Tag: NYFF

  • “There are Miracles”: A Conversation with Hong Sang-soo

    “There are Miracles”: A Conversation with Hong Sang-soo

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    Hong Sang-soo has a reputation for being a tricky interview, and he knows it. In Claire’s Camera, one of his three films that premiered in 2017, a Korean director who’s in Cannes to promote his latest movie tries to back out of the two press engagements on his schedule. “You need to do that much,” his sales agent cajoles him. “It’s not that much.”

    Hong, likewise, has been known to cancel or reschedule interviews and to give terse and seemingly disinterested answers. He tends to talk about his production methods in the most straight-forward terms and dismisses questions about authorial intent. Asking him to interpret his own work is a fool’s errand. “I get up at 4:00, I smoke, and something I didn’t expect comes to me,” he told me. 

    I met Hong in the bar of the Loews Regency on October 9th, the afternoon after his other two new films, On the Beach at Night Alone and The Day After, had their first public screenings at the New York Film Festival. He was tired from a late night but amiable and generous. My strategy was to begin by raising an under-discussed aspect of his career—that Hong’s early training in interdisciplinary art programs, rather than an industrial film school, had set him down this road of unconventional production techniques. From there he took the discussion in a few unexpected directions. There are miracles, indeed.

    On the Beach at Night Alone opens November 17 in the U.S. Read our review and interview from Berlin. See also our reviews of Claire’s Camera and The Day After from Cannes.

    * * *

    HUGHES: I’ve heard you tell a story that you stumbled into filmmaking as a college student, that you were bored and decided to transfer to the film department on the advice of a friend. Is that right? 

    HONG SANG-SOO: I was in limbo. I didn’t take the entrance exam. And then this playwright and theater director, my mother’s friend, came to our house. They had a small party. Everyone left except for him because he was drunk. He was sitting on the sofa alone. This was around 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., and I was cleaning up. I was fond of him because he was a character. I was sitting next to him and he said, “What are you doing?” “I’m doing nothing.” [laughs] He said, “Maybe you should try the theater? Maybe you can do it?” He was just saying it. I don’t know if he really meant it. He was drunk. But when he left, I started thinking, “That sounds very nice.” So I prepared for the entrance exam for a couple months and then I entered the theater department. But unfortunately I had a problem with the senior students, so I couldn’t go on being in the department.

    HUGHES: What do you mean “a problem”?

    HONG: We had a severe problem. [laughs] In those days, especially in the theater department, there was a hierarchy between senior students and junior students. It was very strict. But it happened to be a theater and cinema department, and when I looked at the film students, they didn’t have the same hierarchical relationships. So I thought, “Maybe I’ll try film.” 

    HUGHES: Was it just film production or did it also include film history?

    HONG: Production. There were film history courses, too, but I never meant to become a scholar. 

    HUGHES: Were you a cinephile before then? 

    HONG: I only watched movies on weekends on TV. Hollywood films.

    HUGHES: You eventually went to the California College of the Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which are both interdisciplinary film programs. 

    HONG: Yeah, they encourage you to study the other majors. That was another accident. One day I saw this newspaper article about how they’d just allowed a student to go abroad even though he didn’t fulfill [his compulsory] military service. He could study abroad, come back, and do the military service afterwards. I was in my second or third year in the Korean university when I saw this small article. I started looking for funds that I could use for going abroad. First I went to some institution that helps you find a school and I said, “I want to go abroad and study film. Any college is fine as long as it’s cheap!” 

    And then I went to this person I knew who is a friend of my mother. He’s another character. He was a monk and then became a film producer. He was also a writer, and I liked him, and I had this feeling that he might help me out. So I went to him and said, “I want to go abroad and study film, and if you help me now I will help you later. Can you do that?” And he said, “Yes.” So I got funds from him for studying abroad.

    HUGHES: Why is your mother surrounded by such interesting people? 

    HONG: Because she likes interesting people, talented people. [long pause] Anyway, I was very lucky to get the answer “yes.” 

    HUGHES: Most film schools in America train students to play a part in a larger production machine. The schools you went to …

    HONG: Had nothing to do with that.

    HUGHES: Did you meet filmmakers in those schools who showed you other kinds of production models? 

    HONG: In both departments, most of the teachers were filmmakers themselves. It was good to see that. During vacations they would make their own films. Most of them were experimental filmmakers. I liked them and I really enjoyed talking to them. They were a great help. They encouraged me a lot. I was lucky again.

    HUGHES: Did you see that as a model to follow? Could you imagine yourself teaching and making films during vacation? 

    HONG: No, I never thought of becoming a teacher. Now I’m teaching at a university, but at the time I didn’t have any concrete plans.

    Until I was 27, when I saw Diary of a Country Priest, I never thought I would make a feature-length narrative film. I always thought I was going to make experimental films, very short films, strange ones. [laughs] That was the vague plan. It was all I had. And then I saw Diary of a Country Priest and thought it was so beautiful. That film was something, really. It gave me hope: If a film can do this then I can learn how to make a narrative film. 

    HUGHES: Where did you see it?

    HONG: In Chicago. In a seminar.

    HUGHES: Was it a Robert Bresson seminar?

    HONG: No. They were showing many films. This was one of them. And so I started reading about how to write a script. 

    HUGHES: When did you first see Luis Buñuel’s films? 

    HONG: Also in Chicago. Richard Peña, who used to be the director here of the New York Film Festival, was a lecturer there and taught a course about Buñuel. I was Pena’s graduate assistant for the course, so I saw most of Buñuel’s films and really loved all of them. 

    HUGHES: Years ago, after a screening of Claire Denis’s L’intrus, I was discussing the film with a friend and he said, “This is what I learned from Buñuel: It’s pointless to ask, ‘Is it real or is it a dream?’ Who cares? It’s cinema.” I think about that often when I watch your films. At the end of part one of On the Beach at Night Alone, Kim Min-hee’s character is abducted by a stranger, with no explanation. I assume you don’t care how that’s interpreted. 

    HONG: It doesn’t matter. As long as I feel it’s okay, it’s okay. Everything is illusion, realistically speaking. Everything, everything we see, we feel, we imagine, everything is real and at the same time is fake. It’s an illusion. The distinction is not that important.

    HUGHES: Do you mean in life? Or just in cinema?

    HONG: Okay, when you deal with practical things, we all have to speak the same language, so we pretend to [share the same reality]. But really, really, really [laughs] realistically speaking, everything’s okay, is how I feel. Know what I mean? Everything is illusion, everything is grace. But when you deal with everyday life you have to speak the same language in order to communicate and get what you want. It’s dualistic. 

    HUGHES: Did you intentionally just quote Diary of a Country Priest? “Everything is grace.” 

    HONG: Oh, yeah, yeah. Maybe one of the reasons I liked that film when I saw it for the first time was because of that dialogue at the end. It touches me deeply. It’s what I keep saying to myself every day. 

    HUGHES: It is all grace.

    HONG: Everything. Whether we acknowledge it, it is grace. 

    HUGHES: This is a dumb and obvious question, but is that what your characters are seeking? 

    HONG: Kim Min-hee’s character [in On the Beach at Night Alone] says something about this, about praying to God. Except for that character, I’ve never written someone who says this, my attitude, directly. I was being careful. But now I’ve changed, I guess, a little bit. With Kim Min-hee I thought, “Maybe it’s okay to say these things directly.”

    HUGHES: You talk often about how you begin each film with certain actors in mind. You see some quality in them that you think you can work with. As I’ve watched these recent films, I’ve tried to figure out what it is that interests you about Kim Min-hee when she’s on screen. In that first long scene in Claire’s Camera, when she’s being fired by her boss, her body language is beautiful. She rolls her shoulders forward and leans into the conversation.

    HONG: Yes, I find it very beautiful too.

    HUGHES: Do you stage that? 

    HONG: No, no, as long as they are faithful to the dialogue I gave them, each take is their own. They are free to interpret the dialogue. I try to give them a minimum amount of instruction. Only when they are going in the wrong direction [laughs], I tell them, “No, no, that’s not the way to go.” Otherwise, I let them do whatever they want to do.

    Each take is very different, usually. Each take is a small universe. That’s why I want to have unbroken takes, because each one is very different. So when they finish [a great take] I don’t even want to talk about it. They do these small things. There are miracles. I don’t want them to repeat that from a reverse angle. 

    HUGHES: With that shot, though, you’ve chosen where to put the camera. 

    HONG: Yes.

    HUGHES: And it’s slightly behind Kim Min-hee. We don’t see her entire face until the very end of the take, when she turns toward the dog on the ground. Much of the drama is in her stooped shoulders. 

    HONG: Yes. 

    HUGHES: I was also struck by another long take in Claire’s Camera, when the sales agent is talking to the director in a cafe. Midway through the scene a bus or a truck passes by the window. We don’t see it, but it briefly blocks out most of the natural light. It’s an exciting moment for me as a viewer. The image suddenly becomes charged in some new way.

    HONG: I plan few things but I expect—secretly, all the time—that something will happen during the take. Could be a noise, could be the change of light from a truck passing by. [The actors’] interpretation of each take is always fresh for me. Sometimes they emphasize this line but the next take they emphasize another line. They’re in harmony. I really love watching these changes between the different takes. I allow all of these things to happen, and if I like the result I keep it. 

    HUGHES: Is there ever any doubt about which is the right take? Or do you always know immediately? 

    HONG: I kind of know. I usually have one or two takes that I keep, that I think are okay, and when I return to my office I look at them and decide. 

