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.
Tahar, the two of you met once in a car, and Jacques was immediately taken with you. Yet he made you audition a grueling amount of times for this role. What did you get out of that, if anything?
RAHIM: What I learned doing the auditions was that [Audiard] directs something from one moment to the next. I had never seen that before. You're working, you're doing a scene, and he says, "Do this, do that, do this, and do that at the same time." That was...unusual. [Both laugh] It's like we were doing a silent movie.
AUDIARD: That's true, I have a problem with my editor because I'm always talking during the takes. We have to dub a lot of stuff. I have these notes from my editor, and they are all, "SHUT UP!" [Both laugh]
RAHIM: I think I was able to control my fear as we went through the audition process. I learned more and more how to give him what he wanted, but I was never sure if I was succeeding. It trained me to learn how to deal with the pressure.
Did you ever get to a point where you felt like you'd succeeded?
RAHIM: No. No, no, no, no. Not even after we'd finished the film together. It's not about "succeeding," but sometimes on a film, you know you've captured something. Sometimes, I could see in his eyes, "Yes, we've got that one."
Jacques, part of the inspiration for A Prophet came when you screened a previous film for French prisoners. Can you tell me about that?
AUDIARD: I had already started writing with Thomas Bidegain, so we knew that the screenplay was set in a prison, but we had a very literary approach. The city of Paris, the government, asked me to go screen my previous film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, at the video club of the prison La Santé in Paris. It was a shock for Tom and me -- we'd had words up to that moment, and all of a sudden, we had images to go with them. We saw what it's really like. There were one or two instances in A Prophet where I reproduced exactly what I had seen at La Santé. When they're standing up on the tables in the classroom and they're looking through the window into the courtyard? I didn't know that the guys would push the tables against the wall to shout at the guy in the yard. It's something very simple, but very real.
Did it help to cast ex-prisoners in those extra roles?
AUDIARD: Most of the people who were playing prisoners had some experience of prison, but a lot of them were also playing the wardens. In the beginning, it was a problem. I just recently learned that there was this tension there, and I didn't realize it: All of the extras who were playing convicts were naturally apprehensive in front of the people playing the wardens. It was the uniform! They wouldn't speak to them, I think they didn't want to eat together, and at some point, the wardens said, "Well, put me in jail too already!" [Both laugh]
Tahar, how did it help you to have that element of authenticity?
RAHIM: It was a bonus, because you didn't even have to think about it. It's like the prison set was so real, I never had to imagine it, and all of the extras in the film had been in prison. Sometimes I was looking around the set into their eyes, to see if I was reflecting the same tone and the same mood that they were showing in their faces. What's crazy is that you could improvise something with those guys, and it was like rapping -- they would bounce back at you. They were great at responding to the improvisation.
AUDIARD: It was kind of crazy. I don't know if we should say it's luck, but can you imagine if those people hadn't been there? If you didn't have those guys with you in jail, it would have been a lot more work. Maybe we were lucky.
RAHIM: It's true, otherwise I would have been portraying something of which I had no knowledge at all: life in prison. But no, they were in their element. They were a bit mistrusting in the beginning, but then they became quite frank with us. Once they felt they could trust us, they would give it their all. In a way, it was like getting recognition from another world. To this day, I'm still friends with some of them, and I think that something in them has changed because of this adventure.
Tahar, you have Eagle of the Ninth coming out with Channing Tatum. Are you looking for more English-language roles?
RAHIM: Why not? It's the experience that I want, whatever kind they are. To learn things, to fail sometimes, to experience things.
So what was the biggest thing you took away from that experience?
RAHIM: I learned how to be alone. I experimented as well. That's a movie where the actor is in the service of the camera, which wasn't the case on Jacques's film. That's very hard, because it's impossible to give 100% when you have to think about your position, hitting your marks...
AUDIARD: That seems insane to me, that kind of work.
RAHIM: It took me a long time to get used to that. With Eagle of the Ninth, every shot was extremely planned and organized. The director was like, "Do this!" And I say, "How was it?" and he says, "Good." It was very odd. I would never know where he was headed, or even if he was shooting me at a close-up or from a distance.
AUDIARD: For me, it's like I'm staging something without thinking about it. When something starts to happen, everything has to be together. If something's emerging, coming to birth, I call my cinematographer and then he does his lights and then we resume. I think it's important to have this gray zone of discovery where you're not quite sure what's going to happen.
RAHIM: I think that's exactly right.