Interview with Alain Guiraudie

On March 25, Alain Guiraudie came to Chicago as part of a five-city American tour in support of his new film MISERICORDIA. The French writer-director has been making shorts since the early 1990s but first garnered international attention in 2001 when his featurette THAT OLD DREAM THAT MOVES screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Since then, he’s directed about half a dozen features, each in his distinctive tone, a mix of harsh realism and playful anti-realism. Cine-File co-managing editor Ben Sachs briefly sat down with Guiraudie to discuss his links to the surrealist tradition, his writing process, and his fondness for “popular” faces.

Cine-File: I feel that, of all the cineastes working today, you remind me the most of Luis Buñuel. Could we start by talking about Buñuel? Is he an influence on your work?

Alain Guiraudie: Yes, yes! Luis Buñuel is a very important filmmaker for me. He first opened my horizons as a teenager. At that time, I really liked leftist cinema, a cinema that denounced injustices. And Buñuel really stayed in touch with that social aspect of leftist cinema, but at the same time, he took it toward surrealism. I’m not a big fan of his last era, the French movies. I feel like when people think about my movies, they think about his French era, which I’m not a fan of. Do you think of THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE when you watch my movies?

CF: Well, I did think of DISCREET CHARM while watching MISERICORDIA, because of the affectionate priest.

AG: Yes, yes, yes, the priest is a very important figure in this film by Buñuel, even though it wasn’t really an inspiration. It was the Spanish and Mexican ones that were more of an influence.

CF: You refer to surrealism, which was and remains so important to French art. What does this tradition mean to you?

AG: It’s a very personal debate for me between a cinema that represents reality and a cinema that’s looking to open new horizons. I think surrealism really opened new horizons for us. It made us get away from the triviality of everyday life, even the vulgarity of the everyday. I think there’s a great, universal cinematic project, which is to look for a place between reality and dream, and I think surrealism took us there.

CF: Every film of yours contains at least one image that I can’t shake from my mind, like the whole film is building toward it. For example, there’s the scene in STAYING VERTICAL (2016) where the hero, Léo, is helping the old man end his life while sodomizing him. When you’re writing, do you start with a moment like that, or do you have to build to it.

AG: All the images really come from the writing process, as you dream the screenplay. A film is never one idea; it’s multiple ideas that form in a chain. For example, there are the moments in MISERICORDIA, such as the scene with the priest’s erection, that came to me as I was writing.

CF: If that was what came to you in writing MISERICORIDA, then what was the initial inspiration

AG: What I needed to find was the object of desire for the film. There’s this idea of the village and making the film with this village and the forest around it. And then there was this unconscious image, which was the last scene with Martine and Jérémie in bed. I made the film for that last scene, even though it was unconscious. I didn’t have it in my mind at first. For me, making a film is to build an image that’s in the mind but not concrete. You’re making a fantasy become a reality.

CF: One of the distinguishing qualities of your films is that the mise-en-scène is so matter-of-fact. How do you get from the fantasies of your screenplays to the hard realities of your finished films?

AG: What’s interesting about cinema is that you’re always confronting your fantasies with something very real, for example, actors or places. And when these two things meet, that produces the territory that is cinema. What I’m interested in is telling weird stories with weird relationships between characters. But I want to tell them in a very credible, even obvious, way. Cinema is a matter of belief. You have to believe in and respect reality. So, the actors [in my films] must never overact or exaggerate their characters—they just have to be. And for the characters to be believable, I accept that the characters look like the actors, instead of the reverse. There should be some confusion between the actor and the character. The actors fill the empty shells that the characters are.

CF: All of your films contain people I’m not used to seeing in fiction films. You tend to cast people who look wonderfully ordinary, sometimes even slovenly. What attracts you to people like this?

AG: For me, casting part of filmmaking is very intimate. It’s almost like a seduction. You look at pictures of actors and think, “I like him, I don’t like her. I want to meet him…” It’s like flirting or being on a dating app. There are also very objective criteria in what I’m looking for. What’s important for me is finding actors who have a simple way of acting but who are able to bring complexity to their roles. Also, it’s important that they can work well in an ensemble. It feels like in French cinema you always see the same ten actors or so, but I always want to see new faces. So, for each film, I like to change actors; I don’t like to reuse actors I’ve worked with before… I’m looking for typical faces. I feel like faces that are popular as in “from the people” disappeared from French cinema around the 1980s. This is true of American cinema too. For example, in John Ford’s films, you could find very typical, popular actors, but that is no longer the case.

CF: Your films are also notable for how they represent sexual desire as this force that seems to come from outside of people, rather than from within. It seems to capture and control some of your characters. In this regard, you have this in common with your countryman André Téchiné.

AG: I feel that sex is generally very badly represented in films. It’s shot from multiple angles, so it doesn’t seem very fluid. I like to take the time to film sex scenes the way I film any other scene, with a beginning, middle, and end. Timing and choreography are important as well. As for desire, I agree that it’s a very mysterious force, and this is true of Téchiné’s films. But for my characters, the desire comes mostly from me instead of from them. Because I think it would be pointless for actors to simply play their desires.