    HUGHES: I saw Claire Denis’s new film, Let the Sun Shine In, yesterday, and it felt like her version of a Hong Sang-soo film.

    HONG: [laughs] Another interviewer mentioned that. I haven’t seen it yet.

    HUGHES: I only mention it because in an interview for the film she said she told her screenwriter, Christine Angot, “We don’t have much time. We don’t have much of a budget. Let’s film your words.” That approach is out of the ordinary for her but pretty typical for you. Especially in the recent films, your characters barely exist outside of conversation. 

    HONG: I always have a few scenes of a character alone, walking. I like them because there’s a different light outside, or trees are moving. Even if the scenes are short, they’re very precious. I’ll have long conversation shots and in between there’s a small insert or they’re walking on the street. Just that much is precious to me. 

    HUGHES: Is that rhythm designed ahead of time?

    HONG: No, I just keep shooting in chronological order. I write based on what I wrote the day before. 

    HUGHES: There are several beautiful images in the new films. For example, the shots of Kim Min-hee on the beach. You could have shot those scenes somewhere else, in a cafe or in front of a brick wall. How important is beauty when you’re designing a scene? 

    HONG: If the image reminds me of a cliched “beautiful image,” I try not to use them. When I decided to [make a film] in Cannes I knew I wanted to shoot something on the beach. Cannes is known for the beach, so I knew I would shoot something important there. If it turned out to be a beautiful scene, that’s okay. I’m satisfied with it, but I don’t aim to repeat what others say is a “beautiful scene” intentionally. It has to come naturally and out of necessity. 

    HUGHES: Would a clichéd image break your films?

    HONG: I make a joke to my cinematographer all the time, “Maybe this is too beautiful?” [laughs] I guess my frame, my cinematography, is neutral. I don’t know if this expression is exactly right, but I want to contain what is going on in the most economic frame. Following them in the most economic way has a certain beauty. That’s all I’m aiming for. But sometimes it happens that the scenery is so beautiful [that it necessitates that I] shoot at a low angle to show [Kim’s] back on the same level, and it’s beautiful. That’s okay. I can handle that. But I don’t aim for a so-called beautiful scene. Never.

    HUGHES: Because your films follow that long take/short aside rhythm that you described earlier, I’m always intrigued by the images that break the pattern. There’s a shot in Claire’s Camera when Kim Min-hee and Isabelle Huppert are looking at a large mural. They’re both quite small and cut off at the bottom of the frame. 

    HONG: That’s the place where we always stay together—the crew, everyone. I noticed the mural has three ladies and I wondered, “Maybe this has something to do with my films?” [laughs

    HUGHES: Since you’re now shooting mostly in long takes, do you ever regret not getting to use some of the other tools of the trade? Do you miss close ups? 

    HONG: I have a close up! I can zoom in any time I want. 

    HUGHES: I don’t remember seeing a tight close up for some time. 

    HONG: [smiles] You will see it. The one I just shot. 

    HUGHES: Do you feel that you have to preserve those shots for particular occasions?

     HONG: It just comes naturally. I’m not aiming for any effect. I’m just following my instinct. 

    HUGHES: The final, long conversation in On the Beach at Night Alone is staged as a group scene, but because it’s a dream, presumably it could’ve been written as a conversation just between Kim Min-hee’s character and the film director. 

    HONG: It just came out that way.

    HUGHES: It’s interesting, though, because the presence of other people changes the dynamic. She wants validation from the director. He wants validation from everyone at the table. 

    HONG: It shows who he is. Maybe we have hints of why the relationship didn’t work. All of these things can be perceived by this group of people—how they interact with each other, things like that. But when I wrote the scene, I didn’t intend that. It just came out like that. 

    HUGHES: Are there still moments when you’re surprised or especially delighted by something that, ten minutes earlier, you’d had no intention of writing?

    HONG: Every morning I’m surprised! Every morning, after one or two hours, something really fresh comes to me, and I’m surprised. “Wow!” [laughs]

    HUGHES: Is that the fun part? 

    HONG: Of course. It’s the most intense part. I enjoy it so much.

    HUGHES: Do you think that process has helped to teach you how to recognize grace around you? 

    HONG: I think it’s all connected. I want to create something right now, in the moment, spontaneously. Sometimes I think about why I do this, writing in the morning, and I’ve come up with this explanation: it’s my temperament. I remember even when I was young, I would have a good time with my friends and then one would say, “Let’s meet again this weekend.” I’d say “no.” I didn’t want to have a preparation period. It’s my temperament.

    HUGHES: The way you describe your writing process sounds not like prayer, exactly, but like a kind of spiritual practice. 

    HONG: I get up at 4:00, I smoke, and something I didn’t expect comes to me. I hurry to finish everything, I retouch it, print it, and call the actors to set. And after two hours I can see them acting what I wrote. 

    HUGHES: It’s a miracle every day. 

    HONG: It’s so nice.

  • Guilt as Madness: An Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

    Guilt as Madness: An Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    The Unknown Girl opens with a handheld close up of Dr. Jenny (Adèle Haenel) examining a patient. “Listen,” she says, handing her stethoscope to Julien (Olivier Bonnaud), a medical student who is interning at her clinic. Never ones to shy away from a glaring metaphor, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne announce in that brief exchange their film’s driving thematic and formal concerns. When Jenny later learns that her decision to not allow a late-night visitor into the clinic might have contributed to the young woman’s death, she puts her skills and training to new purpose: listening for clues that might help solve the murder.

    The Unknown Girl differs from the Dardennes’ previous fiction films only in its more obviously generic plotting. This seems to have contributed to the uncharacteristically mixed reviews that greeted the film at its 2016 Cannes premiere, where it was faulted for failing to embrace the conventions of the classic policier. The main character, in particular, has been deemed an unconvincing and unmotivated detective. In fact, like all of the Dardennes’ most compelling heroes—Jérémie Renier’s Igor in La promesse (1996), Olivier Gourmet’s Olivier in The Son (2000), and Thomas Doret’s Cyril in The Kid with a Bike (2011)—Haenel’s Dr. Jenny is first and foremost an object of physical fascination, conventions be damned. Bodies “react before they speak,” the directors told me—a fitting description of their film style, generally, and of The Unknown Girl, specifically.

    This interview took place at the offices of Cinetic Media on October 13, 2016, the day after The Unknown Girl had its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival. 

    * * *

    HUGHES: Am I right in remembering that the character Samantha in The Kid with a Bike was originally going to be a doctor?

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: Good. Right.

    LUC DARDENNE: That’s exactly how Samantha meets the little boy, in a doctor’s office. Originally, we thought the doctor would save the kid, but we changed it because we thought it might be a little too cliché, because a doctor is meant to save lives. In [The Unknown Girl] we returned to the idea of a doctor, but put her in relation to a death that she feels responsible for.

    HUGHES: Is that typical for you? That you have a character in mind and then work to find an appropriate or interesting scenario to drop him or her into?

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: This is the first time. This is our first adventure. We got fixated on the doctor issue and wanted to find a story that we could fit her into. The doctor escaped us the first time, and so we tried to figure out why, find a place for her. But we’ve never done that. And even in the screenplay for this one, it was originally an older doctor, and we couldn’t make it work until we decided on a younger doctor. It was a character who resisted us.

    HUGHES: Why does the character work as a young doctor but not an older one?

    LUC DARDENNE: The older doctor was not that old, she was about 40, but when we wrote the screenplay with the older doctor in mind, it kept taking us in the direction of a detective story. She was someone who had more life experience. When we saw the younger actress, she looked more candid and naïve. With her, we thought that when she meets people, her candor and naïveté might incite them to talk to her. She might free the truth. It was a gamble.

    HUGHES: So you conceived of her as a listener. You’ve said about your early career that one of the pleasures of making documentaries was the opportunity to sit with people, to ask questions, to hear them tell their stories. Is that still a part of your writing process?

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: The short answer is yes. For the kinds of films we make, we have to have our ears open to what is happening in the world, what is happening around us. And we also have to listen to our characters. When we create characters we do not watch them from above. We try to be in tandem with them while they’re going through the experience. Our characters are not puppets that we’re manipulating from above.

    HUGHES: The doctor serves a similar function in the film. She’s a witness, and within the context of the film, that is a moral act.

    LUC DARDENNE: We constructed this film with a lot of silences, notably when Jenny is doing medical procedures. Bodies exist, you hear them breathe, you hear them make other noises. Even when she simply touches someone’s body, we hear it. We constructed the film knowing that these silences would encourage people to talk, which would advance us toward discovering the identity of the unknown girl. Dr. Jenny is an instrument for revealing the truth. She’s there to be at the birth of the truth. That’s how we saw her, which is why we didn’t invent a private life for her. She’s on a mission.

    HUGHES: Making your main character a doctor—someone who observes and listens to bodies as a profession—makes explicit something you’ve done in many of your films, yes?

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: I wouldn’t quite say that. But it’s true that because she’s a doctor, she’s able to move forward [toward solving the mystery] because the bodies she’s dealing with react before they speak. All of the people she meets—either before or after she’s with them—they have a visceral, physical reaction. The bodies talk.

    HUGHES: I like that: “bodies react before they speak.” In your films, you seldom use classic formal techniques such as eyeline matches to create a subjective point of view. But I wonder if you achieve another kind of subjectivity by being so attentive to the bodies of your actors.

