–Why the title “La France”? Is there something about the soldiers’ story or plight that evokes or says something about your country in general?
To put it with the words of Michel Delahaye, one of my favorite film critics from the sixties (in the Cahiers), who wrote a paper about La France, I’ve tried to tell the story of those men who “got lost in the shadow of victory”. They managed to escape, but died during their trip, so disappeared “en voyage”. So I wanted to deal with desertion, but in the following way: not to tell the story of the desertors who were caught by the French army (and put in jail or shoot), not to tell the story of the desertors who managed to reach their goal, no, to tell the story of the desortors “in between”, because they are the only ones who have left no trace (no trace in France, because they managed to escape France, and no trace in any other country, because they never attained their destination). So it’s like a secret story that only fiction can tell. To sum up, this crucial part of French history can only exist through fiction, that’s why I choose the title. Just listen to “Going all the way” by The Squires or “On Tour” by The Cancellors (two garage diamonds found by the mighty Tim Warren of Crypt Records) and you’ll understand the relation of this title (in the sense just given) to the music: “On Tour” is a song (as you could guess) about the life of a group on tour (the girls, the cities, the trains, boats and planes…) but, like all the real garage bands, the Chancellors never played even once outside their own city (Potsdam, actually). Now think about the “tour” of my soldiers… You begin by expecting some light pop uplifting on the air, but in the end it’s only imposture, frustration and anger all over the place. “Anywhere out of the world”, yes, but you won’t even manage to get out of your own town. You will die before. Like my soldiers.
–Why did you want to tell this story – during war? What do war movies mean to you?
Doing a war movie (in France) has nothing to do with doing (in France) a western, a pirate movie, a musical, etc., because this is the only classical american genre which is still alive (in France), where a lot of war movies are been made each year. So there is no manierism here. The menace of war is unceasing, or even eternal. To be more precise, my movie is more a movie about the menace of war than about the war itself, and so I could have done it nowadays, but what I wanted, from a historical point of view, is to deal (in the very special way already explained) with the question of desertion, which was huge in France in 1917. I filmed only the menace, and this menace is only our present, and the desertion is still, in our present history, “neddles and pins”, to quote The Ramones covering The Searchers.
–Which war movies have intrigued or inspired you over time – or for this film specifically?
The american and russian war movies of the fourties and fifties. And I must press this point : the movies of Fuller, Ford, Walsh, Tourneur, Hawks… are not more important for me that the sublime russian war movies, for example “Tales of the Siberian Land” (Pyriev), “Two Soldiers” (Loukov), “Mashenka” (Raizman), “Soldiers of the Swamp” (Matcheret)… In all of these movies, contrary to Walsh, Fuller and company, you have songs in crucial moments and the moods do not have to be hard-boiled all the time : there is a lot of childish tenderness and emotive exuberance amongst the soldiers, because the relation of men to virility is more naive. You also have beautiful female characters : “Mashenka” for example is a war movie about a woman. And you also have a non-american (but rural) way of filming the landscapes with a romantic touch (in the musical sense : as in Berlioz). For exemple, in Pyriev’s masterpiece, there is no such sense of economy as in the classical american way of directing, la “mise en scène” is a little pompous, in fact, but in a non academical way, with a lot of ingenuity. Very pictural also, but also with a lot of ingenuity. And there are a lot of changes of registers (moods), much more than in the american movies. For exemple, “A Good Lad” (from 1943) by Boris Barnet is (in one hour!) a musical (with opera singing during the war scenes), a comedy, a love story, a war movie, and everything is perfectly balanced and free. (By the way, Barnet is the best russian film director ever, far away from the auto-proclaimed russian genius like Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Sokurov, whose movies all suffer from a severe grandiloquence and solemnity disease. ** And it’s always very interesting to see how Barnet treats some american genres, not only the war movies, but also for example the spy movies in his fabulous “Secret Agent”.) In these different aspects, those russian movies are more like the early thirties american movies, when the exuberance of the filmakers was not restricted by the Hays Code, the strict separation of genres, all those narrative and ethical codes… Just think of a typical thirties masterpiece like Sailor’s Luck by Walsh. My movie, in some of these acceptions (songs, picturality, constant changes of registers, no hard-boiled virility all along, a central feminine character, etc.) is much more russian than american.
–Some of the soldiers are cinema critics? Why did you cast them? Are you making a comment about cinema writing? How do the soldiers – and the real people who play them – strike you?
They are my friends, and I like to work with my friends, because my friends are talented, and that’s why they are my friends.
By the way, I must say that, in all my answers, all the things I said occurred to me after the editing process, when I had to watch my completed movie over and over and so thought about it like a film critic. When Axelle was writing or when I was directing, I just tried to make what I liked, lost in emergency and rushing through the material and financial problems. But the main thing is that the more you love movies, the more you can free yourself of influences. You can not be sincere when you don’t really know what you like. That’s why film critic is the best school.
–Where did the music come from? Is it one song, sung throughout? Also who did the final song over the credits? How and why did you come to choose this music?
The songs in La France are an attempt to synthesise British pop-sike (nervous, acidic, driven, tongue in cheek, and incorporating elements of Victoriana & Nursery Rhyme), and Californian sunshine pop (slow, ethereal, hallucinogenic and featuring multi-layered harmonies), two mid-sixties musical genres. However, it’s a twisted synthesis because the instruments and the recording conditions are unlike the usual recording process required for this kind of music: no bass, no guitar, no drums, no organ… the actors played live, outdoors, like the 1917 “Poilus”, on trench-made acoustic instruments, built with junk (a coal bucket, a pickle tin can): the “charbonnière” guitar, the “cornichophone”, the square violin, the Vosges spinet, etc. The songwriters and arrangers for the songs are Fugu and Benjamin Esdraffo. The first one is coming from a sunshine pop background, the other one from pop-sike, which created this hybrid result. There are four different songs played live by the soldiers in my movie. The first three are original songs, the last one in an adaptation of the song of the end credits, which is a 1969 homemade demo of another unsung sixties genius : Robbie Curtice (the music was composed by Tom Payne, the lyrics by Robbie Curtice).
