pursuing.
All the girls in the film are Maria Lenoir; as far as I’m concerned, there are only two people in the film, one is Maria Lenoir, and the other is Michael Schlieman. If you start talking to me about ‘characters’ in a film you’re talking about Hollywood; I’m not interested in that, I’m interested in the archetypal. The two archetypes are the man and the woman and the archetype of the female, which I’ve called ‘Maria Lenoir’, is the modern female, and she and Schlieman have a dialogue about technology and the rape of nature and God knows what else. It’s about that total split between the male vision and the female vision. For the female it is all about revenge and rejection, self-sacrifice and suicide. I hope it’s clear that Michael Schielman identifies with these females; there is a mention at one point that he identifies so much with Maria that he too might be Maria. In other words, there is an archetypal yin and yang in all of us; the yang is that male thing, which is to do with technology, and that is why I have the sequence that says ‘Welcome to the machine’. The female thing is the development of this virtual web of total connecting, gossipy little fragmented bits of communication; the world of the female is a conspiracy.

The film keeps returning to the two tram lines in Vienna, and the possibility of an overlap, or collision, between related forces or events. At times, the film itself plays like a collision between your real-world concerns and an evident enthusiasm for classic narrative cinema, as exemplified by The Third Man, and literary pulp fiction. It seems to be deconstructing narrative and space.
It is totally and deliberately doing that. Part of that is the deconstruction of the single character because only a single character can give you that linear line from A to Z, and I’ve just disintegrated it. I’m fascinated by the Ringstrasse because it’s a circular thing, you go right around the city and you see the entire history of Vienna. Tram number one goes one way, and tram number two goes the other way, they just go around constantly, and they’ve been doing that for 40 years. I thought that was perfect for me because the film is about entanglement; I imagined all these characters linking like a cyclotron, one going one way and the other going the other way, so the narrative is a double circle. Entanglement is where you split a proton and it goes off into two halves, and they go round two circles, and then they collide. I like the idea that he is reflecting on his past, because he is about to die, and she is trying to look to the future. One is the past and one is the future, one is memory and the other is imagination.

When discussing the production of The Third Man, Sophie observes that, ‘Film doesn’t play by the rules of space. It makes quantum leaps’. It’s interesting that film can capture a city to some extent, but it is also always cheating the audience by jumping to other locations of studio sets.
That’s the reason that I wanted her in the movie. I went to the Third Man Museum and she started to explain how she was taking people around the city to show them how the film was a complete lie because half of it was shot in London, and half of it was shot in Vienna, and that’s what fascinates her; how time and space in film can become something totally different. The idea was hers, she brought it in at that moment, but I had already talked to her about entanglement and physics, so I had encouraged it.

Interview by John Berra

Bluebeard

Although the film was one of the highlights on last year’s festival circuit, it has taken a while for Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard to get a UK theatrical release. Originally scripted and produced for French television, Bluebeard is a subtly suggestive retelling of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale about an ugly and extremely wealthy lord whose wives disappear under mysterious circumstances, until he falls for the much younger Marie-Catherine, who agrees to marry him in order to escape the shadow of her beautiful, talented older sister. What makes this understated, low-budget film a pure pleasure is the bold, teasing dialogue between the two sisters in the film’s framing plot, set in modern time, in which Catherine, the younger girl, thoroughly enjoys terrifying her older sister Anne by reading her the infamous tale from a book found in their attic. Playfully grim and increasingly disturbing, with a wonderfully cruel narrative that hints at the fiercely, sexually provocative spirit of Breillat’s previous work, Bluebeard slowly inveigles you before hitting you hard.

Pamela Jahn took part in a round table with Catherine Breillat at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere.

Q: Of all fairy tales, what is it that fascinated you so much about the story of Bluebeard?

Catherine Breillat: When I was a child this was my favourite fairy tale, but I was always astonished that this tale was actually told to little girls, because it’s a fairy tale in which women are killed – Bluebeard is a real serial killer. In fairy tales, you often find a protagonist who is an ogre, like in Little Red Riding Hood for instance, who feels the urge to eat the victims in order to feed himself. But in the case of Bluebeard, you are talking about a human being who marries his victims, including this young woman. But in a way, he is as innocent as Marie-Catherine.

If you look at my films, you will see that I am somewhat obsessed by the relationship between victims and their executioner, but as if the relationship was a rational thing in a physical sense, a relationship between two different forces that measure themselves. And therefore I’ve always wanted to make a movie about Bluebeard. I had decided to make it before I started shooting The Last Mistress. I went to Arte and told them that I wanted to make the movie in five months, and within three or four weeks I wrote the script and organised the shoot. But then I had my stroke and all of a sudden I got a little scared about making the film. But eventually, my desire to make it was stronger and I decided to go ahead with it.

In your film the elder sister dies in the end. Being a younger sister yourself, was revenge something that crossed your mind when you wrote that last scene?

I think a younger sister’s secret desire is always to eliminate the first one. So, the death of the elder sister was a bit of a treat for myself. When I read the fairy tale to my sister at the age of five, I did so because I knew she was going to cry and break down before me, and at that point I felt stronger than her. I could have shouted ‘I have no fear, I have no fear’, like the little one in the film, and I was very proud of that – sadly, very proud of that. In a way, I was the small Bluebeard at the time. And when the mother arrives we don’t see the dead sister, we just see the little one, and we see her finally hugged by the mother.

Why didn’t you show the mother’s reaction to the death of her daughter?

Because this is a children’s world, and the mother is only there to show that the little girl will now get all her attention – this is what really matters. This is why she’s not looking at the elder daughter, she is just concentrating on the little one.

Has your sister seen the film yet?

No. There’s also a direct reference to us in the names. My sister’s name is Marie-Hélène and in the film she’s called Marie-Anne, and the little sisters are called Catherine and Marie-Catherine.

When the girl enters the room with the hanged woman, why did you choose the little girl from the present time instead of the girl from the fairy tale?

