Translator: Sarah Rimmington Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Good evening.
At the cinema recently
I underwent a kind
of mini Copernican Revolution when I saw a particular film.
(Laughter)
Why are you laughing?
But seriously, something struck me.
Watching this film, which I very much liked,
I came out, discussed it with my friends,
and there was one compliment that kept recurring.
"It's a funny film! Wasn't it funny?"
The film, crammed with special effects, cost 220 million dollars to make,
in the end, all people remembered was that it was a comedy.
And that struck me.
Because, when I was a kid, and I went to see "Back to the Future",
or Terminator,
I went to see a hover-board.
I went to see the special effects;
I went to see innovation.
So, what could have happened?
What could have meant that after a certain point
the public only goes to see "The Avengers" for the laughs?
Well, I believe that if we divide a film's quality into technical merits
and emotional merits,
I believe that really, in relation to technical merits,
we have kind of seen it all.
We've seen towns exploding, we've seen aliens landing,
and we're somehow a little bit jaded.
But as for emotional merits on the other hand,
that is to say, at the level of feelings in the storyline, of all of that,
we've only become more thirsty.
Because we have content; we have an avalanche of content.
When you need, or when you want to enjoy some music,
you don't just switch on the television.
You can go and look for a guy who lives two million kilometers away.
Can you have 2 million kilometers?
(Laughter)
When you're an artist, you have to watch your kilo-metric estimates.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
It's always the case that you can find exactly the music you want,
the cinema you want, etc.
This creates an extremely heightened level of demand.
So when you are there,
and you are watching your favorite series
being streamed in crappy quality via your computer,
that's what you are saying.
You're saying: "I'm part of a generation that doesn't really care about technique,
and that prefers to focus on feelings."
So that was exactly what was in my mind
when I began my first full-length feature in 2009,
I had the idea of homing in on this emotional quality.
Given that we had a budget of 150 Euros, I didn't have much choice either.
but let's keep that between ourselves.
(Applause)
My first equation, the first equation I had to solve,
was "How do we get from something written down, to something living?"
How do I write a text in such a way that it becomes something emotional?
Well, I said to myself, "Let's write 70% of the text, and bring in the actors."
Invite the actors to participate, to read the text with me.
Mathieu, whom you can see in the picture with the white T-Shirt,
was playing a religious fundamentalist.
Oversimplifying a bit, but that's how it was.
So, the bad guy.
I had a serious concern.
Namely, that Mathieu was not connecting with the text.
He wasn't connecting to the text; he didn't find it realistic enough.
So he always had the trace of a smile.
The whole time.
Even when he was saying my lines.
At that point, I thought, "What can I do?"
I said to myself, "Let's validate the smile,
let's invite the smile into the character."
And so, in the end, we arrived at this.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
We achieved the heights of subtlety of that smile there.
The whole writing process was like that.
The whole writing process was like that; with humility towards what I had written,
resulting from confronting the living version,
by telling myself that the living version could influence the writing.
The second stage was moving on to the actual filming;
the tangible realization.
Once I had written this living material,
how could I ensure that it continued to live, even when I was filming it?
Well, very simple.
This photo came from a day of filming.
You can see I did not have extra lighting.
I was the only technician,
I was with the three actresses,
I did not even have a camera.
No, I'm kidding; the camera was just underneath.
Otherwise there wouldn't have been a film.
And there was just the photographer who was taking the photo.
We were five people in a room, creating a scene.
I'll make a confession,
I always get extremely anxious about the word "action".
The word "action" makes me anxious,
because I've always had the impression that life is there.
Life already exists, and I've felt that by saying "action",
I am stopping life in order to ask it to start again.
My first goal in directing was just that;
it was to avoid the moment when I was stopping life,
when I was cutting the action.
Émilie, to whom I'm talking in the photo, was playing a teacher,
who had had an affair with a student.
There, she was telling her friends what had happened.
What I said to her, was,
"We'll all talk together, like this, all four of us.
Then gradually, when you feel at ease with it, you'll start telling the story.
You'll switch over, enter your character,
and start telling the story to your friends."
And so that's what we did.
We went for it, we started the scene,
Émilie started to speak, and suddenly,
she switched over, and she started telling the thing,
I realized that the photographer
who was just next to me, was getting a bit pale.
Just as he was about to say something, I signaled to him that we were filming.
So that means that someone who was there with me, on set,
just next to me,
had not realized that we had passed from reality to fiction.
The whole film worked like that.
Very light filming, Very frugal filming,
in order to foreground the emotional landscape of the actor,
to enable him to transmit it, to show it.
To enable the camera to capture it.
The film was completed, and for me, it was kind of "mission accomplished"
as much on the level of screenwriting, as on the level of directing,
and now there was a new stage starting.
The sharing stage, the distribution stage.
This is often a stage that is seen as not being artistic.
That is an opinion to which I am completely opposed.
For me, distributing a film is part of creating a film.
Giiven that we had been close to real life throughout the whole process,
I wanted to continue being close to real life.
So I said to the Internet users, to the people who wanted to see the film,
"If you want to see the film, tell us.
Tell us, and we'll come and show it to you."
That's what they did.
We found ourselves under an avalanche of photographs
with people expressing their desire to see the film.
And so, no sooner said than done,
we climbed into a double-decker bus,
- the whole company of actors -
by the way, it is a scientific fact that the odor of smelly feet rises.
(Laughter)
Since the seating compartment was at the top, it was no picnic.
We did 9 000 kilometers like that, throughout France,
to distribute this film.
And at a certain point I found myself asking the question,
"There we go, this adventure is over; now I have the chance to start a new film.
A new film, with a budget and resources.
Do I want to work in the same way again?
Do I want to work in this way once more?"
Before I was forced to work like that;
now do I choose to work like that?
And in fact I didn't answer this question alone;
it was other filmmakers who answered in my place.
This means that the films shown here,
which were made using a very intimate approach,
with very personal stories, through a very human process.
Which said to me, well, I said to myself,
it's funny, but when we talk about popular cinema,
we mean big-budget cinema.
We mean cinema that brings vast numbers of people together.
My wish for 2030 would be that popular cinema,
when we say the words "popular cinema",
we would be meaning more of a process,
we would be meaning more of a way of writing,
a way of directing, and a way of sharing.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)