Q&A: ‘The Class’ Director Laurent Cantet
Source: AOL
Posted: 01/14/09 3:31PM
Filed Under: Film
At the Cannes Film Festival last year, 'The Class' came out of nowhere in the latter part of the fest and won the top prize, the Palme d'Or. Director Laurent Cantet was awarded for his realistic depiction of an inner city school in France over one school year. The film was based on the memoir by teacher François Bégaudeau, who also starred in the film.
AOL had the chance to take part in a round-table interview with Cantet in Toronto this week. The director talked about openness in the classroom, the French education system and why French cinema is only now moving towards multi-culturalism.
How did you get the characters in the film to be so much like real people rather than characters?
First of all, by working with the students for a long time, getting to know them and respecting who they were. Then by creating the characters based on what the students put forward. It wasn’t systematic. It just so happens that some characters are more different than others to the actors that are playing them.
Originally, in the script there was a Chinese character but his name was Ming and he was a very shy boy. He wouldn’t speak for fear of making mistakes in French. But Wey is very talkative and loves to argue. We didn’t want to ask Wey to be quiet to appear like Ming, so he just created a new character and the new character was Wey. As it happens, Wey is a lot more interesting than Ming would have been.
Arthur, the Goth boy, is not at all a Goth in real life. But the day we started talking about costume, some of the kids asked: “Do we have to wear what we usually wear?” I said, “No, if some of you want to change your personas, if some of you want to be Goth…” and then Arthur didn’t let me finish my sentence, he said: “Yeah, I want to be a Goth.” It was a way for him to do what he may not have been able to do in real life. He got into his character so much that he was able to improvise in character. The day his mom came to talk to the teacher in class, I had to tell her to remember her son was supposed to be a Goth. So the mother had to play the game as well.
Souleymane is the other character I’d like to mention. He’s played by someone who is very different from the character in the film. Frank is very timid and discreet, yet he loves acting. I understood very quickly that by pushing him, I could get him to play a tough guy, but behind this there was fragility.
You wanted to base the film within the school’s walls. But why did you include bits from the outside lives – like Wey’s mom being deported?
That was precisely to show the school could not be a sanctuary or a fortress separate from the world. All the troubles of the world pass through a school. The story about the expulsion – something that is very real in France, unfortunately – the return of kids who can’t integrate to their home country, these are very concrete things that the school must take into account.
There was an interesting emphasis on openness, for the teacher as well as the student. An example being when one of the students asks Francois if he is gay. Did that come out of the source material?
The question about homosexuality was actually in the book. It’s a question that a lot of teachers say they have been asked. Boys at that age are very interested in anything sexuality. Homosexuality intrigues them but they consider it with a sort of homophobia. It’s true that a lot of teachers would refuse to answer that question but Francois – because all situations are fodder for instruction – won’t refuse the question, instead he will try and show Souleymane his latent homophobia to help expose it.
What I found interesting about Francois was his willingness to take risks. What some teachers considered provocative, was that the teacher put his students on the same level as him which showed them respect and brought out things that they otherwise would not have seen.
One of the things people didn’t like about Francois was how intimate he was with his class, but at the same time I think that’s inevitable. We’re humans and there are sympathies and when we talk about things we can’t stay in abstract terms, we have to speak in real terms.
Francois is an idealist who thinks he can create this dialogue of equality with his students, but at the same time he hits against a system that keeps him from doing this. He is continually confronted with dilemmas – while he is trying to establish an equal system, he is still aware that he has the last word because of the way the system is set up.
There seems to have been a shift from bourgeois art house films to movies that focus more on the real-life multiculturalism in France. Why do you think that’s happening only now?
I think the world we live in has gotten more complex and relationships are a lot more complicated. We ask more questions now than we did 20 years ago. In cinema, we express those questions that we ask in reality. It’s not only French cinema either, you just have to look at the films at Cannes last year, so many straddled documentary and were anchored in reality.
Between learning from your parents about the school system and reading Francois' book, did you change your mind about the French education system?
I don't think it radically changed my mind, but it did allow me to understand everyone better - both the students and the teachers. I also became aware of the complexity of the school system. What I quickly understood was that school is a formidable place that allows kids to be integrated into adulthood, but at the same it's a system that excludes a lot of kids. The co-existence of these two realities is, at the same time, inevitable and tragic.
The Class opens this Friday.
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