Because in stories or fairy tales or fiction in general, people usually like to project themselves onto the story. And it’s the same for this little girl, she wants to see these women, so she goes into the room herself.

It is fascinating to see how well the different time settings work together.

The girls are reading the story in the present and projecting their own feelings onto ancient times. But ancient times are modern, in the sense that Shakespeare is very up-to-date and modern, and the same goes for Sophocles. I remember that I had a big discussion with my producer because she wanted to have the girls’ hair styled in a certain way, but I said no. They had to look exactly how they imagine themselves in the fairy tale, dressed as though they are in the Middle Ages. All the characters are themselves, with the exception of Bluebeard, who is dressed half way between François I by Clouet and Ivan the Terrible because he is a ghost and therefore is dressed like in a dream.

You also have a very playful way of dealing with the subject matter, for example, when the two girls start talking about homosexuality. Here you bring in a completely new topic into the story that, at the same time, creates some sort of confusion about their relationship.

Children have their own, delirious rationality, like when one of them says ‘God is somebody who is very busy and therefore he had to go down to the earth before going up to the sky’. This is something that I actually heard with my own ears, I didn’t make it up. And that’s why I decided to have this sequence, when they are talking about marriage, and the elderly sister starts talking in a very romantic way, playing with a ring all the time, and then the little one starts talking about sperm in a very rational way but, again, sort of in a delirious way also. Then she suddenly talks about homosexuality and I was absolutely struck by that and decided to keep it in the film. Little girls are not like puppets that will move and behave in the way you want. You just have to show children the way they really are. This is also why you should never explain fairy tales to children, I think, because children have their own imagination and their own way of interpreting them, which is much more important.

You mentioned before that, to some extent, Bluebeard was innocent too.

He is innocent in so far as he cannot not leave the castle, and he cannot not ask his wife to give him back the key, because the key is like a fairy. And this is fate, or a metaphor for fate. And we see very clearly that it is difficult for him to actually kill his wife because he loves her.

So, the monster is a friendly monster, in a way.

Yes, because he is the monster of desire – the monster of our desire, this obscure desire that we all have inside of us. And in that respect he must be somewhat nice, because what is exciting for us must have a nice side to it.

Does the killing of desire free the girl in the end?

She keeps him for herself, just like he keeps the hanged women for himself. So, that’s what unites them, because they do exactly the same thing. They become each other in a way.

So, in the end, the person, and his or her desire, is a very lonely thing.

Yes, I’ve just understood it myself because I’ve been asked the question. I hadn’t actually thought about it at all when making the film. This is why I am telling you that the real birth of the film happens when the audience watches the film. As Freud said, this is where the consciousness is being revealed.

White Material

With White Material, Claire Denis revisits Africa, the setting of her debut feature Chocolat (1988) as well as of her childhood years. Subtly political while also deeply personal, the film focuses on a French woman, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), who runs a coffee plantation in an unidentified African country amid racial tension and revolutionary combat. Obsessed with her plantation, she is blind to the realities that surround her and refuses to leave when the fighting between government forces and rebels gets worse and her position becomes increasingly precarious. Racial and political conflict is intermeshed with personal conflict and Huppert’s dysfunctional family disintegrates as outside events unravel. Denis paints a compelling portrait of a driven woman who can be harsh and ruthless to protect her passionate attachment to the African land she owns. Below, Claire Denis talks to Sarah Cronin about the inspiration for the film and its complex depiction of a troubled continent.

Sarah Cronin: In your director’s statement, you dedicate the film to Sony Labou Tansi. Can you tell me a bit more about him?

Claire Denis: Sony was a writer from Congo, who, along with his wife, died at the beginning of the 90s, without treatment, from AIDS. He’s a great writer, one of my favourites. He has this terrible quality, lucidity, and humour.

Did he write a lot about corruption?

He wrote about his own country. He was very active, he was actually in the rebellion, so he didn’t get treatment for his disease because of that.

How did the film originate? Were you interested in Maria’s story, or civil war in Africa?

It started with Isabelle Huppert. She wanted to work with me, and asked me if I knew the novel by Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing. I said, of course, not only do I know this novel, but it was a big inspiration for me when I made my first film, Chocolat. Although in my family, as opposed to Lessing’s, no one was farming, we were not settling in Africa, we moved all the time, so I had absolutely no experience of farming. I told Isabelle that the problem for me was that period South Africa was not really something that I wanted to do. I wanted to make a contemporary story. Actually, I found it watching the news on TV. There were elements I saw that I put together.

It’s a much more tragic film than Chocolat.

It has nothing to do with Chocolat. That was a film I made out of my own memories, with a sort of – not nostalgia – but I think it was a flashback of someone going back to the country where she grew up.

It seemed to me to reflect a disappointment in the last 20 years in Africa – things like the seizures of white farms in Zimbabwe and Rwanda.

I think that touched people in England more than in France, we were not aware of that, except that the President of Zimbabwe is completely crazy. I was more aware of South Africa, because I have been there many times. Rwanda is a different story, it’s a genocide – you cannot be inspired by Rwanda slightly – you have to be very explicit with Rwanda. No, I was inspired by the west coast. Sierra Leone, Kenya…

The child soldiers especially reminded me of Sierra Leone…

Also Liberia, Nigeria…

I really like the scene where the children are ‘playing’ in the house and find the white dog, and the music on the soundtrack tinkles, a bit like a music box. It’s a very poignant scene.

For me, the child soldiers were victims. They were number one children, and only after soldiers with guns. I wanted them to be children first.

At the very end, why is the last shot of the young rebel, rather than of Maria?

It was important to me to give a chance to a young kid to grow up with some hope. For Maria, her story ends there.

Was she taking out her anger on her father for putting her in that situation?

Her father-in-law. There is no more for her there. This violence expresses something about that.

And what about Manuel, Maria’s son, has he been corrupted?

