Director (But you are crazy, The Event et Emmanuelle) but also a distinguished and prolific screenwriter (Love phew, La French, Ami-ami, Love and Forests, North Bac, Barbès, Little Algeria), Audrey Diwan also knows how to demonstrate great intelligence in her speeches in the media. She recently gave a blunt interview to the magazine Tsunamiin which she returns to the “misunderstanding” what is his latest film, Emmanuellewhich she recently directed, but also on the controversy North Bacfrom which she announces for the first time that she is dissociating herself. A rare and valuable interview in an industry often stiffened by meticulous junkets and very controlled interviews, the essentials of which we summarize here.
His latest feature film, free rereading of the novel Emmanuellewas received with very mixed enthusiasm, for which she takes responsibility, admitting that the reading she proposed was “effectively impossible”. “Apart from seventeen people who are in my head and perceive the world exactly as I do, no one has done this reading of the film… Perhaps, for me to be audible, it should not have been to call Emmanuelle to start”concedes with great honesty Audrey Diwan in the columns of Tsunami.
She also puts her finger on the main fault of the film in our opinion, an overintellectualization of its subject, which has become totally opaque for the spectators. “I think I talked about it better than I showed, and that’s another trap. I bear responsibility for that. Moreover, we encountered signs of market resistance which should have alerted us. Many of our interlocutors told us that they did not understand the project. I believe in the virtue of error. I would have learned the hard way.”
In this same interview, Audrey Diwan also speaks for the first time on North Bacwhich she wrote with Cédric Jimenez, director of the film but also her former companion in the city, who gave birth in painful conditions.
“I didn't want to write this film, I wasn't supposed to in the first place, Cédric [Jimenez, ndlr] had to write it alone while I worked on The Event. At the time, we were together. […] At the end of the summer, he told me that he didn't really like the film and that it would be better if I accompanied him. We had a big discussion about what the police represent in our society. I tell him I'm not comfortable with the subject. […] We wrote the film together, it went very badly because as a couple, we no longer agreed on much and we separated during the writing. I'm finishing the first version, I think I'm still being asked to move on to the next version, but we're in the middle of a separation. It’s hell.”
She also returns to the controversy sparked by the film at the Cannes Film Festival, when, during the press conference, Fiachra Gibbons, an Irish journalist employed by the AFP, dared to denounce the caricatured representation of the suburbs in the film. “We are in an election year. I saw this with the eye of an outsider and I said to myself: maybe I will vote for Le Pen after that. The people of the cities are seen as beasts”he said to the film crew, hilariously.
To illustrate a more global questioning on the place of the screenwriter, his responsibility or his adequacy with the final film, Audrey Diwan returns to her initial vision of North Bac and his total disagreement with his final version. “I was very angry because of the shift in meaning between what I had proposed and the film I saw”she confesses.
“The controversy started from this scene where we see a kid break a car, be taken away by the cops and thrown into a police vehicle. […] The journalist rightly criticizes a terrible amalgamation between drug traffickers and residents of the cities. […] In the final version, the children of the city are portrayed as delinquents. But obviously, we should have given time to this story, telling the mother, then the hunt, the table football, the child's reaction… Here for me, the rewriting gives way to the shortcut and the logic of the action , to the detriment of meaning.”
The entirety of this long interview, which also addresses the complexity of the cinema economy, can be found on the website of Tsunami.
