Not adapted so much as vertiginously extrapolated from a Henry James novella, Bertrand Bonello’s audacious “The Beast” is a hypnotic and destabilizing vision of a past, present, and future in which two star-crossed lovers struggle to connect in the face of their own fears, as the engulfing threat of unknown catastrophes—both individual and collective—subjugates their tremulous, ever-fluctuating romance to a state of perpetual dread.
In James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” an 80-page short story from 1903, a man spends his life alone, paralyzed by the conviction that something terrible awaits him, a beast certain to pounce at any moment, only to realize too late that the beast was his own fear. Cross-cutting between three time periods, Bonello’s vividly unsettling film (now in theaters) transposes Jamesian themes to the realm of genre pastiche, threading together period drama with suspense thriller, metaphysical horror, and insidiously blanched sci-fi futurism to weave a temporally boundless tapestry of desire, fear, and disquiet—of humanity at its most passionate and alive.
In each of its settings—belle-epoque Paris, on the eve of its great 1910 flood; Los Angeles, in 2014; and Paris in 2044, in an aseptic dystopia ruled by artificial intelligence—two characters recur, souls fated (or doomed) to circle one another in successive lifetimes. In 1910, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is a celebrated pianist who confides in her handsome suitor, Louis (George MacKay, in a role originally intended for the late Gaspard Ulliel), the sense of impending doom that’s been with her all her life, which Louis claims he shares. In 2014, Gabrielle is an actress housesitting in Los Angeles, where Louis—an angry incel whose hateful, self-aggrandizing video rants are lifted verbatim from the chilling manifestos uploaded by the American spree killer Elliott Rodger before his rampage in Isla Vista—begins to stalk her. And in 2044, Gabrielle contemplates a new procedure to “purify” her DNA and erase her emotions, a prospect that fills her and a chance acquaintance, Louis, with a profound terror.
In each setting, Bonello unearths what he describes as a “history of feelings,” depicting how people can express, repress, and suppress their emotions, as well as how the social, political, spiritual, and technological shifts that overwhelm and entrap his characters can also work to drive out their humanity. This is a frequent preoccupation for Bonello, a French director whose past films—the opiated “House of Tolerance,” set in a bordello in fin-de-siècle Paris; decadent biopic “Saint Laurent,” starring Ulliel as the fashion designer; “Nocturama,” a dreamlike vision of young radicals in Paris who retreat to a shopping mall after committing a terrorist attack, only to be ideologically undone by its consumerist excess; “Zombi Child,” in which the ghost of colonialism rears its head at a modern-day French boarding school; and “Coma,” a surreal descent into the dreams and reality of a teenager locked in her bedroom—have manipulated time and space to reflect the relative freedom or confinement of characters within the larger, unknowable cross-currents of cultural context and histories.
Speaking with RogerEbert.com over Zoom from the Criterion offices in midtown New York, Bonello discussed the uncanny distortions of self that recur in his work, operating in three different time periods, and the timeless allure of Léa Seydoux.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
The last time we spoke, at the 2019 New York Film Festival, was for an interview about “Zombi Child” and its place within your body of work. You described the film as embodying the “cinema of fear,” both formally and narratively, in how it allowed you to express your own anxieties and fears of the world. The two films you’ve made since, “Coma” and “The Beast,” belong to the cinema of fear as well, so I’m curious how your perception of that concept has evolved over the past few years.
In a way, they do belong to the cinema of fear. They’re not proper genre movies, but they include genre elements that allow me to talk about my fears but also express political thoughts. For example, “The Beast” is the first time I’ve used science fiction and set something in the future, but I realized that, when you invent and create concepts of the future, it’s also a way of talking about your fear of the present.
I had this concept that, in the future, humanity has f—ed everything up, and AI took power and solved everything, and the price has been expensive to pay. It’s the future you see. All my fears of relationships are in there as well. Of course, that can be the fear we all know, of everything happening around us. We don’t know where it’s going to stop or where it’s going to drive us. But it’s also more about personal fears. How do you belong to this world? How do you navigate the relationship between technology and humanity, something that’s been very strong across the last 20 years but is now stronger than ever? God knows what’s going to happen in the future, about that.
What I said about the cinema of fear in 2019, I think of it more every day. “Coma” is a nightmare movie, my nightmare seen through the eyes of an 18-year-old girl. She’s the future of the world, and that’s the subject of “Coma.” I know these are both dark movies, but I tried to make them in a sexy way, with visual ideas and melodrama, both intimate and spectacular scenes. But, of course, beneath all of that is my terror of today.
“The Beast” was twice delayed, once by the death of Gaspard Ulliel shortly before production was set to begin, then again by a year due to scheduling conflicts with Léa Seydoux. In the interim, your producer suggested you make a short and you instead made “Coma,” a feature, with a short’s budget. Though these projects are distinct, they both reflect on fear and love, life and death, real and unreal, and other such juxtapositions. What connections do you see between them, in hindsight?
There are quite a few, in fact. They’re first of all going from one world to another, and mixing different types of images, including the “nice” images of cinema and something dirtier, coming from the Internet. How you can make a YouTube extract become part of cinema links the two. Both films are in between life and death, which I call in limbo. And limbo is a fascinating space, one that has fascinated people before me in painting and writing and a little less in movies, but still there as well.
With more digital, multimedia means of film production made accessible by the Internet, it feels like filmmakers like yourself are discovering new ways to convey that liminal space. Exploring connections between digital and physical realms, in the context of films that continually shift form, evokes a kind of negative space that surrounds the characters and impacts the audience as well. To what degree do you see yourself as exploring that digital frontier in your cinema?
There’s a very long scene in “Coma,” with young girls in a Zoom call. That’s our daily life now, on Zoom. We live inside it. How can you use this and make it become a movie scene, a movie image? In fact, a Zoom call is like a sequence shot with six cameras. And if you think this way, you think differently, and you can write it. Some people say that it’s improvisation. It’s not improvisation. It’s very precise in terms of dialogue and mise-en-scène, and it’s a sequence shot with six cameras. It’s at once the same thing, and it’s very different. It depends how you talk about it. And it’s the same with many scenes in “The Beast.”
You’re known for manipulating time in your films. “The Beast” crosscuts between three time periods—1910, 2014, and 2044–but moves in accordance with emotional connections or discursive links more than any linear chronology. The film’s structure feels expansive, as if it’s rippling outward from an epicenter that exists outside of all the periods, outside of time. How did you want to work with time in this film?
It started with “House of Tolerance,” released in the U.S. as “House of Pleasures.” I was playing with time and distorting it, to use it in such a way that I could quit reality without quitting reality. Time and space are the main tools of direction, and of mise-en-scène, and I used time across “Saint Laurent” and “Nocturama” as well. Here, in “The Beast,” I decided to make this the subject of the film: distorting time and exploring how you can use time in a narrative way. It’s very obvious in this film. In the others, it’s more insidious.
Time is an amazing tool. It’s endless. In a way, losing one’s sense of time is losing one’s mind. And in “House of Tolerance,” at any one moment you don’t know if it’s one moment or one year. You lose the sense of time, and the characters lose their minds. We say “The Beast” takes place over 120 years, but it could be a thousand years or five minutes… When they meet at the party in 1910, the first sentence one of them says is, “We have met before. Do you remember?” “Yes, five years ago.” “No, seven years ago.” They’ve already missed each other, in a way.
Other distortions in your cinema are existential, such as your motif of actors seeing themselves reflected in these simulacra of humanity: shop mannequins in “Nocturama,” masks in “House of Tolerance,” inanimate dolls across “Cindy: The Doll Is Mine,” “The Beast,” and “Coma.”
I know, I do use them a lot… It’s filming a face whose expression you don’t know, which is both mysterious and scary. If you look at a doll’s face or see someone wearing a mask, it’s about what’s behind that. For example, one of my favorite scenes in “The Beast” is when Léa Seydoux is in the salon de thé and [impersonating] the doll; her face just stops moving. For a couple of seconds, you say, “Wow, she’s very beautiful.” And after another five seconds, you say, “She’s f—ing freaky.” I really like this because you do not know what she is thinking. I love this sensation.
And the dialogue in that scene directly addresses the peculiarity of sculpting emotion onto a mold. On some level, we recognize this uncannily “neutral” face, but it lacks emotion and humanity. Gabrielle is haunted by a premonition of catastrophe, and the dolls recur—including in the 2044 section, where a “doll” robot companion is played by Guslagie Malanda—in a way that feels linked to this premonition, as well as to the film’s overriding themes of fear and love.
It really comes from the Henry James novella. This is the argument of Henry James that I took. What’s great about the idea of premonition, of a sign that precedes something, is that you don’t know what the beast is. You don’t see it, and it’s not an actual beast, so you can put a lot of fears into the word “beast,” just as the characters can put a lot of fears into the word “catastrophe.” Something is going to happen. It’s an amazing argument from Henry James, that something can happen and so everyone is in fear, like animals, looking at what’s going to happen. And that makes you very alive. And, of course, the ending is sad because the beast is the fear of love. And when they realize this, it's too late. But that's the essence of a melodrama: it's too late. The idea that we might wait for something to happen until it’s too late is very tragic.
When I was a little lost in my story, I always went back to the novella. Even though it's short, and even after I took its arguments, everything is in it. Everything. When I was working on the 2014 section, and the fear of love in this period, I went back to the novella: the fear of love, and the beast, what would that be in 2014? And I was thinking about the loneliness of this period. She’s connected to a computer, and he with the iPhone, but there is loneliness. In 2014, the fear of love made me think about incels. But I always came back to the novel, even if I didn’t take much of it. What I took was the argument that something is going to happen. It’s the best argument possible: everything can happen, so everything is possible in the mind of the audience and the characters.
Two of the most harrowing scenes in “The Beast” come with the Great Flood of 1910 in Paris, when Gabrielle and Louis are caught in a fire at the doll factory. You see dolls’ faces melting in the flames, and you follow their attempt to escape underwater. Tell me about filming those sequences.
These were, of course, two of the most challenging scenes to make, technically. I wanted to do everything on the set; there is no CGI. For the first time in my life, I did storyboard, because it had to be very precise. This is not a $30 million film: it’s a $7.5 million film. We had two days with the fire, and two days underwater, so we had to be very precise. Of course, it’s slow. If you do a shot with a fire, then you have to open everything up for five minutes, because otherwise it’s too toxic. And when you shoot underwater, it's slow, because it’s hard to talk to your actors. They don’t hear you; they don’t see you.
These types of considerations made it complicated. Though it was challenging, there’s nothing more beautiful than fire to shoot, as it’s so visual, and the underwater sequence was also tough, but we were happy, very quickly, with the sensation and the visual appearance of it. So, we had a location and just set fire to it. That was it. And then for the underwater sequence, we built a location that we dove into, like a pool.
“The Beast” begins by depicting Léa Seydoux’s Gabrielle in front of a green screen, taking direction from you, and cowering from an imaginary threat. You expose the artifice of filmmaking so early, in connecting it to that preoccupation with our fear of something that’s not actually there. Was this always your opening scene?
That was the first thing I wrote. When I started to write the film, I wrote this prologue, and I knew that it would stay there and make it through the final edit. There are many reasons for this. One of them is for the audience, so that everyone watching can make the connection between a green screen and virtuality. If you enter the film in 1910, it looks like a period film. If you go before that with a green screen, the audience understands that it’s going to be weirder than that, that everything will not be real, and so on. I wanted that to be clear.
Secondly, I have for three minutes Léa Seydoux alone in this green ocean, which is another way to say that one of the subjects of my film—perhaps the subject of my film—is going to be her: Gabrielle, but also Léa Seydoux. This scene is divided in two. One’s not quite a documentary but is me talking to her and saying, “Now you’ll do this, and we’ll see that. Are you ready? Action. Let’s go.” And the second is her acting in fear without anything around her, just in her mind. When you enter 1910, you enter loaded: with a scream, with this discussion of the beast, with the idea the beast might be something horrible because she screams. You don’t enter the film the same way. I wrote it very quickly, but I was sure that it would stay in the film.
To your point about the subject of your film being not only a character but also the actress playing her, tell me more about your collaboration with Léa Seydoux, who previously appeared in your films “On War” and “Saint Laurent” and has a three-role showcase in “The Beast.”
We’ve known each other for a long time. In “On War,” she had a small part. In “Saint Laurent,” she had a supporting role. For many years, we had said we should do something bigger together. I didn’t have an idea, but we had this conversation. When I started to write “The Beast,” she came to mind, not because she was a friend but because I knew that there would be three periods.
I knew that she was the only French actress that could be in all three periods, because I believed Léa in both the past and the future. She’s modern and ageless; she crosses time, and there’s something mysterious within her that I needed for the writing and the film. It became natural. I wrote thinking of her, I gave her a script, and I knew she would say yes, because the subject of love is so important to her. After that, we didn’t talk much about the film for a couple of years. She doesn’t like to talk too much before the shoot. And she trusts me. I trust her, but she trusts me. That’s why I could push her quite far on set because I had her confidence.
Often, Léa is acting against technology, including during the scenes of her in Los Angeles, where she’s housesitting right before an earthquake, alone and in front of a computer. I know you looked to Fred Walton’s “When a Stranger Calls” as an inspiration for that section, which casts Louis as a 30-year-old incel stalking Gabrielle through the house…
That’s a beautiful film. The idea that you have this guy who has killed two kids, and then you spend time with him, and you don’t excuse him—of course not—but you have some empathy, because you see his sorrow. He’s this lost guy in a lost America. I’ve never seen that before in movies.