    LUC DARDENNE: That’s correct. Hearing is passive as opposed to looking, which is more active. Jenny, from the first take, is listening to a body. And that’s what we try to do. We film her in profile, not head on. We tried to make it so there was something passive that would create an expectation for something to come into the take—speech or words that don’t always come.

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: That’s why we created all of those silent moments. We take the time to really film the bodies. They’re not pretexts for something more important. They’re it.

    HUGHES: One standard critical line on your work is that you brought the techniques of documentary filmmaking to the narrative world. You’re often described as “realists.” But the films are also formally expressive. I’d like to better understand that balance by asking about your collaboration with Igor Gabriel, who has been your production designer on every film since Rosetta [1999].

    LUC DARDENNE: We work together from the get-go. We find the initial locations, knowing that they will be modified somewhat with Igor. We often cast at the same time, but we go around with our little handheld camera and film so that we can see how the actors will be able to move around in the locations. And then we say, “It might be good to have a wall right here. Or maybe here we should have a door. And maybe the door should open this way rather than that way.” Then we bring Igor and say, “Come and look at all of this with us.” We look at it from an architectural point of view. We’re not looking yet at color tones or that type of thing.

    Igor does come in with his own ideas about the mise en scène, but most of what he creates has to do with our intentions. For example, the clinic is, in fact, a social services office. Outside the doctor’s office there is a wall—the wall you see behind the unknown girl when she’s ringing the buzzer. We didn’t know how we were going to handle it, but we knew it was an important wall for us. All of the accessories—the buzzer, et cetera—all have to be on the side of the door that works for us. So there’s a little bit of handiwork that has to go on there. Or the work site where the unknown girl died? Igor completely built that. Igor dug the hole that Jenny falls into, but we told him exactly where it needed to be because the camera would be coming in from this angle, et cetera.

    Igor is a very important partner. We don’t always agree, but that’s a good thing. He likes to come in and create a story in the location that relates to the people who might be living there. But we might say, “No, no. We’d rather have nothing on this wall so that the color is somewhat similar to her doctor’s office.” Because then you’re staying within Jenny’s mental universe, within her guilt.  

    HUGHES: That last example is exactly what I was hoping to get at when I described your images as expressive. When I revisited Two Days, One Night (2014) recently, I noticed during the final act that the hospital, the laundromat, and the locker room are all strikingly similar designs. Or, in The Unknown Girl, Jenny goes to buy a cemetery plot, and the yellow accent color on the gray wall behind her matches exactly the yellow in the flowers she’s carrying. I guess my question is, why is that important? What does a designed image like that offer a viewer that strict “realism” can’t?

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: In that case it was kind of haphazard. In all public buildings they use the same colors, a kind of yellow. We had flowers that Igor had found, but we saw at the cemetery that there were some nicer ones—that were luminous. We wanted Jenny to be making a larger gesture.

    HUGHES: But I’m curious about the effects of those small design choices. As another example, you’ve said before in interviews that you spend a great deal of time choosing the wardrobe of each character. Eventually, though, your main characters always end up wearing plain blue, purple, or red shirts, with slight variations. As a viewer, I’m moved deeply by the sight of Cyril’s red shirt in The Kid with a Bike.

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: It’s only afterwards, when we’re looking at the rough cut, that we notice the effect that some of the colors have. For example, with Cyril and Jenny, it isolates the character. Jenny’s bulky coat has a pattern on it, almost like bars. But only when the movie is finished do we see the strength of the colors or patterns.

    HUGHES: I asked Philippe Garrel about the blue and red walls in his film A Burning Hot Summer, and he said he’d learned the power of primary colors from Raoul Coutard and Godard. I don’t know if it’s intentional or not, but I think you do something similar.

    LUC DARDENNE: I’m trying to think of what we say when we’re in the middle of the work process, what we say to the costume designer, the set designer. [pause] What pushes us to those choices? [pause] Of course, we’re the products of the films we’ve seen. The choice of the costumes takes a lot of time because during the rehearsal process the actors try on a lot of different clothes, we try all kinds of things. The thing that really obsesses us? The faces of the actors. The clothes they wear, we don’t want them to look as if they’ve been costume designed.

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: It’s true. [pause] We do try to pick primary colors. We liked to see Jenny dressed in blue and burgundy—simple, basic things that didn’t overpower her face.

    LUC DARDENNE: And that also give her a certain softness. Because you know Adèle. In other movies she is really strong and aggressive. So here we said, “Easy. You need to pull back.” We felt that blue and burgundy made her hospitable to the patients. It attracted them rather than repelled.

    HUGHES: This is an odd thing to notice, I know, but in several scenes, her shirt has a wide neckline, and because you shoot her in profile, we see more of the soft line of her shoulder and neck. It’s like the tank tops Marion Cotillard and Cécile De France wear in the previous two films.

    LUC DARDENNE: Yes. You’re right. We really liked seeing the softer image of her neck.

    HUGHES: One of my favorite scenes in your films is when Cyril hugs Samantha in The Kid with a Bike and says, “It’s warm, your breath.”

    LUC DARDENNE: Ah, yes.

    HUGHES: It’s one of the many beautiful embraces in your work. They’re often moments of epiphany. The Unknown Girl also ends with another unexpected embrace.

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: When Jenny hugs the sister, first of all she doesn’t do it without asking. We saw two things there that cross each other. The first is that this young woman allowed Jenny to complete her mission. Now, the unknown girl, even though she is dead she has a name. The second is that this woman, the sister, went all the way. She admitted everything, as far as she could go. Not only did she give Jenny the name, she also admitted it was because of “my guy” and then went even further and said, “I’m the one who’s responsible. It was because of me—because I was jealous.” The woman is transformed by admitting this. She is finally free.

    HUGHES: That brings us back to the idea of listening as a moral act. Jenny seeks advice from two older doctors and they both attempt to assuage her guilt with legalistic responses. Those scenes make for an interesting contrast with all of the conversations in Two Days, One Night, when Sandra’s colleagues repeatedly ask her, “How many votes do you have? How is everyone else voting?” Their morality is fluid and under the influence of social pressure. You’ve said Jenny is motivated by “not a supernatural possession but a moral possession.” How would you describe the moral framework that drives her?

    LUC DARDENNE: Speaking from a legal point of view, Dr. Riga is correct. “You can’t be convicted for this, so you should continue along the rising path of your career. Come work for us.” We prefer Dr. Habran’s point of view. “You should have opened the door. You can’t be convicted, but if you had opened the door, she wouldn’t be dead. Ultimately you are responsible.” What interested us was how the wheel could begin turning for her, where she tries to repair what she did, and in order to repair that she has to find the name of the girl. It’s a fiction. Reality is different. Here, it seems that Jenny’s guilt is almost a kind of madness. The unknown girl has gotten into her head. She has another person inside her—it’s a kind of psychosis.

    HUGHES: The implication is that we should all suffer a similar moral psychosis.

    LUC DARDENNE: Exactly. That is our hope. If the unknown girl can travel between Jenny and the people she meets and talks to, then she can travel to the audience’s mind as well. Jenny is all of us.

  • Philippe Garrel in Conversation

    Philippe Garrel in Conversation

    There’s no exact equivalent in film history for Philippe Garrel’s “family cinema,” as he calls it here. To immerse oneself in his work is to watch Garrel and those he loves (parents, partners, children) be transformed by age and experience, while their passions and preoccupations—that particular Garrelian amour fou—persist.

    After several decades during which Garrel’s films saw limited distribution and exhibition in North America, he’s now experiencing something of a revival. Over the span of three days at the Toronto International Film Festival I enjoyed an impromptu Garrel family retrospective. In the Cinematheque program, TIFF debuted its recently-commissioned 35mm print of Jacques Rozier’s first film, Adieu Philippine (1962), which features a middle-aged Maurice Garrel in a supporting role. Actua 1 (1968), Philippe Garrel’s long-lost short documentary of the May ’68 protests, screened in the Wavelengths section, also in a new print. And Philippe’s latest feature, In the Shadow of Women, with an appearance by Louis Garrel as disembodied voiceover, had its North American premiere. In the Shadow of Women begins its U.S. theatrical run this week, courtesy of Distrib Films.

    It was also at TIFF that I heard rumors Garrel would be making his first trip to the States in more than a decade for the New York Film Festival. Rather than conduct a series of brief interviews, Garrel instead requested a three-hour, wide-ranging discussion. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to join Eric Hynes, Vadim Rizov, and Nicholas Elliot at that table. Garrel spoke at length and with great humor and enthusiasm, noting with a laugh when comments were off the record. It would be impossible to overestimate Nicholas’s skills as a translator.

    We agreed as a group to publish the entire interview with only a light edit so as to maintain the flow of the conversation. See also: Part 1 at Filmmaker Magazine and Part 3 at Reverse Shot. The interview was conducted on the morning of October 7, 2015, the day after the NYFF premiere of In the Shadow of Women and soon after news broke of Chantal Akerman’s death.

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    Part 1

    Edited by Vadim Rizov at Filmmaker Magazine

    The interview begins in response to a query from Garrel to Hynes as to whether he’d passed along a message to a filmmaker; then he explained who he was talking about.

    Garrel: He was at Cannes, I was showing La cicatrice intérieure. At a crossroads at Cannes, he caught me — I was with Nico — and said “I know who you are.” And I said, “Who are you?” “I’m Jim Jarmusch.”I said, “I don’t want to speak.” And he said, “It’s a pity!” I always remember that scene, that I refused to talk with a young filmmaker from my generation, because I was afraid he’d take my wife!