Manuel is not corrupt. He’s a young boy, he’s crazy. Corrupted is a big word for someone young.

At the end, he plays with the kids – for him it’s almost like a game.

Yeah, it’s something liberating for him.

And what about the radio DJ who gives information to the rebels, how crucial is he to the film?

He’s not crucial, but there is no place in Africa without the radio being like a clock. You don’t live without a radio anywhere, so the guy is telling people to pack and run away. The white people are going to leave, so if you are on the side of the rebellion, be aware, you are going to be killed.

The film seems very ambivalent, you don’t seem to favour the government or the rebels…

The mayor and his militia are not really great, and while the child soldiers are dangerous, it’s not right to kill children in that way. I’m not ambivalent as a person. I don’t want to be a prisoner of cliché, but I’m not ambivalent. I’m very clear, I think.

Maria is infuriating at times, especially when she puts her workers’ lives at risk, but it’s also easy to have sympathy for her because she has lived there her whole life.

Yes, I feel that way too. I dislike what she represents, but she has something – she wants to believe in herself, that she has the power to transform, or force disaster into something successful, because nothing in this family is a success. And I think that’s why I like her so much… and because of Isabelle, Isabelle gave her something, some of her light.

I like the scene when she’s on the motorbike, and her hand is floating up in the air.

She enjoyed that moment. She felt free, like the queen of the world. She doesn’t want to be another person.

It’s the subtle things too – in that scene where she shows the workers where they’re sleeping, and the camera just briefly shows the old blankets lying on the floor. She loves Africa and loves the people but she doesn’t realise…

She lives probably like her father-in-law did. She is no different – she thinks she’s different, but she’s not.

Interview by Sarah Cronin

Institute Benjamenta

Acclaimed for their animated short films, the Brothers Quay released their first feature-length live action film, Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life, in 1995. A menacing, oneiric tale inspired by the work of Swiss writer Robert Walser, it follows new student Jakob as he enters a strange school for servants run by the somewhat sinister Herr Benjamenta and his sister Lisa. The film glides fluidly through beautifully textured black and white images that open up imaginary spaces. Intensely visual and musical, its progression is guided not by a linear plot but by dream logic, recurrent motifs and basic fairy tale elements. Virginie Sélavy had the pleasure to interview the Brothers Quay in the wonderland of their London studio.

VS: You have often been inspired by literature in your work and for your first live action feature you chose to adapt Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten. Why did you pick that book?

BQ: It’s what we were reading at the time when Keith [Griffiths], our producer, asked us if we would ever think about doing a feature film, and our first response was ‘no way’. The thing about this work is that it’s a chamber piece, so it didn’t seem daunting. And in the background, there was always the precedent of Walerian Borowczyk’s Goto, l’île d’amour (1968), which was a chamber work in one space, a hermetic universe. And we realised that with Walser’s book, we could set the film entirely in the institute itself.

So Goto played an important role in convincing you that you could do this?

Yes, in so much as it was a great precedent for animators who moved to live action, like Kon Ichikawa, who did An Actor’s Revenge (1963). It’s quite a leap to come from a graphic universe and move to live action but both Borowczyk and Ichikawa have this great graphic quality to their live universe. They don’t change gears. They make live action submit to the same hermetic universe. And of course it’s quite powerful.

And it gives it that slightly unreal quality – humans don’t seem quite human.

Yes, it’s true. It might not have been easy for people like [actor] Pierre Brasseur, but in the end the actors understood that it was very much a type of universe seen almost from an entomologist’s point of view. For Borowczyk, they were insects in the kingdom of Goto.

The way you approach literary adaptations is very interesting. I believe that for Benjamenta you asked your composer Lech Jankowski to write the music first and you conceived the film from the music. Why do you work this way?

I think that the principle is that the music comes first, whether it’s live action or animation, or in many respects dance. Entire sequences of Benjamenta were choreographed specifically to the music. Music is always in place. That suggests for us far more potential for elaborating a scenography than just adapting a piece of literature.

It also seems to be a way of distilling and condensing the original work. It goes through the filter of the musician, and then you filter it some more through images. Is that a way of avoiding too literal an interpretation of the literary source?

I think we place an immense trust in music in that it will open doors in a way a proper scenario couldn’t possibly attempt. It musicalises the way we approach everything. And it’s true that music makes you move from the word, the text, to a kind of musicalisation of space, which allows for another realm to open up, and you can do just as powerful a reading of the text without relying on Walser’s words but on the context that he sets up.

You made three short films inspired by Walser before making Benjamenta (Stille Nacht: Dramolet [1988], Tales from Vienna Woods [1992], and The Comb [1990]). Did you see those films as some sort of preparation work?

Yes, because we never really thought we’d get the film off the ground. It took 10 years to make it, so they were like little stabs, forays into Walser-land. When Keith first asked us to think about it, it was around the time of Street of Crocodiles, so that was 1985, and we made the film in 1995. We then did The Comb, which really tried to map it out, because at one point we were thinking of a mixture of animation and live action. It gave us a chance to play with a bit of live action, somebody sleeping, Lisa Benjamenta.

In The Comb, there is a contrast between the real world, which is in black and white, and the animated dream world, which is in colour. Did you think of keeping that in Benjamenta?

No, not at all, because there was really no separation, it was all live action. What animation there is is totally invisible.

Why did you decide to make a purely live action film and not to have any visible animation?

It didn’t need it. We did a lot of scenes in our studio and the big set of the inner sanctum was a model, so in the live action décor they built only a walkway and a bit of the wall, and the rest was matted in. It was just us building it here in the studio out of photocopied paper – just textures! There is a sequence where the light animates up, but nobody would realise that that was animated. The set was on the floor, just on the other side of the studio. We were trying to light it with artificial light, and then one day, towards the end of the day, we were sitting here with a glass of wine and the sun passes around the corner and comes through the two buildings and we saw it creep across the floor and we said, go! We just rounded the camera and we started clicking every 3 or 4 seconds, manually, until the light came across, crept up and went up the wall. The next day, we waited for the same hour, and this time we did it every 5 seconds, and the next day every 7. And then it was cloudy for a month! But we had it in the can, it was like liquid gold, like a found object. And we realised that artificial light doesn’t have the intensity of real sunlight, so it was a really beautiful discovery.

