Audrey Diwan talks about the “hell” of “Bac Nord”, in the midst of her separation from director Cédric Jimenez

CINEMA – Angry. When the film was released North Bac Audrey Diwan May 28, 2020 is credited as screenwriter alongside her ex-spouse, director Cédric Jimenez. Four years later, the one who is also a director cannot digest the “shift in meaning” between her initial script and the result of the film and recounts the difficulties encountered during writing, while she was in the middle of a separation from her partner.

More than a month after the release of his second film, Emmanuelle, the former journalist confided in a long interview for the magazine Tsunami. She talks about her new role as director, but especially her previous career as a screenwriter started on television, then in the films of her companion at the time, Cédric Jimenez. On this subject, she declares having been “very angry” seeing North Bac.

Audrey Diwan reveals that she did not want to write this film at first, since she was working on The Event (2021), Golden Lion at the 78th Venice Film Festival. But the director was quick to ask him for help on the script. After “a big discussion about what the police represent in our society”she admits to being uncomfortable with this subject.

After careful consideration, and reading The monster factory by Cédric Pujol, the screenwriter then decides to propose a new angle: “ trying to understand how those we designate as being “the best cops in France” have become anti-police”she presents to Cédric Jimenez, who accepts the idea.

The couple then wrote the film together, but their personal problems disrupted the writing of the script. “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,” reveals Audrey Diwan. “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 concludes.

She decides not to complete the writing, despite the contract. “There, we could no longer work together, it was in no one's interest to force us both to finish the work,” she concedes. The screenwriter then thinks she has given “a fairly precise road map” on the direction of the film, but she notices, from a distance, that the scenario is evolving and that it focuses on “a form of efficiency, of logic of action”.

A scene rewritten to make a “shortcut”

Upon its release, the film sparked numerous controversies over its representation of the neighborhood's residents and its political orientation. Fiachra Gibbons, an Irish journalist for AFP, notably estimated that the film could encourage Marine Le Pen to vote, in the middle of the presidential campaign. “The journalist criticizes the director for making the inhabitants of the city “savages” – it seems to me that is his term. In any case, he rightly criticizes a terrible amalgamation between drug traffickers and the inhabitants of the cities. explains the screenwriter.

To illustrate the difference with its basic scenario, she returns to a scene in particular, the one where a teenager breaks a car before being taken away by the police, whom he insults before singing with them.

Audrey Diwan explains that she wrote the original scene based on an anecdote from a local resident who sometimes called the BAC to prevent children from falling into the hands of drug traffickers. “So the BAC North team was tasked with recovering a young boy who was hanging out in a multipurpose room, with narcotics indeed, but this kid was just playing table football! […] And that's why he insults them in the car! »

The screenwriter bitterly regrets this change, where the “rewriting yields to shortcuts and the logic of action to the detriment of meaning “. She gives to Tsunami a second example where we can think that the inhabitants are “on the side of the narcos”.

“It makes me sick” she becomes sad, regretting that the film has encroached on the promotion of her first feature film, The Event. “Now time has passed, so I feel I have the right to speak this truth,” assumes the screenwriter who says to herself “totally disagree” with the final rendering. The film will in any case have allowed the director to “think about the place of the screenwriter and his responsibility or his adequacy with the final film”.

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