    Hynes: He was a good looking guy in those days.

    Garrel: Yeah, exactly. He’s not presentable nowadays?

    Hynes: He’s very presentable.

    Garrel: His last movie was fantastic. I thought it was a low-budget movie. It’s not.

    Hynes: It’s not super low-budget.

    Rizov: And he got tax breaks by shooting in Detroit.

    Garrel: Like $4 or $5 million. Not a one-million budget.

    Hynes: But I think that he often goes to Europe for financing.

    Garrel: Ah, that’s why. Because ten years ago, a lot of people said, “[There is] no more money” — during the subprime crisis — “in New York. Everybody has gone to Detroit,” like you said. Nobody wants to — can, not want — put private money into a movie like before, so I thought it must be a low-budget movie. Why the movie is great is because it’s one of the good films in digital. If you look, in general, the photographic artistic level has dropped except for Jarmusch and Blue is the Warmest Color, which is a fantastic film.

    Hynes: Is there anything about seeing those films that makes you curious about trying it yourself?

    Garrel: I’m like this group of Hollywood directors who went to see Kodak in Manchester and said, “We’re still going to shoot film. Even if our films are distributed on digital, we’re going to shoot on 35mm.” And I was one of the first in Paris to say, “I’m going to stop shooting if there’s no more 35mm.” It’s like what Henri Langlois said — Henri Langlois, who is one of the five major friends of my life. We were friends in the ’70s. He said — at one point people were saying black and white was going to disappear — “It’s impossible. Black and white cannot disappear, because cinema was invented in black and white.”

    And it’s true: for ten years it was very difficult to make films in black and white, but then it came back. So now, I think it’s a similar thing. People have said that 35mm is finished, it’s over. I don’t think it’s true because it’s the same thing. Cinema was invented in 35mm. So I think this is just a passage we’re going through, even though distribution has been generalized to be in digital, because it’s easier. But I’m sure I’m right, and I’m like these Hollywood directors who will keep shooting in 35mm. And in France, they’re even now shooting advertisements on 35mm, so it will continue.

    Hughes: How do you decide between black and white and color?

    Garrel: Many directors are frustrated actors or writers, and some are frustrated painters. Me, when I was a child, I was a painter. I went to a public state school at one point that was at the Louvre. It was called the “Arts Decos’” [the Decorative Arts School], and I was in a specific workshop that was for people under 15. That’s what really brought me to art, this workshop for people under 15. I was very good at pencil drawing, and I was good at gouache, but when I first tried oil painting, I found my painting very bad and I broke it, I destroyed it. That’s when I decided I would make films.

    For me, black and white is like a pencil drawing, color is like a gouache, and it’s because of that moment, with that first oil painting — when I was maybe 13 or 14 — I realized it’s very, very, very hard to do oil painting. It’s not like gouache. Mixing colors with oil is much more complicated. If you put a blue and red together, it won’t be a violet like it would be in gouache. It would be a brown. So, I’m scared of color, and I make three black and white films for one color film. Overall, I’ve made four more black and white films than color films.

    Hughes: When I think of your films, I think of a close-up of a face against a white background, or a white-washed window. When I saw A Burning Hot Summer a couple of years ago, it was shocking to see Louis’ face against those blue and red walls in the apartment.

    Garrel: Yes. There’s also an economic aspect to this. For me, to make a film in color is twice the cost of black and white. That’s not really because of the cost of buying the film or the lab work, that’s about the same today. The reason is that for me to shoot color, I need not only a DP, I also need a costume designer and a set designer. This is something that I learned from Raoul Coutard. Raoul Coutard told me this about Godard and he also told me this regarding Antonioni — where you find emotion in the red, for instance, regarding Antonioni. The thing with color photography is that it’s not only about lights, so you don’t only need a DP, it’s also about the color tones that you use. That’s why you need more money. When you’re shooting color, you need to change the sets, you need to change the walls, you need to change the costumes.

    What Coutard explained to me — Coutard, who is alive but he’s no longer shooting, and he’s the greatest French DP — he explained to me that in Godard, and also in Jacques Demy, the range of colors that would be used was decided beforehand. Godard uses the three primary colors: red, yellow, blue, and also green. Antonioni is the same thing: you don’t have pink, violet, etc. I think that’s where you get the special chromatic effect that I find emotional.
    Demy is the opposite: you have violet, pink, etc. But if you want to avoid having colors clashing, the way they do in life, you need to make sure you have a harmony of colors, and for that, you have to transform every set, every costume. You need to put paper up on the walls that you’ve made in special workshops.

    The reason I’m talking about economics is that if you look at Jealousy and In the Shadow of Women, for example, these are real low-budget films. They’re about a million, a million and a half each, so really low budget. I pay the bottom union rates. It’s very quick, they’re made in 21 days. Another thing about black and white is when I shoot black and white, I don’t use make-up. The women don’t wear make-up, not even their own personal make-up. They’re not allowed. But if I shoot color, immediately I have to have make-up, because otherwise that means the skin will be red. That means more lights, you have to have a make-up person, so you’ve got a heavier, bigger crew.

    Another reason I shoot black and white is so that I can make low-budget films, and that’s the condition of my freedom. That’s how I stay free. If I make for one or 1.5 million, I demand, in exchange, total freedom. I get final cut, no one has any right to have any influence on the cut of my film or anything — the distributors, the financiers, they can’t say anything. But I couldn’t request, or be able to get, that kind of freedom, if I wasn’t less expensive than the other directors.

    That’s something that I understood from Godard. I understood that Godard was the most avant-garde director of the French New Wave because he was a little less expensive than Truffaut, Chabrol, and the others, and it’s similar to how I am now vis-a-vis Desplechin or Carax. My films cost about half the price of their films. I understood that about Godard, that he was more avant-garde through being less expensive. And it wasn’t by exploiting his crews, it was about being faster. He shot in less time, he edited in less time — that’s the condition of my freedom, that’s how I can keep my freedom, and it’s something that’s very rare in the US today.

    Hynes: This is related to something you and I talked about last year, about working with single takes for the most part, and there being a practical reason for that. But then there’s an actual effect of that too. Hearing you talk about all the reasons you work in black and white — financially, logistically, and in terms of your own control — there’s also an effect from that. So you make a practical choice about make-up, and yet seeing your actors on screen in that manner has an effect on us as an audience in terms of how we approach them as people. How do you see the value in that as an effect?

    Garrel: When I made my first films — Marie pour mémoire, Les hautes solitudes, L’enfant secret… I’m talking about the films that I produced myself, which here were probably only seen by cinephiles. I made these films with no money at all. That’s how I’m different from the New Wave, because I made films like a painter painting. I took some money that I got from patrons to buy paint and canvas, what painters would do. Now, the New Wave, they made inexpensive films, but industrially they weren’t working like painters. So that’s a difference that I have from the New Wave. I was my own producer for 15 years, and I don’t mean a painter with an office.

    What I would do is, I found this idea of asking for the leftover, unexposed film on a roll that was taken out. At that time, when stars acted, as soon as the star had been shot, they would change the roll of film, because they were afraid that the roll would run out if the star was doing something else. So I invented this idea of making features by going around and asking people to give me their leftover, unexposed film. There was so little film, therefore, to shoot, that I couldn’t shoot two takes, it was impossible. So all my films were made in this way. Then in 1983, when I started working with producers, I kept this one-take method. And, in a sense, it’s a lucky accident, a lucky coincidence, because now, if I hadn’t done that, the producers could have forced me to shoot digital.

    My first films were shot in 35mm using this method, and when people switched to digital, the argument was that digital is so much less expensive to shoot. So if I didn’t have the one-take method, I could have lost that argument. Now, I make a film with maybe five hours of exposed film. It’s very different from Abdetallif Kechiche, who for Blue is the Warmest Color shot 600 hours. Jealousy, I had five hours of rushes. In the Shadow of Women, four hours of rushes. That’s a huge difference from digital, and, in my case, it’s a method that I’ve had from the beginning.

    Hynes: But there’s substance in what the artwork is too.

    Garrel: There’s no doubt — unquestionably, this one-shot method leads to a specific genre of film. As I’m the son of an actor who died four years ago now, I’m very, very sensitive to the question of good acting. I work like the theater does. I rehearse long before the shoot, let’s say about 25 days. I rehearse with the actors, and that’s where I do all the directing, in rehearsal. Once we’re on set, I do only one take, and that one take works because of everything that I’ve done before. If I used the traditional method of cinema-making — coming in in the morning and starting to direct the actors at that point — it would be extremely, extremely difficult. It’s thanks to the fact that I added the theater rehearsal before the shoot that we can do this.

    And to be specific about it, it’s actually more than theater, because what we do is we work for 25 Saturdays. That’s nearly a year, let’s say about eight months, if you don’t work on holiday, and that allows the role to mature in the actors’ minds [and] the actors to act together. A lot of times now there’s this absurd risk that actors meet on the set for the first time and have never acted before. If only for the chemistry, as they say here, it’s so important for them to be together. So, what I have the opportunity of doing, starting with the casting in these rehearsals, is to match the actors together, to see different people together and see how it works. That’s how my method has evolved.