What about the scenes where there’s a pattern of light that moves along the walls?

The director of photography, Nic Knowland, just asked one of the technicians to run on the upper floor with the light down the hallway and turn the corner!

It feels like the building is alive with this ghostly presence.

We wanted to create the idea that the school was in an imaginary setting where you’re at the edge of a forest but just on the edge of the city, where the trams move around. So you had the animal kingdom and the forest, and the urban side coming in via the trams way off in the distance, and it made it quite magical.

Institute Benjamenta

The work on the light and the texture of the image in Benjamenta is very impressive.

The light was pretty much written into the script. The goldfish bowl is the centre of a kind of focal plane, and when the light hits it at certain hours, it ricochets throughout, and Lisa has these erotic reveries because she knows the light comes at certain hours.

Throughout your work you have an interest in imaginary spaces.

It was all filmed in Hampton Court House, which is opposite the beautiful Hampton Court. Apparently, it’s where one of the Henrys had one of his mistresses, and there’s supposed to be a tunnel, nobody knew where it was. It’s just a dilapidated old place which was rented out to a lot of people, and when we went all the doors were marked in Russian numbers… They allowed you to do anything you wanted with it as long as you reverted it back to the state that it was. So we rented it out for a six-week shoot, we lived there on the top floor, and we built sets inside the place, so there was Lisa’s room, Herr Benjamenta’s office, the students’ room, etc.

Inside the film you create a space that opens up inside one’s self as well as downwards, and it feels like both a personal and a metaphysical journey. Is that the sort of impression you wanted to create?

We wanted to give both the banal side of being a student and the magical side of passing through a blackboard. So you have extremes from the banality to the imaginary, and that was part of the voyage that we created in this film. But it had to be almost insufferably claustrophobic at times to allow for this rupture into this inner sanctum of Lisa Benjamenta. And on to this almost neo-realist dilapidated boarding school for servants, we grafted the animal kingdom element, which allowed the fairy tale to slightly contaminate it.

So the stag imagery is both part of the animal kingdom and part of the fairy tale, right?

Yes, very much. I don’t think this particularly came from Walser, it was our own exploration. The deer has always been part of fairy tale lore.

It also seems to be connected to your interest in the fluctuating boundaries between the human and the inhuman, transmutations between the animate and the inanimate, between different realms, throughout your work.

Also, Herr Benjamenta, who, in fairy tale terminology would have been the ogre, was also the great stag deer, Lisa was the doe, and Jakob was the young princeling figure who was meant to arrive with the kiss of life for the sleeping beauty, but brings the kiss of death in a way, both to Lisa, who dies a sort of metaphysical death, and the school, which basically just implodes. And I think that Herr Benjamenta’s implication, ‘let’s go out of this life, out of this world’, is purely fairy tale, but it is a metaphysical journey, to some place, either here or…

Jakob also seems to be on a quest for nothingness, to get rid of one’s self in a way.

It’s a descent into the lower spheres, but also one that opens up potential, a release from the constraints. Normally, everyone tries to go on a journey upwards, and for Walser, going to degree zero was something that could really open up something, an otherness that could be of great value.

And you represent this visually through the circular motifs in the film.

Yes. It was a very crucial formal element. Invariably, the characters would walk around each other and the camera would constantly go in a series of circles. It was a formal way of placing the zero as a physicality as well as a mental notion.

It is a very physical film, there are moments of pure choreography and so much depends on the facial expressions of the actors, like in silent films.

Absolutely. I think that’s why in a way we all like choreography because we watch to see how shapes move through a frame and just what an expressionless face is able to transpose. You have to read it like a mask, and it’s richer than you tend to think. We all have no problem with Buster Keaton because it’s important that he traverse a world mutely with that face that doesn’t give an inch.

Were you inspired by Keaton for the film?

We told Mark Rylance to be aware of that sort of impassivity, because he didn’t have a lot of dialogue. With someone like Gottfried, you didn’t have to tell him that, he knew. He’s a remarkable actor, even in English, he’s faultless. In a way, he was the one character that, although we had written it, we hadn’t a clue how to inform, and he just knew precisely what to do. And he proposed certain scenes like the lipstick scene. We said OK, if Herr Benjamenta would do that, that’s OK with us!

Your films always work on different levels and in Benjamenta you also draw on Walser’s life. Why was it important for you to have this personal element in the film?

Because Walser was that servant, he did do that job. Also, when we first read about Walser, what attracted us was an article that said ‘Portrait of a Nobody’, and we felt that it was for us, nobody, a loser. This was absolutely ideal. You can put more of yourself in or how to elucidate the world of Walser because it is so minimalised, so it allows you to expand that with a sense of décor.

And there’s also the fact that he spent years an insane asylum, so the institute could be a reflection of that.

We had that in mind, that it was also a sort of asylum too. I think in the end we backed away from making it too much of a reference, but it was always there.

You also put in a reference to his death.

Yes, a reference to when he was found in the snow on Christmas Day. We’d shown Mark a photograph and he beautifully added a detail: he makes that gesture at the end and his hat flies off, just like in the photo.

So it was a way of condensing Walser’s life, the servant school, the asylum, the death?

Yes, exactly. And the snow, that was also important. From the beginning, Jakob says, ‘I’ll only be here for a little while until begins the snow’. And it creates this totally fairy tale-ish world. At the end of the book, they go into a desert. So we had to choose the opposite, this Alpine landscape!

What was your approach to the fairy tale element?

