Laurent Cantet: The Hollywood Interview

(Director Laurent Cantet, above)

by Terry Keefe

Director Laurent Cantet's The Class is no Dead Poet's Society/Mr. Holland's Opus/Stand and Deliver, and that's a good thing. Francois, the youngish teacher in the French junior high school depicted in the film, has an often unruly classroom of adolescents to manage, but he certainly doesn't have all of life's answers for them, or even for himself. Shot in a quasi-documentary fashion, loose and handheld, the truths of The Class come from its determination to avoid any sentiment or artifice, and to show life in the classroom as realistically as possible. The cast features real junior high school students and it's an immediate reminder that real 13-year olds don't look like the model types seen in Hollywood high school films. These kids are also socially awkward, and often irritating, and teaching them requires the patience of Job. Francois is played by co-screenwriter Francois Begaudeau, who was himself a teacher and wrote a best-selling autobiography entitled Entre les Murs (Between the Walls) about his experiences. Cantet worked with Begaudeau on the script for The Class, using the material from the book as a jumping-off point for the development of the eventual storyline.

The Class has arrived on DVD and Blu-ray this week (Buy it here at Amazon) with special features which include a Making of Featurette and commentaries on select scenes. We sat down with Laurent Cantet for our interview several months ago, in February, when he was visiting for the Oscars, and for which The Class was nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

Terry Keefe: Was your reading of the book Entre les Murs the initial inspiration for making The Class, or were you seeking out a school-based story to adapt regardless and reading lots of potential material?

Laurent Cantet: In fact, I started to write a script, when I was not sure that I would be able to make my previous film [Heading South], and the story I wrote was – is still in the film, in fact, in the plotline of the film, which is the story of (the student character of) Souleymane. And it was like the book, just set between the walls of a sort of junior high school. But I stopped writing, because I finally managed to make my previous film, and the day of the release, I was invited to a talk show, in a radio talk show, and Francois, the writer of the book Entre les Murs, was here too, and he was here to speak of his book, and he read some excerpts of the book. He has been a teacher for ten years, and I realized that could bring me all this documentary material I really needed to make the film. And he also – it was obvious when you read the pages of his book – it was obvious that the dialogues and all that was happening in the book, had this energy I was trying to find for the film. So I proposed to him that we work together, not to make a real adaptation of the book, but just a sort of extension of it. To just take the different scenes that interested me in the book, and make them be a sort of departure point for the scenes of the film. Propose a scene to the class that we would form, and then see the way the children could react from that. And he was really interested in that. I don’t think he would have been interested in just another classical adaptation of his book. He would have had the feeling to do the same thing again, but here it was not doing the same thing. We were going to see the way these scenes…could resonate for other children. And so we worked together for quite a long time before shooting. We made a sort of workshop in the school, and Francois was here every Wednesday afternoon with me, and with the children. And he was just acting in front of them, and working with them. And we could write the film from three different things: From my first idea of the Souleymane story; from the book and the scene he proposed me; and from the way the children react to these scenes. And we put all that together – I don’t know exactly, even today I don’t remember what comes from the book, what comes from my previous idea, what comes from the children. Everything is mixed….

(Star and co-writer Francois Begaudeau, above)

Did you tape the rehearsals in the workshop as you were going along, so you could look at the material that you had?

Yes. We had a camera during all of the workshop – and in the French DVD, we have a sort of making-of which shows big parts of this workshop, and it’s quite interesting to see what they brought to the film, as in moments that they proposed in the improvisation that are in the film now.

Let’s talk about the editing process, which must have been daunting. You shot quite a bit of material that had to be pared down to feature length.

At the end, we had one hundred and fifty hours, and it was quite, how do you say, you could get lost in it [laughs] ?

How many editors did you have?

One.

One!

Yeah [laughs], and he (Robin Campillo) is also the co-writer of the film, so maybe he had a good idea what we were doing, you know.

Did you devise any type of charting system to keep track of all this diverse footage?

No, in fact we edited the film scene by scene. And we tried to get, to see everything before starting to edit each of the scenes, and we had in mind all the possibilities before editing. I’m sure that if we would have watched the rushes after editing, we would have changed a lot of things again. But, you know, at one moment, we said, “So, okay, it works this way,” but I think we could have made another editing which would have been very different.

You shot on HD. I assume you had a few cameras going at once?

Three cameras.

And did you have certain things planned out that each camera would cover, or did they just sort of float around?

One of them was always on the teacher. Because, you know, he’s the one who sort of organizes the scene and says to each student, “It’s up to you.” And the second camera was on the student who was speaking to the teacher. And the third one was preparing itself for the next one to speak, or trying to catch these little moments of the class life, you know? And all that makes, I think, the class feel real.

Production-wise, was there a challenge in making sure the multiple roaming cameras were never in the frame together?

No, in fact, that part was quite easy, because the room was square. And we changed it into a rectangle, and we kept two meters (free) for the cameras and for the technical stuff. And the three cameras are in the same side of the class, just like when you film a match, and you have always the teacher on the left, and the children on the right. It’s quite easy to understand who is watching whom.

How long was the casting process in terms of deciding which kids you were going to focus on?

Well, it was not real casting. In fact, we made this workshop in the school, it was open to all the volunteers of the school, who were aged between thirteen to fifteen. And, at the beginning, I think there were fifty of them who came, just to see what was happening in that workshop. And after a few weeks, twenty-five stayed, and they are the twenty-five who are in the film. I didn’t choose them – they decided to be part of the story, that’s all.

