You’ve already adapted three screenplays by Ingmar Bergman, Arnaud Desplechin, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder for the theatre, and directed a short film, Violetta, selected for the Cannes Film Festival. How would you explain this remarkable role played by cinema in your theatre career, and how does it form the basic structure of this new creation?
I discovered theatre as a child, in a very joyous way, and I continued practicing it first with workshops at my local youth centre, and later in the various theatre schools I attended. I’ve always wanted to do theatre, to build scenic spaces and toy boxes, even before I saw my first show! I lived in the south of France and my secondary school offered art classes, not theatre but cinema and plastic arts. Through those three disciplines, I started to see critical spaces open up, to build my perspective as a director but also my outlook on the world. At the theatre, objects rely entirely on our presence to even exist. The vertigo of the present is everywhere and infinite, when we give our time to each other and give ourselves over completely to this moment of sharing. Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Fassbiner, Arnaud Desplechin, and now Frederick Wiseman: when I adapt a film for the theatre, it’s always because of the power of its dialogues. I don’t borrow a work for its cinematic or aesthetic qualities. I borrow a territory I think I can transpose to the stage: a story, a few characters, words I have to filter because they don’t have the same weight once embodied. This passage from film to the stage is also about teamwork. A team, structured around different points of view, working on scenography, dialogues, performance. Together, we examine what rises out of a magma made up of the film and our different outlooks, the first gesture towards a stage version. We ask ourselves which paths to choose to embody the work of the filmmaker in a different form. It’s a long and ambitious work of deconstruction, which then continues with the actors who put the text of the play to the test onstage, who explore it and show me how to write the final version.
With this show, you’re switching gears and leaving fiction behind to tackle Welfare, a documentary shot in 1973 by an American master of the genre: Frederick Wiseman. How does one go about adapting a film whose many characters could all have their own show?
It’s a different project, in that it’s Frederick Wiseman who approached me about Welfare. Although based in New York, he’s often in Paris, where he shot documentaries about the Comédie-Française or the Opéra de Paris. He saw my work at the Odéon-Théâtre national de l’Europe and told me he’s always thought his cinema was close to theatre. That’s how I discovered Welfare, which I’d never seen before, a thundering work that left me stunned. The documentary shows men and women working for a New York welfare centre in the 1970s, and illustrates the staggering diversity of social problems they face. Frederick Wiseman chooses a specific space to film those who occupy it and the rituals that take place there. Social workers and aid recipients alike struggle with the laws and regulations that rule their work and their lives. This place becomes a geographical and collective framework, eminently theatrical, which allows us to watch and understand how order is established, how each person tries to resist this order (or not), how violence becomes formalised, how things are passed on, and how life in a democracy is performed. At the same time, I was wrapping up shooting on Violetta, the parallel stories of two women, halfway between fiction and reality. That’s how I discovered the power of fictionalisation in a documentary. A cinema of the moment, of the present, dependent on the real, whose narrative aspect is handled by the editing. That’s exactly what Frederick Wiseman does: he never does any location scouting, but shoots for weeks on end. He ends up with 150 hours’ worth of rushes, which he then edits together. That’s why he doesn’t like his films to be classified as “cinéma vérité.” As he says himself: “What truth? There’s no truth here!” Indeed, his gaze as a filmmaker influences reality. Sometimes he even rigs it, with fake shot/countershot effects he couldn’t actually create, because he only uses one camera! It’s an extremely clever work of writing because, through the way he looks at those heroes, he manages to unveil an aspect of society. Ingmar Bergman and Arnaud Desplechin are authors who chose to write the dialogue of their films. That’s not the case in Welfare. While the question of location was easily solved for the play, since the film takes place entirely in a welfare centre, we had to focus on the many faces and stories that make up the film. Over 50 disjointed stories of men and women caught up in the urgency of daily life and who come to find some help. A matter that is repetitive, accumulative, and impossible to perform because literally incomprehensible, caught in the net of Frederick Wiseman’s editing. It’s a unique approach: people struggle to find the right words, try to become citizens again by expressing their thoughts clearly, mix truth and lies to try to be understood and legitimise their situation. In the play, this location-as-world shown in Welfare is embodied by 15 characters whose stories we follow. Characters we can love, but who can also shock us… This work allowed us to identify the core of the cinematic matter in order to create collective sequence shots which come together to create acts, dramaturgic movements. The characters are no longer anonymous, they become mirrors of Frederick Wiseman’s work ethic in the creation, with and through the human, of a critique of American neo-liberal institutions as they work to destroy that very same human.
The movie was shot in the United States in 1973: how can something filmed 50 years be made relevant again?
Frederick Wiseman does talk about his own country, but in a film we all can understand, for it speaks of the inhuman condition of our societies. The outsiders he films have the power of Shakespearean characters. They’re homeless, stateless, clothes-less, with no social identity, in a way that reminds us of Samuel Beckett’s antiheroes, who expressed out loud a state of the world many would prefer to keep silent. They embody the dysfunctions of a democracy, and should invite us to rethink the way we come together to make a society. To that end, I took them out of their original context, the welfare office. The heroes of Welfare find themselves in a sort of gymnasium turned into an emergency centre. A place that’s too big, too open. A reminder of Covid-era vaccinodromes. There’s something unique about the Cour d’honneur: it’s one of those venues that’s big enough to have a societal function. It’s also a space that allowed me to easily escape everyday life to show characters who have broken free from reality. I don’t make documentaries. I make theatre, I tell stories. And I need fiction to win in the end. Ever since I started directing, I’ve been obsessed with the concepts of community, of democracy, of the collective; it’s what I want to explore, what inspires me and makes me create things. By choosing to adapt a new social epic, which depicts America as a country of immigrants and which, as such, must therefore pick up the torch of diversity, I continue my work on our collective horizon with a play that’s an uncompromising look at our social reality
Interview conducted by Francis Cossu and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach