Interview: Jacques Audiard
Jason Solomons

The Guardian / The Observer
Sunday 6 December 2009

Jacques Audiard’s new prison thriller is the most stylish film to come out
of Europe for years, following up on the promise of his previous movies Read
My Lips and The Beat that My Heart Skipped and confirming his place among
the greats of French cinema. Jason Solomons talks to a director who wants
his audience to fly with him

[PHOTO: Jacques Audiard at the Mayfair Hotel. Photograph: Suki Dhanda]

Jacques Audiard wears a hat. It’s a trilby that, the 57-year-old director
says, keeps him warm in the winter and cool in the summer. He was wearing it
in the heat of Cannes last May when I first met him, on a blazing roof
terrace; and he’s wearing it again today, in London, on an autumnal Monday
when I catch him smoking his pipe outside the hotel where we’re due to meet.

A Prophet (Un Prophète)
Production year: 2009
Country: France
Runtime: 150 mins
Directors: Jacques Audiard
Cast: Adel Bencherif, Niels Arestrup, Tahar Rahim, Tahar Ramin

With horn-rimmed glasses, smart jacket and a cravat, he looks a bit like an
English gentleman, a bit like Jacques Tati and a bit like a gangster. For a
film-maker in the middle of the frenzy of a festival visit in which his film
is the hottest ticket, he looks pretty cool.

"Cool? Am I cool?" he asks later. "I don’t know, but I hope my characters
are cool, in the sense of iconic. That’s my job, at its very essence. For
me, that’s what cinema is all about – it produces monumental figures, icons,
male or female, people who are emblematic of their time, who are in their
time and who define their time. Used properly, cinema is the coolest thing
in the world."

Without a doubt, his latest film, Un prophète (A Prophet), is the coolest
movie to come out of Europe for many years. It’s the story of Malik, a young
Arab in jail, who is summoned by the prison kingpin (a magnificent
performance by Niels Arestrup) to carry out a "hit". Malik thus gains entry
to the privileged Corsican mafia in the jail, while retaining contact and
respect among the maltreated Muslim prisoners. Gradually educating himself
in language and street politics, he plots his own rise to the top of the
criminal underworld.

A French prison movie is oddity enough, but Audiard’s treatment of the genre
is outstanding, blending American-style toughness with a European sense of
documentary-like realism and a host of stylistic flourishes, including
sudden bursts of rap music, freeze frames, magical hallucinations, jolts of
violence and gripping set-pieces. The film won the Grand Jury prize at
Cannes, is France’s big hope for an Oscar nomination and, most recently, won
the first Best Film at the inaugural London film festival, a very cool
choice for the LFF to champion. It was, according to LFF jury president
Anjelica Huston, "a masterpiece, an instant classic and a perfect film".

A Prophet is indeed that rare thing, a wholly original piece that feels
somehow familiar, the sort of thing you’ve seen before, but never seen done
so well. The same feeling occurs watching Audiard’s most recent films, Un
héros très discret (A Self-Made Hero), Sur mes lèvres (Read My Lips) and De
battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped). They are
crime dramas of a sort, starring Mathieu Kassovitz, Vincent Cassel and
Romain Duris respectively, but unusual and intimate studies that draw the
viewer in to the characters until we’re thinking like them, until we almost
inhabit their skins, no matter how morally suspect their actions or
intentions may be.

"You don’t have to like heroes," says Audiard. "The hero in my film is there
to illustrate the capacity for resistance of the individual and his ability
to make himself his own rules, his own life. I like to ask the question:
have I just got one life to live or is there another way? And what is the
price to pay for that other way, for inventing myself another way – will my
second life be more costly than my first?"

Malik, played in a star-making turn by newcomer Tahar Rahim, becomes a hero,
for certain, but by the end of the movie you find yourself rooting for a
killer, a rat and a committed criminal. "Do we root for Michael Corleone in
the Godfather films?" asks Audiard. "I think so, even if he is a monster.
People have difficulty swallowing the fact that Malik is a survivor – but I
think that’s because he’s an Arab character. They’re not used to seeing
Arabs come out on top and they don’t like it, not in France, anyway. Oh,
it’s fine for them to cheer for [Jacques] Mesrine," he says, referring to
France’s most notorious criminal ever, recently embodied by Cassel in a
two-part, César-winning film, "because he’s played by an actor everyone
thinks is cool. But Tahar, they don’t know him, he’s an Arab and, sad to
say, this is still a problem. Good. I hope it pisses them off. That’s the
point."