You’ve stayed in touch with the kids. Do you feel responsible for them to some degree now?

Yeah, but I’m very happy, because I was a little bit afraid of what would happen after Cannes, you know.

It’s potentially such an overwhelming new experience for them.

And also because the journalists tried to get them, tried to go with them on holiday, see them going back to their country, and we tried to protect them. But in fact, they stayed very calm about all that. None of them lost their mind. And what’s important for me was they always felt that the group was more important than themselves. And none of them tried to come to the front, you know, and I think it’s – the film has been done in a very democratic way, and I think they understood that very well, and went on in that way of behaving afterwards.

Do any of them plan to pursue acting further?

Some of them would like to play again, to act again. One of them already made another film last summer, but they are still in school, and they still study, and, you know, they don’t lose their mind at all.

In the United States, the story of a teacher and his students is almost a genre in itself. There have been a lot of films based around this dynamic, and they’re often very sentimental. Did you make a conscious decision to veer away from sentiment?

That was one point. The other point was that I didn’t want to create this “perfect teacher,” that would take the children from a very bad position, to – how do you say it - inspirational? I tried to show a teacher that just tries to do his best, and sometimes makes mistakes, sometimes misses his purpose, you know? And I think it’s much closer to the school reality than an inspirational teacher that would be sort, of a maitre a penser, a thinking master, or something like that. And I think that’s the main difference between American school/class films and all that, and this one. I think this film is asking a lot of questions about school, about what it means to learn something, what it means to teach something. But it doesn’t give a lot of answers, because I think that the situation is too complex to have any specific answers – especially in two hours, when you’re making a film, you don’t have time to analyze everything, so you just – I just try to show the complexity of the system.

How influenced have you been by the neorealists?

Well, I think my favorite director would be Roberto Rossellini. I like the way he looks at the reality without being afraid of emotions in the same time. He’s even sometimes melodramatic. And I think that’s what I always try to make in my films: show the reality through the experience of people, and if you really look at people living the situation, you often go to the emotion that they feel about the reality.

The film has a strong fly-on-the wall feel, much like a real slice-of-life documentary, but there is a subtle guiding hand of narrative underneath. It's a tough balance to pull off, I imagine.

I, in fact, have a fictional line, and I like to develop it in a context that really looks like reality. And even if this reality is always rebuilt, it’s not a documentary in the sense that you just put your camera and wait until the things happen in front of the camera. Here, especially for this film, we created the class by putting together children who are in the same school but didn’t know each other very well, and we created characters with each of them. They were allowed to improvise on the scene, but also I gave them very precise lines that I really needed to hear in the film, and that they were able to introduce in the improvisation, just like it was coming from them. And most of them are very different in the film than what they are in real life. The main character, Souleymane, was a tough guy, you know, who has problem with the system, but he’s one of the most quiet boys I ever met, and he’s very discreet, and he’s even a little bit shy. But he likes acting, and I saw that on the first day we met, and I was so happy to try to find a character to try to act a different way he would act, he would be himself. It was very interesting for me to work with him.

Were you shooting hand-held most of the time?

It was all on the shoulder – and, you know, the first shot of each scene was very long, it was twenty-five minutes long. And then, after the first take, I would speak with each of the children, telling them, “That was interesting, you will keep that, you can avoid that, you can forget that, you could say that later – when you will say that…” and we were rebuilding the scene through what they proposed, but quite close to what I was expecting, in fact.

How long did it take for the kids to stop noticing the camera?

That was not a problem at any moment. Maybe because they are part of the generation that is very used to this, or just because, you know, after a while, when you let them think about what they are doing, they forgot they are not in a real lesson, and they are just acting, without thinking. And the other thing is, with three cameras, they never know when they are filmed, but they can be filmed at any moment – so they are acting from the action to the cut.

Did you learn anything about being a kid that’s different now, from when you were one?

What I learned is that, you know, we have a very bad image of kids now – they are supposed to be idiots, just able to play video games, and what they proved to me is if you give a certain meaning to what they are doing, a sense, I don’t know how you say that, they can give you much more than what you can expect at the beginning. And they were able to stay concentrated on the work, for a six-hour day. And the teachers who are in the film are also the real teachers of these kids in the same school, and they were so jealous to see that we were able to keep them like that – in a room and just working for six hours!

Do you know what you’re working on next?

No. For the moment I am just traveling with this film, which will soon finish, so I will have to think to the next film. And I need to go back to work now, but it’s too early, and I really need to finish this story before starting another one. The only think I’m sure of is that the working method I found for this film will be the one I will use again on my next one.

It’s hard to imagine the production process of this pre-digital. I’m envisioning several Moviola editing decks covered with hundreds of trims.

Yeah, and HD really…it gives the film freedom that I never had before, and I think you can see it when you watch the film. And, you know, since we had three cameras, we didn’t have to cut and make the reverse shot, and so it respects all the energy of the scene, and I think it’s the only way now for me to work. I think the freedom I’ve found with this film is what I will want on the next one. Because it allows you to really listen to what people have to say, and just let the camera roll, and then see sometimes you have ten minutes where nothing is happening – and then after ten minutes you have one scene that is so perfect.

FIN.