Interview: Jacques Audiard - 'Cinema for me only has meaning when it has a relationship with what I see outside on the street'

Published on Tuesday 12 January 2010 18:31

Forget Avatar, A Prophet, the tale of a young Arab who rises through the criminal ranks while in prison, is exactly the sort of artistically audacious genre film cinema needs right now. Alistair Harkness talks to director Jacques Audiard ahead of the film's British release

• Tahar Rahim, the 29-year-old newcomer who plays Malik in A Prophet

WHILE Hollywood and the rest of the world falls over itself to praise James Cameron's Avatar as the future of cinema, despairing moviegoers can take comfort from the fact that French filmmaker Jacques Audiard's appropriately named A Prophet is quietly making a case for the need to usher in a new era of serious, grown-up cinematic entertainment.

Since winning the Grand Prix at last year's Cannes Film Festival, this hard-hitting and breathlessly exciting prison drama has become a box-office success in its native France, picked up the inaugural Best Film prize at last October's London Film Festival, and is currently up for just about every foreign language film of the year award going. Indeed the only obstacle in its path to world domination will be if it wins the credibility-trashing Oscar it will undoubtedly be nominated for this coming March (it's France's official entry this year).

The story of Malik, a young illiterate Arab in jail who rises up through the Corsican-dominated criminal ranks after being corralled into carrying out a hit for them within the prison walls, it's exactly the sort of daring, artistically audacious genre film cinema needs right now, something that takes familiar cinematic tropes and transforms them into something new, original and reflective of a changing world.

That's something 57-year-old Audiard – the ultra hip writer/director of such critically adored crime films as Read My Lips and The Beat that My Heart Skipped (both international arthouse hits) – deliberately set out to achieve, although as the chrome-domed, immaculately tailored filmmaker tells it via his translator, serendipity also played its part in his decision to make it.

"It was actually a script that a producer friend of mine was developing," says Audiard, sitting in a London hotel ahead of the film's British premiere, his signature Trilby and black-rimmed glasses perched on the table in front of him. "It had been written by (Mesrine screenwriter) Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit, and they contacted me just to read it, without any particular commitment, but when I saw the result I found it really fascinating."

It was the opportunity to present a new type of character that appealed most to Audiard. Having just made The Beat that My Heart Skipped with Romain Duris (and having worked with movie stars Vincent Cassel and Mathieu Kassovitz in his previous films), he was keen not only to put new faces on screen, but also change the types of faces usually seen in leading roles in French cinema.

With Arabs of North African descent a prominent but cinematically ignored community within France, the fact that this story offered the opportunity to make a pure genre film in which the audience is asked to identify with and root for an Arabic protagonist at a time when such characters only feature in social-issue films or movies about terrorism was important to Audiard. As he says: "Cinema for me only has meaning when it has a relationship with what I see outside on the street."

In this respect he had a suitably random first encounter with Tahar Rahim, the 29-year-old newcomer who plays Malik. "I met him in the back of a car," chuckles Audiard.

"I went to see a friend who was making a TV series called La Commune and when we got into the production car, he was in there, too. When I saw him I had this instant feeling of love at first sight: I knew he'd be perfect. The only problem with this kind of thing is that you think it's too good to be true, so I felt I had to see about 40 other actors first to convince myself I'd already met the right person."

The fact that Rahim was unknown was important, too, because Malik is not a standard criminal archetype. He's a new type of gangster: quiet, observant, highly adaptable, he's someone who has fallen through cracks and found himself adrift in a terrifying world that may require him to do some horrendous things to survive but who uses his environment to educate and better himself in ways that would never have been possible on the outside. "He's a young man who has no history, yet will write one before our very eyes," says Audiard. "That's why we knew it couldn't be a name actor because it's a story of a rise to power, a rise to visibility."

Of course, as with all modern crime epics, the film has been compared to The Godfather. It's a comparison that may have some validity in the sense that, thanks to Rahim's blistering performance, doors might open for Arabic actors in much the same way that they did for Italian-American actors after The Godfather's success, but Audiard scoffs at any reductive attempts to hype Rahim as the Arab Al Pacino. He's pretty dismissive of any attempts to talk about the film in terms of the social issues it raises, too. When A Prophet opened in France, for instance, it sparked a debate about prisons, with many praising its realism as an indictment of a corrupt and broken system.

"You have to remember it's a work of fiction," he says, rolling his eyes. "When people tell me it's so realistic, I always ask: 'How much time have you spent in prison?' The kind of rotten corruption the film shows would never be as visible in a real prison. The set is false; we built it in an empty factory in the suburbs of Paris. That's the magic of cinema."

That Audiard should want to toast the power of cinema is hardly surprising. The son of veteran screenwriter Michel Audiard, he grew up consuming movies and got his start in the industry working as an assistant editor for Roman Polanski. With just five films under his belt, he's managed to create a distinctive body of work that showcases a remarkable ability to create intensely exciting genre films that are very cinematic yet pulsate with a kind of documentary realism that audiences willingly accept as authentic. A Prophet is his most ambitious, but also his most powerful and directly affecting film to date, something he puts down to an important lesson he learned while making it.

Having hired a lot of ex-convicts to work as extras for the sake of authenticity, he was distraught to realise during the first week of shooting that the film wasn't really working. "It was very wooden, because I was working how I always work: I was rehearsing with my actors, then, once that was right I'd bring in the technical crew and discuss angles and shots and then I'd sort out the background and the extras.

"But I realised I had to do the opposite here: I had to do the background first and get all the extras in place. Once that was set up I could see it see it starting to work. It was as if I'd been given proof of what cinema really is. You need life to be there first and then put the rest on top of it."

If only the rest of the industry would unplug from the artificial world of Avatar long enough to realise this.