But doing the sequences with Léa in 2014, alone with a computer, even if it looks easier than doing scenes underwater, was difficult. She’s just alone. How do you create tension? She doesn’t have a partner. Her partner’s a computer. How do you create tension between a shot list and a face? That was possibly the most difficult scene to do. Often, you find ideas because you have a problem. That’s how you find your best ideas: “I don’t know how to do it, so how can I do it?” In the house in Los Angeles, that was often the case.
You shot the 1910 section on 35mm, which gives it this lively and sensual glow, and the other sections on digital, which is colder—and further restricted by the square format you adopt in 2044. In the future you envision, there’s this unsettling absence: of warmth, of texture, of sound. What kinds of choices were you making in creating this artificial tomorrow?
It was the most difficult thing to imagine. In 1910, you recreate. 2014, you recreate. 2044 was for us to invent, so we decided to take the world as it is today and to begin taking things away. We took away cars, screens, advertisements, relationships with others… We emptied everything out. We emptied the sound and made it fake. There are no more things you can relate to. There are no more textures. There is nothing you know.
It took us a long time to find how Gabrielle would go back to the past, to purify herself. The idea of this black bath took ages. We started to draw some machines, to consider her taking pills, and everything sounded fake. I don’t say that the bath looks real, but you can feel something from it. You can feel it. When we had this idea, we knew that we had it. I don’t know why. I don’t know how it works. But, for me, it works.
To certain eyes it’s been long and abundantly clear that Bertrand Bonello is one of the world’s great contemporary filmmakers, a practitioner in the Carpenter-Cronenberg-Romero Holy Trinity of socio-political comment dressed with genre tones and astonishing formal control. Inasmuch as that reputation even exists, though, relies on the relative exposure of his work from 2011’s House of Tolerance onward—a bewildering run that encompasses Saint Laurent (2014), Nocturama (2016), Zombi Child (2019), and The Beast, which premiered at Venice last fall and is now playing in limited release from Janus and Sideshow. (Perhaps the best of these, 2022’s Coma, flew under the radar. Considering its deliriously galvanizing, evidently appealing blend of genre and form, this is both inexplicable and embarrassing. Coma is perhaps the defining portrait of our horrible decade, and—God bless—finally arrives in theaters this year through Film Movement.)
Bonello’s early films—a set comprising Something Organic (1998), The Pornographer (2001), Tiresia (2003), and On War (2008)—remain mostly underseen and undistributed. I was pleased to interview the director about his early career and its never-elucidated origins, which began as a dedicated musician (no surprise to aficionados of his original scores), includes run-ins with the most successful filmmaker to ever live, and ends with a major career shift marked by House of Tolerance, which has just been added to the Criterion Channel in a two-title series also featuring Nocturama.
As Bonello and I Zoomed between Paris and New York, I immediately took note of a cigarette-smoking doll over his shoulder.
Nick Newman: What is that behind you?
Bertrand Bonello: It's Cindy. It’s the doll that is in The Beast, in the Los Angeles part.
NN: That's fantastic.
BB: I adopted her.
NN: That's great. I hope she has a good home. The purpose of this interview is to cover your earlier films, which you’ve had very few—if any—English-language conversations on. Maybe these are the only questions you’ll field this month about Tiresia and The Pornographer. I found myself rewatching your filmography over the past week. Through The Film Stage, I hosted a 35mm House of Tolerance screening at the Roxy Cinema.
BB: Oh, I’ve heard about this screening. Yeah.
NN: Which ended up being, dare I say, kind of a huge hit. People really came out without having seen the film previously. The print looked unbelievable.
BB: In fact, I had a huge retrospective at the French Cinematheque, like, three weeks ago and they all screened on 35 if they could. So I rewatched, like, ten minutes of House of Tolerance on 35.
NN: How did that go?
BB: Really well. We always sold-out and it was great because when I was introducing it I asked, “Who is watching for the first time?” Most people raised their hands and there was a lot, a lot of young people.
NN: I asked the same question and got the same response, which was quite satisfying. It’s funny: I talked to you in 2015, when On War randomly got a U.S. release.
BB: Yeah.
NN: I revisited that conversation where you said—I had forgotten this and it startled me reading it again—at that point you tended to be disappointed with a lot of your films, or watching them was the experience of remembering what you wish you had done, wishing they had come out differently. So I’m glad 10 minutes of House of Tolerance was good.
BB: Yeah, I rewatched, like, ten minutes of every film during the retrospective, and I realized: for the audience it’s just films, but for you it’s part of your life. Your lifetime, you know? And it always brings me back to something personal of me doing the film. I never thought this way before this retrospective—I don't know why. It’s not only films; it’s really part of your life.
NN: Something I love about the films and doing research is that you don’t offer a world of biographical information. You don’t do interviews saying, “I was at this place in my life and did the film for this reason.” They seem to come right out of time. And I found an interview you did around the time of Saint Laurent where you describe your early years, which sounded fascinating: you grew up in the south of France in this large house with many rooms that had artists coming and going. Which almost suggests Sarah Winchester.
BB: Yeah.
NN: Even the house being called L’Apollonide and you eventually making a film with that title—somewhat telling. I’m curious how much that upbringing was essential to an artistic vocation, but also a personal perspective.
BB: Well… yes, it’s very essential, but it’s also a question of that period. I grew up in the ‘70s, in this house full of—yes—painters, philosophers, writers, whatever. Of course the real subject of everything was freedom. Because it was this period. The second thing is, “Tomorrow will be better than yesterday or today.” So of course you grow up with the idea of freedom and desire; desire can be possible. My daughter, she’s 20, and she’s grown with the idea that tomorrow will be worse than today, and it changes, of course, a lot about the desires and about the idea of freedom. That’s why I think freedom is one of my central subjects in all films. Lack of freedom, like in House of Tolerance; or desire and freedom, like in On War; or prison and fame, like Saint Laurent, which is a freedom also. It’s in all the films, this desire: how you inscribe yourself in the world. And that comes, I guess, from my childhood and all these conversations I had [during] this period, the atmosphere in this particular house.
NN: And you were raised with more of a focus in music. You’ve said your mother, who worked in the opera, had you playing piano from the age of five.
BB: Yeah. Music was really my first work, first love, first
job.
NN: You had a band—it initially had one name, but then you started calling it The Bonellos.
BB: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s true.
NN: Because you were trying to book a show and…
BB: When I was booking, they would say, “What name?” And I said “Bonello.” Everybody starts to call us “The Bonellos.” So it [Laughs] remained.
NN: There’s not much information on that time in your life or that music. How would you characterize the Bonellos’ sound?
BB: No, the group didn’t have a huge enough career to be remembered. It was a kind of mix of punk rock—really influenced by The Clash—and soul music. Bass, drums, and guitars, and some horns. But then most of my musical career was to be a session man. I started to work with other people in the studio or on stage. I did that for four or five years and I made a lot, a lot of money at that moment because there was so much money in the music business. It’s the early ‘90s, you know? So it was huge: you make three or four gigs a week, two studio sessions a week, and then I started to think that I would not do that all my life and I moved up to cinema without being a big cinephile. I just… guessed, tried something. [I had] an intuition that I would like that. And as I earned a lot of money with one tour, I saved half of my salary every night and I could pay myself—like, a short movie. That’s how I went into the movies. At that moment I started to watch four, five films a day to try to understand how you make films and read a lot of interviews of directors and DoPs.
NN: Looking back, do you think you really learned from that? It’s an odd method: no school, just reading and watching. Did you find yourself, when the time came to make a film, prepared for a lot of the minutia that goes into making a movie?
BB: It’s a weird preparation. But it is… one. Because if you watch a film and you say, “How can you do a film like this?” You see the scene again and you are looking for the interview of the director and sometimes he doesn’t say anything, sometimes he does. But, for example, the interviews of DPs taught me a lot. I was reading, a lot, American Cinematographer because their interviews are sometimes very, very amazing.
NN: I know you made a short film Qui je suis [Who I Am] which you somewhat recently screened. But you prefer to be present when it’s showing.
BB: Yes, I like to introduce the film—to say why I did it, what exactly is the book, when the book was written in Pasolini’s life. I think it’s better. I did a huge introduction at the Cinematheque and I think people really enjoyed the film better after that.
NN: So is that a film you think you’ll keep sequestered for the time being?
BB: I have a lot of rights problems on this film—especially music—so it cannot be commercialized.
NN: As someone who loves your music choices, can I ask what’s in it?
BB: Oh, you have a lot of classical music. Bach, John Lurie, and some stuff I did.
NN: You’ve said that by your late 20s you’d written a few scripts and a producer took particular interest in your script for Something Organic. That facilitated it becoming your first film. Do you remember what feeling went into that being the one to really catch someone’s attention? And I’m curious about the basic necessity of that being your first film because it simply received the most material support.
BB: Yeah, well… I didn’t know a lot about movies, but even less about movie business. I didn’t know anyone, in fact. And it was a pre-Internet period; it was difficult to connect to some reality. I was very, very innocent and very, very naïve—which has some good sides. So a lot of questions, I didn’t ask myself. Now, if I meet a young guy of 25 that wants to make films, they know everything. They know everything: how it works, what you have to write to have money from commission, who’s going to be in Cannes. They know everything. I was very, very different from that. So, for me, everything I could take was good.
For example, I shot my first movie in Poland and Steven Spielberg was preparing Schindler’s List—everyone was shooting in the same place—so I met him a few times in a cafeteria. And for me it was normal. “I make films. I met Steven Spielberg.” I was very, very naïve.
NN: How was that experience?
BB: Great! When you do something and you don’t know what the reality is… this naïve stuff has some good sides, you know? Of course, if I look back and think of it I say, “My God. I was really stupid.” But in the moment it’s just fantastic.
NN: Do you think he’s seen any of your films?
BB: [Laughs] I don’t think so. I don’t know if he’s seen… I know Martin Scorsese has seen quite a lot. But Martin watches films all day. [Laughs] I don’t know about Spielberg.
NN: You’ve talked to Scorsese—you guys did that panel at Cannes some years ago.
BB: Yes. We gave him a prize and I was doing the masterclass on stage with him, and we spent a couple of days together.
NN: I assume he likes your work.
BB: Yeah. He has a memory—crazy memory. He remembers the cuts in House of Tolerance and Saint Laurent. It’s crazy.
NN: I suppose it’s unlikely Spielberg is watching your films, but Mathieu Amalric did On War a few years after Munich, Elina Löwensohn is in Schindler’s List…
BB: Yeah, exactly.
NN: Rewatching Something Organic was fascinating. I forgot to what extent it’s your quietest film: it has the least music, it opens with an act of violence but it’s not that violent, there’s some sex but the sex is almost chaste. Do you think there’s a correlation with making your first film and making this, let’s say, slower step into some of your characteristic gestures?
BB: Well, Something Organic is a film I did with something like $100,000 and shot in 15 days. I guess some of the minimalist stuff comes, really, from that also. And also, you evolve because you’re growing, aging, because your relationship with the cinema of others changes. I think at that moment—if I remember clearly—I was very obsessed by Robert Bresson. So yes: a lot of silence and attention to sounds—precise sounds—leave space to the sound. I think that was part of my thinking.
NN: There is at least some fixation on music, though. You have two dance or “vibe-out” scenes in that movie’s first 12 minutes. Which begins an interesting trend in your oeuvre: there's trance-dance sequences in this, On War, Nocturama, Zombi Child… even Coma and The Beast have some fixation on the relationship between body and music. Or we can just call it “dancing,” if we want to. Anyway, can you locate where that dramatic interest comes from?
BB: I think it’s something that says a lot about a character or an actor. It’s something very intimate. When an actor or an actress does a dance in front of a camera, she or he gives a lot of himself. It’s more intimate than a sex scene, for me, and it says a lot about a character. For me, dancing scenes—and I know there are a lot in the films, even in The Beast—are sometimes better than some dialogue to say something about someone. You really choose the good music and put the actor in a good mood. He doesn’t have the choice not to give you something.
NN: Léa Seydoux dances at some point in all three of your movies together.
BB: Yes. Léa loves dancing. [Laughs] For example: The Beast, she dances twice, and the second time—when she comes into this club in LA—the way she danced said everything about what she had in mind. Much better than a dialogue.
NN: That arm-jerk she does is so… her character’s not a great dancer, per se, but it feels entirely real to what she would do. Eventually you get to The Pornographer. It was so much fun rewatching it last week. And it blew my mind because the first time I saw it I was 22 years old; now I’m about to turn 31 and the thought of being this age, now, making my second feature with Jean-Pierre Léaud is… insane. Did you have a similar feeling while doing that?
BB:. I was very happy and moved because when I presented The Pornographer in La Cinematheque a few weeks ago, Jean-Pierre came. It might have been his last public appearance—could be—so it was really moving to present the film with him. Of course, when I was shooting, I was a young filmmaker and he had already marked the history of cinema. But it was amazing that he never made me feel that. Because for him, whatever the age of the director, the director is God—he’s the father. Because he’s been taught that with the New Wave: the director is the one who knows. Even if I was much younger than him and young in my career, he was like a kid and I was like the father. It was quite weird.
NN: It’s bold to be that young and make a film about a fading, washed-up director while staging sequences from his camera’s POV. It’s like a young man imagining what it’s like to be old.
BB: I think the subject of the film, in fact, is what it is to be a son—politically, intimately, cinematographically. It’s just a question about the fathers. Because I was born in 1968 and this question was very important to me when I was a teenager: how are we going to exist after what our parents did?
