He Who Dares
Stéphane Brizé talks to Carol Murphy about his latest film, Not Here to Be Loved, discusses his new ultra low-budget production Among Adults, and gives an insider’s perspective on the French film industry.

Stéphane Brizé’s second feature, Not Here to Be Loved,  follows Jean-Claude (Patrick Chesnais), a world weary man in his fifties who has resigned himself to the void that his life has become. His days are spent in the thankless job of a bailiff, delivering paperwork to people facing eviction.

Jean-Claude took over the business from his father, a bad tempered, unloving, tactless widower who tries the patience of the care workers in the rest home where his son dutifully visits him each Sunday. Across the street from Jean-Claude's office is a dance studio that he watches from afar. One day he decides to break the deathly monotony of his life by enrolling for tango lessons. There he is approached by Françoise (Anne Consigny), who tells him that his mother was her babysitter when she was a child. She is learning to dance in preparation for her wedding, but when they dance together their lives change.

Carol: What initially attracted you to this story?

Stéphane: What really touches me in this character of Jean-Claude is the total incapacity he has of expressing himself and his emotions. This is something that is very present in my family and indeed in a lot of other people’s families. He really is at the heart of my own being and construction. This issue of not being able to express your emotions is something much stronger in someone who is 50 years old rather than in someone who is 18 because it means that here is someone who has already gone quite far without ever having being able to come to terms with the issues of his childhood.

Do you then connect with his ability to come to terms with expressing himself through tango?

Yes. Tango has no words, so he is able for the first time in his life to express something through his body. By the end of the film he can express it not just through tango but through himself making a first move, if you will.

When you are dealing with things that are emotionally attached to you and your life, how difficult are these things to write when you are writing with a partner – in this case Juliette Sales?

Initially I put a lot of myself in there, as you would tell a story about things you know. But then there is a certain distance, and you can apprehend them in a particular way with a co-writer. To work with someone else is really a rich process as you can play with ideas back and forth.

When you finish with the script and move into the filmmaking process, do you find that the process changes the script and changes the original ideas that you had?

I’m not stuck to my text and I can spend a long time shooting a scene many many times; then if we are in the editing room and it has to go, I can quite happily get rid of it without apprehension. So the main objective is the same, but all the elements that are attached to the path of reaching the final film can change and are composed of lots of different elements and I am not so attached to those.

Do you want to develop a signature style in terms of film language or does your style change in relation to the narrative of each of the films that you make?

I don’t have a theory to start off with, and I do see that there is a line that goes through the films that I want to make but that is very intuitive. I don’t have a theory that I stick to.

And so does what you do and the decisions you make on one film affect the next?

Yes. We are indeed nourished by something, but I always have the feeling that I am starting everything from scratch. But of course in real life that is not true, because in real life I did ask myself certain questions in relation to my previous film. What was quite hard is that you have all this experience, and you have to use that but not just completely stick to that, otherwise it is just like an old person reflecting from their own point of view.

So how has this film affected how you think you will approach your next project?

Actually it happens that the next one is already done, and it was shot before this one. I wrote Among Adults in 10 days, shot it in 4 days, and edited it in 4 days. It was really a kind of experiment. When it was being written I didn’t have the idea that it would be shown on the big screen, but I was completely free when I wrote and shot the film in my head. I knew I had just 4 days for the shooting, so I wrote a story I could shoot in 4 days – on two video cameras. And after that film I shot Not Here to Be Loved. A few months ago Claude Lelouch saw the film and he helped me transfer it to 35 mm. So we transferred the video and worked on the sound (as the sound was not so good) and the film at the end is exactly the film I shot in 4 days. The story is incredible because the 12 actors in the film, all professional, never played in a film before. Then one of the biggest distributors in France heard about the film. We didn’t dare call them, but they heard about it and immediately loved it and said ‘Yes, we are going to distribute it’. For the moment it has been sold to two foreign countries, Belgium and Switzerland; we are at the very beginning and we have already got two buyers. It is incredible.

