Pacifiction is one of the best, most compelling and creatively stimulating films released in the past year, and when you watch it, you just know that the brains behind it are every bit as fascinating. So it came as little surprise to have that confirmed, when we had the pleasure of sitting down with Spanish auteur Albert Serra in Paris earlier this year, to discuss and dissect his latest production.
He talks about the power of imagery, and his approach to his craft, and the process to his execution. He talks about the blurred lines in humanity & politics, and the staggering work from his leading man Benoit Magimel. He also talks about his next feature film, and what his fans can expect, and tells us why he believes there aren’t any filmmakers out there like him. “I am that extreme”, he tells us. Ain’t that the truth.
One of the things that really struck me as the imagery – was there quite a meticulous approach in terms of what each frame is going to look like, or is there a sense of spontaneity when you’re on location and in the editing suite?
I always like to make it a little bit dreamy, to make a reality that is not exactly the reality of life. You look at the film, it is never a real island, except in the scene with the waves when you see a lot of boards and people, and obviously in the night club, but already the characters are very well chosen, mostly iconic, as if you were in a Fassbinder film, but in the rest, there is never the presence of any real island, it is mostly a dreamy island. One of the key points when editing the film also, and when shooting, but especially when editing, is that any feeling of social, anything that felt like social content, it went out. If you see a real market, with real people, with a real road, with the vulgarity of normality, or something social, it went out.
So to me it had to be mostly a spectacle, and this was very important for me because it makes it a challenge for me as a filmmaker, and of course some things arrive later, such as the saturation of colours. We had the idea at the beginning of course, but we didn’t know how far we’d go with it. It was very saturated, and even with real colours we put some artificial colours on the sunset. More on this idea of making a film that was almost in a studio. But then at the same time, as the actors perform, in such a wild way, in such an organic way, the authenticity of what they do inside the frame of any shot, then the contrast is what I like. It was also in my previous films this idea, but here it is better. As a narrative, it makes you follow the film in a normal way, following a story, but then lots of things are artificial and the visuals are strange, and the actors are performing in a more rough way than in conventional ways with professional actors.
You can say that Magimel is more realistic than any Scorsese actors, or studio actors. So the quality of the performance goes beyond because it is more ambiguous, because when you see actors in a studio shooting with one camera, performing, developing or creating a character, everybody knows what they have to do, the script is very concrete, and there is one camera. But not on my film, there were three cameras, and craziness around. So it means that if there is something that grows up in this context, it grows up like a wild plant, it is stronger. The qualities are quite strange because you cannot believe what you are seeing. It happens to me with Magimel in two or three moments when editing the film of course. The two or three moments are still in the film, and I cannot believe what I am seeing. The way he performs, I cannot even believe how he does it. It is still a mystery for me – and I was there. It is not a creation, I do not know where that comes from, the creation, where he gets the energy doing it in such a precise way, and such an overwhelming way. But it is so precise that sometimes it is cold, like a machined way of working. It’s very strange for me.
I didn’t hate De Roller. Cinema can put people in boxes sometimes, telling you that who is a villain. In this instance, even though he is a flawed person, I felt pity at times for him as well. Was that intentional to get across?
I think it is closer to the ambiguity of the real world. To see a film explain how bad are bad people, or how good are the good people, we all know. How bad is Putin? We know. Maybe it’s more interesting to see a film that shows the qualities of Putin, you know? To go to Polynesia and see the victims of a nuclear test – we all know, they don’t put the bomb here in Paris or Bordeaux. So of course they are the victims there. But what is the point of saying what everybody knows? So I think this is something I have to avoid at all costs. My goal is to create images that are unknown. Atmosphere that is unknown. I don’t care which direction it goes, for me it is enough that they are unknown.
What is beautiful when you see a film is that you see a lot of things that you don’t understand, and the ambiguity of the main character, like, let’s take Tony Blair. You are from the UK, yes? So let’s use Tony Blair. Is he a bad person? Is he a good person? Was he on the service of rich people telling him what he had to do? Or was he the victim of the system? Or simply he had enough energy to impose his will? You don’t know. He doesn’t seem a bad guy, but then he left and he worked for the rich companies. You cannot think he is simply a bad guy, working for the devil. But then he goes to work for Gazprom immediately after. So does he like money? Why does he want to work for them? As ex-Prime Minister he has a huge charity and could live in a normal way.
So on a smaller scale, this character, also in the middle of this little action, but it is not so little since it is nuclear energy, it is not a little subject, because it is extremely expensive and important. The character itself, and the world he lives in, it represents more about the reality that we all live. You live in the UK, you had a new Prime Minister who was that woman who was not skilled at all? She didn’t have any of the qualities to be Prime Minister, she was properly useless.
Liz Truss. Yes she was.
You couldn’t imagine that you could’ve had something worse than the previous one, the blonde guy. But it exists. This film reflects a little bit of that. Because it is done without being scared, always on the edge of not being politically correct with some outrageous moments, but never crossing it, because the film is not a provocation so I never believe in that provocation, to give instead something interesting aesthetically, but it is on the edge of a lot of things. It is a brave film, but it is the way I work, in an anarchic way. It was delivered to Cannes two days before the press conference, they asked where the film was as there were two days left to go, and I said, well, okay. Because of this I couldn’t show the film to anybody before Cannes only editors and producers.