This is probably the real subject of the film. So of course I identified myself to the son, to Jérémie Renier, and the more and more we were shooting the more I started to have an identification to Jean-Pierre; in fact, because there was such a strange and weird connection between us two. And the editing went more on his side than on the side, the point of view, of the son.
NN: The end credits of Tiresia, your next film, give thanks to Pedro Costa and Olivier Assayas. That opens a question I’ve wondered for a while: do you have much of a personal relationship with other filmmakers? Particularly in your country or your generation? You’ve spoken before about feeling more like a descendant of Eustache and Carax than Pialat and Desplechin—a fascinating way to characterize yourself, and one of the only times I’ve heard you place yourself in a continuum.
BB: No. Less and less, in fact. I don’t talk to many directors. I mean, we know each other and if there is, like, a party or something it’s nice to have a drink and talk a little, but... I don’t know why. I feel more and more lonely in French cinema, in the French universe. It’s okay; it’s just a feeling I have.
NN: The Beast seems like a slightly bigger release. But it hasn’t brought you closer to them.
BB: Yeah. I feel more and more lonely about the vision of cinema in France.
NN: Are there more relationships with musicians, then, because of your longer musical background?
BB: Um… not much. A little lately, in classical music, because I just did a big show in January at the Philharmonie with Schoenberg’s music. But for the last two or three years I spent all my time working, working a lot, so my relationships were with my partners.
NN: I rewatched House of Tolerance in the middle of this grand revisiting of your work. From an outsider’s perspective—not French, not a filmmaker—it does seem to represent a dividing point in your career. Your earlier films remain, in America, rather underseen. I think On War is the earliest that has any real distribution here, still. Do you think anything accounts for this? Do you see House as a dividing point in your career?
BB: Yes, clearly. For many reasons. It came after films that were difficult to make, that didn’t work. I turned 40, I think—maybe 42. There was a switch in my relationship with how to tell a story, how to use a form, how to use the mise-en-scène’s relationship with time and space. I changed a lot of things. From that moment—I don’t know why—my audience started to be younger. House of Tolerance is not a subject for young people, but its relationship with music, with editing—stuff like that. Of course it got even younger with Nocturama. Because before that, the first films—Pornographer, Tiresia—the audience was much older than me. Starting from House of Tolerance it started to be younger and younger. And The Beast: the audience in France is very young.
NN: Does that make you happy?
BB: Yes. I did a premiere in, I don’t know which city, in France—80% of the people were between 17 and 25.
NN: Well, you don’t want your audience to die off.
BB: Yeah, yeah! I’m not looking for that. It just happened.
NN: Your use of music has always amazed me. I don’t know how you do it, but…
BB: Because I think of it very early, during the writing process. Either which song is going to be played in the film—if it’s a club—it’s all in the script. Even the original score, if I write a scene and feel the scene needs some music, I stop writing, I go into my studio, and I start to record stuff. Then I go back to my office. So I try to include the music as much as I can inside… not the film, but already the script.
NN: Do you have any particular songs on a secret playlist that you’re hoping to use someday but haven’t yet found a place for?
BB: No. It goes the other way: I don’t put songs because I like them, but I need to find a song that says something about what is being written. But sometimes… for example, when I was writing House of Tolerance, I had this image of 12 girls dancing and crying to the Moody Blues. I had this image; it came like this. Then you have this scene in mind. You say, “Why did they cry? They cried because one of them died. Okay, why does she die? Because it's a sexual disease.”
NN: Years ago you attempted a Vertigo remake-of-sorts, Madeleine Among the Dead, that would’ve retold the story from the woman’s perspective, but rights issues prevented it. Is that an idea you still entertain?
BB: I loved the idea because Madeleine, she’s an image in the film. I love the idea to give her a life, a personality, feelings. But it’s something I wrote in 2007, maybe; it’s really the past now. It’s really the past.
NN: I still dream of seeing it someday.
BB: I should read it again, maybe.
Bonello, Bertrand
b. 11 September 1968, Nice, France
Bertrand Bonello’s movies coalesce into a saga of political disillusionments. His characters are would-be revolutionaries, doomed youths, and indecisive figures paralyzed in the face of new political futures. Grappling with his cinema requires context of his birth-year. In 1968, France was in the midst of Les Trente Glorieuses—three decades of post-WWII economic development, modernization, and mass consumerism. Despite a long revolutionary lineage, large-scale protest movements lay mostly dormant in post-war France. The French Communist party (PCF) was widely considered a fossilised antiquity. Generations of post-war babies came-of-age into a hierarchical, patriarchal society under authoritarian President Charles de Gaulle. Yet across the 1960s, France was aflame with youth culture. Vibrant counter-cultural art (e.g., French New Wave, yé-yé, nouveau realism) thrived, beckoning for a liberated modernity.
May of 1968 was a sudden rupture. Voices of an enraged proletariat and student body amplified from passive somniloquies into full revolt almost overnight. Revolts began with students (university-age and highschooler alike). Disparate groups united through opposition to Western imperialism in Vietnam, the repressive bureaucracy of French education systems, and global capitalism. Student protests consolidated Maoist, Trotskyists, and anarchists, rejecting the PCF and embracing contemporary international revolutionary struggles (e.g., Vietnam and Cuba). It was a movement built on the spontaneity of the masses, without unified ideology. Students occupied cultural institutions like the Théâtre de l’Odéon and the Sorbonne, chanting watchwords like “all power to the imagination!” A nationwide wildcat general strike ensued with ten million of the workforce joining students. Streets bloodied from brawls between protestors and police.
By June, the uprising lost momentum. Counterrevolutionary demonstrations accumulated massive turnouts and De Gaulle called an immediate election, the outcome of which tightened right-wing legislative control. There was no revolution, nor even a substantial democratisation of the country’s cultural institutions. The underpinnings of French capitalism— assailed from all fronts in an overnight shift of public consciousness—restabilized, unperturbed. In his film of the same name, Chris Marker called 1968 “a grin without a cat”—an allusion to a purely symbolic, Cheshire gesture without material form. Naturally, revolution is not isolated; it is a buildup, amalgamating political clashes. Rosa Luxemburg theorises the mass strike (writing in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution) as a spontaneous surge essential for mobilising the proletariat towards full revolution. A snuffed movement becomes a stepping stone, developing momentum towards the establishing of a worker’s state. Undeniably though, even fifty-five years later, a new French revolution never coagulated. 1968 sits as a dress rehearsal for a performance where the curtain never unfurled.
Backdropped by a thunderstorm of violence and revolutionary reverie, Bertrand Bonello was born in Nice six months after May of 1968. His filmography — so far, ten narrative features — holds séance with the spectres of the unrealized political unrest he was born into, chronicling a legacy of (fictional and real life, past and future) dissidence and stasis. Set during transitional historical moments, his films wrestle with the constitution of history. Some of his movies explicitly tango with the long-reaching implications of 1968. Others address its tensions — mass rebellion and deflating defeat — in a variety of milieus, ranging from a turn-of-the-century Parisian brothel to a mid-century Haitian sugar-cane plantation to a dystopian AI-run 2044. The movies are puzzleboxes: hybrids of stylish genre film pastiche and arthouse ambiguity. They’re also intimately researched, tightroping between historiography and topicality. Yet despite their eclecticism, Bonello’s movies return to the same questions. What happens to a revolution deferred? How does a radical consciousness mutate between generations? How do you imagine something after capitalism when capitalism is so ubiquitous?
Bonello was born around the French Riviera, on the southeastern coast of France. His parents—a lawyer and opera-worker—raised him in a large house, often entertaining artists. Trained as a pianist at a young age, Bonello’s first passion was music (today, he continues to score all his movies). He spent his teenage years in a rock band (The Bonellos), then relocated to Paris as a session player during an arguable nadir of French pop. Bonello began his second life as a filmmaker out of exhausted apathy to his music career. “I got into film, but without any intense passion. I didn’t go to the movies very often, and didn’t have any film background at all,” he remarks Bonello is the inverse of the 1960s French New Wave archetype: the cinephile-turned-filmmaker who would foam at the mouth, live and die in moviehouses, dedicate body and soul to the seventh art. For Bonello, filmmaking was primarily a career switch-up.
Regardless, Bonello was hardly passionless about his new medium. He describes an internal eureka, a lightning bolt of purpose, watching Jim Jarmusch (a fellow musician-turned-filmmaker)’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984). In the decades since, Bonello’s self-conception became rooted in the aesthetic traditions of French cinema:
'I’m going to say something a little schematic about French cinema. But if we imagine two lines, we can say there is Renoir and Bresson that gave us Truffaut and Godard, that gave us Pialat and Eustache, that gave us Desplechin and Carax. I fall more on the Bresson/Godard/Eustache/Carax side than the other one. But it’s complicated to find your place, and to find how to change things, because our “fathers” changed things, and not just politically but also in terms of cinema. For our generation in France[,] it was not easy to find our place.'
A legacy of aesthetic forefathers. Unsurprisingly, Bonello — a filmmaker obsessed with historical lineages and chains of causality that spiral across time — situates himself within a (self-acknowledgingly reductive) framework of French cinema’s evolution. Bonello sees his art in a tradition that sprouts from Bresson’s aesthetic minimalism into a legacy of artifice and abstraction (the opposing branch, alternatively, is anchored in the filmmakers’ distinct approaches to realism and dramatic humanism). This aesthetic imprint only becomes more apparent in Bonello’s later movies. As he ages, his approach becomes more audacious, more formally unstable, more attuned to the destabilising chaos of late-capitalism.
Beginnings, New French Extremity, and Transitional Eras
Something Organic (1998), Bonello’s first feature, is his only Canadian production. The movie tracks a disintegrating relationship, where the unspoken harnesses more dramatic heft than any on-screen action. The film begins in intimate close-up: a man and a woman grin face-to-face and kiss against a stark turquoise backdrop. Cut to: a handheld two-shot, her corpse sprawled across a bed, blood-splatter on the wall. He sits in an armchair, revolver-in-hand, eyeing the camera. These opening tableaux, jumping between wide-eyed romance and violent fallout, form a prologue/epilogue to bookend the rest of the film’s narrative. Conventional plotting would suggest the bulk of the movie is a filling-in-the-gaps: an explanation of how rapturous romance turns murderous. Yet Bonello omits any other explicit reference to uxoricide. The second image becomes a cartographic legend, imbuing every interaction as a premonition of a coming violence. This structural tweak necessitates a scrutinising spectatorship, searching for hints of violence in ostensibly non-violent images. In Something Organic, like many future Bonello films, causality is abstracted. Intentions flutter unknowably. Translating interiority becomes the responsibility of sound and image.
Whereas later Bonello is concerned with civilizations in flux and periods of upheaval, Something Organic’s thematic fixations are confined to the purview of domestic drama. Nonetheless, Bonello’s form is instantly recognizable. Soundtrack (which varies from jazz-infused techno needledrops to Will Oldham tracks) gestures at emotional dimensions the characters themselves never betray. Music becomes the main site of simmering violence, manifesting through brooding cellos which underscore moments of supposed stasis. Something Organic begins a career-long exploration of suffocating, otherworldly interior spaces. The domestic chambers which backdrop the movie appear paradoxically quotidian and otherworldly: unremarkably set-dressed, yet always strangely dim, with walls painted stark blueish-green hues. Apartment walls become partitions.
One of many outcomes of 1968’s mass strike was a shutdown of cinemas, including a cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival. Since few other films screened, Jean Rollin’s Le Viol du Vampire (The Rape of the Vampire, 1968) slingshotted into unlikely French box office success. Rollin is a microcosm for the intersection of art and commerce, prestige and vulgarity. His filmography divides between philosophical, lesbian-vampire fantastique cinema and hardcore porn (the latter contracted to produce the former). His own ambitions veered towards the philosophical, the elemental; he collaborated with Marguerite Duras, evoked Beckett with La Rose de Fer (The Iron Rose, Jean Rollin 1973) and Proust with Lèvres de Sang (Lips of Blood, Jean Rollin 1975). Yet market demands limited his expression and syphoned him into crasser forms; Rollin the philosopher became reliant on Rollin the pornographer.
Rollin parallels Jacques Laurent, the ex-radical turned hardcore auteur (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) of Bonello’s Le Pornographe (The Pornographer, 2001), his first feature in France. The movie opens with a Pasolini quote: “History is about sons trying to understand the father.” Bonello dramatises (and literalizes) this aphorism of intergenerational political divide as a father-son melodrama. The movie follows Jacques’ debt-induced return to the porn industry. Once an optimist of May 1968, Jacques embraced porn as a vehicle for sexual liberation: a new, utopian form promising to disrupt repressive mores. In his imagination, porn held an iconoclastic power towards revolution; it was politics. Yet in the 1970s, porn became corporatized, reterritorialized, and assimilated into capital. Any radical potential evaporated.
Today, Jacques still fantasises about his unrealized opus: an arthouse-porno blend which, as Richard Brody notes, is derivative of La règle du jeu (Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir 1939). Yet like with Rollin, the market proves unconducive to artistic impulses. The Pornographer dialogues with legacies of French cinema, adapting La Nuit américaine (Day For Night, François Truffaut, 1973)’s metatextual film production structure to the milieu of new-millennium blue movies. Even the movie’s most prominent visage is Léaud: the boyish face of French New Wave, now withered.