Audiard is a restless figure, fidgety in his chair, fingering the brim of
that trilby, now placed carefully on the table. The night before I meet him,
he’d presented his film at the LFF and presided over a testy Q&A session,
where he gave short shrift to some of the audience’s inquiries. He could
hardly keep still, moving back and forward in front of the screen, popping
in and out of the shadows, rather like one of his own characters on his
expressionistic, noir-ish sets. "I don’t like people to take my films so
seriously," he explains. "I’m deadly serious about cinema and I feel a
responsibility to it every time I pick up a camera, but that’s my role. The
audience must fly with me, must go where the images take them. The film, as
all good films should be, is rooted in realism, but you must not ignore the
poetry, the fiction, the story. Film is abstract, not definite. It is a
dream."

To talk to Audiard is to soar over numerous topics, alighting on one briefly
before taking flight again. He is witty, funny, earnest and flip all at
once. His erudition and mastery of his art form give him the confidence to
play games, to show off slightly, on screen and off. It’s what makes him
cooler than most directors – he’s not worried if you’ll like his movie,
because he knows it’s bloody good and, anyway, he likes it himself, which is
enough.

I ask him if his film was supposed to have political ramifications, given
that it has sparked internal debate in France over the state of the nation’s
prisons. He almost laughs: "That wasn’t the idea. Again, it’s a fiction, a
story. Yes, I looked at real prisons and how they work, but mainly so I
could get my actor to walk right and talk right. In the end, I used plenty
of real-life inmates as extras, so they knew exactly the right behaviour.
But, no, it isn’t a social critique for me.

"However, every time you make a film these days, it’s a political gesture,
like it or not. Every director must be conscious of the power of this tool
we’re using. It’s a very shocking tool, cinema, and you have to ask yourself
what you’re using it for."

I think we’re on to something here, so I ask him to expand. What is the
proper use of cinema these days? "Look, being in charge of a film is
political. It’s an industrial power. I don’t mean political like Gillo
Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers or Costa-Gavras’s Z, although that is of
course an admirable purpose. But even if you’re making a film with special
effects in which men turn into, I don’t know, helicopters or butterflies or
some shit, you have to think: what will my movie be used for? Cinema is
used to sell other stuff, be it toys or popcorn or whatever. So if they’re
trying to fuck you one way, you have to find a way to fuck them back.

"I have to think: what will the state-run TV company that part-funds me make
of all this violence, all these Arabs in my movie? Will they show it? Well,
if it’s good, they will, they’ll have to. That’s what excites me, that’s the
challenge and that’s what validates making films these days – it’s a battle
that gives cinema relevance, immediacy and energy."

Audiard’s theorising is terribly French but wonderfully refreshing. He’s
flattered, of course, when one compares his film to the best American
movies, but he’s also disappointed. "If you said: ‘Oh your films are very
Danish, or Swiss or Korean,’ then I’d be happier, because I feel like all
these influences are in there. If you compare me to Scorsese, well, that’s
because he’s a student of world cinema and he’s cultivated all that learning
into his style. I hope that’s what I’ve done, too."

And we’re back on to the topic of style and look, two words that can appear
empty to too many serious film-makers. Not for Audiard. "I like my
characters to look great, actors or actresses. The audience must find the
film sexy, no? Le cinéma est une machine libidinale!" Audiard continues,
animatedly: "As soon as you put a man or a woman in front of a lens, it
becomes a sensual experience. In a way we can say the history of movies is
the history of the eroticisation of faces. The epitome of masculinity can be
defined by Gary Cooper in City Streets, while there is nothing more
beautiful or sexual than the face of Miriam Hopkins in Rouben Mamoulian’s
version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde."

Certainly, Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped made a European pin-up
of star Romain Duris, while Read My Lips furthered Cassel’s ascent to the
top echelons of French stardom, where only the coolest of icons, such as
Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon, have reigned. "I know that with male
characters on the big screen, there’s something fascinating that happens in
the mind of an audience," says Audiard. "They bring all past associations to
the new image. So when I was creating Vincent Cassel’s character we looked
at Italian cinema where the actors can look louche, but still remain elegant
while asserting their virility. There’s an irony to their beauty that for me
is the very definition of masculine elegance, actors like Vittorio Gassman.

"For Romain in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, we were going for more of a
60s English silhouette, a kind of Small Faces thing, or a Kinks look. These
little touches bring out the character for the audience, subconsciously."

The success of A Prophet should propel Audiard to the very front line of
world film-making. It will probably lead to Hollywood, I venture, though he
seems less sure of this. "My English is not so good," he bats back, though
I tell him, very Frenchly, that surely it’s the language of cinema they
speak there. If it was the Hollywood of Scorsese, Bob Rafelson and Francis
Ford Coppola, I’ve a feeling he’d be off there like a shot, but for now he’s
content to make his films in France, where he lives with this wife and three
children, where they let him take three or four years between projects and
where he is allowed to develop his uniquely cool style of film-making.

"I definitely feel part of the French cinema landscape," he says. "I
absolutely belong to that world, but I can’t say if I’m typical of it or
not. I’m very aware that if your films are in French, you need to promote
them hard abroad to make people watch them, but cinema has globalised, so I
don’t need to go places where cultural fear, artistic fear and aesthetic
fear rule. These are exactly the barriers to break down with challenging new
cinema."

