"In society, we need more transparency," says Ozon

Meeting with the director of the recent Summer 85, considered prudent and discreet, but perhaps not as much as you might think and even more committed than it seems

François Ozon in Madrid in December 2016 - OFA / ZOJ / WENN.COM / SIPA

Every Friday, 20 Minutes invites a personality to comment on a social phenomenon in their "20 Minutes with ..." meeting.
François Ozon returns to his confinement and the expectation that it aroused.
The director also evokes the place of homosexuality in his films and his wish to be able to tackle all the current topics which touch him.

François Ozon is the director of Summer 1985 , one of the best post-confinement films. A love story more than a film about homosexuality, originally planned to compete at the Cannes Film Festival, but which saw its fate turned before finally coming out this Tuesday July 14 under the simple Cannes 2020 label.

You did not climb the steps of the Cannes Festival, did you miss it?

Of course, but with the label, we can say that it is as if the film had gone to Cannes and that it is still there right now ... in a virtual Cannes. The confinement was a complicated period because the film had been finished for a while and I only wanted to show it. We had contacts with Netflix, which was interested in releasing it directly all over the world… But Eté 85 is a film that I made for cinema, shot on film rather than digital to regain the aspect of in the old days. And I said to myself that if this film were to be limited to platforms, people would not see this work on the image. So I bit my brake, like everyone else, and I waited… to be able to get it out as soon as the confinement was over.

What did you do in the meantime? What did your confinement look like?

I spent my days watching a lot of movies, including Fellini movies that I hadn't seen in a long time. It felt good to immerse myself in the Italian joy, in full confinement, of being able to appreciate the vitality of Fellini's films. I also saw Rashomon by Aki Kurosawa that I had never seen. Like many people during confinement, I did not want to see things about the present, I rather wanted to immerse myself in the past. So yes, I took the opportunity to see classics that I had not seen or that I had forgotten.

There, you plunge us back into a past… not so far away: in 1985, the year of your 18 years, with the carefree attitude linked to this age, and you tell us about a teenage romance during the last summer before we talks about AIDS…

Yes, after this confinement that we have gone through, there is a return to a lost paradise, in the blessed era before Covid 19 and before AIDS. Two diseases that have extremely disturbed us, especially in terms of sexuality, and this in all societies. Seeing this film today takes on a fairly strong value. It is a love story with its attractions and disillusions that can affect all couples, all those who have lived a love passion, whether you are a teenager or you are older.

Despite everything, the adolescents of the time are not like those of today who display their feelings more and claim their sexuality more easily. There, there is a kind of unspoken with which I play, there are mothers who suspect the homosexuality of their child but who say nothing, a father who, perhaps, does not think of it less ... But there is still nothing about this tradition of coming out that happened long after the mid-1980s.

The way you talk about homosexuality in this film, like in most of your films, is never frontal, even if you are, in the end, someone fairly direct and there is no ambiguity as far as you are concerned on this subject. How do you explain it? Is this your nature reserve?

No, it's just that I don't want to make homosexuality a subject in itself. The fact that this is a story between two boys has no bearing. They are just people who have desire and it is two boys, two girls, a boy and a girl, it does not matter much ... I do not make a very gendered cinema, I think. Often I tell myself, well, I could have told this story by changing the sexes of this or that character. It happens to me, moreover, to change them during scriptwriting.

Is it important that "Summer 85" comes out during the summer?

Yes, that's good, especially since in summer, there is always a lot going on. It is a moment of sentimental, erotic discoveries… It is also a way, for a filmmaker, of filming the bodies of actors and actresses, because everyone is in a bathing suit. There is something of desire, and cinema is made of desire. When we make a summer film, inevitably, we think of Summer tale , Pauline at the beach , Claire Knee by Eric Rohmer, who was my professor at the university and whom I really like. As I also like Claude Chabrol, his bulimia and his pleasure to make films. There is a fun side, something playful, about him, in which I find myself completely.

Are you bulimic?

It is the others who say it: "oh well say one more Ozon film, one more, like every year" ... Me, I just have the impression of doing what I love: neither too many films , or not enough.

You film a lot, but you don't deliver much. We wonder who is behind Mister Ozon… Is there an Ozon mystery?

No, no, it's all in the movies. Just do the puzzle.

You do not engage in much, but there are still often quite strong resonances with current events or social issues. For what reasons ?

I am permeable to what is going on around me. Inevitably, that influences my desire for films, stories. The artist who stays alone at home and who creates outside the world, this is not my case. There are some who do this very well, but I want to confront the world and be inspired by it. Having this openness to the world is something that is part of my way of working.

Is your previous film, "Thanks to God", the most committed that you have made, or at least the most political?

In fact, this film reveals nothing. I just wanted to tell how three victims decide to join forces to fight. When we speak, it feels like things are coming out, but in fact everything I put in the film had already been reported in the press. On the other hand, the fact that it is embodied by actors, all of a sudden, it affects more people and it takes on a political dimension. At the beginning, I thought of making a documentary and the victims told me "no, no, we prefer a fiction". They had the intuition that a fiction would broaden the subject, to touch more. We wouldn't have made more than 200,000 admissions with a documentary. With a fiction, we touched almost a million people in France. And thank God is going out all over the world today. Fiction has a political power which I had not necessarily thought of.

When you get started to deal with pedophilia in the church or student prostitution in Jeune et jolie , is it because the subject is in tune with the times or because you see it as a real necessity?

No, no, it's not at all because it's in tune with the times. It's because it suits me at that time, that's what I want to tell.

It is in "your" trend, in short?

Here. But we can't say that it was calculated ... For God's sake , the legal proceedings should have taken place before the film was released. It turns out that with the delays in justice, everything was postponed, and the film was released in the middle of the trial, but that was not at all what was originally planned.

The cinema industry has experienced many upheavals in recent times, due to the coronavirus pandemic and the closing of theaters, of course, but before there was #MeToo and then more recently the Caesars… How did you experience everything that?

See that other segments of society take hold of the liberation of speech, which was the central subject of Grace à Dieu , and do it also for women, or for children because Adèle Haenel was a child when she been abused, I think it's going in the right direction. In today's society, we need more transparency and we need to recognize that certain behaviors are no longer admissible today.

Cinema

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