Meanwhile, Jacques’ estranged son (Jérémie Renier) wanders the same alleys of self-discovery Jacques once haunted. He dreams of revolution yet bickers with his comrades about means of protest. Father and son recognize their shared quandary, searching for their roles in a rapidly changing culture. As Bonello explained, “when I was writing the film, of course I am the ‘son.’ I am the son who asks his father, ‘Okay, now you’ve done everything. What is left for us?’ And I was talking politically and I was talking in terms of cinema: What do you do with your fathers?’” The Pornographer is an epilogue, a long sigh at the end of an era. Many of Bonello’s films occupy transitional moments when old structures fade and new ones emerge. Jacques prepares for the end of his life while his son prepares for the beginning of his. Bonello asserts a dependency between generations, where young leftist of the early-00s are beholden to rhetoric of 1968. This proved prescient; in 2006, French youths protested a new labour bill, skirmished with police, repeated 1968 slogans and iconography, and demonstrated at the Sorbonne. The Pornographer asks the question: is the modern left’s indebtedness to 1968 an extension of that revolutionary fervour or a cyclical repetition, a submission to the past?
Eleven seconds of sexually explicit material were trimmed from The Pornographer’s home release (with the uncut version available in licensed sex shops). From this controversy onwards, Bonello became associated with France’s New Extremity (NE) movement. These movies included works by arthouse provocateurs (e.g. Gaspar Noé and Catherine Breillat) alongside ultraviolent genre films. Bonello’s link to NE is dubious. Violence is sparse in his films and always a brief, destabilising eruption: never rabble-rousing shock.
This is the case with Tiresia (Bertrand Bonello, 2003), Bonello’s third and most opaque film. The narrative is two halves. In the first, a Frenchman (Laurent Lucas) abducts Tiresia (Clara Choveaux), a trans, Brazilian sex worker. Bonello repurposes John Fowles’ The Collector (1963), reimagining the captor’s fetishism as a fixation on his prisoner’s transness. Yet with her hormone injections withheld, Tiresia’s body reconfigures to the Frenchman’s disgust. He blinds her with scissors and abandons her in the woods. This is the movie’s only moment of violent extremity. It registers like a tornado. Bonello holds in close-up on Tiresia’s face, blood pooling from her eyes as she howls, locked in the trunk of a car. Afterwards, Tiresia—now perceived as male (and played by Thiago Telès)—is discovered by a Christian family and adopted into their pastoral household. The pious locals become convinced Tiresia wields oracular abilities, which havocs a local priest (also played by Laurent Lucas), fearful his role as spiritual lynchpin will face obsolescence.
Tiresia’s form shifts drastically. In the first section, the camera embodies a predatorial subjectivity, tracking across streets of sex workers. It scrutinises their bodies. Like with Philippe Grandrieux’ NE nightmare Sombre (1998), spectators must inhabit a dehumanising gaze. The subjectivity is oppressive; even scenes of Tiresia’s erotic memories are revealed as imaginings of her jailer. Bonello’s nocturnal mise-en-scène is gloomy, layered thick with obfuscating shadows. Tiresia recalls the murky-to-the-point-of-abstraction compositions of Nuit du carrefour (Night at the Crossroads, Jean Renoir, 1932): films where the unseen contains vast, mysterious worlds. In the second half, Bonello decelerates to a mellower pace, ditching chirascuro for compositions bathed in sun. He even channels Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, Robert Bresson, 1951), where a clergyman’s matter-of-fact voiceover hovers over shots of stasis in a minimalist chamber.
Bonello’s dual-casting of Lucas draws revealing parallels. Abductor and priest alike represent the flailing insecurities of an established custom (gender binary, the clergy) when threatened with the Other’s perceived futurity. Of course, trans-ness and secular oracles are not 21st century inventions. This is an adaptation of ancient myth; Tiresias was the blinded, gender-fluid prophet of Greek legend: a similar inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928). Bonello focuses on the crumbling psychologies of gendered and religious orders. The movie opens with redish-orange-tinted footage of magma bubbling, set to Beethoven’s 7th: a grandiose statement, adjacent to the film’s otherwise stripped-back aesthetics. These first moments suggest a coming eruption, a reconfiguration of a landscape. Magma boils up, overflows. Tiresia belongs to a tectonic shift. The old world cannot stay congealed. Bonello’s cinema often registers as defeatist, focused foremost on the melancholy of squashed ideals. Tiresia’s volcanic images remain an altar of hope in his filmography.
Hope is already deflated by Bonello’s next feature De la guerre (On War, 2008). Though devoid of explicit references to revolution/revolutionary history, the movie explores how social discontent is co-opted and channelled into a fad of self-actualization. In a jab of sly self-reflexivity, Mathieu Amalric (who even resembles Bonello) plays a filmmaker named Bertrand with a Tiresia poster on his wall. His world is plagued by middle-aged malaise. He is surrounded by numbing and omnipresent stimulation: the cacophonous thud-and-tumble of a choir of laundromat washer-dryers, the constant woosh of motor traffic. Even at home, he takes phone calls in a living room aglow with a televised broadcast of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999): a movie about all-consuming, Baudrillard-type simulations. Overwhelmed with possibilities, Bertrand cannot decide how to live and succumbs to listlessness.
Preparing for a shoot one night, Bertrand trips with slapstick grace and gets enclosed in a coffin. He is rescued in the morning, but everything has changed. Claustrophobic, restricted space is a staple of Bonello’s films. In On War, closed-off space spawns a revelation. The coffin’s deprivation is intoxicating. In an age of hyper-stimulation, nothing is more appealing than a brief moment of self-negation, a brush with the neutrality of death.
Afterwards, Bertrand spirals in pursuit of intensities and limit-experiences to erode the accrued emptiness of his day-to-day. “I’d like to be dazed by life,” he longs. His awakening leads him to a (monetized) new-age cult-bootcamp modelled on military training. He submits to their repertoire of meditation exercises, fasting, vows of silence, animal mask frolicking, erotic prose, and trench warfare. Eventually, the film spins into a parody of Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Bertrand deluded into thinking he is on a mission to execute Col. Kurtz. Bonello’s form evokes the transcendental, aligning with his characters’ subjectivities. During a forest rave, Bonello pans patiently across the trance-induced cultists’ swaying bodies, tribal house music pulsating. Time passes indiscernible, hypnotised. Despite On War’s satire of new-age cultism, Bonello does not invalidate the characters’ affective experiences. His form elucidates the allure of transcendence.
Yet in On War, even the desire for self-negation — to imagine life outside of capitalism — gets commodified and reproduces the structures of capitalism. Bertrand’s world is haunted by late-capitalist ennui. Everything is robbed of affect, performed in obligation around ritualised habits of production and consumption. Bertrand’s disheartenment stems from the same factors which, in other contexts, produce political uprising. Yet On War suggests outlets for political unrest are different in the late-00s than 1968. The ostensible solution is a pseudo-spiritual exodus: expenditure in service of the individual rather than the collective. The spirit of rebellion has not died; it just gets funnelled towards an amorphous idea of escape.
Escape fantasies also form the unspoken backbone of L’Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close (House of Tolerance, Bertrand Bonello, 2011). Unlike On War, closed-off space does not instigate a breakthrough but, instead, perpetuates continuous agony. The movie unfolds in a turn-of-the-century luxury Parisian brothel called L’Apollonide (also the name of Bonello’s childhood home). There is no world outside House of Tolerance’s windowless interiors; Daniel Kasman likened it to a submarine movie. The titular house is extravagant and frequented by wealthy men. Sprawling hallways lead to ornate chambers bathed in candlelight. A panther catnaps on a divan. Yet illusions of leisure mask a carceral truth: none of the women can leave. They will die in this house.
Bonello’s artistic process begins by compiling a series of discordant images and composing/selecting corresponding sounds. Narrative, character and theme become ladders between disharmonious audio and visuals: connective tissue to render disparate parts whole. House of Tolerance is an eclectic, anachronistic film. Bonello injects period piece formality with soul music needledrops, Moody Blues dance numbers, surrealism, horror pastiche, and split-screen compositions. Simultaneously, House of Tolerance is moulded from a breadth of research, enmeshing historical accounts with literary inspiration (e.g. Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs).
Despite high-society illusions, the “pleasure industry” reduces the women to an apparatus for clients’ eccentric fetishes (e.g., fucking in a bathtub of champagne, living dolls). Though House of Tolerance is a film about a brothel, there is almost no visualised sex. Bonello understands sex work primarily as exploited labour rather than erotic fixation (e.g. the conceit of Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967)). The so-called “flesh trade” is a particular form of labour where the body itself becomes commodity, subject to the whims of clientele. Biology reconfigures; by the end, one of the women’s tear ducts can only weep semen.
House of Tolerance opens in 1900, “the dawn of the twentieth century.” An era is ending. The culture of high-end Parisian brothels will fizzle out in coming years. Everything is in decay; the women’s bodies become plagued with syphilis and opium addiction. Because there is no escaping L’Apollonide, they have no future. In its coda, House of Tolerance jumps to the present day, streets overrun with cars instead of carriages. In the movie’s only glimpse of an exterior world, Bonello films sex workers on the curbside, their business now relocated to the streets. 110 years elapsed but the fundamental exploitation of sex workers remains unchanged, just shifted to a new locale (now without shelter). Social progress — the re-legislation of prostitution laws — fails to assist the lives of sex workers. The promise of change remains unfulfilled, suffering continues cyclically.
If House of Tolerance depicts the victims of commodified hedonism, Saint Laurent (Bertrand Bonello, 2015) is about the hedonist at the core of a cultural industry. When the Altmayer brothers producing-duo approached Bonello about making a YSL movie, he refused. Creative freedom in a biopic about one of the 20th century’s defining fashion moguls seemed unattainable. Yet with approval from YSL’s current owners, Bonello was granted autonomy. Though Saint Laurent is a “true story,” its style is quintessential Bonello: montage, collage aesthetics, surrealism, eclectic soundtracking. Bonello avoids a comprehensive, Wikipedian summation of Saint Laurent’s life. Instead, he excises any detail he does not resonate with, creating a subjective portrait.
Saint Laurent is another end-of-an-era Bonello film. Here, the movie captures the last hurrah of 1970s Parisian discotheque decadence: days of indulgence and freedom, champagne and pills. The orgiastic environment is a refuge for Saint Laurent, a man who finds open expression for his queerness in a plastic world of gaudy artifice. The film is deeply sensual, eroticizing the vibrant, haute couture mise-en-scène. Even inanimate signifiers of time and place become sexualized. In the midst of the cacophony is Saint Laurent’s search for solace, beyond the alienation of his celebrity. The film offers a plain explanation of how 1968 radicalism mutated and absorbed into capital. Search for liberation becomes an individualised quest via maximum stimulation.
The Youth Trilogy
Bonello’s Youth Trilogy (2016-2022) encompasses three movies: Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello, 2016), Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello, 2019), and Coma (Bertrand Bonello, 2022). Each revolves around young people forced to reconcile with/change age-old systems they are unwittingly born into. Released on the heels of real-life terrorist attacks in Paris, Nocturama follows a group of Parisian youths who orchestrate demolitions of government infrastructure and assassinate a tycoon of French finance capitalism. Then, they take overnight refuge in a shopping mall. Nocturama is a narrative of waiting, suspended in anxious shopping spree leisure, anticipating an inevitable downfall. When the conclusion arrives via a faceless, silhouetted SWAT team, bullets rain indiscriminately. The film builds from familiar genre touches: the swirling synths and ensembles of John Carpenter, the shopping mall apocalypticism of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). Bonello’s editing — more calculated than ever — disrupts the pastiche, deconstructing thriller conventions. Every cut is disruptive. A pivotal moment initiating the climax — a gunshot — is told and retold from several different perspectives, cycling through a temporal loop and protracting a moment of tension. Nocturama offers no catharsis. When action finally erupts, violence is cold and indifferent. Then the movie ends.
In Zombi Child, two parallel narratives converge. One recounts the story of Clairvius Narcisse: the dead Haitian man resurrected into zombified slavery on a sugar-cane plantation in 1962. Like On War, the narrative’s inciting incident is a body’s removal from a coffin. The other half is a coming-of-age drama set in a present-day, all-girls boarding school for descendants of Legion of Honour recipients. Here, Bonello follows the burgeoning friendship between Fanny, a white student, and Melissa, a Black orphan, immigrating after the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Fanny fixates on her friend’s voodoo heritage, seeing it as a remedy for her own pulverising heartbreak. In a final act horror turn, a voodoo session goes awry, and Baron Samedi — the master of the dead in Haitian voodoo — possesses Fanny. Zombi Child explores the dynamic between colonizers and the colonized, backdropped by an elite educational institution that sanitises colonial histories, forwarding myths of colour-blind allegiance. While Nocturama follows a failed attempt to (literally) explode the frontier of French capitalism, Zombi Child is about a failure of reconciliation. Haiti is a country ravaged by a history of the French-run slavetrade and then unpayable, economy-devastating debt to buy back independence. Peaceful coexistence between colonizers and colonized subjects proves impossible when centuries of violence lie unreconciled.
