- Could you tell us about the background of the film project ? How did it start ?
I wrote the original script a few years ago, just after I finished the film We Are Winning Don't Forget and an art installation, both of them dealing with the concept of ‘work’. Politically, and personally, ‘work’ is one of the most complicated themes. On the one hand, a majority of people really suffers through it (or from the absence of it); slavery and/or poverty. On the other hand, almost all of the political systems that oppose capitalism failed to propose another kind of ‘work’.
With my two previous works dealing with this theme, I felt that I hadn’t explored all I wanted to express. With Entre chiens et loups, I wanted to deal with the shame that could rise from work and/or from the absence of it.
Simone Weil: "Why I will give much price to this part of my intelligence of which everyone could, by uses of whips and chains, or by a piece of paper covered with certain signs, deprive to me? If this part is the whole, then I have almost no value."
Krisis Gruppe: "The fact that, now, work appears to be irrationally its own goal and meaning is transformed into personal failures."
- Why was it important for you to make this film?
I need to make films about what is hurting me. And the violence that rises from work (or the absence of it) is one of them.
These days I’ve got the possibility to choose how to work (I write about work for money, not my art works). I can't live from my films, obviously no one can with short movies, but as I am editor Imanaged to organize my time and my budget, in participating in the making of other movies or documentaries I found interesting. To choose how and when to work is a luxury. But before that, there were difficult years. Now I have many friends around me who live in complicated situations. Humiliating ones. So for me, the question of work is not only an abstract debate.
As a director, I simply can't make movies about love and flowers when our societies are based on the destruction of human beings.
- Is the way you worked on this film similar to your earlier works?
There are obviously some links between this movie and my previous works. Particularly my desire to make films from which political questions could arise. (Questioning is more important to me than answering.)
But I think that there are some important differences between this film and the previous ones. The most important difference is not the fact that this one is fiction and the others are some kind of documentary. I don't care about the question of ‘genre’. The meanings of Entre chiens et loups could appear to be less clear that the ones of my previous works, that are based on more basic dialectics. In those films, the audience could easily project itself to the ‘good side’; almost everyone is against war, torture, violence and so on… In Entre chiens et loups, there is no border, there are no clear keys of lecture as there are no innocent victims of the violence. And even if I make this movie with the same questions, the same political views as the previous ones, this one could appear at first sight to be more obscure. This kind of abstraction, the unreality of the story and the characters allowed me to go deeper in a political questioning of our contemporary reality.
- In what way do other filmmakers inspire you?
The most obvious reference for this work was Michael Haneke. Particularly, The 7th Continent which is for me the best film of Haneke. In Haneke’s movies, the audience is always alone, there is no key, no explanation, and that could be disturbing. Perhaps it is this point, the liberty of the viewer, that makes his movies so political. As he did in his early movies, I tried to erase all psychological aspects of the characters, and all explanation of the situation. And I have to confess that I directly used one of his ‘tricks’. At the beginning of Funny Games, the family is in a car listening to classical music and the credits appear with really noisy music. That editing is giving the presentiment of the violence that is about happen. I used the same kind of editing for the beginning of my own movie.
The second reference I could give is the work of the Dardenne-brothers. I like their cinema, as much I like Haneke’s even if they are totally different, for the adequacy between the political meanings and the cinematographical forms. The cinematography of the Dardenne’s is the perfect model of what the audience feels as realistic. And this feeling allows the Dardenne’s to create real fictions under a realistic varnish. For example, Rosetta is really more complex than it firstly appears. My own character, as Rosetta, is not at all realistic, but I need to make it appears ‘real’ as the destruction of this reality is one of the turning points of the film. So for this first part of my movie I used the same kind of cinematography as the Dardenne’s, cinematography that the audience accepts as realistic.
- What was the audience you had in mind?
I’m really in two minds about that. On the one hand, I never make movies for the audience. I am quite sure that good movies are good only because the directors make them according to their own view, their own mind. Some elements of the creation can't be shared. Myself, I prefer to take the risk and fail than to make consensual movies.
In the other hand, as I make political movies, I address them to the audience with the desire that viewers question themselves after the screening about what they just watched. I think it is more effective to address those movies to the most people, not only to the ones who share the same political ideas as me. But it is complicated for me to describe how that could influence my work or not.
- Could you tell us something about the next project you are working on?
I’m currently working on the script for a long documentary for cinema, an archives movie. About the confrontation between the Red Army Fraktion, a guerilla group active in the Germany during 30 years, and the German state. Different things interest me in this history. The first one is simply the possibility of radicalising the left towards terrorism and the overreaction of a democratic state against it. The story of the RAF is like a pattern to describe that. But my main interest, it is that this story is also the history of the images it created itself. Both sides of this conflict used images as weapons, and in the middle, artists and directors, afraid by the consequences of this confrontation for the democracy, tried unsuccessfully to give other views. The RAF history allows me to question what images are and how they act on reality.