While his latest film, "Adieu les cons", appears in the cinema with the reopening of theaters on May 19, the filmmaker Albert Dupontel returns to Michel Denisot's microphone on the icons that have marked his life and inspired his work.
Among them, Terry Gilliam and Charlie Chaplin, whose shadow is sometimes even a little too present.
INTERVIEW
When we ask Albert Dupontel who are the icons of his life, the first quoted is surprising.
"The fear of living is an icon that made me screw the camp of my social integration to go to the puppet", answers the actor and director at the microphone of Michel Denisot, on Europe 1. Young, Albert Dupontel intended to studying medicine, before turning to the cinema.
Today, his seventh film,
Adieu les cons, is
about to experience a second life by releasing next Wednesday, thanks to the reopening of theaters.
>> Find all of Michel Denisot's interviews every Saturday at 8.45am on Europe 1 as well as in podcast and replay here
In addition to this fear of living, the filmmaker evokes two tutelary figures: those of Terry Gilliam, member of the British comedy group Monty Python, and Charlie Chaplin.
"Terry Gilliam is one of those who marked me the most," he says.
“When his film
Brazil
came out, I was 20 years old and I must have seen it three times a week. It had all my nightmares and dreams in it. I thought it was great because Terry Gilliam is a Monty Python , so a priori a puppet -I specify that it is very positive in my mouth- and I was esbaudi of the virtuosity, the emotion, the speech, the vision. It is one of the founding films of that time."
"The difficulty of loving each other in a repressive and anxiety-provoking world"
We find there, according to Albert Dupontel, a common theme with
Adieu les cons,
"the difficulty of loving oneself in a repressive and anxiety-provoking world".
So much so that the French director considers his film "a collateral damage to
Brazil
".
As for Charlie Chaplin, "it's a classic", slices the filmmaker.
"No sooner was the cinema invented than some posed the dramatic codes with the camera. He the first, great comic, dared the drama in his comedy. He posed the reasons why people seek to live."
A territory that Albert Dupontel also explores in his cinema, passing "through the register of the fable".
Because with him, he admits, "writing is [a process] painful, laborious, anxiety-provoking".
When working on a film, the director has "more the idea of the emotions" that he wants to convey "than that of the structure." "The plot and the characters have to blend cleverly. That's what it was doing. Chaplin. "
"I prefer fables"
This difficulty in giving birth to a script perhaps explains why
Adieu les cons
is only his seventh film. "Very verbose people, like Woody Allen, are real authors. Me, I have an idea of emotion and I try to reproduce it through a plot. I am helped by the camera, the actors, the music, the light." Hence a cinema of evocation and not ultra-realistic. "You can choose to restore reality, it can be frontal or brutal, like Ken Loach. Or to express reality. I choose to express it, I prefer fables", admits Albert Dupontel.
Still, the icons are sometimes bulky. "I try to chase them away but Terry Gilliam and Charlie Chaplin are still there. Sometimes I'm just happy with a find and realize they already have."