The 40th Santa Barbara Film Festival held their International Writers Panel on Sunday, February 9. Directors Gints Zilbalodis (“Flow”), Walter Salles (“I’m Still Here”), Mohammad Rasoulof (“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”), and Jacques Audiard (“Emilia Pérez”) joined festival Director Roger Durling for a wide ranging Q&A at the Arlington Theater.
Coming off a contentious last couple weeks for his film’s awards campaign, Audiard had a more light-hearted opportunity to reflect on his Best Picture nominee. Durling highlighted the director’s history with portraying music onscreen throughout his career. Audiard responded by noting how his “natural masochism” influences him to make films in languages he doesn’t speak or understand.
“It’s incredible because the only memory I actually have of really articulating music and opera in my work was for my second feature, ‘A Self-Made Hero,’” Audiard said. “At that time, I had thought of making a little opera based on that film with the composer. Then there was an evolution, and you know, I really have to say, I’m such an idiot when I make films. Then I made a film that was entirely about music, ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped,’ with this additional thing that two characters would talk to each other without understanding each other.”
“And from that point on, I started again making films in languages that I don’t speak and don’t understand,” he continued. “One could attribute that to my natural masochism. But actually what started to attract me was the musicality of languages on set; I started to lose interest in the actual meaning and become drawn to the music and the song of the dialogue.”
As the conversation continued, Audiard talked about some of his most pressing challenges with the film, including depth of film — something the director stated that he only learned about 20 years ago working on “A Prophet.” “‘A Prophet’ really taught me a lot. It may seem kind of dumb to have learned what depth of field really meant around the age of 50, but that’s what ‘A Prophet’ did for me and what I understood.”
“In ‘Emilia Pérez’ I was shooting on a soundstage and I didn’t have a lot of depth. We didn’t even have as much as this room here. What I quickly understood is that I was going to have to use the choreography and the bodies to deal with that question of depth of field. The entire choreography served as the background and allowed me, therefore, to not have to fight against the set,” he said.
His response came right off the heels of Rasoulof talking about the challenges he experienced while making his film, including being imprisoned and dealing with catastrophic censorship. “My answers are very prosaic,” Audiard said.
“I would have loved to talk about metaphor and self-censorship. I’m really kind of ashamed to talk about my first-world, rich guy problems when Mohammad here has just talked about his issue being how much light for a square foot, what he had to deal with as a surface, you know, whereas I’m here like, ‘Our depth was just, you know, not quite this theater.’ We’re really in different worlds and I apologize to you, Mohammad.”
While making “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Rasoulof pat himself on the back every day of filming. He never thought he would finish the project, so every day of successful shooting was a reason to celebrate.
“I had to tell a story with a lot of limitations,” Rasoulof explained. “And when I reached [a] point in the story, I just hit myself in the head, and I thought, ‘What am I going to do with the critics? They’re going to be very angry at me. They’re going to think that I don’t know cinema. They’re going to think that I don’t know genre, and that I’m going in and out between the two genres.’”
He continued, “Then I said to myself, ‘You have been paying the price for your social and political freedom. You have been going to jail, you have been making so many devotions to that. But then what about your artistic freedom?’ That’s the point I thought I need to do what I want to do. And there was another factor involved, and that was the fact that I never thought I would actually finish the film. Every day we went to shoot, I would pat myself on the shoulder and I would tell myself, ‘Just go and enjoy it, don’t think about finishing.’”