    Many, many French films — not as many American films, but still some — are simply bad because there’s no chemistry between the actors. Directors see an actor, they see an actress separately, they say they’re great, and it’s like they’re putting two photos together. But it doesn’t mean that they can act together, it doesn’t mean that they’ll have chemistry. Hollywood knows that, I think. In France, you can’t test stars together. If you want a star, you deal with the star separately. You can’t test them together. I’m told that in Hollywood, they have readings with stars and actors together so you can see how they go together. You see films where actors may be very good, but organically, they’re not meant to play together; they don’t play together.

    My second career is as an acting career. I spent eight years teaching at the Conservatoire in Paris, the national school, also two years at the National Theater School in Strasbourg. When my films don’t make enough money for me to make a living, I sign up to teach acting. It’s there that I saw this business about chemistry — that though actors may have the talent, they don’t fit together. That’s something that you have you to look at in casting. Apart from the Actors’ Studio, in cinema we’re very, very primitive about this question of the association of actors.

    Rizov: One of the things I associate with your films is a shot of a face or a whole body in the moment before the actual dialogue and argument of the scene starts. These can go on for a long time. I was watching Liberté, la nuit last night and saw that some of the reaction shots of Emmanuelle Riva are much longer than you let them go on now. This also relates to your work in the ’70s, such Le berceau de cristal, which is a lot of portraiture, which relates to your interest in the screen test. Could you talk a little bit about how long you allow them to get to this point, whether it’s up to them to decide when to enter the dialogue, and how you’ve changed your compression of these moments?

    Garrel: Like the New Wave, what I liked best when I went to the Cinematheque was the silent films. For instance, I think that Sunrise by Murnau is one of the greatest films ever made. My three top films are Godard’s My Life to Live, Bergman’s Monika, Munrau’s Sunrise. Why? Because of the faces, the silent shots of faces. Now, when I wrote scripts by myself in the period you’re referring to, the dialogue was very, very short. That’s because I’m a paranoid type. Paranoid types don’t talk very much. It’s like Warhol. I think it’s very useful in art to be paranoid or schizoid. The most paranoid person I ever met, the most paranoid artist, was Warhol. I met him through Nico. He never talked. You would see him standing there all pale in the Factory, never talking, and he made these long, hours-long silent films with no talking. To me, that’s the work of a paranoid man, and I’m paranoid too.

    So at the time of Liberté, la nuit, the entire dialogue of my film was three or four pages long. Once I started with co-scriptwriters — this started with Marc Cholodenko, who is also a novelist. This started with Emergency Kisses. He’s more of a schizoid, so my cinema started to talk. There were pages and pages of dialogue. My original thing, though, comes from who I am, and the silent films that Henri Langlois showed me. At the time, the silent directors that people really liked were Murnau, Fritz Lang and — now he’s a little bit out of fashion, young people don’t know him so well — but I loved Erich von Stroheim. These films of von Stroheim’s, you would see them in a kind of half-waking state. It was like a dream, these films were like opium to me. And I think that left a trace on me, aside from my personality, which is to not talk very much, at least not in art, not to declare. This combination of the paranoid and the silent films is what had an impact. Now, today, things have really changed because I work with co-screenwriters.

    Hughes: My favorite moment in In the Shadow of Women is when Pierre and Elizabeth are sitting on the bed together. I think he’s fixing a coffee maker, and he hurts her feelings, and she leans forward. She’s so delightful before he makes the hurtful comment, she’s just staring at him and admiring him, and then when he hurts her she leans forward, toward the camera, and makes this gesture with her hand. It’s really lovely, and I’m wondering — you talked about 25 Saturdays of rehearsals, and I’m wondering what the scene looked like at the beginning of those 25 days versus the one when the camera’s finally rolling and you get that one take. Where does that gesture come from? How are those choices made?

    Garrel: All the young people in my films since Savage Innocence, which is 2001, have come from the Conservatoire, the national conservatory of acting Paris where I teach, like for example Lena Paugam, who you’re talking about. In my work as a professor with an acting class, it’s not at all a magisterial lesson. It’s a workshop class. I have a camera man, I have a sound person, I have a small camera, and I get the actors to do scenes in front of the camera. My work is to deblock the actor, to free the actor, to give him the freedom that’s been taken away from him by being filmed. Because being filmed paralyzes him, my job is to remove that paralysis.

    So that for example, for that gesture, my responsibility is simply to free the actress. She invents it, she makes the gesture in that moment that you’re referring to where he’s hurt her feelings and she’s repulsed and slightly traumatized. My only responsibility for the gesture is to free her, to be free on the set. Now, some good directors will push the actor. They’re like, “Let me show you what to do,” and then the actor imitates the director. I stay behind the camera. I don’t ever get in front of the camera, I don’t show them what to do, I don’t say what to do, I free them. Now, that takes a very long time, which is why it’s useful to have these many rehearsal days that I use. All my recent films — Savage Innocence, Regular Lovers, Jealousy, etc. — have actors from the Conservatoire, either people from my own classroom or, because I’m a titular professor there, people who I see at the graduation exercises in the new classes.

    So the level of acting is reached by the level of freedom; the actor has to be himself and to act only like he would. And that’s what’s touching about it. In Regular Lovers, for instance, the May ’68 riot scenes, all of those people — 45 actors — come from the Conservatoire. So what you have behind that is six years of work in my class. School nourishes the set for me. And my son has been my student too in class, so he knows very well what the other students have done. It’s not like he is only my son, because he’s just a student like the others.

    Part 2

    Edited by Darren Hughes at Mubi’s The Notebook

    HYNES: I’d love to know for you the relationship between teaching and directing. Is there a real overlap in those two jobs? And more specifically for this film, did your directing start well before the shoot? Do you think of it in those terms? Or are there points when you feel you’re primarily teaching? How do those two jobs evolve over the course of a project?

    GARREL: It’s the same thing. It’s like playing tennis. The tennis match is the shoot, the training is the classroom. The only difference, I would say, is that when I’m on the set, I only talk to the actors separately, secretly. I don’t let the others hear. Whereas, when we’re in the classroom, I do let everyone hear so that they can learn from it. That’s the only practical difference.

    When I chose what my profession would be, what my craft would be, which was after this business of the failed oil painting, I remember I was waiting at the bus stop and I saw a poster of a Marcel Carné film that was playing at the time starring Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan [Port of Shadows (Le quai des brumes, 1938)], and I thought to myself, “I’m not able to act, but I would be able to tell actors how to act well, because I’m the son of an actor.” So, that at first is what I realized I could do. Nine-tenths of directing is directing actors. In school, they put way too much emphasis on camera placement and so on, whereas really that’s just one-tenth of directing a film.

    When I had kids, and I wasn’t as well known then, I was able to make a living by becoming an acting teacher. By thinking that you know something, you’re able to convince other people that you know it, and you become respected for it. It’s kind of like working with a psychoanalyst—by believing that the psychoanalyst is a wise man, you in fact heal yourself. It’s the same with an actor. I can say for myself that I’m a conductor, except that I’m a conductor who doesn’t know how to play any of the instruments.

    HYNES: You talk about your father being an actor, and you felt emboldened in terms of offering that to others, but if I’m not mistaken you father was ambivalent about being an actor. You seem less ambivalent about being an actor and a director than he was. There’s a legacy of acting that you’ve inherited, but you’ve inherited it without the reluctance.

    GARREL: It’s true that my father was like a hidden actor. He was mostly a theater actor, not a film actor, and the reason for this was that during the war he landed—he invaded in Provence and in Italy and he had killed people. This was a huge problem for him because my father was a humanist [yet] during the war he had been forced to do this. He had signed up with the North African Free French troops and he landed, like Samuel Fuller and others. He used to say to me, “There are no murders in war, Philippe,” but still, because he killed, it was very hard for him. At the end of his life, he explained to me that he had hidden himself away in a small profession, the small profession of being a theater actor.

    He also was a puppetmaker and puppeteer first. When I was born, that’s what he was doing—acting with Jean Dasté and Gaston Baty. Gaston Baty belonged to the so-called “Cartel,” which was Baty, [Jacques] Copeau, [Charles] Dullin, and [Louis] Jouvet. My father was a student of Dullin, and my method comes from Dullin. Dullin is someone you might have seen in a few films around the second world war, but he was primarily a theater actor. That’s where most of his leading roles were. So when I was around six or eight I would go and sit alone with adults at night in the theater and watch my father on stage.

    But it’s true he was ambivalent about it. He considered it a small profession. In a way, that’s something that I inherited from him.

    RIZOV: I want to follow up on that a little bit. You talk about the work of unblocking the actor. When you were working with your father—especially regarding his experience in Algeria, which is addressed in Liberté, la nuit—did you have to unblock him in relation to his own experience to then relive it on screen?

    GARREL: Just once. Other than that, I never directed him. He did it all alone. And on the contrary it was me who learned from him.

    But for the last film he made with me, Un été brûlant, which was actually the last film he ever shot, I gave him a supporting role—he was too old to play a leading role—and he was acting with his grandson, Louis Garrel, and he was telling an incident from the war. For the first time I had seen with him, it was reality for him. It wasn’t improvising, it was reality. He started acting not just for Louis, he was acting for the crew as well, as if it were a confession. The crew included great, experienced members like Willy Kurant, the D.P., and he was talking to all of them. So it was the only time in my career that I decided to do a second take with him. I told him, “No, you have to talk just to Louis.” It was the only time I directed him, and it was for his last role. I think it was because he was so old that for him there was no difference between acting and being.

    HUGHES: I’m deeply moved by that scene with your father, partly because as a cinephile I have a unique relationship with your family. A few weeks ago in Toronto, for example, I saw the new restored print of Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1962), in which we see your father in his late-30s. You’ve been working with your family for several decades now. Does that still satisfy your curiosity and bring you pleasure as a filmmaker?

    GARREL: At the moment I’m rehearsing a film with my daughter, Louis’s sister [Esther Garrel], because my family is kind of like the circus. Everyone is in the theater or in film. So right now I’m rehearsing a film with my daughter who’s 23, an actress from the Conservatoire who I found in the recent graduating class and who’s 20, and one of my father’s best friends who’s an actor. It’s very, very important for me that art is grafted onto real, intimate life because a film is a piece of your life. Sometimes it takes a year, sometimes three years. I think it would be hard for me to maintain professional—even emotional—ties with people in cinema if I didn’t have these people from my family around me.

    Sternberg had done it before, but what really interested me in the New Wave was that it was a couples’ cinema, it was a lovers’ cinema. Antonioni did it, too. What I think I invented, with my situation, was a family cinema. It’s very important for me that film remain meaningful, that it does not remain outside of the subconscious. Once the subconscious is expressed on the set—and I think this is very important—the film becomes more expressive.

    At the end of his two books on acting, Stanislavsky comes to the conclusion that one should leave room for the expression of the subconscious. If you can let the subconscious be expressed in the making of the film, then when the viewer sees the film he will have something of his own subconscious emerge. Not through identification. He’ll think of people he loves, for instance. He’ll think of something that is emotionally moving to him. If my subconscious surfaces in the film and comes through, he will be touched because his subconscious will emerge. In this way, cinema heals.

    I look for emotion in truth. I don’t go searching for emotion like some filmmakers do. I think it’s more successful to go looking for emotion through truth because that way the viewer can come to his truth.

    RIZOV: In terms of your work with your son, his relative lack of expression is something that’s been discussed a lot. As an example, I’d like to ask about one of my favorite of your scenes that everybody likes, the “This Time Tomorrow” scene in Regular Lovers. Everyone is dancing around him and you cut to him in the middle of it. He’s very unmoved, in opposition to the spirit of the room. How do you develop that characteristic as you direct?

    GARREL: In that particular scene, it was a choreographer who teaches at the Conservatoire. At the Conservatoire, they also have dance professors. It’s not just theater and films. Anyways, Caroline Marcadé choreographed the Kinks number.

    My set is quite free, and Louis Garrel, in general, is quite inhibited about dancing, so he didn’t want to dance. Since my cinema is free, I said, “Okay, don’t dance. Be a character who doesn’t like to dance.” Then, as we were shooting, I saw that Louis was watching his classmates, because all the others in the scene were people he was at the Conservatoire with for three years. He was watching them, so I told the D.P. to film Louis without telling him. Those are documentary shots that are inserted in the choreography that Caroline Marcadé did.

    By the way, I’m working with her again this year, so it’s not just actors that I get from the Conservatoire. I also take professors and use them behind the scenes. For instance, the person who teaches fight choreography at the Conservatoire, I’ve had him act in the films.

    My father acted like I never could have imagined. And now Louis Garrel is a much better actor than I am. I try to help him, but most often when he’s stoic like that, these are decisions that he has made among his classmates, people he was in school with for a long time, based on what he can and can’t do.

    I try to navigate this family relationship on the set. It can be awkward for people, and I try to avoid that. You have to avoid playing favorites. He and I are obviously very close, but one has to be democratic and not treat him differently. Of course, if we come back to the subconscious, of course I do treat him differently because, for instance, I dream of him more often than I dream of his classmates.

    HYNES: You talked earlier about introversion and about how you’re an introvert and there’s an expression of that in terms of lengths of shots and the quietness, to some degree. It’s interesting to me that that’s how you describe yourself. When I spoke to Louis he also talked about your family as being a circus and he likened himself to being the clown in the circus. So, in that sense he seems very different from you. And yet, in your films there is an introversion that comes through at times, and I’m wondering about your relationship with him in terms of him basically being an expression of you in a deep sense. And also, how do you relate to other actors in that sense? Because actors tend to be introverts. As a teacher and a director, how do you work with that dynamic, bringing actors down to a quieter place? Or at other times encouraging their outgoing aspects?

    GARREL: When I film Louis Garrel or my actors, even if I’ve written a story based on my own life, it’s really them that I’m filming. When I filmed my son or, back in the day when I filmed my father in films like Liberté, la nuit, I wasn’t asking them to play me. I was really filming them, and it’s been like that since the beginning, even when my films are drawn from my own personal life.

    The problem is, for instance, if you’re telling a story that involves sex you can’t talk to your father about sex the way you would with your best friend. What we’re getting to is the problem of incest. In asking my father or my son to be actors, I can’t film my father kissing a woman. I can’t film my son holding a naked woman the way I could with other actors because that would be like looking through the keyhole at my parents or into the children’s room.

    It’s Freud who said that the number one taboo for humanity is incest. It’s the most repulsive point. Everything about our evolution as a society is designed to avoid incest. So if I write, for instance, my love story with a woman, and I ask my father or Louis to act in it I don’t ask them to play me. I ask them to play themselves. And not only that, I have to film a purely spiritual love, because otherwise it’s like going and peeking at your parents or going into the kids’ room. You can’t do that.

    There’s an inconvenience to that, which is that it makes for a certain kind of story; but there’s an advantage, which is that every time the story has to be of amour fou. It’s not just a little love affair. It can’t be that. It spiritualizes the love while taking away the problem of incest or voyeurism of other family members. So there’s both a limit and a kind of luck in this, which allows a transcendence. Perhaps I haven’t completely answered the question.

    HUGHES: You mentioned earlier that you wanted to trigger the subconscious rather than create an identification. When I watched Emergency Kisses for the first time ten years ago, I felt very removed from it. I’m now the same age as you were when you made it. I’m married and have children the same age as Louis in that film. So when I revisited it last week, I identified much more closely with your character, but I was also deeply moved by it because I now understand deep in my bones that the loss of my family would be the great tragedy in my life. I now experience—subconsciously, I suppose—the threat of despair.

    GARREL: Well, I think that’s proof of how art is useful. As we see with great filmmakers like Bergman, his films show that he was an artist, but they also show that films can be as useful for healing as a book by Freud.

    It’s very important. I deeply believe that art can replace religion, like psychoanalysis can help—not replace but help—medicine. Art can supplant religion as far as belief in life. And that’s what’s sad about Chantal Akerman’s suicide. She was an atheist. My father used to say to me, to deal with suicides, “All young people are suicidal and I was, too.” And he used to say to me, “Suicide is two lines in the newspaper.” And we saw as much.

    So, with Chantal it’s a real failure of art, as far as our business is concerned. We can’t get into her private life or the failure of love or any of that. But what we can see politically in her life is the concentration camps, because her mother was in the concentration camps, and we can see that art wasn’t enough for the collective unconscious, as Freud saw the collective unconscious. Not this idea that we have now of a cloud floating above men. Freud saw it as something that’s anchored in our memory and that comes from those who lived before, who came before us, and that makes us act despite ourselves.

    As far as friendship and love and so on in art, that’s what art is good for, as the five of us here who agree that art must be defended in this way, because it helps us to live. But even psychoanalysis fails us. We see that with Primo Levi, who had been in the concentration camps and who, like Chantal, killed himself. It’s very, very complicated to heal the psyche through art, through this search for emotion, for reliving things, for bringing things forth from memory and unconscious when we see art. It’s not like we’ve reached the end point with this. On the contrary, we’re at the eve of the importance in our civilization of understanding that art is essential.

    RIZOV: It would be hard for me to imagine a film of yours that eliminated political aspects entirely. There is an analytical component in returning to, revisiting, and re-experiencing charged political moments, whether through Maurice’s monologue in Liberté, la nuit about the scars left by the Algerian war, a very short eruption like in Frontier of Dawn when the man at the bar suddenly says, “I’m an anti-Semite,” or in A Burning Hot Summer, when a sidewalk conversation is interrupted by immigrants running from the police. The characters are preoccupied by their lives, while briefly noticing what’s still going on around them.

    GARREL: Instinctively, what you’re touching on with all of these scenes is something that I didn’t invent. I didn’t invent this process. Artists have been doing this since the dawn of time. What you’re touching on are dreams that I wrote down upon waking up. Notated dreams. For instance, the murder of the mother in Liberté, la nuit, the arrest of the immigrants in A Burning Hot Summer, these are all dreams.

    Now, many artists have done this. They mix imaginary scenes and dreams. But these scenes are not shown as dreams because I’ve also had scenes in my films where you see actual dreams, you see the hero fall asleep and dream. I like to mix those with reality. What I’m interested in is the search for a method, and that’s how you get an avant-garde style—by searching for something new.

    In Regular Lovers, for instance, toward the end of the shoot, I had a dream, but instead of writing it down I did something like what Godard would do when he was . . . let’s call it “improvising the mise-en-scene” on the set, where he would make something up and shoot it with without writing it down. So, I had this dream. I called my assistant early in the morning and said, “Go to the store, buy some barbed wire, and come to the set. I’ll tell you why.” We were shooting in the forest, and what I was able to do is I noted the dream directly through the camera. I didn’t write it down. It would be hard for you to remember, but it was the scene where the character takes opium and then he dreams. That was a dream noted on camera. You see a young woman wearing old clothes in a small camp with barbed wire. She’s woken by Louis Garrel, who’s dressed as a young prince. There’s a small flame. He takes her out of the camp.