So what is the film in the end? The power of images, and what is different with language is ambiguity, the inner ambiguity of it. If I do a close-up of your face I can know you very well. But I will never know what you think, for sure. If you are Proust, maybe you get a sense, but 100%? No. For me what is good with images is that they show you what you don’t know. They are always pushing you, and showing you what you don’t know, not what you do know. Most of the films are done with the basis of what you know. But I think the real potential… you know to destroy this idea, in poetry for example, it took centuries to destroy the meaning and to go into the unknown part of language, when language really can explode, like a bomb in a way, that it really opens up language to the unknown. It took time. But images, it happens by nature.
For me it is the most beautiful thing to do, and to work with this part of the reality. To keep it alive. Not to kill this really precious part of the reality that we don’t know, the images, so I want to make this part alive. And I think if you fill it with a narrative film, it becomes hypnotic, because the film is a part of the narrative, so okay there is a plot, there are characters, and we follow the main character and we have the same information he has, we are like him, we don’t know anything else, we don’t have extra information as spectators. So we follow, and there’s a narrative. But working with this idea of images, and the artificial side of it like I said, the concept of social being zero, we’re in a dreamy world.
I love the fact that obviously the film is political…
Yes, of course!
But most political thrillers, they’re set in grey buildings, and boardrooms. This felt like a wonderful juxtaposition of politics in paradise.
That was a key point. It is why it isn’t set here [in Paris]. I simply didn’t have the energy at that time to make it interesting. I think it is difficult to make it interesting here, because we have seen it so many times. So this was really my idea from the beginning, that we’d go to an exotic place, a crazy place, and we’re talk a bit like we do in the world nowadays. We’ll touch on a lot of contemporary subjects, but it will be totally unpredictable, and impossible. Not so impossible because it is a colony, and colonies, all the tensions we have nowadays, they have it even bigger, historically they have inequality, and all this power and they are alienated. This idea, in colonies, is more visible. It is more tough. I think a colony is a good metaphor of the world we live in. London is a colony, you know, you have rich people there in the city centre, and they simply run the city and they don’t even care about you. It is what it is. You see big cars, and you meet all these people who are not even rich themselves, it was their father who was rich, so it’s like a colony, you cannot get rid of it, and it is extreme. This is my theory, that the whole world in the future will be a colony of the rich. There will not be states anymore, just a colony. Exactly the same kind of set-up, but in an ultra-modern way.
My final question, and I don’t usually ask this at the end as it can feel lazy, but in the case of asking you, your career is so fascinating and every project so different from the next, I have to know: what is next?
I am working on my next one, yes. I have quite a concrete idea, I started to write the script, but I write it very fast, but it was the week before Christmas and suddenly a lot of work came to me as a producer so I couldn’t follow up with it, but of course the set-up is quite clear. It will be, probably, 90% in English with maybe American or English stars, one maybe, or two. I don’t know yet. Again it will be about the contemporary world, in the worst possible sense. Pacifiction was about politics, but here we go into money. Money – where even politics are out. There is not politics. When you are in the heart of money, what is politics? This is the main idea, but as with all my films it can change a lot, it depends on casting.
For me, the film starts, well I write the script, I need to use it for finance and I try to make it as nice and good as possible, but the film starts when I am on the set, two or three days before the start of the shoot with the actors. I never do rehearsals with actors. Then I start to see the people because most of the actors I never know, like all the indigenous actors, they’d never acted in a film, we were casting in the area one or two weeks before we started the shoot. But when I have these people and I start to see their weaknesses and then strengths, as human beings and as actors, I feel something – then the film starts.
I think it is only then when there is something for me. It starts to be interesting. So at the moment, it is very difficult for me to say anything about my next film because it is that day, that moment, when I know more or less what we have. I don’t know where the film will go, because for the reason I want to keep myself innocent and let it flow. That day if you call me, I will say, listen, we’re going in this direction. I could say, it’s not about money now, it’s about whatever. It’s about sex. Sex is more important than money, I thought money was more important but no, now I see the people and I see the sexy men or women, the physical power and fascination you create, then maybe beauty becomes more important than money. I don’t know. Who cares. But what I mean is, it can change.
Well I can’t wait to see it, there aren’t many filmmakers like you.
I had 500 hours of rushes. With 1300 pages of transcripts of dialogue. 300 pages of notes from myself. So maybe you are right, in this case, I think that you are right. If you find somebody else, maybe there is a documentary filmmaker that follows extremely long processes with a lot of images that could work in a similar way. But in normal feature films, then no. I am that extreme. My idea of shooting with three cameras, personally I don’t know anybody else. I know Lars von Trier shoots like that, but the concept of always shooting everything with three cameras, all my career, in all my films, I don’t know anybody else personally. Maybe they exist, it is possible they exist.
Pacifiction is out now.
