09/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: The French director talked to us about the genesis of a film as spectacular as it is sensitive and moving

Co-written with Ladj Ly and Elias Belkeddar, Athena [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Romain Gavras
film profile] by Romain Gavras takes place in the banlieue but has the unambiguous airs of a Greco-Roman tragedy. The film follows three brothers — a soldier in the French army, an arms and drugs trafficker, and a rebellious young man — as the latter leads his entire neighbourhood in a mass revolt against the police, after a video emerges online showing that the very recent death of their baby brother was caused by men in uniforms.

At Venice, where the feature is competing for the Golden Lion, Romain Gavras spoke to us about the genesis of a film as spectacular as it is sensitive and moving.

Cineuropa: With banlieue films, many feel the impulse to ask that they offer something new. Did you also feel this way when making Athena? 
Romain Gavras: Generally, whether I’m working on films or music videos, regardless of the territory or the genre, I try to bring something new. When you make a movie or a visual work, you have to try to contribute. I think the banlieue film is more based on a territory, but has now almost become a category of film in France — it's been 30 years since La Haine, and even more since Tea in the Harem in the 1980s. And obviously, because Ladj and I are on the same team, and Ladj released Les Misérables [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ladj Ly
film profile] three years ago, we asked ourselves when we started writing, “How can we have a story that is articulated in a different way? How will the visual grammar complement this different story?” We quickly arrived at the idea of ​​tragedy, formally and in the way of articulating the story. What tragedy brings is a strong iconography, and it conveys ideas through emotions and symbolism. It is above reality.

Much of cinema today automatically falls back on realism. Was it a conscious desire from you to get away from it?
Completely. Of course, each director will have his own way of telling a story. For me, cinema works through images and sensations. That, too, is cinema. The films I like are those that offer a symbolism and iconography that I have never seen before. I love seeing a movie that introduces me to a way of telling a story that I've never witnessed before.

What was your collaboration with Ladj Ly and Elias Belkeddar like?
It was a very smooth process, and we all really got into it during the first few months of COVID. Strangely, when you think the world is going to end or you don't know what will happen, you can write a very ambitious film like that because you tell yourself that it might never get made, and you’ll never really have to shoot all of these one-take sequences. It's easy to write, on paper, "We start there, and we end there." We wrote it without the constraint of feasibility — except that later, the feature was greenlit, and we had to shoot it. I had fewer white hairs before this film.

Most filmmakers went the other way during the pandemic, making smaller, simpler films.
I had written two! The other one was very small; it could be made with very little money, and I really thought that was the one that would work. We were really lucky that the folks at Netflix read the script and said, “Ok, let's go” and decided to take the gamble — because it really was a gamble — to trust us and greenlight the film.

Where did you shoot?
In a neighbourhood where half of the place was inhabited, and the other half was going to be demolished for rehabilitation. This allowed us to shoot the most complicated scenes far from where people live, but at the same time, to have a neighbourhood that was alive. I needed there to be life and to be able to project myself. Three-quarters of the neighbourhood’s people were involved in the film, whether in small roles, as extras, or even in decoration and in other roles backstage. Suddenly, the neighbourhood had kind of become the Cinecittà of the banlieue. And it was interesting because, behind the camera, there was a lot of love, union and fraternity between the crew and the people, but in front of the camera, it was war.

The film has action scenes, one-take sequences, an epic dimension — but also a lot of close-ups on the faces of the characters.
That was intentional. We had envisioned the film as something that would be very sensorial, and that’s why there is very little character exposition. In a traditional movie, you can explain where they come from, who they are. There, a lot of it goes through the performances from the actors. That was, for me, the challenge of the film, the main question: will the actors be able to embody their characters in such a way that they’ll transmit to the viewers what they’re feeling internally? I thought they were wonderful in that sense because the film has this impressive, wide-angle aspect, but we spend most of the time on faces, as they intensely experience the events that unfold. That was the idea: to experience with them, in real time, the eruption of that neighbourhood. To make it so that we don't have the time to think, just like the characters themselves don't have the time to think. So we are in a kind of hysteria; we experience events as the characters experience them in the film. But on the other hand, and this is where I was really impressed, the actors managed to embody their characters without me having to explain to them who they are, etc. I think some viewers might not be able to really enter the film if they are not touched by the characters, it’s possible to not really understand them; but on the other hand, if the viewer is hooked, then I think the film can really take them on a journey.

This is a Netflix movie, and therefore, most people will see it on their TV. But putting aside the implications of that for the viewing experience, what do you think are the film’s chances of having a cultural impact, the way The Stronghold [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] had, for example?
The answer is very simple: a film like this is a gamble, and without Netflix, the movie would not have been made. It's not even a matter of "bigger budget". When you want to make a film, it's quite simple. If there are people who want to bet on you and say, “Here we go,” you go with them. I must say that the collaboration was quite extraordinary, in the sense that they let me make the film that I wanted, which would not necessarily have been the case with a traditional producer. But obviously, as a director, I want people to see it on the big screen, which the media timeline in France does not allow. It's a system that I think needs to change. But the film will exist on the big screen: it will do a week in New York, a week in London. It is also a picture that actually works well on TV, and there's also the pleasure of knowing that the whole world will be able to see it on the same day. There are pros and there are cons, but the reality is that I couldn't have made this movie without Netflix.

Are you going to direct the other film that you wrote during the pandemic?
I don't think so, because it was a movie that should have been shot either during the pandemic or not at all... When you write a film, it's hard to come back to it afterwards because there's a momentum, a moment when one is excited by a story. I don't know yet what I'm going to do next. I think I’m going to get a bit of sleep.

(Translated from French)