    And that’s how you get to be avant-garde. You try to be the first to make a certain gesture. So, in this case, two or three hours after I’d woken up, I was shooting the dream, noting the dream directly through the camera, while I was still inhabited by it. What I try to do is I take these scenes from dreams, which you’ve instinctually noticed, and I mix them with realist scenes. They’re oneiric scenes by definition, since they’re taken from dreams.

    You’ve instinctively put your finger on all of these scenes that were from dreams that were shown as reality!

    Part 3

    Edited by Eric Hynes at Reverse Shot

    HYNES: I don’t usually think of your films in terms of genre. I think of you as coming out of the avant-garde but continually working towards your own vocabulary. But with In the Shadow of Women, you do seem to be in dialogue with comedy. How deliberate were you in bringing in those elements, and how willing were you to go into that area?

    GARREL: It’s true what you say, but it was not on purpose. In France, when I saw the audience laughing at the movie, they were laughing at it as if it were a comedy, as if I had told it with humor. It was absolutely not on purpose. I did it without humor. What’s possible, however, is that it’s due to the fact that it’s the first time I’ve worked with Jean-Claude Carrière. When I said to Jean-Claude, “Everyone is laughing in the audience,” Carrière said, “Yeah, Philippe. That’s me!” When Godard decided to make industrial cinema again in 1979, I observed that he worked with his wife, Anne-Marie Miéville, and he worked with Carrière, who as you know had written for Luis Buñuel and worked with Godard on two films, Every Man for Himself and Passion.

    The importance is not that I’m avant-garde or a modernist; what’s important is that we say, “It’s cinema,” the way that we can say, “It’s a painting” when we look at a painting. Now, in the modernists that I like—Picasso and Matisse and Max Ernst—you have a figure, sometimes it’s Cubist, it’s de-structured, interpreted, but underneath it you see the classic drawing, you see the construction of the human body. That’s the modernism I like in painting, because the two forms of art I like are cinema and painting. What I’m looking for is how to be modernist in a profound way. But you also have to be classic in a narrative sense. You can’t, with cinema, put the book down and do something else or look at another painting. Only cinema and theater have this thing of imposed time where the viewer must accept to be a prisoner. So, what I wanted to do was be like a painter, to have a classic design underneath (which Picasso could do very well because he was a master draftsman) and on top to deconstruct. I thought Carrière was the ideal person for this because what he had done for Every Man for Himself. What I wanted, in a sense, was a classic script and to do a modern mise-en-scène.

    What you see with Godard—and he’s the only one who does this, and this is why he’s so much better than me—is that ten years later, after the movie, you see that he was telling the story. But because of his modern mise-en-scène, the story wasn’t exposed. It appears over time. And in that way he’s like Picasso, or Einstein. Because he’s searching, he’s searching and he finds. For instance, take Nouvelle vague. I had to see it four times to understand the story. People walk out of Godard movies because they say there’s no story, there’s no logic. But there is a story. It’s just exposed differently. For instance, in a classic film you’ll have an actor who says, “I’m the President of the United States.” In a Godard film, you’ll have an actor saying nothing, and you’ll have a voice coming in from somewhere saying, “Mr. President, do you want a glass of water?” That’s his method of exposition. It’s hard to understand. And you need to understand that logic to be moved by the movie. But with time and maybe one sentence in the program, these movies can touch people. Slowly we’re catching up.

    If we take the example of Nouvelle vague—which was shown in competition in Cannes because Alain Delon was in it—there were many, many walkouts. Which is what happened to Chantal Akerman’s film, No Home Movie, in Locarno. Godard was used to this kind of treatment. When I took Godard as a master when I was 13 or 14, there were maybe six of us in the screening room to see Alphaville, and at the end there were four. But Chantal wasn’t used to that kind of thing. She filled theaters. So maybe No Home Movie is too modern. Maybe it’s hard to understand. It was the same for Nouvelle vague as it is for No Home Movie. But the difference is that Straub and Godard—they’ve always seen this kind of behavior. They’re used to it. Now when I read the Cannes reviews of Nouvelle vague back at that time, the story they described was wrong. They said it was the story of two brothers and a rich heiress. The critics told a different story than was the movie’s actual story.

    When I saw the film a fourth time, I realized that the story was actually of a Machiavellian character who makes people believe that he was killed by this heiress. And then he reappears with another personality pretending to be the first man’s brother. And out of guilt the heiress gives him everything she says to avoid him telling the police about her. At the end, when she nearly drowns in an accident, she realizes who he is. And he saves her. So she says, “But it was you all the time.” And he says yes. And so she says, “But there’s one thing I didn’t understand—why did you save me?” And he says, “Because in the meantime I’ve fallen in love.” Which is very, very moving. But if we don’t understand it, it’s like a math problem.

    So back at that time I wrote to Godard, because I write him quite frequently or I go to visit him—and I was right, that was the story. But no one at the time understood it. Except maybe the top student [smiles]. Now everyone understands it. It’s a great story, but instead of exposing it in the Scorsese style, Godard told it in his modern way. It’s a moving story for the 21st century. It’s told in the avant-garde way of Godard. The exposition is too hidden, instead of being really comprehensible. But that’s why Godard is in my eyes the greatest modernist. Why he’s above all the rest. Like Picasso—Picasso who in relation to the Louvre or classic painting in general, he came along and he broke everything. So that he could come after, and that’s what Godard did. After only 80 years of cinema, he came along and he broke the Lumière and Edison things that we were doing, and he invented modernism.

    HUGHES: When you talked about seeing Nouvelle vague for the fourth time, you said you came to understand the logic of it, which is an interesting choice of words. All critics and viewers have to wrestle with Godard’s logic, but I’m not sure it’s a word that comes to my mind when watching and writing about your films, which are more about unearthing, in that subconscious sense, the emotions generated by your images. You’ve talked about growing up as the son of an actor, being exposed to art and painting as a young child, but I’m wondering about other sources for your images, beyond dreams. Do you still take direct inspiration from paintings? I’m thinking about the images of feet being held and wrapped and washed, which is a trope in sacred art. Some of your earlier work is almost mythological.

    GARREL: The other exercise that I devote myself to, aside from seeing and re-seeing the films of Godard… actually there are two other exercises. One of them is going to the museum. When I was fourteen I lived next to the Louvre, and the Louvre was free once a week. In fact I saw here that on Sundays it’s pay as you wish at the Frick, which I think is a great thing, a democratic thing, to allow poor people to see classic painting. I went to the Louvre every single Sunday. At 25 I counted, and I’d been to the Louvre 147 times. When I shoot, I don’t watch movies—I go to the Louvre. And I look at how they paint things. I don’t look at the dates—I don’t know the history about paintings. I look at the names and I look at the paintings.

    The other practice that I’ve undertaken, which I started when I was 25, is that I read Freud. Whenever I had a problem, I read one book by Freud. For instance, if I had an addiction, I read a book by Freud to get over it. And I would say, in the Freudian sense, this is the this of the illness, and I would work through it by reading the book. And then I would not be dependent. Or if a woman had left me and I felt terrible, I would read one Freud book. And no lie, I think I’ve read more than half of Freud. And I did this without undergoing psychoanalysis while making films.

    Now, not long ago, I started to experience really visceral jealousy over a woman—a very serious problem. And so for the first time I decided to go to psychoanalysis. And I found an old psychoanalyst who is a disciple of Lacan. And I had a very short psychoanalysis with him—six months to get rid of the jealousy. I didn’t get rid of my other problems, but I did get rid of the jealousy. And so I wrote to this 92-year-old psychoanalyst, “I think I can get by alone.” And because he’s a very wise man, he wrote me, “If you think you can get by alone, you should leap on the opportunity.” So I stopped the psychoanalysis, and I also stopped reading Freud. So here, for instance, in New York, I’ve seen zero films, but I’ve been to the Whitney, I’ve been to the Frick. I’m really, truly interested in that.

    So I have classic and modern painting, I have Freud, I have Godard, there’s seeing old films as well. Like recently I discovered some Bergman films that people don’t know very well, from the mid-forties. Like Prison and Music in Darkness. These are all films that I go to see in the Latin Quarter, small movie theaters—kind of the remains of Henri Langlois’s Cinematheque. This is how I make my cinema. It’s something I get from my father. I’m an artist to make a living—I just do it well. I’m not alienated by it, but I’m not a specialist. And that’s why I have a small audience. I like being recognized as a filmmaker, but I don’t need to have a huge audience. It’s much more important to me to fully live my life, and be thoroughly involved with my intimates and loved ones, and my family. Life is more important. I surround myself with art to escape the ambient idiocy. But I’m less of a specialist than, for instance, Leos Carax. Because I prefer life. And I think that’s something that comes from May ’68.

    RIZOV: I would like to go back to your new film for a little bit. What the couple is united by initially is their work in the editing room. At the end, when she’s the first to discover and understand that the film is based on a falsehood, she sees the footage better than he does. This seems to relate a bit to your practice of having female collaborators come in to help you write the female parts. At the same time they’re working with physical film, and he meets the other woman when he’s helping her carry cans of film. It’s a triangle united by celluloid.

