Emmanuel Mouret, at the Enlightenment ceremony -
BERTRAND GUAY / AFP
At 50, Emmanuel Mouret enjoyed great public and critical success with his film
The things we say, the things we do
, a new variation on love.
Born in Marseille, passed through Fémis, he forged his taste for cinema with great clumsy heroes à la Pierre Richard, but also with Hitchcock and Rohmer.
On the eve of the Caesar ceremony, Emmanuel Mouret seems to be staying far from his favorite status.
"What makes me happy is that the whole team is appointed, I have been working with the same collaborators for a very long time", he slips from Marseille, in a daily life caught between family life and preparations for the shoot of his next film.
With thirteen nominations for
The things we say, the things we do
, his tenth feature film, the Marseille director continues the beautiful story of this film which has already won the Lumières prize for best film awarded by the press. international.
"I never really changed the subject, I continued to drive the same point," smiles Emmanuel Mouret.
The titles of his filmography (
Venus and Fleur
,
A kiss
,
please!
,
The Art of Love
,
Caprice
...) compose a tender map where love, desire and feelings weave situations and multiple stories.
"I am much more influenced by cinema than by life itself," says the director, who readily cites Hitchcock among his inspirations, even now.
In her latest film, the character played by Émilie Dequenne, much less readable than at first glance, has the allure of Hitchcockian heroines.
"His films have marked me a lot," continues the director.
There is in Cary Grant or James Stewart this candor in which children can project themselves.
Pierre Richard is also one of my movie heroes, like Jacques Tati, Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis.
I was very easy to identify with these clumsy characters.
I found it reassuring that there is always a tender woman at the end who wears a benevolent gaze, above the fray, who knows how to discern the one with the heart.
"
"The last of the romantics"
Speaking of his “superheroes”, the discreet Emmanuel Mouret finally said a lot about him: “What I understood later is that these great clumsy characters are in fact very skillful.
They fall, but they always get up, without resentment.
This cinephilia, and then also the conviction that it would be "interesting to invent things, to travel", made him say at 13 years that he would make cinema.
After a scientific baccalaureate at the Lycée Thiers, he "went up" to Paris to study drama.
Then passed the competition for La Fémis, at the age of 24.
There he met Frédéric Niedermayer, then also a student and who has since become his producer.
"He may be the last of the romantics," he said of his friend.
He made every possible and imaginable variation around love, while staying true to himself.
It is beautiful people who do not change fundamentally, even if there is obviously a new maturity.
At 50, Emmanuel Mouret has always continued to film, in an economy and a style of very written dialogues which sometimes made one think of Eric Rohmer.
"I put a lot more music in my films, and I perhaps have a taste for the more pronounced romantic", he nuances, as if to ward off comparisons that are too quick, and too heavy: Rhomer is one of the filmmakers that he admires.
"He needs to stay in the background, he's someone who has always been quite deaf to the unnecessary noises of our time", also says Frédéric Niedermayer, saluting a fairly exemplary career: "He's someone of a great fidelity, which succeeded in creating a whole family around him, it is rather rare.
“For his next film,
Chronicle of a transient affair
, Emmanuel Mouret will meet Vincent Macaigne, this time with Sandrine Kiberlain by his side.
He works there from Marseille, where he decided to come back to live in 2001, and where he is careful not to get involved, like a Guédiguian, in the local political cauldron.
He likes this feeling of “feeling like a tourist in Paris”.
In any case, it is as a filmmaker that he will be at the César of this very special year.
Cinema
Lights 2021: Emmanuel Mouret, “Summer 1985” and “Deux” awarded by the international cinema press
Cinema
"The things we say, the things we do": Emmanuel Mouret speaks of love in the singular and in the plural
Director
Marseilles
Caesar 2021
Cinema
Culture