We chose a non-specific mode of fairy tale because we didn’t want to have signs of fairy tale-ishness, otherwise it’d look a bit fey. What we wanted was a very hard, proletariat ascent into the fairy tale. The magic is probably closer to something like Cocteau’s Orphée (1950), where suddenly you go through the mirror. That’s what Alice does, you enter another universe that is not only sound but décor. So the images were pulled down into a non-fairy tale simplicity. It was through Walser and through The Comb because he did a lot of exploration of re-telling the fairy tales. He was going through the backdoor and for us it was easier to walk through a backdoor or side door than walking through the big heavily-laden front door with ‘fairy tale’ written on it. That scared the hell out of us. He re-worked Snow White, the text is amazing and we adapted quite a bit of that into Jakob von Gunten, so it’s a real journey through Walser-land to create Benjamenta.

After Benjamenta, you made a second live action feature, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes ( 2005), but when I interviewed you about it on its release, you described it as a rather unhappy experience. You are now working on a new feature project based on Bruno Schultz’s Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, so your experience on The Piano Tuner hasn’t discouraged you from making feature films?

No, not at all. I think it’s a question of returning to what worked in Benjamenta and creating that climate again. And again making a much more visual film and not getting trapped by the Film Council’s idea that it should be dialogue-bound. I think Schultz really gives us that space, so again it’ll be an exploration of Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, but also a lot of other Schultz material that we know and feel comfortable with.

Street of Crocodiles was based on Schultz, right?

Yes, and it’s not one specific story, it’s quite a few stories.

Are you aware of the Wojciech Has’s 1973 film version?

Of course, but you have to go in the opposite direction, because it’s a very powerful and very singular rendition of Schultz, so we’ll stay well clear.

Is it daunting that there’s already a film version of that story?

There was already a film version of Jakob van Gunten that we knew. It was also pretty weird and wild. Even Careful (1992) has resonances of Jakob von Gunten. Guy Maddin is a great lover of Walser. A good text or a novel can hold a lot of interpretations. It’s like, how many people in the world of opera have a shot at doing a Mozart opera or Tchaikowsky? You just have to approach it from a different angle.

Will it be all live action?

It’ll be a mixture, 70% live action, 30% animation, something like that. Probably black and white live action and colour animation. But again, it’s up in the air, we’ll see…

You have also recently made two shorts, Inventorium of Traces (2009), inspired by Jan Potocki, and Maska (2010).

We’ve just finished a film for the Polish Institute based on Stanislaw Lem’s The Mask. The year before, we shot in Poland, we did a documentary on this castle in the south of Poland, where Jan Potocki, who wrote The Saragossa Manuscript – another book that Wojciech Has adapted – lived for a while and wrote a piece for the theatre. So Poland has been supporting us for the last two years. We’re also going to do something for the Manchester Music Festival next summer based around Bartok. It’ll be a live performance, music and images.

Is it getting more difficult to get projects made?

No, what intrigues us is to be leaping from one form to another, be it an animation film, a documentary, a dance film and then a feature film. It’s far richer than just be knocking off three features every three years, or in our case it’d be six or 10 years! The smaller format gives greater scope to keep experimenting with that form and not to approach it in a hackneyed manner. We’ve just been given a grant to do a film in a medical museum in Philadelphia. We’ve also just done a little three-minute clip for Comme des Garçons for a perfume called Wonderwood. They came to us saying, you guys know about the kingdom of wood, you write the script, you do it. They gave us total freedom – that’s pretty unheard of in the commercial world. It’s nice working with people like that because they were very trusting. In commercials they don’t ever trust anybody, they’re always telling you what to do.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Watch the Wonderwood video:

Bodyguards and Assassins

The 2010 edition of the Terracotta Festival closed with Teddy Chen’s Bodyguards and Assassins, a spectacular action saga set in Hong Kong in 1905, as historical revolutionary Dr Sun Yat-sen travels to the then British colony to meet with rebel leaders from other Chinese provinces and coordinate the uprising against the Ching dynasty. But the imperial regime has sent assassins to stop him and revolutionary Chen Shaobai puts together a team of ill-assorted and unprepared fighters to protect Dr Sun, with the help of businessman Li Yutang and his son Li Chongguang.

Mixing fact and fiction, the film was a hugely ambitious and expensive project, not least because an entire Hong Kong neighbourhood had to be recreated full scale. Produced by Peter Chan, it was plagued by many problems, including death, financial difficulties and the SARS epidemic and took 10 years to make, a process documented in Hiroshi Fuzakawa’s Development Hell (2009), also presented at the festival. To find out more about the film, Virginie Sélavy talked to Teddy Chen during the Terracotta Festival in London.

VS: You set the story of Bodyguards and Assassins against the background of historical events, namely the revolution led by Sun Yat-sen against the imperial regime of the Ching dynasty. Why did you choose that period of history?

TC: Actually, the film was inspired by a film made by Peter Chan’s father in 1973 [Tung Man Chan’s The Bodyguard]. I started working on this film with Peter 10 years ago. I wanted to mix action with a bigger historical background to make an epic film. It sounded more interesting to me because all my previous films were made up – Purple Storm, The Accidental Spy, they’re not real. I thought about a subject for a long time, but nothing came to me. But then Peter said, ‘I’ll show you a video, it’s about a film that my father made, it’s about protecting Dr Sun’. When I heard this, I knew that was it. Dr Sun was kidnapped in London once and was almost killed in San Francisco by assassins, so I thought this great revolution father could be the background of the story. So it’s not because of the historical period, it’s because of the person.

You focus more on the fictional, unknown characters who helped protect Dr Sun during a visit to Hong Kong, rather than on Dr Sun himself. Why is that?

It’s a human drama. I want all those unsung heroes to move you for different reasons. Some of them don’t even know who the revolution father is, or what the revolution is for. They have their own reasons – they want to prove themselves, they want to die to serve a great cause, or they do it for the next generation, or out of friendship, or for the person they love. Many people have made films like this before, so I wanted to shoot it in a different way and I wanted to focus on why people become unsung heroes.

