Jacques Audiard and Tahar Rahim on A Prophet, Violence, and Sex with Nicole Kidman

Crime pays for Jacques Audiard and Tahar Rahim. Audiard's newest film, the fluid prison drama A Prophet, has been an overseas sensation; not only is it the most acclaimed movie yet for the 57-year-old director (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Read My Lips), but it's also served as a launch pad for Rahim, the previously unknown actor who plays Malik, an innocent who's slowly turned into a savvy prison kingpin.

In Park City last month, Movieline sat down with both men to discuss A Prophet on the eve of its American release, and just after it had picked up a host of honors including Lumiere Awards, European Film Awards, and BAFTA nominations.

This is a very awarded film...

JACQUES AUDIARD: It's crazy. And it's terrible, a little.

How so?

AUDIARD: Sometimes, it worries me because I wonder if there isn't a risk here. I don't want people to think of it as "just a festival film." Do you see what I mean? There's a phase of these movies by French directors that were festival darlings. We've made a movie for the people.

Did either of you realize what a marathon it would be? You premiered at Cannes, but whether you like it or not, there have been many, many festivals since.

TAHAR RAHIM: No. [Laughs] Not at all. Not at all.

AUDIARD: It was Cannes that was the trigger for everything, but when you present at Cannes, your film isn't necessarily finished and you have no idea what the response is going to look like. When the lights go up, you don't know if they're going to throw rocks at you.

Because they would!

AUDIARD: [Laughs] Right. And then it's become this crazy acceleration, and it's been going since May now.

Malik is an innocent that's thrown into this prison system and must learn to survive. Tahar, you're a newcomer thrown into a system that's almost as vicious: moviemaking. How are you adapting to it?

RAHIM: Fast. I have to learn things very quickly. There have been so many challenges. I have these goals each day that I wanted to meet -- that's the biggest challenge.

Jacques, I always read that you're not a fan of onscreen violence, yet it seems like a requirement in the films you make.

AUDIARD: I can't resolve the problem for myself.

Is that another parallel to Malik, who only seems to resort to violence because it's absolutely necessary?

AUDIARD: Absolutely. It's true, I have a character who has the same apprehension to violence as I have myself. What I was trying to do with that is to show violence as I imagine it myself: disgusting. In movies, it's so easy to have this BOOM, to kill, and I think that's inhumane. It's awful, so I want to make this kind of violence as difficult as it could possibly be. I want it to be unimaginably difficult to commit, and I also wanted to show that once you've committed this kind of violence, you never recover from it.

Does it take a toll on you, the director, to stage scenes like those?

AUDIARD: If you're even slightly responsible, you have to realize what you'll be depicting. We could have a very long discussion about this. In cinema, there are two things that are false -- that are hyper-false -- and that make me uncomfortable when I have to do them. One is in violence, and one is love -- the physical act of love, this ecstasy. Filming coitus. We know that it's false. We know that Nicole Kidman didn't get screwed that day. [Rahim bursts out laughing] She's acting, she's imitating. In depicting an act of screen violence, too, you know that people are acting, that it's fake. I came to that realization when I was doing music videos; I was doing a video for a musician I like very much who passed away last year, I was watching the playback, and this musician I have the utmost admiration for, I'm asking him to mime to his song. I was very uncomfortable doing it.

But isn't acting often imitation?

AUDIARD: No, no. Take The African Queen -- and I'm mentioning a very old film intentionally. Katherine Hepburn cries, and those are really her tears running down her face, because her craft as an actor can bring her to a place where she can cry her own tears. An actor could never act through their death, though. An actor couldn't physically climax onscreen, unless he was in porn or something.

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