“I felt the irrepressible need to go and tell this story”: six years after his last film, Daniel Auteuil is back behind the camera with “Le Fil”, in theaters Wednesday, a sober and effective trial film with thriller overtones.
“A trial film mixes so many other things about life that it’s fascinating. It’s often on the order of tragedy,” the actor said in an interview with AFP at the beginning of August.
His fifth production is a far cry from his adaptations of Marcel Pagnol (“The Well-Digger’s Daughter” in 2011, “Marius” and “Fanny” in 2013) or the play “Behind the Scenes” by Florian Zeller which became “Amoureux de ma femme” in 2018.
With “Le Fil”, which received a standing ovation in May at Cannes where it was presented out of competition, the actor-director embarked on a new adaptation, that of a true story taken from the collection of short stories “Au guet-apens: chroniques de la justice pénale ordinaire” by Maître Mô, alias Jean-Yves Moyart. This criminal lawyer, who died in 2021, was known for his blog “Petite chronique judiciaire, ordinaire et subjective”.
He plays a lawyer convinced of his client’s innocence, a father accused of having murdered his wife, played by Grégory Gadebois, facing a relentless attorney general played by Alice Belaïdi. He also plays opposite his eldest daughter Aurore Auteuil, who plays a supporting role.
It was his youngest daughter, Nelly Auteuil, who produced the film with Hugo Gélin, who introduced him to the work of a lawyer and made him want to slip into the director’s costume again.
– “An irrepressible need” –
Daniel Auteuil then began writing the screenplay with Steven Mitz. “I stayed with this story for a long time, until I made it my own and reinvented things. (…) I wanted to make cinema, not reportage,” he explains.
To prepare, he attended a closed-door trial. It was “a trial like the one in my film, that is to say, where there is no proof, where it is one person’s word against the other’s word.”
An episode that “upset” him. “Before attending this trial, I had an idea of staging but I had not been touched by the humanity that emerges from these places,” he explains.
“It’s terrifying, this place where dramas like this are played out. But these are dramas that are played out without theatricality,” he continues. “It’s something of great lucidity, great rigor, great coldness, and all that to arrive at what they call ‘intimate conviction’.”
– Far from Paris –
A rigor and a coldness illustrated by a very sober staging and interpretation in the heart of a wintry Camargue, rather than in the North where the story takes place.
“I know the South better than the North and I felt that I would be more credible filming places that I knew,” explains Daniel Auteuil, originally from Avignon.
Above all, he wanted “a story that takes place in the provinces”, far from Paris, for “a more direct proximity”.
“Here, it’s an ordinary trial, not publicized. Every day, the magistrates, the police, the people in the prison do their job like that. I wanted, without showing things, to make them felt”, like “the tension” that he himself felt during the trial he attended.
This new film makes him want to get back behind the camera… but not right away. “I have to let it mature, let it become an irrepressible need, let the subject transport me, because that’s what helps transport others,” he believes.
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