With Coma, Bonello pivots to an elastic, hybrid form. He cites Lynch and Godard as major influences on his filmmaking, less for their individual styles and more for what they “allowed us: to search for freedom.” With Coma (and La Bête (The Beast, Bertrand Bonello, 2023) after it), Bonello indulges a newfound creative liberty, untethering further from narrative/stylistic unity and deep-diving into a hodgepodge of creative possibilities. Reductively: Coma is about a teenage girl in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic. Restricted from the outside world, she draws inwards, towards fantasy. In a non-narrative, episodic structure, Coma links soap opera dramas enacted with dolls, rotoscope animation, surveillance footage, a Deleuze interview cropped around his untrimmed fingernails, long-take POV nightmares wandering through The Free Zone: a spatially disunified abyss of shadowy roaming figures and distant screeches, and Zoom calls. Patricia Coma — a menacing Youtube superstar — watches over the world as a panopticon warden. Like The Pornographer, Coma questions what space youths can occupy freely in a world turning gradually insular and less inhabitable.
The Youth Trilogy probes what potential futures (if any) young people are permitted to imagine. Nocturama distils the fulcrum of Bonello’s work: the revolution, betrayed. In a feature-length exemplar of capitalist realism, the film suggests the seeds of late-capitalism are sewn hopelessly into even the most radical dissidents; it recalls what Godard called “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Exploring the mall, characters notice their own outfits on display in shop windows. Mass culture proves inescapable. Despite their act of defiance, the characters remain branded by the system they battle. Continuing Saint Laurent’s sensual, object-oriented cinema, the products of capitalism are eroticized. Mall paraphilia is eye-candy: the latest garb, the trendiest gizmos. The mall is adorned with rows of crimson mannequins à la Mario Bava. In a blunt Eden metaphor, one character is drawn towards a colossal, glittering ceramic apple. Radical politics exist hand-in-hand with pop culture; Nocturama’s terrorists are avid fans of Willow Smith and Chief Keef. Bonello (not-so-subtly) juxtaposes the infectious hook of “Whip My Hair” over images of a smouldering, gilded Joan of Arc statue (a target from their attack). Bonello’s thesis is a reiteration of Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry, where mass production creates a culture of distraction and complacency, defanging the possibility of insurrection. Solidarity is consumed by temptations of consumerist hubris.
The mass-execution ending of Nocturama is repurposed in Coma’s opening, cropped into an indiscernible haze of pixels. Self-referentiality is common in Bonello’s films (e.g., the Tiresia poster on Bertrand’s wall in On War, a brief flash of a laptop background from Bonello’s short Cindy: the Doll is Mine (2005) in The Beast). Usually, Bonello cites copyright clearance as the reason for recycling his own work. However, the use of Nocturama is more than set-dressing; it seeks to find Bonello’s own role in the apocalyptic tragedy of modern youth. In Coma’s opening, subtitles deliver an unspoken monologue: a letter to Bonello’s eighteen-year-old daughter, reflecting on a year of COVID quarantining. The self-reflexive use of Nocturama (teenagers massacred by cops) implies a bleak reality for a new generation, that any resistance will be thwarted. In Coma’s conclusion, Bonello’s text-monologue returns, this time over footage of climate disaster. In an era of exponentially increasing natural disaster and looming climate catastrophe, is there a future for youth? Bonello’s text promises his daughter there is. A new sun will rise; tomorrow will be different. Hope feels inorganic against the movie’s bombardment of nightmare imagery. This promise is a departure from Bonello’s signature pessimism. His words are even accompanied by images of lava erupting: the same iconography that underscored Tiresia‘s uncharacteristically hopeful prologue.
Coma includes several Barbie doll vignettes, plastic bodies enmeshed in adult worlds of sex and politics. The doll is a central motif in his movies, first explored in Cindy: The Dolls Is Mine: a short film where Asia Argento plays both American photographer Cindy Sherman and her model. In an apartment scattered with wax and porcelain dolls, the model stands wigged and made-up like a Barbie. Bonello cultivates an anaemic atmosphere of long silences dressed in bellowing room tone. In the midst of the shoot, the photographer decides she wants mascara-streaked eyes. The two women must collaborate to procure tears. Cindy demonstrates a bond between photographer and subject, focused on the tingling anxieties of becoming malleable. At first, the politics of being a photographer’s plaything seem sadomasochistic: a submission to another’s will. Yet Cindy shows reciprocity between the artist and her model; at the end both shed tears, wound together in a symbiotic act of creation: an identical ending to Catherine Breillat’s filmmaking parable Sex Is Comedy (2002). In Bonello’s later movies, however, the doll is an erosion of agency. For instance, in House of Tolerance, a sex worker performs as a human doll to pacify a client’s wishes. The doll is an uncanny imagining of the human, frozen in time. The body is fixed, so is the expression. Dolls offer a human stand-in stripped of agency: a dartboard for any erotic whim.
Masks perform a similar function in Bonello’s work. They first appear in On War during a burst of animal-masked, bestial revelry. The climax of House of Tolerance is a mansion-wide masquerade-orgy, sex workers and clients alike veiled in an eclectic assortment of masks. Masked, the women — faceless mounds of flesh in the eyes of their callers — only see their anonymity and disposability accentuated. In an iconic image from Nocturama, a teen explores the shopping mall and stumbles on a golden, full-face mask. Wearing it, the mask erases any vestige of humanity in his face; he is neutralised. After Cindy, Bonello’s dolls and masks become sterilising assets, reducing human agency to inanimate objects in the game of capital.
Like House of Tolerance, the Youth Trilogy continues Bonello’s fixation on closed-off, striated space. Nocturama’s shopping mall is a windowless (like Tolerance) capitalist microcosm, where TV is the sole outlet to an external world. In Zombi Child, girls are confined to the premises of a boarding school, repressed with administrative surveillance. The girls rebel, sneak into cellars to form secret societies and perform rituals, including rapping to Damso’s “N. J Respect R.” In Coma, the world is divided into Zoom space or secluded bedrooms; characters must imagine fantasy realms as social outlets. In each movie from this trilogy, teenagers are thrust into alienated spaces, separated from external reality. Bonello’s spatial metaphor captures a predicament of youth: a hopeless feeling, watching the world incinerate around you while handcuffed.
The Beast
Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle is a novella about self-cannibalising anxiety. Its protagonist lives a whole life petrified by an ambient fear of amorphous disaster (metaphorized by the titular beast) brewing on the horizon. He rejects love and commits to nothing, fearful catastrophe will ruin everything. In old age, he realises the nature of his beast: a life lived without love or purpose. His cowardice concretizes his very fear and becomes his own condemnation.
Bonello’s The Beast is a loose adaptation of James’ text, a springboard towards a post-modern hybrid of melodrama, dystopian sci-fi, and slasher-isms. The movie begins in 2044, across a depopulated, brutalist landscape administered by a technofascist AI overseer. Emotion is obsolete, outfashioned by data-based pragmatism. Submitting to the times, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) undergoes an operation to purge her emotions in a process that resurrects visions from her past lives as a high-society 1900s pianist and 2010s L.A. model. Bonello conceives personal narrative as something unbound by birth and death: a driving force battering across history. Gabrielle’s lives are a summative saga of unactualized desires, love deferred indefinitely, into a future that renders all feelings — love or otherwise — impossible. The Beast is a film about petrification, choosing stasis over action in the face of existential crossroads.
The Beast’s portrait of 2044 is a wasteland, a time after culture. Forlorn nightclubs blast throwback tunes — 1960s, 1980s —, nostalgic séances summoning old art into a sterile present. Art is a memory: something archaic in a post-emotion society. Bonello evokes Mark Fisher’s idea of the slow cancellation of the future. All future culture becomes erased. There are only lingering spectres of the past, foreclosing cultural development and marooning society in an endless loop going nowhere. The future evaporates alongside “the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live. It mean[s] the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already established (capitalist) system.” Because there is no future, anything after capitalism becomes inconceivable.
Bonello’s work bristles with hauntological loops. His films fixate on pastiche, observing how genre propels culture, and deconstructing conventions as Trojan horses of ideology. Bonello’s filmography follows the birth of the 20th century onwards. His ten movies create a tapestry of modernity, probing different means of preparing for the future. For his characters, praxis is usually a mischanneling of energies into escape. Like Gabriella’s thwarted romances or Jacques Laurent’s submergence into pornography, revolution is always zig-zagged around. Even when Bonello’s characters organise and try to enact revolution (e.g. Nocturama), they are swiftly squashed by the state. Politics seem fixed, as if inscribed in prophecy.
What is the value of a filmography as consistently defeatist as Bonello’s? Is his inability to imagine a revolutionary future — an overthrow of capitalism — reactionary and anti-revolutionary? Is part of the reason why capitalism seems so ubiquitous because filmmakers like Bonello portray doomed, capitalist realism incarnations of political life? Decades ago, German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder defended his own right to dwell on failure:
'People often criticize my films for being pessimistic; there are certainly many reasons for being pessimistic but I don’t see my films that way. They’re founded in the belief that revolution doesn’t belong on the cinema screen but outside in the world. Never mind if a film ends pessimistically but exposes certain mechanisms clearly enough to show people how they work and […] realize the necessity of changing their own reality.'
A social melodramatist, Fassbinder situates filmmaking as a diagnosis of ailments which plague the social organism. It is not manifesto, remedy, nor utopian vision. To dwell on loss — ravages and deaths at the hands of a political order — is a means of rallying spectators. Cinema becomes a tool of politicised manipulation, illuminating violence and igniting wrath. Fassbinder’s methodology is too didactic to encompass Bonello’s cryptic modes of storytelling. Nonetheless, Fassbinder’s reframing of defeat is crucial. Bonello’s characters (failed or would-be revolutionaries, discontents buckling under hopeless disillusionment) are embodiments of social panic. Bonello described his signature closed-off spaces “like movie theaters. When you come into a movie theater, there’s no windows — no relationship with the exterior, with the outside — and you’re ready to receive a film or fantasies or ideas.”. The realm of his characters’ containment is not an adjacent universe but, rather, one meant to parallel the experience of spectatorship. Mutual containment creates an identification without distraction. We are forced to be moved by the hopelessness on-screen, forced to imagine a way out. In Bonello’s films, defeats are not declarations of political impossibility but, rather, reflections of a sadistic order, and acknowledgement of direness. Witnessing defeat becomes a call-to-action.
The interview that follows took place on October 9, 2019 at the Hudson Hotel in Manhattan. The hotel is close to Lincoln Center where Bertrand Bonello’s latest film, Zombi Child, had been shown the night before as part of the 57th New York Film Festival. The morning after that screening, Bonello spoke for two hours to a group of (enchanted) film students and faculty at the City University of New York’s Hunter College. That afternoon he graciously agreed to speak even further, to the two of us, for Cineaste, returning to and extending some of the topics of the Hunter event. Zombi Child remained central to the discussion but we also, as will be apparent, moved across the span of his twenty-year career. From such early films as The Pornographer (2001), Tiresia (2003) and On War (2008), to more recent efforts such as House of Pleasures (2011), Saint Laurent (2014) and Nocturama (2016), Bonello repeatedly tests himself in relation to not simply new subject matter but also new forms, including Zombi Child where he comes the closest to the genre that was formative for him, the horror film. But it’s not quite a horror film but something that, as with all of Bonello, resists easy categorization. With Zombi Child, Bonello moves beyond his familiar landscapes in France and travels to Haiti where he re-engages the specificity of genre so as to further expand his longstanding interests in the tension between literal and metaphoric space, the unsettled ground on which life and death permeate one another, and the significance of ritual as it is transformed through the new technologies of younger generations.
Cineaste: In a recent interview you said that only two films were important for you in preparation for Zombi Child—I Walked with a Zombie [Jacques Tourneur, 1943] and Les maîtres fous [Jean Rouch, 1955]. Last night at the New York Film Festival, though, you mentioned Maya Deren’s Haiti film [Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, 1985]. So, could we say all three, in different ways, were important?
Bonello: I wouldn’t say they were important but they were the ones I watched again. I Walked with a Zombie because, of course, it deals with zombies, and I wanted to see again how Tourneur shot the sugar cane plantations. With the Maya Deren, even though the text is a little dated, the images are fantastic. I was talking this morning [at Hunter College] about trying to find the right distance when you are filming something in a country that is not yours, especially a country like Haiti and that kind of culture. And I wanted to know how far and how close Deren was from the people she was filming. And of course Jean Rouch, always, because he was really close to the possession ceremonies he was filming and I wanted to see what kinds of distances he created.
Cineaste: For Tourneur the zombie is often immobile or, in the case of the white zombie woman, she has to be forced to move. Your zombie doesn’t seem to have quite the same limitations of movement.
Bonello: When I was doing the casting, I met thirty to forty men and I said to them, “Okay, you’re playing a zombie.” And they all moved the same way. It’s how they learned the way a zombie walks from the time they were kids—and also they all made that kind of nasal sound a zombie makes. That doesn’t come from me. It really comes from them. And I think of course they know better than I. So I wasn’t going to direct them. And also my zombies are workers because the film is mostly about slavery, so they have to move a little, even if it’s slowly.
Cineaste: One of the things I was curious about in terms of walking and mobility and stillness in your films is that you seem to be fascinated with mannequins and statuary and busts. I wonder if the zombie was another way for you to address this tension between the mobile human figure and the static human figure.
Bonello: Well, I know I’ve filmed a lot of mannequins, masks, dolls, things like that. It’s just because they are something that scare me, and the zombie is somewhere between them. The zombie is between everything, between life and death, between night and day. But sometimes I do shots of things that ring bells in terms of my own fears. Not talking about me for a moment, in the last sequence of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me [David Lynch, 1992], there is a very close shot of someone eating corn. I don’t know if you remember this. And a journalist told David Lynch that he didn’t understand the shot. And David said, “I hate corn.” So for him it was the ultimate image of nightmare.
Cineaste: The men in your films are presented in rather complicated, arguably seductive, ways. The same, of course, can be said of the women in your films but a particular tension is created by the way your men are framed, whether on their own or in the company of other men. Do you approach the framing of men differently than when you frame women in your films?
Bonello: Well, first I think it depends on the film. For example, when I shoot a film such as Saint Laurent, the topic of this particular man interested me because it allowed me to make a film that escaped the confines of the classical biopic. To do this, I thought to myself, “Okay! Saint Laurent is me.” So, I approached him as if I were Yves, as if I were him in every situation. When I do a film like Zombi Child or House of Pleasures, however, I approach the shoot differently. It’s very difficult to know how to shoot the group of women in Zombi Child or House of Pleasures. It’s a question, again, of distance. If you’re too close to them—I’m not their friend, I’m not their father—I must find the appropriate distance. You know, I’m always obsessed with this question: What is a good distance for the scene? And so when I do a film with men at its center—Saint Laurent for example or The Pornographer—I’m really in the middle. I am between Jean-Pierre [Léaud) and Jérémie [Renier]; or I try to think like Yves, I move between myself and him. For Zombi Child, or House of Pleasure, where women are at the center, I try to be very close but only to observe. With all these films, I try to find my place in the scene.
Cineaste: It’s interesting that in searching for your place as the director—somewhere in the middle, in between—a dynamic shift occurs in scenes where men occupy the space. For example, when we see Yacine (Hamza Meziani) in the bathtub in Nocturama and he asks Samir (Ilias le Doré) to join him, the scene is casual, seductive, strangely natural. At that moment, Yacine’s and Samir’s friendship tilts differently. Given that the sequence follows on the heels of Yacine’s drag performance where he lip-syncs to Shirley Bassey’s “My Way,” Yacine’s invitation is anticipated by the viewer. But the scene is still surprising even though Yacine’s gesture and Samir’s response seem to flow naturally from within the film’s course of events.
Bonello: Yes, for me, what takes place here is because it takes place on this day, this place, this time of the night. Yacine decides to act on something he’s never done before.
Cineaste: So, it’s a question of how desires take place within particular moment.
Bonello: Exactly.
Cineaste: Zombi Child continues your exploration of the way confined space and time moves characters to act. And Zombi Child is not your first film in which a body escapes a coffin—On War, for instance.
Bonello: Yes.
Cineaste: It seems, moreover, that the coffin serves as a metaphor in your films. Confined spaces are tomb-like, in the classical sense of entombment where Pharaohs were buried in enclosed sarcophaguses along with their personal treasures, and so forth. In House of Pleasures, the women are similarly enclosed in luxurious surroundings, unable to leave the brothel in which they live and work. They’re told, in fact, that if they leave the space they may very well be arrested. Yves, in Saint Laurent, is also confined to the elaborately decorated interiors. But, even more significantly, he is confined in the exterior world when he’s in the bushes cruising for men with Jacques. Ultimately, confinement is of the character’s own choosing.
Bonello: For Yves Saint Laurent, it’s a kind of prison, a golden prison. He has a fear of reality, a fear of the outside world.
Cineaste: It’s as if because of their fears, characters seek out, or create a utopia.
Bonello: On War works on this kind of utopia. One re-creates a world, and as it is re-created it is recreated with new rules. But, in fact, the new utopia still does not work. So, I think a lot of my films—since The Pornographer—deal with a search for utopia while realizing it is the end of utopia. In trying to build a new utopia, characters only discover the limits of what they created.
Cineaste: How do you execute your vision? In other words, how do you prepare and then create your vision on film, especially where you make dynamic confined spaces?
Bonello: What I do, and while I’m writing, is that I keep a separate document that holds my notes. It’s not a shot list. It’s different. It’s where I write questions—or answers—about a scene. For example, do I need one shot for the scene, or several shots? Am I close to the scene? Or am I far? Music, or not music? What kind of color works for the scene? What is the heart of the sequence? What is the thing that I shouldn’t miss when shooting? Is there something I am overlooking in order to understand the scene? So, I have this big, big document, like—I don’t know—sixty pages that I give to my DP, continuity person, and assistants. And then we have all the questions we need to prepare the scene before shooting, including, how do we deal with the space, the tempo, and stuff like that. I’m quite precise about all this.
Cineaste: This, after you’ve done location scouting?
Bonello: No, before. And, of course, it has to be corrected, like I correct my drafts of scripts. I do several drafts of this document.
Cineaste: So, when preparing the opening shot for House of Pleasures—where we see the women who work in the brothel, crisscrossing the coffin-like corridor, and in and out of rooms—how did you organize and prepare the shot?
Bonello: Well, when I found the location, I was not searching for something specific, I was just visiting many places. I discovered this chateau, a small chateau and chose it because of the kind of corridor you describe. So, I said, “Okay, if I want to do something that moves geographically and mentally, I think the chateau’s corridor is a perfect location.” But I really compare the brothel to a movie theater. You don’t see the outside. You don’t hear what’s happening. So, to get this kind of geographical and mental movement I simply say, “Okay, let’s go, let’s go inside.”
Cineaste: Similar to Flowers of Shanghai [Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998].
Bonello: Exactly. The space is like a box, which is open to fantasies, my fantasies. And it’s like a brain. There is this expression in French, un film cerveau, a brain movie. It’s like a Kubrick film, for example. Something very mental and—
Cineaste: Gilles Deleuze’s argument that Kubrick’s films are like a giant brain.
Bonello: Exactly. And when you have spaces without a relationship to the outside, it fully develops this concept, which is the case for On War. And, of course, Nocturama, which is why it took so long to make the mise en scène so precise.
Cineaste: But also, for you, always the space within the space, boxes within boxes, like the school in Zombi Child that’s in that strange location in Paris. It seems very incongruous, this kind of school in that location. But that school exists in reality and precisely in the way you show.
Bonello: It’s a world inside of a world and in this first world you have rules, the boss. And something doesn’t fit because you need some reality, in a way.
Cineaste: Many worlds kind of fold into each other. The exterior world of a “Paris-on-alert” in Nocturama, for example, creeps into the sealed-off interior of the department store via electronic devices such as television screens.
Bonello: You’re totally right. The enclosed world takes place only in its relationship with the outside. And that’s why I wanted for the first time they turn on the TV they hear and see the music video of Willow Smith, something very unreal that’s also very real.
Cineaste: That’s a very strange assortment of young people in Nocturama. It doesn’t feel like a terrorist group of today, which will tend to be much more unified. Their diverse backgrounds evoke a political group from the Sixties or Seventies.
Cineaste: There’s a quote you use from Pasolini in the end credits for The Pornographer that history is about sons trying to understand the father.
Bonello: That is an amazing quote. I put it at the end because it’s so great it would crush the film. But he said in one sentence what I’m trying to say in an hour and forty minutes. The other day I read a beautiful and very long interview with James Gray. And, of course, I felt very close to what he said. I think we are the same age and he was talking about fathers, and that’s very important to his films, fathers in the stories but also his cinematic fathers. And the interview was very melancholic and he was just saying, “Okay, yeah, all this is impossible now. I just do what I can.” And I feel the same way. I do what I can with our possibilities. I think a film is really the mix of your possibilities and your impossibilities. And that’s what’s beautiful.
When you see the making of Apocalypse Now [Francis Ford Coppola, 1979], you see that the director doesn’t know what to do. He’s totally lost and it’s beautiful. You know what I mean? Today, if you make a film and you say in the middle of the shoot, “I’m lost,” you’re fucking fired. But I was talking with a friend the other day and we said it’s a pity that that will never exist again, an adventure like Apocalypse Now or Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980]. Yes, we will have some expensive films again, but not these crazy adventures. It’s done.
Cineaste: That’s the end of On War, when Bertrand relives Apocalypse Now.
Bonello: Yeah.
Cineaste: Is your fascination with death and resurrection tied to this?
Bonello: No, I think this has to do with something that works well in cinema, more so than in literature. For example, I’m working now on a film of a woman who is in deep mourning over a love affair. And she kills herself. But since she doesn’t face her mourning, she is reborn and obliged to face it. This could work in literature, but in movies it’s visually stronger, I think.
Cineaste: Do you find as you’re getting older and you’re making films in which you deal with younger people engaged with new technologies that your conceptual framework for filmmaking has changed?
Bonello: Maybe it’s related to my being more obsessed with what’s happening now. And as I was saying this morning, it’s more and more difficult to maintain innocence because while we have more knowledge and knowledge is good, it is also dangerous. As I go deeper and deeper inside myself to find an emotion or an idea when writing I find myself saying, “Okay, I’ve done this already.” More and more knowledge makes it difficult to go deeper and deeper to discover something that really can interest you.
Cineaste: So many people today are always attached to their phones, and you see that in Zombi Child. By way of contrast, in The Pornographer you get a sense of Léaud’s historical dislocation when he can’t even remember what the name for a cell phone is. And when he borrows one he’s afraid it will give him brain cancer.
Bonello: It’s sometimes very, very difficult to have a scene without a cell phone in it because it doesn’t look realistic. Everyone has cell phones in their hands today.
Cineaste: Your daughter was a consultant on the dialogue for the girls. She’s fifteen and she was saying to you in relation to what you’d written in the film, “Oh, that’s two years ago.” But that means that maybe two years from now, everything those girls are saying will be out of date.
Bonello: I’m happy my next film is set in 1936 because I won’t have any of that technology. If you make a film in the present day and avoid it, it becomes a statement.
Cineaste: Are young audiences attracted to Zombi Child so far?
Bonello: Well, at some of the screenings in Paris, yes, they were very young. Like between, I would say, eighteen and twenty-five. And I’m not trying to make films for young people. For example, for The Pornographer and even On War, the audience was quite old, I mean like from forty-five to seventy-five, and then beginning with House of Pleasures my audiences began to get younger and younger and I don’t know why. But it’s something I really appreciate.
Cineaste: The experience of new technology and young people is also presented through the use of split-screen in your films. I am thinking of Nocturama but other films use the effect as well on multiple occasions. Zombi Child, however, uses it once. Here, the split-screen effect occurs when the character does a simple search on her cell phone.
Bonello: Yeah, it’s a very simple use in Zombi Child. I use the effect because if you simply cut this shot with that shot, it gets a little boring. So, I thought, let’s do both! And at the same time!
Cineaste: And, also, while the split-screen effect provides an interesting way to deal with the simultaneity of a moment, you also achieve something similar when you repeat an action from multiple angles. It’s as if you ask the spectator to grasp as much information as possible even though it is impossible to know everything there is to know about any one particular moment.
Bonello: Yeah. It’s something very mathematical in a way, but at the same time, mathematical and musical. But it’s quite well known that great musicians are often good at mathematics. But I have a very simple way of thinking about it. When I edit for example, I am not thinking about the story—well, a little but not that much. I sometimes just change a shot when I get bored. It’s always the same. If I see the sequence and it’s not that great—the cut is too early or too late for example—I pull a little surprise from the cards. Maybe this is where I lose some spectators, but it’s my sensation of the film when I sit in front it, when making it. It’s the same with music.
Cineaste: After you left the event today at Hunter College, everyone was very excited. The students and faculty were thrilled by your appearance. You were very personal in terms of your own experiences but also gave the students such practical advice. After the event this morning, a student told me that he was sixteen when he saw House of Pleasures in Canada. And he said it completely changed his life. He decided to become a filmmaker after that.
Bonello: If I was a teacher, I would put on the audio commentary of The Godfather, nine hours of Francis Coppola talking about the film and after the nine hours I would say, “School is finished. Go make films!”
The cinema of French director Bertrand Bonello transports audiences to a variety of meticulously controlled worlds, each one wildly different from the next. From the velvet-walled turn-of-the-century brothel in House of Pleasures (2011) to the French fashion scene in Saint Laurent (2014), his insular, often surreal settings serve as stages for him to explore the social structures that confine his protagonists. Both stylistically lavish and intellectually adventurous, his films are rich sensory experiences, showcasing his sharp visual sensibility and his talent as a trained musician.
Bonello’s controversial new film Nocturama follows a group of young Parisians who carry out a series of large-scale terror attacks. What begins as a tightly coiled thriller turns into a music-fueled chamber drama as the characters retreat to the glossy late-capitalist mecca of an upscale shopping mall. With the film opening this weekend in New York at the Metrograph and Film Society of Lincoln Center, the latter of which is hosting a series of films that have influenced Bonello, I spoke with the director about what inspires him as an artist and how he blurs the line between realism and abstraction.
What came first in your life, music or cinema?
Definitely music. I started to play the piano when I was five years old, and I had an arrangement where I would just go to school in the morning and do piano in the afternoon. Up to the age of ten or eleven, I was playing a lot of classical music. Then I had a band, and I discovered punk and rock and switched from classical to pop music. So music was always very present in my life. As for cinema, it came in different stages. When I was twelve or thirteen, I was living in a small town. I was so bored, and the arrival of VHS really saved my life. Every Saturday I went to the video club with a couple friends and we would rent four or five films, which were mainly horror films.
Which horror films?
It was around 1980, 1981, so you had the first Cronenbergs, Dario Argento films like Suspiria, all the Romeros, Lucio Fulci—all these directors who were major in the video clubs. Then music took over again and I was a session man playing for people on tour or on records. When I turned twenty-three I started to get a little bored with music, so I decided to switch to movies. But I didn’t know a lot about movies, so I started to get interested in cinema at the same time that I began making films. When I saw Stranger Than Paradise I said to myself, I want to be a director. For me, this film was as good as music.
It’s a jazz riff of a movie.