Audiard, whose father Michel was a prolific and respected screenwriter in
postwar, pre-new wave France, didn’t go to film school. His education took
place in the cheap cinemas of 1960s Paris, when, on weekend breaks from
boarding school, he’d watch five films a day, without even knowing what was
on the programme, letting it all wash over him: American films, Swiss,
Italian, Canadian, even British – he has the highest regard for Lindsay
Anderson and Peter Watkins but never liked Nic Roeg.

"I think it all comes out of me now, when I direct," he says. "I trained
first as an editor, so I know how to put images together, but when I started
directing, I wasn’t sure what style would come out. I’m still never sure,
and I get scared but I find that dynamic and inspiring. All I know is that
it must be rooted in the real and that it’s that relationship with what’s
real that makes film tick. After that, I find I can do more or less what I
want."

A Prophet will give him that freedom, too. I ask if there’s a sequel
planned, since he himself mentions The Godfather and the end of A Prophet
feels, to me, like a very Godfather-ish moment. "A French crime epic like
that feels a very good idea," he admits, "and of course Godfather 2 is the
best film because of the different levels there, the past and the present
and the layers of style. Yes, it’s a very good idea, to continue the story
of Malik, the rise of a criminal Arab.

"But it was not something I ever thought of in making the film. I’ve wanted
to end a film with Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s version of "Mack the Knife" for 10
years now and this was the first time it really made sense, so that’s why my
film ends how it does." He shrugs, as if to acknowledge that this doesn’t
feel a very thought-through style of film-making. And one wouldn’t want it
to be. It’s Audiard’s capacity for surprise that thrills, that makes his
style so fresh.

Before he goes, he tells me his favourite director of all is John Huston,
because he didn’t seem to be tied down by genres or laws. "While the City
Sleeps, African Queen, these are my masterpieces," he says, and he enthuses
about Huston’s Fat City, a film whose final shot he says he keeps in his
mind every time he gets behind the camera.

His enthusiasm stays with me because, a couple of nights later, I attend the
London film festival awards where A Prophet wins and Anjelica Huston hands
out the award to the film’s young star, Tahar Rahim. After the prizegiving,
I tell Anjelica what Audiard had said about her dad and that final shot of
Fat City. Her eyes fill with tears. "That’s my favourite moment in my dad’s
films, too," she gasps, as if she’s seen a ghost. "I knew there was
something about this film that spoke to me. I’m glad to know that, under my
watch, the prize has gone to one of dad’s kindred spirits."

Audiard’s films have that effect. They remind you of all the best films
you’ve ever seen and then add something new of their own. Now that’s cool.

A Prophet opens on 22 January

A heritage of French cool

Jean-Pierre Melville

His 1955 heist film Bob le flambeur had a big influence on Godard et al.
Obsessed with US cinema and its early gangster movies, he was a difficult,
perverse man with a taste for dark glasses and trilbys who confounded the
Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, who revered him, with his right-wing attitudes. His
films tended to be tough and laconic but exuded style. Le samouraï, starring
Alain Delon, is perhaps the coolest gangster film ever.

Jean-Luc Godard

Among the young iconoclasts who turned cinema on its head in the 1960s,
Godard was the most revolutionary in his dealings with form. His debut, A
bout de souffle, was stylistically exhilarating, with its jump cuts and
freewheeling camerawork. It was also exceedingly cool – guns, girls, that
Herald Tribune T-shirt. His work grew less audience-friendly, particularly
post-1968, but his centrality in the French new wave, and the influence that
movement had on 1970s Hollywood, means he is regarded as unimpeachably cool
.

Luc Besson

Before stumbling with The Fifth Element and putting his name to kids’ movies
and feature-length car chases, Besson made some terrifically cool films.
Léon, in which an underage Natalie Portman consorts with Jean Reno’s
bespectacled assassin, is the favourite, but Subway is more interesting,
delving into Paris’s underground and the dark side of the Mitterrand
generation. Social alienation served up in slickly stylised fashion was the
key ingredient of Cinéma du look, the movement in 1980s French cinema which
encompassed films by Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva, Betty Blue) and Leos Carax
(Les amants du Pont-Neuf), as well as Besson’s The Big Blue and Nikita.

Mathieu Kassovitz

It’s difficult to watch Amélie and reconcile Audrey Tautou’s gentle-hearted
love interest, Nino – Kassovitz in acting guise – with the man who unleashed
La haine on the world in 1995. A searing depiction of race relations in the
poverty-stricken banlieues of Paris, it was as controversial as it was
successful, establishing him as France’s most thrilling young director.
After La haine he made the even more provocatively violent Assassins and The
Crimson Rivers, but of late his output has been disappointing (he was
responsible for last year’s lacklustre Babylon AD).

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress