I start to think about making a film about the epidemic from the very first start of the epidemic in 82
when I learned there was a "gay cancer" in the United States killing people.
A few people, at the time.
And so, it kind of struck me because I was really afraid, because as a young gay guy
I was 20 years old, I knew something very hard was starting
and it was like a real nightmare, like a bad science fiction film, you know?
But it kind of paralyzed me and I didn't find any way of talking about that.
I was just afraid. And at the same time, I started to go to cinema school —
it was called the IDEHC — which is now La Femis
And I realized that all the films I loved, which is not very original as a French director, which are the films of the French New Wave
Godard and Rohmer
These people were not able to talk about this epidemic.
If you see the French New Wave, its the cinema for healthy people.
You don't have... there's an exception which is the film by Agnes Varda called "Cleo: From 5 to 7"
But that's it.
And so, at the beginning, I couldn't do films. I couldn't think of cinema
because I was so afraid, so I joined ACT Up in 92. And that was kind of freeing.
And it took me like more than ten years, 15, 20 years to realize that the film I wanted to do about
about this epidemic was a film about this moment. When we stop to be afraid of the epidemic.
And we try to speak and create action and we try to become actors of this epidemic
and reinvent ourselves.
So it's happened seven years ago but it took me... I worked 36 years, about, on this film.
It has been a long time.
It's not exactly my story, of the story of people I knew.
All the details in the film are real.
Quite.
But they are mixed in a very specific way.
It's like I tried for two years, writing this film, and it was very hard because of course, it was emotional to put me again in this situation.
But I tried to find a perspective not to find a meaning, but to make the feeling of things a little bit more clear for me
about this period, which is enough for a film I think.
And to create a position of trust between the characters that I think was very relevant about this.
So there are a lot of details, for instance, I dressed up a guy — a friend of mine — who was dead
with his mother, and his mother was talking to him as if he was alive.
All of these things happened. But it's not exactly me or people I knew at the time.
In France, you have to have a president, you know you have to have very specific rules and that changed a lot
things, because as you can see in the film, it's very democratic
but at the same time, the president is at the center of the group.
They also come to power in the group and create a lot electricity between people.
That didn't exist and it's very strange for the United States.
Which you don't have people that are absolutely equal in the group — there was no president or this kind of thing.
So that's created something very different.
And also, I think for Americans, we were too violent.
[They] considered that we were too... they wouldn't do things like this — like put fake blood on people.
And I wanted to talk about that because of course, even in ACT Up, as I show in the film
there were a lot of debates inside, because people were thinking we were going to fail
and that plays a political rule of debate, to see how far can we go
and how to legitimate our way to do this kind of things.
So that was the main difference about that. Also, I think that in the United States there were more,
it happened in France but a little bit later, there were more I.V. drug users
and for people in France, it was very gay and lesbian.
And that was even when we were talking about all the people who had the disease, it was really, very gay.
I was kind of okay with that, I mean it was...
we we always, as I show in the film, sometimes a little bit afraid to be
because you do that for TV and because you want to touch people, to talk to people so we are doing that
for the TV news. And you are always afraid, I was always a little afraid, that sometimes, we were too close to a populism
and that there was a demagogy in our way of doing — it's not the the radicality I was afraid of
it was the opposite. It was like we were doing a self-justice — I was a little bit concerned about that.
But I always thought that we were legitimate and sometimes when I was looking at some militants,
we were getting across to politicians
the anger was going to high. But at the end, also, I was thinking that I was not dying myself.
So, that was easy for me to teach the others but there was always something, because we were playing things.
And that doesn't mean it wasn't true, but we were an activist group so it was a kind of theater.
A legitimate, genuine theater, but it was some kind of theater.
So we had to adjust things and I wanted to show that.
To be honest with the spectators, because it doesn't destroy the legitimacy of the struggle.
It's means that we were intelligent enough and clever enough to know, to find the way we could go through
feelings and to convince people, and to change the perception of epidemic in the mind of the people in society.
That was very important.