–You are a big music fan and record collector, I hear. How does music play into your films? What role does it play in your cinema and your life?
I did not write the script of La France, but only the lyrics of the songs. The script-writer is Axelle Ropert. She wrote the scripts of all my movies and even shorts (La France is my third movie being released in France in the theaters). In all the movies we’ve made (because she’s also a director), there is always something related to music. In Mods, garage music was central; in Axelle Ropert’s Etoile Violette, it was folk music; in La France, it is pop; in the Wolberg Family, Axelle Ropert’s next movie (written before the shooting of La France), it’s (northern) soul. It’s always that very same idea: to handle a musical genre by putting it in self-working fiction, like Craig Brewer’s beautiful movie Black Snake Moan succeeded to do for the blues. Self-working fiction means that the action has nothing to do with the current playing (no musicians, no managers, no concerts nor parties) and fiction doesn’t call up for the usual musical imagery (no Lambretta in Mods or patchouli in Etoile Violette or Carnaby Street outfits in La France). How can one find the essence of a musical genre when the story has nothing to do with music? I think it’a an interesting question.
–What is the most valuable record in your collection? Single? Album?
The french EP of The Birds (mod freakbeat).
–What are you listening to now? In Buenos Aires?
Nothing here, in Buenos Aires, because even if I’m here with three boxes of rare 45’s, because I’m Djaying tonight, I can not listen to them, because I don’t travel with my turntable, my speakers, etc.! And I do not have any Ipod, or things like that. But, the day before my flight ot Argentina, I was listening to the last two volumes (just released) of Messthetics, the beautiful UK seventies DIY-punk compilation series of Chuck Warner (the owner of the Hyped to Death label), some obscure fifties rockabilly (compiled by Billy Miller and Miriam Linna from Norton label), and some doo-woop and psychedelic singles I bought in New York two weeks ago.
–What songs or albums are inspiring to you?
Every song I like.
–Do you prefer to act or direct? And why?
I have more immediate pleasure (to quote one of my fave groups, The Eyes) when I act, but I have more eternal pleasure when I direct
–“La France” is very beautiful. What did you hope to achieve with the cinematography and look?
Thank you. The cinematography choices came from my desire to have many night-scenes in La France, like in the best war movie of all time : “Objective Burma” (Walsh). When my sister (the cameraman) and I thought about the lighting process, we wanted to get, without any special effects, a kind of secret oniric touch far away from the usual modernistic natural chiaroscuro. Take for example in “Gerry” (Gus Van Sant) the scene where Casey and Matt speak about the ancient greeks in front of a small campfire. Everything is completely black (you just can not see anything) except the fire and the parts of the two bodies lighted up by the natural light of the fire. In my movie, on the contrary, you can see a lot more things in the night scenes, because no part of the screen is completely dark, never, thanks to the many spotlights we used. So it’s artificial, like in the fifties movies, but this artificiality is buried, is secret, so to speak, because it is used subtly to get a soft image, where the colours are less constrated, the texture of the image almost a little blurred, and the same goes for the relation between the dark parts of the screen and the light ones, etc. All the boundaries are softed, to get this “aquarium feeling” you sometimes have in the best B movies (Tourneur, Ulmer, Dwan…: in “Cat People” for example, the dramatic tension is almost always induced by this subtle “aquarium lightning”). After all, my movie deals with Atlantis, so the lights must be just like “under the sea”, with all these soft shimmering stirrings just like invisible ripples. We used a film never used before for the shooting of a movie, the Kodak 5299, which is usually used as an intermediate film in numerical post-production.
–What do you love – or find relevant – about musicals? Why are there so few? Do you have a weakness or love for Scopitone images/films and music? Do you have a favorite and why? How do you feel about current music videos?
I do not love so much the musicals and it’s the only american genre that I don’t know well. To put it frankly, I have not seen many of them. My movie is not a musical, the soldiers just sing when they have nothing else to do, just like in the classical westerns, war movies, adventures movies, etc. I will be more precise : firstly, to have songs in a war movie (and not a musical movie!) is very classical (or used to be – when the american cinema was still great); secondly, the fact that these songs are not historically accurate is also classical and almost a convention, just like in all the other movies non-musical genres (think about Ricky Nelson singing in Rio Bravo, Marilyn in The River of no Return, Marlene in Rancho Notorious, etc.: are these 19th century songs, are these movies musicals? Not at all); thirdly, singing songs from a female point of view is also common (even the brutal Victor MacLaglen sings like this, if I remember right, in The lost patrol of John Ford, which could have been the title of my movie by the way), and it was a tradition in primitive folk music from the twenties and before (listen to the Alan Lomax or Harry Smith anthologies). So I hope I made clear that I never tried to get any “out of it” originality.
–Your previous short movie was called “Mods” and appeared to touch on that subculture? How do you see that film connecting with “La France”? Were you a mod? What did you like or connect with concerning mods?
Mods was one hour long, I am (dressed like a) a mod, like some of the characters in Mods, but I do not know how Mods connects to La France.
–What do you want those who see “La France” to come away with at the end?
96 tears.
–Do you still write about film? What was the last thing you wrote? And what interests you about or in film criticism?
No, the last thing I wrote was about Paul Vecchiali for a retro of his work in the festival of Belfort.
–How would you describe the state of cinema?
Poor.