This director was speaking to me. I discovered afterward that music is very, very important to Jarmusch’s films and his life. It’s almost the beginning of my love for cinema. I guess I will always be faithful to him in that way. I’m also very impressed by the fact that he never tries to be impressive. The decades change, but he doesn’t change. In 2016, when everything’s so quick, he’s making a film like Paterson.
Back to horror for a moment: another director you’ve cited as an influence is John Carpenter. Did you think about Nocturama as a horror movie?
John Carpenter could make political films within the genre. Romero did this too, with Dawn of the Dead, which is also about people who have nothing to do with each other, who have to create a new society to resist something unknown from the outside. You know something’s going to happen, you just don’t know when, so then people have time to wait, and that waiting builds tension.
When you’re writing a film, do you think of it in the same way you think about composing music?
I do both at the same time, in fact. For me, the structure of a film is very, very important and I cannot start to write if I don’t have a clear idea of it. When I start to write, I always try to visualize the film, and I also try to hear the film. If I write a scene and feel I will need some music in it, I start to write the music at the same time or begin to record music in the studio. Usually by the end of a first draft of a script I’ve written or chosen the music.
How did you go about constructing the soundtrack?
Everything is written in the script. The film is in two parts, and I decided that the first part would mainly use the original score and the second part would be as if this mall were a huge jukebox. Every music choice is, of course, mine and not the characters’. I’m not sure they would listen to Blondie, but it’s exactly the atmosphere I needed at that moment. And for the original score I wanted to find a texture that was electronic but not electro-dance, so I worked a lot on my computer to find the right waves.
Does your approach as a musician differ when you’re not making music for a film?
Yes, because good music for a film doesn’t have to be good music. For example, if you take the music from Contempt, it’s very cheesy. But when you put it together with the image, it becomes brilliant. When you make music for a film, the most important thing is not the melodies but the texture. Cronenberg and Howard Shore, that’s how they work; they talk about texture before they start talking about anything else. It’s like talking about what kind of film stock you’re going to use.
How important is the script for you?
You have to work on a script a lot, a lot, a lot—and then it’s nothing. It’s something that has to disappear. It’s not good if you watch a film and see the script. The script has to be as good as possible, because it’s how you get money, actors, etc. It becomes like a bible, very holy, but you have to get rid of it. In terms of structure and time, my films are becoming more precise. A lot of people ask me if a lot of the film is found in the editing room. You always find stuff, but at the same time everything is written beforehand. With Nocturama I had the idea that I would bring the fiction with the mise-en-scène and the actors would bring something closer to documentary, and the film would find an equilibrium between the two.
The balance between realism and abstraction is very evident throughout all of your work. What attracts you to this style?
It attracts me first as a spectator. I love when I watch films that start in a place you know and then bring you to a place you don’t know—a kind of travel. If it’s too abstract, I get lost, and if there’s too much realism, I’m not interested.
House of Pleasures is a good example. It’s a mix of realism and abstraction. The realism is in the chronicle of these girls’ everyday lives—what time they eat, when they wash, etc.—while the abstraction is in the more psychological stuff that emerges little by little.
A common point in House of Pleasures and Nocturama is that each takes place in a location that has no windows. The relationship with the outside world is cut off. The characters create a world that has its own rules and its own aesthetic.
Can you tell me about the decision to shoot digitally for the first time? Was that dictated by the immediacy of the narrative?
There were many reasons. One of them was that I had just made House of Pleasures and Saint Laurent, both period films shot on 35 mm, and I wanted to try something else. I didn’t want to become what everyone thought I would be. For Nocturama, I wanted something sharper, to accept some kind of reality from the outside. But I’m hoping now to go back to 35 mm, which was much easier for me. I think it’s visually more beautiful and you can shoot very quickly. Everybody thinks you can shoot quickly in digital, but you can’t because it’s not so beautiful, so you have to work the shot. With 35 mm, if I took a camera and placed it here now, the shot would immediately be beautiful. For Nocturama, I was happy with the digital, but there is something very sacred about 35 mm. The crew is very concentrated because the film costs a lot of money. When you’re shooting digitally, you have all these screens on the set and nobody’s watching the actors anymore. They’re all in front of TVs, and I hate that.
While you’re writing, are you conceiving the visual world of the film at the same time?
More and more I’ve been making mood books when I start to write a script. They’re very, very important to me. I find things in books or on the Internet, ideas of colors or spaces. Then when you have your script finished you have this huge mood book that you can give to the cinematographer or the set decorator. For me, it’s more and more difficult to write a scene if I don’t have the location in my mind, even the colors of the walls.
So what was in your mood book for Nocturama?
There were a lot of photographs of malls but also pictures of art galleries. I wanted to show the objects in the film as if they were in an art gallery and not a shopping center. There were a lot of pictures of the Metro. I like to spend time searching for these photos, and sometimes you find stuff you really weren’t expecting.
Starting with 2011’s House of Pleasures, Bertrand Bonello has been on the verge of some sort of breakthrough, but it’s telling that this is the most obvious starting point — it’s the only one. That was essentially the first project to got any real U.S. distribution, and its appreciation, while fervent, remains hermetic, while the attention paid to this year’s Saint Laurent wasn’t exactly significant. (This, I should stress, is in no way a reflection on their quality.) The very small release being granted to On War some seven-and-a-half years after its debut probably won’t launch him much further, thus all the more reason why it’s a work — familiar in its archetypes, entirely unique in its approach, and difficult to shake after the fact — in need of attention.
I got in touch with its U.S. distributor, Indican Pictures, who put me in touch with Bonello for a phone interview between Paris and New York. Although it’s initially clear that the writer-director hasn’t thought much of the film in years — to say nothing of the revelation the he doesn’t much admire his own work — the specificity of its vision, and of his way to approach cienma, becomes clear as we get deeper into our discussion. I did, of course, have to end with a question about his next feature, Paris Is Happening, which concerns young terrorists in the city and, needless to say, has gained an unfortunate significance in the last month.
The Film Stage: Could you give us some background as to why this film is only now being released in the U.S.?
Bertrand Bonello: No. I really don’t know. [Laughs] The film was released in France, like, seven years ago. Earlier this year, Saint Laurent was released in the U.S., and, you know, the attention was maybe getting a little bigger, and maybe a distributor looked at my former films.
There was a retrospective in New York and Saint Laurent opened up the conversation a bit, but your work is pretty badly distributed here.
I know.
Do you have any idea why? Have you asked yourself this question?
Well, it’s not that easy for French films to travel. We are doing, like, 240 films a year, and not all of them travel — especially in America, which is a difficult country. I guess the first one that was really released would be House of Pleasures, probably also because of the competition in Cannes; that put some light in the film. When the film was shown in Cannes, it went pretty well, so maybe it helped the distributor to make his decision, to bring the film to the U.S. After that, Sony was interested in what I was doing, and they bought Saint Laurent before they saw it, just before the festival. But, before that, I know my films were quite “confidential” in foreign countries, yes.
Has this release made you consider the movie again? Has it been on your mind more in recent months? Maybe even rewatched?
For me, it doesn’t change a lot. I just keep on working the way I always did. Films are getting a little bigger — I have some more money — but I try not to change the way I think and the way I do movies.
Is there any habit of revisiting your work?
Not a lot. I’ve done it recently because I’ve had quite a few retrospectives, so I had to watch some again to prepare them and prepare the Q & A — stuff like that — but, for me, when it’s done it’s done. I try to look beyond, to the future, more than to the past.
I think the film quickly announces certain, let’s say, “intentions,” if only because Mathieu Amalric plays a film director named Bertrand. But there are other, bigger things, e.g. this director owning a poster for your film Tiresia; at one point, he has a nightmare in the form of its most horrifying scene; and the movie’s actor, Laurent Lucas, also appears. You also make a very peculiar cameo at the end of Saint Laurent. Why, if at all, do you like inserting yourself into your own movies?
Well, first of all, I think if I call the character Bertrand it’s because it gave me more freedom. I’m not afraid to treat myself badly, you know? If I had called the character, like, Pierre or Jean, maybe I would have been more respectful. With my own name, for me, it’s easy, and it gave some humor to some of the stuff. For example, with the poster of Tiresia and how it becomes a nightmare: because, in a way, for me, the nightmares are my former films. That’s why I don’t like to look too much into the past, but toward the future. But you’re always living with the films you’ve done. Here, you live with them, and it’s not always so easy.
Do you ever consider people making inferences about you? Perhaps thinking you have an idea of who you are as a result of the character?
Not that much. The fact that the character has my name is just, like, a small part of the film, you know? I hope the film can be seen even if someone doesn’t know my previous films or anything. The character is a director — as in many, many films in the history of cinema. It’s a very familiar character, the director, because it allows you to talk about your anguish, about creation, about your life — not really mine, but everyone who makes films, or art’s, life.
Are you not happy with Tiresia?
What I’m very happy with is a short film with Asia Argento called Cindy: The Doll Is Mine, which is based on Cindy Sherman’s work. It’s fifteen minutes, but I’m really happy with it. The other films… you know, I always think a film is the result of what you were able to do and what you were not able to do. That’s what makes the film. So, of course, you are disappointed, but the disappointment is part of a film. So it’s a strange feeling, but that’s the way it is, and I really accept it.
Is the disappointment a way of applying something to your next film? Are you always trying to ensure that it doesn’t creep in again?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You try, when you move on, to say, “Okay, the other one, I missed that. On this one, I will make it.” All the mistakes, you try to avoid them on the next film — and, of course, you don’t, because part of your mistakes is also your style. It’s inside you. It’s just not a mistake; it’s just who you are. Some part of who you are, you don’t like. Some you do, and some you don’t. But that’s who you are, and that’s what your films are.
Your films tend to be very claustrophobic, and this is no exception, from Bertrand being locked inside a coffin to the strange colony in which much of the action is set.
It’s very true, yeah, and even the next one, it’s the same: it takes place in a mall. I really like these flirtations, you know? To make a film, or 75% of a film, in one unique place. That means it’s cut out from the outside, cut out from reality, because then your characters are also cut out from reality. It allows you to have a lot of fantasies. For me, these places, they are like movie theaters. When you come into a movie theater, there’s no windows — no relationship with the exterior, with the outside — and you’re ready to receive a film or fantasies or ideas. It’s exactly like a brain, and that’s why I really like writing and directing these films in one unique location, cut from the outside: it gives you a lot of possibilities, a lot of freedom. Like a brain.
The soundscape plays a major part in establishing On War’s tone. The score, in particular, is this droning piece, and its interaction with the images — such as a trance sequence — makes me wonder where you start with music. Do you compose first and then apply, or is there more interplay?
Usually, I try to compose the music while I write the script. If I write a scene and I think there should be some music, I have a record and I really try to put it in the script — which record is it, when it starts, when it ends. Or it’s original music, and I start to compose it and to record it. Usually, when I finish the script, the score is finished. For me, the music in films is exactly like a script: it’s supposed to say something. It’s not just an illustration of the meaning. It’s as important as the script itself, and I do them at the same time.
Do you play your music for actors?
Usually, what I do is make CDs for the actors with the music of the film, but also with some other music. For example, for Mathieu, I chose, like, ten or fifteen songs or pieces that remind me of his character, and I do a compilation and give it to him. And I do another compilation and give it to Asia, or give it to Guillaume. All the characters. I ask the actors to listen to the music once a day for the last month before the shoot, for example. For me, it’s much more useful than talking to the actor about their character. You don’t need to use words; everything is in the music. You don’t use the music during the films, but they know it, you know? Sometimes, before a take, you tell them, “Remember this song. This is the mood of the scene,” and it’s very efficient. Much more than psychological indications.
There’s a mystery to this colony where Bertrand visits, with mere hints giving us a history. Do you have full portraits in mind, or are profiles as scant for yourself?
It’s always a mix of who the actor is and what I’m writing. For example, I really wrote the film for Mathieu, Asia, and Guillaume. So, for Asia and Guillaume, I know who they are — what they’re going to bring, what kind of energy, how they’re going to say the words — and that’s about fifty percent of the character. The other fifty percent is my imagination, my fantasies. But I really wrote the film for them. It’s people that I knew very well, so it’s very much part of the writing: it’s the fact that I know the actors for this film.
Talk a bit about Mathieu Amalric. He’s pretty well-tuned for this role: his facial expressions and gestures and tone of voice tell us as much as what’s on the page.
Well, to be honest, if Mathieu turned down the film, I wouldn’t have done the picture. It was him or no one. We’ve known each other for twenty years, and, for twenty, people always told us that we really look alike. I think it was before that he did a film for television, with a character inspired by himself, and he wanted me to play it. I didn’t do it, because I was a little afraid of doing an imitation of him. But when I asked him if he would do this film, he was a little more generous than I was and said yes. But, if he had said no, I couldn’t have replaced him, I guess.
There’s a point in the movie where he watches eXistenZ, and the climax directly homages Apocalypse Now. In the end credits, you thank Cronenberg and Coppola for their assistance. What’s the story behind this?
Oh, yes. When I asked the authorization of using eXistenZ to David, he said, “Yes, of course. You can take it for free.” Then we asked to Francis’ production, the rights to use the voice of Marlon Brando, and they said, “Yes. It’s free.” It was very, very nice of them.
I have to ask about the current state of Paris Is Happening. Where are you with it?
It’s a little complicated. I’m editing the film, which is about young people putting bombs in Paris — so it’s very weird, these days, to work on the editing. So, yes, it’s a very contemporary film. I’m working on the editing; I showed a version today, for the first time, to the producers, but it’s a little weird to work on that in Paris these days.
