20/07/2005

Emmanuel Carrère is a novelist and a scriptwriter for TV and cinema. After an original documentary entitled Retour à Kotelnitch (''Back to Kotelnitch'), he has just released his first fiction feature, The Moustache. As a fantastic Jack of all jobs (and great master of all of them), he is the author of the novel the film is based on which he co-adapted himself for the feature he also decided to direct. This is not the first time he has worked on the adaptation of his own novels, for he wrote the script of L’Adversaire, by Nicole Garcia, and La Classe de neige, by Claude Miller.

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How did you decide to make a film based on your novel?
The idea came after my documentary Retour à Kotelnitch; strangely, I did not know what it was going to be about and discovered the subject gradually while the project was building up. We knew from the start that we would only find out what we were dealing with while editing. It took two years to shoot the whole documentary with little money and few people. In the beginning, it was a reporter's work but it became a documentary, which made me want to go on and make a fiction. I used not to even consider it, for directing a fiction seemed too hard for me. Kotelnitch came out unplanned; we adapted to the circumstances. I loved doing this and I like the result so I felt like trying it again, but from an opposite angle, that is, I felt like making a fiction.

How difficult is it to adapt a novel?
The difficult part is to manage to convey ideas without an intrusive narrator, to decide when something must be insisted upon, to imagine when the spectators will start understanding what is going on, to realise when something is not clear enough. We always wondered, 'What is the public going to understand?'. We worked in the dark in this respect. Sometimes, we thought, 'we should be more explicit', but sometimes we found 'more would be too much'. Many elements seemed essential to the logic of the film and the interest of the plot, but when we edited, we realised they could very well be suppressed to give the film an emotional, rather than a rational impact. I was literally obsessed all the time, when I wrote the film and when I shot it, with the need to make it clear what was going on and what each character had in mind as well as what he thought the other characters were feeling. It felt crucial to make this obvious, at least for the main characters, the couple whose relationship is the core of the plot. My work with the actors consisted in telling them, 'you are at this or that point, you think this, she thinks that'. I reckon we could not have worked otherwise.

How do you compare the novel and the film?
What is very different from the novel and makes the movie very interesting is that the film deals with the relationship of the couple, while in the novel, the wife is only the witness of what happens to her husband. For that matter, although both actors are not equally present in the film (for Vincent Lindon is always on the screen while Emmanuel Devos is only in two thirds of the scenes), they are equally important; the story is about both of them. In my view, this is the main difference between the novel and the film. The latter is obviously also about madness and about how deceiving reality is, but it mostly tells something about the couple. I don't know what it tells exactly but it does tell something. What can be touching or moving in this film is precisely what it says about couples, trust, distance, closeness. The other difference between the film and the book is that I wrote the latter when I was thirty, so the character was in his thirties too. In the film, he is in his forties and has a more settled life. There is another small but not negligible detail that changes: the book was written at a time when there were no cell phones, and the character clearly likes using the phone, so we had to adapt to the current reality by introducing cell phones into the plot of the film. However, since we really follow the character, we can hear and see only what he hears and sees, which means that we could not use the usual technique which consists in showing the person on the other side of the line. We had to find new ways of filming the phone-scenes in order to give each of them a different impact. At the same time, it was really stimulating to set such challenging limits, especially for a beginner like me, for it kept me from being messy. As a director, I found the story complex enough as such; the best thing to do was to tell it in the most simple and direct way and avoid fantastic elements to prefer face value. I did not want my film to look like a Lynch or a Cronenberg. The plot is pervert enough to justify a clear structure, the kind we find in Sautet's films, for instance. The film is very classical, there is no subjective camera, no dollies, and few shots.

The full text of this interview of Emmanuel Carrère was published in French in La Gazette des Scénaristes.