The film opens with a teacher explaining the idea of democracy to his students before he is assassinated. The message seems to be that you have to make sacrifices to bring about democracy, is that something you believe?

Yes, I totally believe that. We know the names of the famous heroes in every revolution, but there are many more unknown heroes to make the revolution a success. It took over 11 years, place after place in China. The main point I want to make is that there are heroes with no names.

Can the film be taken as a comment on the current situation in China and the desire for more democracy?

Nothing to do with that.

Did you have any problems with the censors in China because of the subject matter of the film?

Five years ago, when we started shooting the film, we had some problems because they had a department called the ‘History Department’ and if my movie had to go through that, I wouldn’t have been able to make it. But now, it’s more open in China, there’s less censorship. The authorities have now recognised that Dr Sun Yat-sen is a revolutionary father. Now there’s a picture of him in the People’s Square – there are five pictures, and one of them is of him. So they think it’s a good film to remind people to love their country.

What was their problem with the film before?

They said I was making up history, that this never happened in Hong Kong in 1905. But now they’re more open, they say ‘OK, it’s a made-up story, but the idea is right’, so they allowed me to make the film. There didn’t even make one cut.

Did you worry that audiences and critics might expect an accurate historical account?

Before we started I was a bit worried. But I think that as long as you fall in love with one of the characters, you will accept the whole story. I try to move the audience – if it works, they don’t care.

The film shows the role that Hong Kong played in the revolution, due to the fact that it was a British colony. Was that an important part of the story for you?

Yes, very important. I wanted to show the attitude of the British. They were not afraid, they didn’t want to be the enemies of the Ching dynasty, but they thought Dr Sun was doing the right thing, so they were in the middle and they said to him, ‘you can come but don’t make problems’. In fact, before 1905 Dr Sun Yat-sen was not allowed to come to Hong Kong because they didn’t want to make the Ching dynasty angry, but after five years the ban was lifted and he was allowed to come. So he really did come to Hong Kong on that day. Some say he didn’t come to the shore, he met people on the boat, but others say that he did, for a few hours. So there are several versions of the history. No one really knows what happened.

How did you recreate Hong Kong in that period?

When we first started we brought the crew, the art designers, etc, and they did some research, but then production stopped and we had to wait year after year. So at first we had a hundred pictures, but after all those years we had thousands, we had lots of research to support the film! Something very touching happened. I’m a Buddhist, I have a master, and he came to visit our set so at lunch time I showed him around. We went to one street and he stared at a staircase leading to the second floor of a building and he said, ‘do you know what was there 80 years ago?’ I said I didn’t. He said, ‘it was a tailor who worked there’. I said, ‘how do you know that?’ He said, ‘it was my father’s shop’. And it was exactly the same. I was so moved. We’d built it exactly as it was. We reconstructed everything according to the pictures. When the film starts, you really go back to 1905.

How important is it to you that Western audiences understand the historical background?

It’s not a documentary, it’s a drama! You don’t need to know what is real or not. As long as you go along with the characters, you will follow the story.

How did you create the different characters of the bodyguards?

It’s kind of a calculation. If they were all doing it for the revolution, for the same reason, I don’t think the audience would love every single character. But if they have different reasons, you might fall in love with one of them and you might like the other ones and follow the story. I want to make an action film that women also love because it’s a touching story. Until a few years ago, action films were men’s films, but if women love it, it’s not because of the action, the action just supports the film, it’s because of the characters and the emotions.

The scene where the push-chair containing Li Chongguang rolls backwards down the stairs, chased by the chief of the imperial soldiers, reminded me of the famous scene of the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin, which also shows revolutionaries rising against imperial power. Was it a conscious reference?

It did inspire us. But it is a mainstream action film, a traditional Hong Kong film, so it should have a fighting scene at the end. At the same time, it is a kind of tragedy, so many people have risked their lives, and the young boy is last. But you don’t have to try and sustain the action, you have to let people think, it’s not just an action film. So that’s when we brought in the scene you mentioned. The staircase was good for us. We spent a lot of money building it, it’s a very iconic place in Hong Kong. The rickshaw is also famous in Hong Kong. We used the staircase to extend the time to let the audience think about what the point of the film is.

The very last shot of the film is Dr Sun’s face on the boat back to China. Why did you choose to end on that image?

A lot of people said, ‘Why did he come? So many people got killed’. But Hong Kong was the only place where he could go and meet the other revolutionaries because it was a British colony and the Ching dynasty couldn’t do much about it. That’s why I wanted people to realise that this man knew that people would have to be sacrificed but still he had to come. Revolution is sacrifice, you have to think big, you can’t stop.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Life during Wartime

A social satirist who returned to filmmaking with a vengeance following the studio interference that undermined his first feature, Fear, Anxiety and Depression (1989), Todd Solondz has since experienced both ends of the industrial spectrum, flirting with mainstream acceptance when Happiness was funded by a studio sub-division in 1998 and paying for Palindromes out of his own pocket in 2000. While his audience has always been relatively marginal, fledgling filmmakers have certainly been taking notes; it could be argued that the scathing high school humour of Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) paved the way for the more widely accepted Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and Juno (2007), while Happiness is an early example of the ‘network narrative’ film that has become the format of choice for independent filmmakers seeking to comment on the social-political fabric of their nation.

Yet, while other films that have favoured the multi-stranded structure have contented themselves with the cleverness of their interlocking story-strands and superstar casting coups, Happiness was an unapologetically raw dissection of the underbelly of suburban society, which asked its audience to empathise with such characters as a paedophile and a verbally abusive phone pest. The frankness with which Solondz discussed such sexual themes led Happiness to be slapped with the restrictive NC-17 rating by the American ratings board, but more than 10 years later the director has returned to the scene of the crime with Life during Wartime, a quasi-sequel that integrates the post-09/11 climate into an already volatile mix, with uncomfortably amusing yet unexpectedly melancholy results.