Has there been any hesitance from producers, financiers, or the like, given recent events?
Well, we’re trying to keep on working without doing any relationship with reality — to keep working on the film, on the feature, the fiction. Even if there are some things that are really the same, there are also some that are very different. We have to separate those and just keep on working, and see in a few months, when the film is finished.
Even with what you’ve said, have you felt your relationship to the work change at all?
Myself? Well, of course we are living in fear — but, at the same time, we have to keep on living. I don’t want to leave Paris or to hide or to be scared. It’s just a major, major question of the 21st century. We are very shocked, of course, but we have to be strong and keep on working and living and having fun. I don’t want to change my life because of the fear in the city — which is very strong these days, you know?
Bertrand Bonello Talks On War, Mathieu Amalric, and Making a Film About Terrorism In Paris. By Nick Newman. The Film Stage, December 3, 2015.
A RARE REPRESENTATION OF A UNIQUE KIND OF FILMMAKING, BERTRAND BONELLO IS EVERYWHERE THIS FALL. NOT ONLY WILL HE RELEASE HIS NEW FILM “SAINT LAURENT”, A PERSONAL LOOK AT THE GREAT COUTURIER, HE ALSO HAS AN EXHIBITION AT THE CENTRE POMPIDOU ENTITLED “RÉSONANCES”. A MEETING WITH A DIRECTOR – AND MUSICIAN – OF A SUPREMELY SINGULAR TALENT.
Some may have caught a glimpse of him at the latest Cannes Film Festival, where he showed up in extremis to present his vision of designer Yves Saint-Laurent with his film “Saint Laurent”. But haste is no friend to the artist: the film fared poorly at the festival and it was quickly sent back to the editing room… In high fashion, everything is a question of cut and silhouette. So the film fell back into the director’s hands before it was finally ready-to-view. In the meantime another YSL film was released, Jalil Lespert’s “Yves Saint Laurent”, which was considered the “official” biopic as it was commissioned and approved by Pierre Bergé. No worry for Bonello, as it gave him the freedom to imagine his own Saint Laurent, with no one to answer to and no “specifications” to meet. His film covers the ten years from 1966-1976, an essential period and – as they say in perfumery – the essence of the myth. A film in three acts, a fresco of a bygone era, a portrait of a tormented and destructive genius, “Saint Laurent” also marks a new direction in Bertrand Bonello’s work, as he explores new subject matter and experiments with a much larger budget. Alongside a graceful Gaspar Ulliel are performances by a surprising Louis Garrel, a playful Léa Seydoux and the legendary Helmut Berger in a savage and unsettling performance as an aging Yves Saint Laurent… Our meeting with Bertrand Bonello takes place in early August, at his home, not far from the Palais Royal. We talk about the upcoming film and the Centre Pompidou exhibition he is still busily preparing…
Can you tell us about your childhood and where you are from?
Bertrand Bonello: Well, I was born in Nice in 1968
and I stayed there until the end of high school. I lived in a big
house that even had a name: L’Apollonide [this would later become
the French title of “House of Tolerance”]. There were a lot of
rooms in the house, and my parents invited lots of friends over,
mainly artists, musicians… It was very enjoyable… My father was a
lawyer, and my mother worked at the opera in Nice. In fact, I was
immersed in music and my mother had me playing piano at five years
old… I listened to an enormous variety of music. Not only
classical music, but also rock. Naturally we listened to a lot of
opera at home: Wagner, Mozart and all the great Italians…
My
personal favorite was Robert Schumann… Later I started
listening to a lot of pop, and I even had a big hard rock phase… I
listened to a lot of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Motörhead…
(laughs)… Then there was punk rock, the Clash, the Stranglers, Sex
Pistols… Then the first U2 albums, and Brian Eno… Music was
something else at that time, nowhere near as accessible as it is
today. It’s difficult to realize, to even imagine if you didn’t
live through it. And Nice was not Paris by any means. We planned
excursions to London to get vinyls we had spent weeks and months
searching for… All that work just to find one specific album. It
made us appreciate it even more; we would listen to it over and over
again… You would be reading a magazine and say to yourself: “I
need to find this album. Absolutely.” We cared so much about music,
and this isn’t the case today, that’s clear. Afterwards I played
in my first rock band. It was called WHY, but later we became the
Bonellos… Because I was the one who called all the concert venues
and I gave my name when we booked shows. So people started calling us
the Bonellos… (laughs)… And then I left for Paris when I was 18…
I became a studio musician. I played a lot of organ actually, but
also some piano, a Rhodes… Music is my first and greatest passion…
And how did things go in Paris?
Well, I played for quite a few people, from Carole Laure to Françoise Hardy, as well as Daniel Darc and Elliott Murphy, and lots of others whose names I prefer to forget… I was mainly working at Studio +, which is still around I think… It was the end of the 80s, a very, very tough time for French music, in terms of quality I mean. And “home studios” weren’t around yet, so it cost a lot to record something or produce an album… I got bored with it fairly quickly, and I intuitively started looking for a new path, something else to do… And so I got into film, but without any intense passion. I didn’t go to the movies very often, and didn’t have any film background at all. All I had was a desire to make films. So I got my finances in order and got started by directing a short film. It was called “Juliette+2” and I filmed it in Poland… It was very basic, not a masterpiece, but a first step. I hadn’t gone to any school; I just started writing. I directed a second short in 1996 with artist Jean- Charles Blais. It was a Pasolini adaptation called “Qui je suis”… I continued writing a bunch of scripts, and they were all very different… Then one of the scripts caught the attention of a producer: Carole Scotta. She had just started her production company called Haut & Court, and she believed in the script, she trusted me. So that’s how I shot my first feature, called “Quelque chose d’organique” (1998). And then I did “The Pornographer” in 2001, when I had the opportunity to direct Jean-Pierre Léaud…
It’s not very common for a director to come from music, instead of visual art or literature…
It’s true… There are a few others, though. I’m thinking of Jim Jarmusch or Vincent Gallo. But for me, music is an integral part of the project whenever I’m planning a film. Music is there as soon as I start working on the script, from the very first… In “Saint Laurent”, for example, music plays a special role, because it always comes out of the scene itself. It’s what we call diegetic sound. It’s a disc playing in a hall, or the music at a fashion show, and we even hear the rustle of clothing and the jingling of jewelry. It’s not music that’s been slapped onto the image, as is the case in many music videos or commercials… From the start of the project I wanted the music to have this “physical” presence. My first thought was Northern Soul, which is a unique genre. Then of course I thought of classical music, of opera and Maria Callas, a Saint Laurent favorite. And for certain scenes I even made some music myself, all with a Moog sound. By that I mean I used a synthesizer, in the Krautrock style that was all over the place in the mid-70s [such as Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and Klaus Schultz]. So there are three kinds of music in the film, one for each part: 1 – Day / The young man, 2 – Night / The rock star and 3 – Limbo / YSL – The rise of the “brand”…
It’s true that each part has its own tonality, its own light, its own mood…
Yes, that was very important. Light plays a strong role when the Saint Laurent world is invaded by Jacques de Bascher, a young man who is extremely seductive and at the same time terribly destructive. And also incredibly tough in his attitude. I wanted to recreate that by using very strong, cold lighting. For example, the drug scenes are not shot in the shadows but in a bright, violent light. With some possible reference to certain scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”, where we see groups of young men in completely white, extremely “clinical” atmospheres… Jacques de Bascher, who is played by Louis Garrel, fascinated Saint Laurent, because of his ability to be fully in the present moment. There is no past and no future for this character…
Can you tell us how the idea first came about to do a film on Yves Saint Laurent?
Actually it was the Altmayer brothers, two
producers, who asked me to do the film after they saw my last one,
“House of Tolerance” (2011). My initial reaction was to say
no, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do what I
wanted. And you have to be careful when dealing with Yves Saint
Laurent… Then as I thought about it and talked with them, I
realized I would have the chance to do exactly what I wanted, that I
could take total control of the project. I was free to bring in my
vision, with no compromises. So the project started to take
shape. And unlike the other film project on Saint Laurent, I didn’t
have to answer to anyone. For me, the first step was to get rid of
anything I didn’t find interesting. There are so many
different aspects of the character; there’s “too much”. So I
chipped away at it, cutting as much fat as possible. Because, in the
end, this is also a very personal film… In fact, the “biopic”
side wasn’t interesting for me. Though I did watch the big biopics
released over the past few years, like “La Vie en Rose” and “My
Way”… I also rewatched Scorsese’s “Aviator”, because there
is a commonality with Yves Saint Laurent’s development: they are
both personalities who, unlike many others, did not need to climb the
social ranks. They were born into well-to-do families, so they didn’t
have to fight to get rich, to survive… So I ended up sticking with
a period in his life from 1967 to 1976, more or less. Then I sat down
to work on the three parts of the film with my co-screenwriter, and
to come up with scenes based on all the anecdotes, stories and
events… Like the scene with the letter from Andy Warhol: How could
we show the rise of Saint Laurent in the media, and the legendary
Rive Gauche boutique, without falling into clichés and déjà-vu? So
we had Warhol say that he and Saint Laurent are now the only two
stars, which puts Saint Laurent on the same level as Warhol. In this
way we see Saint Laurent achieving international celebrity. He’s a
Star. Then we hear « Venus in Furs » by the Velvet
Underground, but it’s not the version everyone knows, it’s the
first
recording…
How does this film fit into your career?
For me it’s actually a continuation of “House of Tolerance”… In that film, as well, the events take place at the end of an era… And there is the same strong relationship between Beauty and Toughness… They also share the theme of confinement, though in “House of Tolerance” the confinement is involuntary, whereas in “Saint Laurent” you can see it as more voluntary. Even when Saint Laurent meets people, he is always and inescapably alone. And once these people leave, he goes back to his isolation… I’m thinking of the scenes where he meets Betty Catroux, then Loulou de la Falaise… But as far as themes go, I think my main concerns appear in all my films…
How did you choose the actors?
It was a rather long process. The first person I thought of was Helmut Berger. He came to mind pretty quickly. So I got his personal number and called him myself. It took some time for him to see what the project was about and what I wanted to do, but he was soon enthusiastic about it.
He’s impressive in the role of Yves Saint Laurent at the end of his life…
Yes, he’s absolutely perfect. His way of moving, his face, everything… And in the scene with the young man he calls Pascal, it’s quite uncanny. I actually thought up this scene when I met Pascal Greggory. Because that’s who it is in the film. Pascal Greggory was kind enough to let me read a letter Saint Laurent wrote to him near the end of his life, at a time when he was in the grip of enormous distress, when he was extremely alone… At that moment, Saint Laurent was tired and suffering terribly. Pascal Greggory visited him from time to time to try to console him… And that’s what sparked this very powerful scene… Then I thought of Gaspar Ulliel for Saint Larent. I didn’t know him at the time. A funny thing he told me is that Gus Van Sant had already contacted him shortly before that to play Saint Laurent in one of his films, which didn’t end up happening… So Gaspar Ulliel took my offer. Then he took the time to really step into Saint Laurent’s skin, because 14 months actually passed between his decision to take the part and the film shoot… By the time we started shooting, he had become Saint Laurent. He simply let the designer speak through him. In fact, he’s the one who drew the sketches we see in the film… And he did it all with exceptional humility, total professionalism… Then I started to think about the other actors, like Jérémie Renier who is just as convincing in the role of Pierre Bergé. Then the women: Amira Casar for Anne-Marie Munoz in Saint Laurent’s atelier, Aymeline Valade, who is a model, for Betty Catroux, and Léa Seydoux for Loulou de la Falaise… Not to mention Louis Garrel for Jacques de Bascher….
And then you started shooting?
It took a long time to start shooting… For many reasons, some of which have already been published, like the fact that Pierre Bergé didn’t want this film to happen, for control reasons… And more than once we almost had to scrap the project. I have to say that Christophe Lambert, the producer at Europacorp, as well as Luc Besson both gave a lot of support to the project, defending it so strongly because they couldn’t understand why, in France today, it would be impossible to do an independent film, free from any control, about a figure like Yves Saint Laurent… It was a tough battle, but once shooting started, everything went extremely well. All the technicians had been ready for weeks. They did exceptional work. We shot almost the entire film in an immense townhouse in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, except the scenes in nightclubs and a few others… We were one big family of 80 people, and we organized big parties, for almost nine and a half weeks. It was a great atmosphere on set, with a lot of great memories… We also got approval for the film by the current owners of the YSL brand, the Kering group owned by Pinault. They gave their approval without asking for anything in return. So I was completely free.
And where does fashion fit into it all?
I’m not crazy about fashion, but I find the process interesting and always have. I had the chance to get really into this side of things because we didn’t have access to the original clothing, due to the disagreement with Pierre Bergé, so we had to reproduce everything. So in the end I got to see and supervise the entire process, and I think that made the clothes look even more alive. The fact that they had just been made, and not pulled out of an armoire… The whole fashion system, its economy, and the act of going from sketches to shows, it’s fascinating. Gaspar, as I said, drew all the sketches based on Saint Laurent’s own sketches…
At the end of the film, in French, you put: “Mise en scène: Bertrand Bonello”… And not « A film by » or “Réalisé par…”
“Réalisé”, I never understood why we say that. I don’t really know what it means, in fact. Maybe in English it makes more sense, “Directed by”, but in French, I think it’s better to say “Mise en scène”…
Like in theater…
Yes. Well, yes and no…
