Interview: Michel Hazanavicius, film director

By Alistair Harkness
Published on Thursday 22 December 2011 00:00

A bold move to go back to the age before talkies has paid off for director Michel Hazanavicius, but some black-and-white lies were needed to get the project off the ground

“THE first person I had to convince was myself,” says Michel Hazanavicius. “So many people told me it was not doable that I ended up believing them.”

Hazanavicius is talking about his new film, The Artist, and the crippling doubt that set in when he began telling people about his idea to make a black-and-white silent film set in the 1920s. It was, after all, a very different kind of film to the French director’s previous box office successes, Bond-spoofing spy pastiches OSS 117: Cairo – Nest of Spies and its sequel Lost in Rio. “I had to really convince myself to take a chance and switch from fantasy to making a real project,” he says.

It wasn’t just himself he had to convince. Nobody wanted to make The Artist in the beginning, and Hazanavicius had to adopt a cunning strategy to persuade his backers.

“I lied,” he says with a laugh. “I said to them that it could be a prestige movie and that we could have a good performance in festivals. Maybe it won’t be a big success in France, but we can sell the movie in other countries. So maybe we’ll have a little audience here, a little audience there, and at the end we could perhaps not lose too much money. But I had no idea if I was telling the truth.”

As it happens, he was. Not only did The Artist debut to great acclaim at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (star Jean Dujardin won the Best Actor prize and the film picked up a nomination for the Palme d’Or), it went on to earn back its $12 million (about £8m) production budget in France alone. It then scooped numerous audience awards at film festivals around the world.

True, mainstream audiences seem to be taking a while to warm to it in the US, but since opening there last month, it has become a critical smash, picking up several prominent accolades and awards nominations, including six for the forthcoming Golden Globes. Needless to say, Oscar speculators are already predicting a significant showing at the Academy Awards when the nominations are announced on 24 January.

“I don’t know what to think about that because it’s not really concrete,” says Hazanavicius of the Oscar buzz. “But it is a wonderful story that the movie has come so far.”

Watch the film and it’s not that difficult to see why it seems to be winning favour with festival-goers and critics. Set in a lovingly recreated Hollywood, circa 1927, and revolving around a dashing, Douglas Fairbanks-esque silent movie star called George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) who is having to confront his own obsolescence with the coming of sound, it is, like Martin Scorsese’s recent Hugo, a loving tribute to the pioneering magic of the early days of cinema.

While The Artist is fully aware of the irony of using modern techniques to evoke a past era of film-making, it is nevertheless forward-thinking enough to explore the need to embrace the future as well as revel in history. In other words, it is both nostalgic and modern; comfortingly familiar yet oddly unique, something Hazanavicius, for one, thinks works in its favour: “I do think that just as 3D is a new experience for a lot of people, watching a silent movie is a new experience for a lot of audiences as well, because it doesn’t work in the same way.” It was actually this notion that first hooked Hazanavicius on the idea of making a silent film. Never a connoisseur of the format – he’d watched some Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies as a kid, but that was about the extent of his interest – he first got into it properly about 12 years ago after discovering the classic melodramas of the 1920s. Films such as FW Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and City Girl (1930), the films of Frank Borzage (7th Heaven, Lucky Star) and King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) fascinated him because of the way they worked on the audience.

“They’re telling a story with people in black-and-white who speak but you can’t hear them. In spite of that, they work; people are very drawn in by the story and the characters. It’s a wonderful format because of that. The audience feels the lack of sound, and because of that, they create all the sound environments themselves with their own imagination. That makes them very close to it.”

In order to replicate that experience for a modern audience, Hazanavicius knew he had to come up with a story that justified the use of the format – which is why he decided to focus on a silent actor whose fall from grace with the advent of talkies coincides with the rise of a starlet called Peppy Miller (played by Hazanavicius’s wife, the Brazilian actress Bérénice Bejo). “It fits with the subject,” says Hazanavicius, “so it makes it easier to watch.”

That was important too, because contemporary audiences really don’t have much frame of reference when it comes to watching silent films. The rapid demise of the silent era brought on by advent of synchronised sound in The Jazz Singer (1927) was so complete that it’s hard to comprehend just how sophisticated the films made at the tail-end of era really were in their ability to convey their stories without the aid of dialogue.

“When people say, ‘We lost something with the arrival of the talkies,’ that’s what they are talking about. First of all, we lost the utopia of a universal language, but we also lost something that was specifically about cinema. Silent movies are really the purest form of cinema. It’s what cinema is really all about and it belongs to no other art form. That’s what we lost, and I had to rediscover that form of expression during the writing. In a way it was like pre-directing: you have to create [in script form] the images that will tell the story.”

The arrival of The Artist, at the same time as Hugo, seems to have kickstarted a revival of interest in silent cinema, but its legacy is actually plain to see in modern movies, particularly in animated films such as Sylvain Chomet’s Belleville Rendezvous and The Illusionist, and the first half of Pixar’s WALL-E.

“WALL-E, for sure,” concurs Hazanavicius. “There’s a lot of sound design, but there’s no dialogue for the first 45 minutes.” He reckons the influence is just as prominent in action films. “If you look at a lot of action movies, there are long sequences with almost no dialogue. The opening of Rio Bravo for instance, it’s maybe six or eight minutes with no dialogue and it’s one of the greatest opening sequences of all time.”

What has been the most eye-opening aspect for Hazanavicius in all of this, however, has been realising that he’s become the envy of the film-making establishment.

“I’ve been going to a lot of festivals and I’ve met a lot of great directors – I mean, really great ones – and they’ve almost all said to me they were jealous. It is a fantasy of a lot of directors to make a silent film and it’s easy to understand why: it’s really the purest way for a director to tell a story.”

• The Artist is in cinemas from Friday 30 December

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