Initially, Maxime Chattam wanted to be an actor. It was a trip to Thailand that changed the direction of the compass. The jungle discovery gave birth to a story written in a small notebook which became the daily diary of this journey and therefore, the first link with this desire to write. His stories are invitations to discover and elucidate deaths, murders and assassinations. End of 2024, after Lux in 2023, he publishes Prime Time published by Albin Michel. The TV set of the 8 p.m. news will become the nerve center of a hostage-taking orchestrated and masterfully carried out by a certain Kratos. Everything is realistic and for good reason, his wife Justine Bollaert helped him a lot in writing the details, the places, the behind the scenes, the jobs, with the gestures and the personalities of the industry. He even went to watch the 8 p.m. news where the team welcomed him.
franceinfo: In Prime Timethe reader is invited to discover the backstage of a newspaper and to experience this event as if they were there. It's a page-turner with a hostage-taking, that of the reader, which you manage to infuse throughout this work. Sometimes it goes beyond reason to keep us in suspense like this!
Maxime Chattam : If it works, I'm happy! Yes, this is the principle of the thriller which is above all a mechanism serving suspense. It’s work on rhythm. I have a story in mind, I have characters, I want to tell it all with twists and turns, a final revelation. Now, I have to manage to distill everything correctly and take the reader on a pace that is satisfactory for my narration and for reading too.
How do you go about finding this inspiration? Do you draw these characters at any given moment to have them in front of you? Have you met them?
Inspiration for the characters comes as the writing progresses. I start, I have a plot, I have an idea for the main characters and then as I write, they reveal themselves. Myself, when I lean beyond the imagination that I can have, I don't see much, but I have to pull threads for it to come. Writing is about pulling threads. Each sentence is a thread that we pull. The characters are created this way. I draw them with notes. I take a lot of notes on them and sometimes I go back a little, change a sentence to readjust because the psychology of the human being is lace. And sometimes I realize that for him to have a coherent reaction later, there is perhaps a character trait that must emerge before, which was not consistent with what I did. I go back, I adjust all that and then it creates characters that I hope are credible.
When we talk about reading, all people who like to read say that the power of writing is that it takes us very far. Was it your travels that made you want to write?
“It was traveling that opened me to the world.”
Maxime Chattamat franceinfo
I traveled early. Until the age of 11.12 I didn't really travel and then I went to the United States and Thailand. And these trips allowed me to blossom, to not just be self-centered on the little boy that I was, to realize that there is a gigantic world around me, with unsuspected richness. At 12 years old, I celebrated Christmas in the Akha tribe, in the north of Thailand, which was not yet a tourist country and for whom Christmas did not mean anything, did not exist. My grandmother took me there on purpose and one morning she said to me: “Merry Christmas“, she kissed me and gave me a little something just saying “it's a Christmas present“It was a small object, but it was symbolic. The idea was precisely to say: “look here Christmas, it doesn't mean anything and yet it's going to be a great day to open up to something different“. Often the difference is first of all enriching oneself, it is Saint-Ex, but beyond that, it is also discovering the appetite for the curiosity of the other. And in this curiosity , obviously, there is a desire for exchanges and a desire to build something. When we have imagination, we create stories and sometimes books.
This grandmother was at the heart of the development of your imagination, of this desire to take charge of your life. And we find in this work, this aspect “take control of your destiny“.
I'll tell you something. Until very recently, I was convinced that I was hiding and that in my books it was only fiction and that I was one of those authors who never reveals themselves in their books. It took me being 48 years old and 30 books to realize that in reality, it is heresy to believe that. When we write, we give so much of ourselves that we open up. My books are guided by what I want to tell, the story that seems important to me, but also necessarily, because I am a human being, by what I go through and what I am.
The more we move forward in time, the more we realize that you like to mix genres and offer something else. Is it a big challenge?
“The storyteller's job is to feel that we have something to tell and pull out this ball to see what we can come up with while trying to give it meaning. It's not just about rolling out stories. chapters to please or to scare.”
Maxime Chattamat franceinfo
It's not even a challenge, it's a need. Typically, it's been some time since I started writing Luxthat I realized that I no longer wanted to go into a form of darkness, to explore the worst in human beings. And I asked myself why I no longer wanted to do it when I had done it for 25 years and had even studied criminology for it. Well, it's because I think I covered the issues that were important to me and what I had to say on the subject. Maybe one day I would have new ideas, that I would want to go back there, mix who I am, me, in the service of a story.