John Berra spoke with Solondz about the reception of his work to date, the realities of ‘independent’ filmmaking, and his subversive approach to the ‘sequel’.

John Berra: Life during Wartime has a melancholy quality that I did not necessarily expect from a follow-up to Happiness. I read that the film was originally titled Forgiveness and I wondered if the title change indicated an intention to engage more directly with the social fabric of the United States and make a more political film.

Todd Solondz: It is certainly a more overtly political film than Happiness and, at the same time, it’s also very oblique in the way that it is political. The original title actually was Life during Wartime, the other title came about when I thought the movie would never be finished and I didn’t want anyone to know what the real title would be.

None of the actors from Happiness return for Life during Wartime. At first, I thought this might have been a way to communicate how these characters have changed and evolved through their experiences, but some of them do not seem to have changed at all.

When you cast the same actors 10 years later, it becomes all about mortality as people get older, and that of course is a very compelling interest, but that wasn’t what I wanted the movie to subliminally communicate. I was more interested in approaching these characters from a different angle and portraying them in a fresh light, and I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I had cast the same people. That’s what made it much more interesting for me. It’s somewhat misleading to call it a ‘sequel’, because it makes people think that the movie is going to have the same kind of character as the earlier film when, as you pointed out, it’s more melancholy. It’s more of a jumping off point than a direct sequel, and more of a quasi-sequel than an actual sequel.

Sequels are usually made by Hollywood studios to follow films that have made obscene amounts of money, but you have made a follow-up to a film that had a comparatively marginal audience.

It’s very un-Hollywood to make a sequel to a movie that makes no money. It goes against the grain. But Life during Wartime is more a variation on the original. I never had the intention of making a sequel, but when you start writing, things come at you unexpectedly and you never end up writing what you plan to write.

Happiness was released at a time when American independent films were receiving a lot of media attention. Based on the controversy that surrounded the film, I was surprised to find that it only grossed $2.7 million in the United States. Was there really an ‘indie’ boom in the late 90s, or do you think it was more of a media myth?

This is a bit of a conversation; how one defines what is ‘independent’ is also something to be questioned. When the movie happened, it was financed by October Films, which was owned by Universal so, in that sense it’s hard to call Happiness an ‘independent film’. I was pleased that it made as much as $2.7 million. The distribution company that had been set up to release it had run out of money, so the movie was playing without any advertising in motion. But say we had a stronger distributor, how much more money could it have made? 10% or 20%? You’re still talking about a movie that’s only making $3.5 million. It’s always instructive when you get very excited about a movie, and all your friends are seeing it; you go and look at the numbers that Variety or the industry sources publish to tell you how much a movie made, and it’s something of an eye-opener. You will see what actually makes a dent at the box office and what does not, and the consequence at this point is that I have a new script but I don’t know if it will get made. It’s not so complicated and it’s not so expensive, but unlike the days of Happiness, the internet and television cover so many channels that it’s much less typical for this audience to go out and pay $12.50 at the box office, or whatever it is in England. That makes things a lot more difficult. You can count on your fingers how many American filmmakers are able to continue operating as ‘independent filmmakers’, making films that are not dependent on big studio corporations. You can make one film, maybe two, but not many can continue. It’s not a system that is able to support the marginal filmmaker. In France, there is a system set up to subsidise and support the national cinema and independent filmmakers, and that applies to other European countries, but there is absolutely nothing similar in America.

In 2007, Premiere listed Happiness among their ‘top 25 most dangerous movies’. It came in at number 19 in-between Gimme Shelter (1970) and Bad Lieutenant (1992). As your work strives for some understanding of individuals that would otherwise be demonised as ‘socially deviant’, do you feel that labels like ‘dangerous’ undermine what you are trying to do?

I didn’t see that article, but if that’s how people remember the film, I just have to take it as a compliment and leave it at that. People will respond to the film no matter what other people say; at the end of the day, if you are sitting alone watching the movie, you will have a unique connection to it. I’m happy if the movie has a life and I can’t control the way people will respond to the film and what they will say about it, but there are certainly a lot worse things to be called than ‘dangerous’.

Dogtooth

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth is an inventive and riveting film that blurs the line between the real and the utterly grotesque. The story (the less you know, the better) takes place almost entirely within the confines of a spacious family house, inhabited by a married couple and their three grown-up children, who have never left the house and are confined to the bizarre world created by their parents’ cruel games and peculiar educational methods. Opting for fixed, meticulously framed shots and a dazzling, yet unhurried visual style, Lanthimos gradually reveals the details of this twisted, self-enclosed world while crafting an increasingly unsettling atmosphere. Full of weird surprises, wonderful dark humour and irreverent spirit, Dogtooth is a bold and brilliantly perverse gem. Pamela Jahn talks to Yorgos Lanthimos about parenting, Greek views on sexuality and the necessity of a good sense of humour.

Pamela Jahn: In Dogtooth you’re telling a story about a dysfunctional family that abandons the norms, rules and logic that have been taken for granted in society. What attracted you to this kind of subject matter?

Yorgos Lanthimos: It didn’t really start as a story about family dysfunction as such. In the beginning, I was wondering about family life and parenting in general and if the way we think about it would ever really change. But I had a conversation with some friends one day, and I was making fun about the fact that two of them were getting married and having children, because today many people get divorced and kids are being raised by single parents, so I said there was no point in getting married. But although I was obviously just joking, all of a sudden they got extremely defensive about what I had said. This made me realise how someone I knew and who I would never have expected to react that way freaks out when you mess about with his family. And that’s how I got the initial idea about this man who would go to extremes to protect his family, and who would try to keep his family together forever by keeping his children away from any influence from the outside world, being firmly convinced that this is the best way to raise them.

But it’s obviously a bit more than just keeping them away from the outside world, because the parents also play pretty cruel games with their children and teach them nonsense.