That is the way to do it!

In our world it is incredible! And at the very beginning it was with very cheap cameras, the same cameras we have at home. Just two cameras, one microphone, no boom and 4 days. All of the actors were completely available and open, and when we shot a scene the other actors prepared the food. It was like a summer camp. But I don’t think that video is good for all films; it depends on the subject matter. For example, Among Adults is 12 scenes with 2 characters – in the first scene you have a man and a girl, in the second scene you have the girl with another man, and then at the end you find the girl again from the beginning.

A bit like Chinese whispers.

Like La Ronde – the same technical system. So it speaks about relationships between men and women. Because we don’t know all the actors, and because I shot it with a video camera which does not move at all, somewhere at the end it is like a documentary. The actors are very natural, as one hour before shooting they didn’t know what they had to do. The most important thing for me when I make a film is to inject life into my script. If I just film the story I will make just a good film, but that doesn’t interest me. I want to make much more than a good film. It is very important to be ambitious. I am looking for the truth on the set, so the most important thing is not to move my camera around the actors. I try to put my camera in the right place, and then it is a question of point of view. If you are with your lover you are not very far from them, it depends on the situation. And when you are with a colleague it is always a question of point of view, so on the set you choose the position of the camera and you choose the frame and then I try to catch the truth and it is my only work.

In the film industry the script is king, isn’t it? Even though it is a visual medium it starts with the script.

Everything starts with the script. I know that for me, when people read my script, many times they say, ‘Oh, it is a little bit caricatured’ – I understand what they mean, but I start to write my story with archetypes and not with clichés, so when I choose my actors I go the opposite way.  So, for example, if a guy in the writing seems a bit macho, I’ll go the other way when I am looking for the actor. So at the end people say it was very well written, the same people who said it was caricatured. Life is what we say and who we are at the moment we are saying it. And life is full of paradox. Life is in 3D but it is two dimensional on paper.

So have you developed a relationship with your funders so that when you give them a script they will understand how it will change in the process of being made?

I don’t have much illusion about their ability to read scripts, and if people might give me money now it is just because my film has been a success in France – purely.

And how do you find the film industry in France? I am jealous of the French industry as I think it is so supportive compared to the British film industry.

As French people it is part of our character to moan. But when we have a chance to go abroad and meet other people in the business we then realise that we are extremely privileged. But it is also a very fragile system. There are many people, for example, who really don’t give a toss for the films I make. Having said that, even though my films are auteur films they are also for a wide audience. But for someone who is going to make films that are maybe slightly more difficult it is much harder to get it distributed. It is a very violent system. In France the people who give the most money are the TV channels, and they don’t think quite so much about how the film is going to work on the big screen, but much more how it will be received on the small screen. So they are going to try to imagine what the audience will want in terms of an evening in front of the TV, and they finance in that direction. The problem is not with private channels that are going to produce very easy comedies, because there the rule of the game is easy and you know exactly who you are aiming for. The problem comes from certain state-funded channels that are supposed to do a certain type of work and actually try to compete with the private channels. So over the last few years it has become harder to make a film. I got less money to make Not Here to Be Loved than for my previous film. Its not a problem to make a film with a small budget if that is the budget of the film, but if you have a small budget to make a film that normally costs more then that it is a problem. When you get there at the end there is a chance that you haven’t made the film that has been in your head.

So what about your foreign audience? Do your films travel well?

Yes, a lot. We have sold the film in 25 countries – in Japan, China, everywhere in Europe, Israel. It is completely incredible to see the film in a cinema in Japan or China and see that, at exactly the same time as people see it in France, people cry and people laugh. I was very surprised because there are so many different traditions between life in China and life in France or in England. It is very different. But my films speak about universal things and universal relationships, and it is the same all over the world. I was very touched when a Japanese person came to me at the end of the film and said it was exactly his story.

Not Here to Be Loved is released in Britain on the 8th June by Artificial Eye.
Visit their homepage for the film.