    GARREL: Well, even thirty years ago, if you met a woman and you were a director, she would say to you, “Make me a star.” Now, a woman will say, “Make me equal.” So the work has naturally evolved. You see, men court women naturally. Or if they like men, they court men. And by courting I mean in the medieval sense of courtship. So naturally there’s courtship in art, and I want to seduce. In the past, women wanted to be glorified in film. Now it’s different. And that changes the work of artists. Smart women today want to be equals—they won’t be upset if they’re not stars. But if they’re artists, they just want to be having their work looked at as equals, as intelligent beings. So I use that to court women. I want to meet the deepest desires of women today.

    Now, the other thing is that in cinema today—cinema is young, it’s only 120 years old—most women have spoken men’s words. It’s never been an objective vision of women. So even men who are not misogynists, who love women, who see them as equals—it’s still a problem in cinema that all the words that women were speaking were coming from men. So by associating men and women in writing the films, I get to have a more dialectic type of film. More dialect in regarding the human species. It’s like an inner documentary on men and women. Cinema is not only macho, it’s industrially made by men.

    So I’ve just tried to move it forward. Godard did the same thing with his second period. Which you could refer to as the Blue Period, if you’re continuing the Picasso parallel. He wrote a lot of those films with Anne-Marie Miéville. There’s one called France/tour/detour/deux/enfants, which he made for television and which I love, which he wrote with Miéville. And I think to write a film with your wife makes it intelligently gendered. The other advantage is that it’s less dangerous to write a film with your wife than to have her be the star—because you’re less likely to have someone steal her away from you. Which brings us back to the beginning of the conversation, when I was talking about Jarmusch.

    [Laughter]

    HYNES: And then you made an entire film about that—about whether or not a director will cast his partner as the lead in a film written about her.

    GARREL: Emergency Kisses.

    HUGHES: Can I ask a very practical question? In the last few films, there’s a consistent rhythm to the sequences, in that there will be a fairly static shot, like of two people sitting on a bed talking, followed by a shot of people walking down the street—there’s visual movement. I’d like to hear you talk about the design of that visual rhythm. What happens in a walking scene that can’t happen in a quiet, static scene?

    GARREL: I don’t know. It’s like drawing. Those kinds of operations aren’t analyzed by the artist. I have no theory on my own film. You know, cinema is gestural; this is what it has in common with dance or with painting. You take your camera, and people, and you write something with that, that resembles life. That’s why I shoot in order. I shoot the first shot the first day, and the last shot the last day, and I edit during the shoot. I have an editor who edits as we go. So that in the evening, I see the last shot, and the next morning I continue from there. I continue from the previous image—not from what’s in the script. Once all the rehearsals are done, in a sense I could throw the story out, the actors would keep the dialogue, and we would start over.

    So if you would ask me, why do you track backwards when this guy is walking down the street feeling desperate because his wife cheated on him?—it’s like painting. If I have a blue line, I look at it and I put a green line underneath it. I don’t tell myself I’m going to make a blue and green painting. I don’t theorize about that. It’s a blue line, then the green. There’s no intention before the gesture. I do it. I observe. Then I do the next thing. I observe. I do the next thing. I observe the continuity. But there’s no outside definition of what I want to get. There’s no film in my head. There’s no imaginary film I want to make. I organize reality, in the present, on the set. What I’m trying to explain to you is that it’s really gestural. I’m not reconstructing something that was constructed in my mind. I’m constructing something for the first time in reality.

    HUGHES: That’s another advantage of your technique of having extensive rehearsals and then shooting a scene only once. I can’t imagine any other filmmaker that looks at the previous shot the night before, who can feel the rhythm of the movie and then make the decision the next morning based on that.

    HYNES: Right, if you were considering from among fifteen takes, it would be harder to determine, tonally, what should be next.

    GARREL: [in English] Ah, yes, yes. Because it’s no more clear if you make a lot of takes. That’s true. Everything is a method that you’ve invented. Every artist invents his own method. And his own method is his style. That’s why it’s so difficult to teach directing. Except for the fact of directing actors. But teaching the mise-en-scene? It’s very difficult. Because every artist is particular, every director is particular.

    HYNES: But you were encouraged by Godard, your mentor, to come up with your own method. Which is quite different from other directors coming up.

    GARREL: It’s also a question of misunderstanding. I thought that Godard wrote nothing at all, and that his films were entirely improvised. So through all my first films, basically from Marie for Memory to Les hautes solitudes, which is where I started to do something like preparatory work, I thought that Godard came to the set with hands in his pockets, nothing written down. In fact, I later learned that he had a notebook in which there was a story, in a few lines. He didn’t have a script but he did have a notebook, and he would give the dialogue to the actors. But since I didn’t know that, and since one doesn’t know in general how other artists work, I started doing things in my own way. So for my six first films I did absolutely no writing, I just went straight to the camera. And then at the end of the shooting I would write just a few lines of dialogue and I would give it to the actors and say, “This is for tomorrow.” This thing of misunderstanding is specific to art. It wouldn’t work with science. Art can tolerate approximation and misunderstanding. You can still have a work of art that’s based on a misunderstanding. That’s expressive.

  • Further Questions for Hou Hsiao-hsien

    Further Questions for Hou Hsiao-hsien

    This interview was originally published at Mubi. I collaborated on this piece with Daniel Kasman.

    * * *

    div>We can’t get enough of The Assassin, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first film in eight years, his first so-called martial arts film, a film set deep in the past yet bracingly present and heartbreaking. A longtime hero of ours, we sought every opportunity to speak with Hou. Thus, the strange email interview after The Assassin‘s premiere in Cannes. And thus, too, this equally strange conversation between Hou, critic Darren Hughes, and myself, where it seemed as though each participant talked past the other, our words and ideas becoming distorted in translation. We offer it to you as a small addendum to the wealth of discourse that surrounds this very special filmmaker, in general, and this film, specifically, aware of and saddened by its slim inadequacy.

    At the end of our conversation Darren requested a picture. Hou removed his ragged baseball cap, glanced quickly at the window and at the fluorescents over our heads, pushed back the curtain, and then leaned awkwardly into the natural light, giving us the photo above. That split-second gesture was a good deal more revealing of Hou’s technique than the preceding conversation.


    NOTEBOOK: Many of your films are set in the past, but you’re also a strong proponent of realism in cinema. Is there a difference for you when you’re staging, say, a scene between a man and a woman in the past, as in The Assassin, or one set in contemporary Taipei?

    HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: I shoot the films the same way. I give the actors short stories to read to give them a sense of how people spoke in that era, but I want them to figure it out for themselves. When making films in Asia, there is little time to give the actors a deep understanding of an era. The best I can do is a classic presentation: the way they wear their clothes, the locations.

    When you see a stranger, or when you talk with someone for the first time, you’re naturally fascinated by that particular something they have. I want actors to come on set and bring that same thing. I want to capture that essence and describe it on screen. So there’s no rehearsal. The actors know what I expect of them. I allow it to sink in for the actors, but it’s not through discussion. I really want them to feel it so that when it’s time to deliver those lines it is realistic to them.

    If it doesn’t work, I stop the scene and we come back to it later. For example, the scenes between Tian Ji’an [Chen Chang] and Huji [Nikki Hsin-Ying Hsieh] were not quite right [at first], so I allowed them to workshop a bit and come back to shoot those scenes again.

    NOTEBOOK: Did the use of an ancient dialect for the film’s dialog transform that process in any way?

    HOU: It comes down to the actors’ relationship with the language. Again, in the scenes with Tian Ji’an and Huji, I made them shoot a couple more times. But with someone like Shu Qi, who didn’t have too many lines, it was fairly easy to get into the dialect!

    The actors who play the parents are from China, so they have more of a basis in the old language. They didn’t have to workshop at all. It was all very natural for them.

    NOTEBOOK: The Assassin opens with a title card about events from 8th century China, and then the second sentence jumps a hundred years to the “present day” of the film. That jump reminds me of your films Good Men, Good Women [1995] and Three Times [2005] in its juxtapositions of different eras. You seem especially interested in the cinema as a historical tool.

    HOU: The opening titles were not in the original cut. The French distributors told me they didn’t really understand what was going on and asked me to add an introduction. But even after adding it, I’m convinced many people still don’t understand.

    Hollywood is good at telling meticulous historical stories. I’m not that kind of director. I don’t want things to be so clear. Carefully plotting every storyline, as Hollywood does, would distract from the humanity of the characters.

    NOTEBOOK: There’s a moment in The Assassin when Shu Qi walks alone through the mainland countryside, and it reminded me suddenly of the young couples in Good Men, Good Women. When I described you as a historian, it’s because your films are interested in causations: what happened in the 8th century affected the 9th century, what happened in 1940 mainland China affected 1995 Taiwan.

    HOU: You’re looking for a thread running through my films, for similar shots in different eras. For me, there are no connections like this. Because I’ve worked with certain actors many times, I’ve come to appreciate certain aspects of their performances, so perhaps this is the connecting line you see.

    The Tang Dynasty is a very modern era. The way people lived their lives was very modern. For example, the assassin questions what it means to murder. Even if there were a time machine, it would be of no use to me because no amount of detail would overcome our modern eyes.

    As I mentioned, I often work with the same actors. But when I was writing the script, I thought about incorporating other interesting people I’ve encountered. I considered casting actors from the mainland who might better encapsulate the feel of the Tang Dynasty. But I like to write with specific actors already in mind because I don’t want to arrive on set and think, “How am I going to fit your personality into my script?”

    The circle of actors in Asia is fairly small. By casting Shu Qi, I knew I could give her direction and there would at least be a possibility of her changing her performance. Even though Shu Qi is not from deep in mainland China, she plays the role like an assassin, and that’s what I needed.