The thing is that because the father really does have the best intentions for his children, or at least that is what he believes, he tries to provide them with the best environment to grow up in, like this big house with a big garden and a swimming pool and all that. But at the same time, he has to create all these myths and fears so that the children don’t dare going out of the house. But since he has been able to do that from the moment they were born it also shows just how much you can influence people’s minds and create a view of the world for them that is exactly the way you want it.

It’s also interesting that you decided not to give any background information about why the parents decided to raise their children this way in the first place.

Yes, that was very important to me from the beginning, because I think it would have been a completely different film otherwise – you would be too engaged in judging if it was right for them to behave that way depending on the reasons they had for doing so. What interested me most was the result of their actions and to see how far you can go when messing with people’s minds and making them believe the things that you want them to believe. It’s a very dangerous thing to do and I hope my film provokes reactions from people because in the film it is obviously too late. Sooner or later this had to explode.

It all seems to work out until Christina comes into play, a woman who is brought into the house by the father on occasion to have sex with his son. She is basically the trigger that starts the fatal chain of increasingly violent events.

That’s right, she is the trigger. But what fascinates me most about her character is that she enters this obscure world and for her there is a temptation to take advantage of the situation and of the children. For example, she demands things from the older sister so they start dealing in this way, ‘I give you that, so why don’t you give me this’. You can feel the power Christina has, which she plays out on the children. It’s the temptation to take advantage of the weaker ones, and that’s what I like about her character. I think I would be tempted to act in the same way if I came into contact with someone so naïve, and to fool them and get whatever I want from them. Why not do it?

Although the son is daddy’s darling and gets special treatment, the two girls seem much more mature and stronger. How did you develop the different characters of the siblings?

I do believe that girls or women in general are stronger characters than boys. They are the smartest ones (laughs). So it was just natural for me that the older boy would be the father’s favourite, but at the same time he tries the hardest and seems somewhat more immature. But it also has to do with the fact that boys are seen as much more deserving of having sex and entitled to more things than the girls. When it comes to the girls, the parents never think that they need to be educated about sex and they deal with them in a much more conservative way. So it creates this bizarre situation, where they just discard any kind of thought about this with regard to the girls. For the boy, however, they are very proud of him having sex. At least this is the mentality we have in Greece. I have to admit, it’s quite dated, but I guess it still exists in other countries too.

How much research did you do before or while writing the script?

We didn’t do any research at all, because I thought it was such a surreal story we were working on. It was only afterwards, when we were already rehearsing, that this Austrian story came out about the father who kept his daughter in the basement, where she grew up like an animal, and he had children with her. But still, this felt very different from what we were trying to do since it had a very different tone to it, way too dark and dreadful.

Your film has a ferocious wit and a great sense of humour, which at times makes it feel more like an inverted comedy, in which absurdity gets out of control when some sort of normality finds its way in. Why was humour so important to you in this story?

That’s true (laughs)… It’s interesting what you’re saying. I actually never thought about it in this way, but it was the only way for me to approach the subject, because to really go deep into things the film had to be violent and, at the same time, have a great sense of humour, with the contradiction of being in an open space with light and beautiful garden and beautiful children. I think it brings out the most intense and powerful emotions when you experience contradictions like this. By employing a certain sense of humour you essentially get more serious about things and show conflict more effectively than if you were overly dramatic or only violent because that’s a one-way approach that just forces audiences to watch something appalling. With humour you can really make people think in many different directions, and it feels like a more existential experience to me. I always try to infuse humour into my work. I also work in theatre a lot, and you often end up working on a play without much humour. But it is very important for me to always find a way to introduce the ridiculous side of things into whatever I do, no matter how dramatic or tragic the given situation is.

It seems quite clear that you are not advocating violence because we see that the kids’ actions lead to some very nasty events. On the other hand, violence and dancing seem to be the only ways for the siblings to express their frustration at their lack of freedom.

I am very close to physicality in general, and I think I can only really work things out that way. I only work physically with the actors when rehearsing. I don’t sit down with them to analyse their parts in terms of what they should be thinking of and how they should approach their character. I just don’t like analysing things too much and I guess that’s why I deal with things physically. It just feels more real to me, and especially in film, where you have actors pretending to be a character in a situation. I don’t like setting up a frame of mind in their head. I just like them to act, literally speaking.

Did you have a clear idea from the beginning of how you were going to approach the visual style of the film?

I never try to visualise a film while writing the script or when I am casting. This happens only when I start rehearsing, I start getting an idea of what the film could look like. And in this particular film I thought it should be shot in a way that was quite realistic on the one hand – for example, there is not much lighting and the location is real – but with really strict framing and a cool, surreal look to go with the narrative. I guess that this is also related to my general philosophy about filmmaking. To me, it looks fake if you try to be too involved in the way you film things and if you ask your actors to get really emotionally involved. As much as I don’t like forcing feelings onto my actors, I also don’t like forcing them onto the audience. I prefer to keep the film open to allow people to get engaged in their own way. So I try to not guide people to conclusions too much, but rather expose things and have the audience react to what is happening on screen. For me, it is also a way of avoiding being too didactic in my films.

Dogtooth feels like a slap in the face of suburban life. In that sense, is it a personal story too?

No, it’s exactly the opposite. I grew up with only my mother, she got divorced when I was very young, and she died when I was 17 years old. From then on, I was by myself, so I had to go out into the world quite early and earn a living and study and do all these things. So, in a way I am observing the characters and the story in the film from a very different point of view. But even so, I really don’t know what I would do if I was a parent. If you asked me today how I would raise my children I would say that I’d try to have them experience freedom and be much more in contact with the world, and I think I would live somewhere in the centre of the city where they can come into contact with as many different elements of life as possible. But I am saying this now and in a year or so we might be speaking again and I might live in a nice suburban house with a garden and a swimming pool… who knows? I really don’t know what life has in store for me, but it’s amazing how your mind can fool you sometimes. (laughs)