📼 Moving Pictures: A Conversation with Frédérick Pelletier
đź“… April 1, 2022
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đź“… April 1, 2022
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Issaka Sawadogo as Traore in Diego Star (2013)
The following is a conversation with Frédérick Pelletier, a filmmaker from Québec, whose critically acclaimed 2013 film Diego Star asks questions about identity, race, and what it means to be human.
Joseph: What drew you to filmmaking originally? And, more specifically, what drives you to make films?
FrĂ©dĂ©rick: It’s half a joke to say I was first drawn to film because I was a bad painter (my first college degree is studio art). With time, I realize that I work better with a crew, [it] makes me a better person and that I’m good at using colleagues’ input; the possibilities opened by dialectic [go] a long way!Â
I would say that I’m usually driven by two things. First, film (and art in general) are for me a way to learn and reflect about the this huge thing that is the Human Condition. It’s true for me when I sit in the audience. It’s also true for me as a writer/filmmaker: I need to learn and understand things. When you work on a film for several years, you end up being a geek [about] a lot of random things. For Diego Star, I ended up learning pretty much all about international laws that regulate sea fare and trade. I’m also very knowledgeable on shipbuilding, mechanics, etc. [This is the] objective knowledge that I like to collect—the one you can learn in books.
But the part of the learning/reflection process that really drives me is the human and relational aspect of creation: trying to understand other people’s perspectives and experiences in life. Working with Issaka Sawadogo was not only about creating a film character. It was for me the occasion to understand better how an African man goes through life, not only as an actor, but as a man. Empathy is the key here. And through it, I also think I learn modesty.
The second reason is more shallow: it’s the playful possibilities of dramatic writing. The What if… ? question you ask yourself on about every situation in life. I simply love the game of mak[ing] up stuff.Â
Joseph: Thinking about the “what if” question, the human condition, and these larger ideas makes me think about the usefulness of art. Do you think cinema, as an art form, has a duty to do this kind of important work, asking big questions?
Frédérick: I don’t think that any art form ha[s] a duty besides a real respect for the audience. By respect, I don’t mean to be soft spoken, obsequious or a crowd pleaser—which would be the artistic equivalent of populism—but rather to never underestimate them and always talk to the best part of people: their intelligence.
There is a political aspect to my films, but I see this as a personal interest and would be very afraid of any “moral obligation.” This would end up in the creation of “film a thèse,” films that are promoting certitudes rather that asking questions. I don’t know if it makes sense, but I like the possibilities of asking questions more tha[n] finding answers.
Once when asked if he considers himself a “cinĂ©aste engagĂ©,” filmmaker Robert Morin answered: “engagĂ© par qui?” “Engagé” is the term we use in French to describe political artists. It also means “to hire for a job.” It’s hard to translate this one but I find this brilliant. At the end, maybe Truffaut was right: “le cinĂ©ma aide Ă vivre et c’est dĂ©jĂ beaucoup”—[or] “cinema helps to live and it’s already a lot.”Â
Joseph: I like that. Asking questions about ourselves often leads to the most interesting stories. My work deals heavily with identity, grappling with identity, and how we present our identities (both of characters and authors/directors) and, oddly, humor has become a part of that study. It seems that your films, such as Diego Star, deal centrally with questions of identity, what it means to be human, a poor human, a human that is stuck under an oppressive system. Why were you drawn to these sorts of questions? What should we be learning about ourselves and the world?
FrĂ©dĂ©rick: This is a huge question—a question that I keep asking myself every time I start working on a new project. If I want to [pat myself] on the shoulder, I would say it’s empathy that makes me explore those themes. We meet people, bond with them, learn about them and their life and make links with our own reality. Then you try to understand what really connects you to the rest of your species. Maybe in a way it’s not very different [from] social science scholars: we try to understand life and share a hidden ambition of transforming reality… Â
Issaka Sawadogo's Traore thinking and praying
Joseph: So what drew you, then, to these questions, and what led to Diego Star?
FrĂ©dĂ©rick: At the foundation of Diego Star, there [were] personal memories—I was born near this shipyard, and my grandfather was a seafarer and worked at the shipyard—and cultural circumstances. As QuĂ©bĂ©cois—French-speaking North American minorities—identity crisis is constitutive of our identity. We are defined by the French language, but also by a diffused and internalized feeling of constant existential threat, the fear of disappearing, finally dissolving in the anglophone ocean that is North America. This feeling [has a] bright side—a vivid artistic scene, a political culture of resistance and a deep concern for the community, a collective welfare and social justice. In its dark side, it’s a provincial variation of your American Culture War, with conservative stagnation and the fear of the “alien.”Â
Traore standing on the Diego Star, looking on
More specifically, when I started [to] write Diego Star, Quebec was in the middle of a political crisis on what we called “accomodements raisonnables.” Basically, it was a stinky debate on how Quebec should adapt their institution to the needs of minorities. The whole thing started when a YMCA in Montreal blurred their windows so the boys from the next door orthodox synagogue won’t see women [doing] yoga… It was really a silly—and somehow funny—debate. While visiting my uncle, who lives in a remote rural part of Québec, he [tried] to explain to me how we shouldn’t abide by this kind of unreasonable demand from minorities. I was shocked, because he probably never saw a Jew [in] his life, and I was an actual member of this YMCA and went there every week with my kids to swim… So [the following question was born]: what if an “Alien” arrived in a small remote all white town? Would he be welcome or expelled like a foreign body?
Joseph: I can certainly see the influence of these experiences on the film. I do still wonder, though, about humor: Diego Star seems rather devoid of humor. There are lighter moments, but there don’t seem to be many jokes. How intentional was this choice? Some directors would want, even in a film as serious as this, levity: is it necessary for the story to avoid that? (Or, another answer could be that there is humor/levity—if so, where do you see that?)
Frédérick: This is an interesting question because from my perspective, there is quite a lot of humor in Diego Star. Obviously, there is no comedic situation, comic-relief character, or scene intended to make the audience laugh, but I still think that some situations are funny—maybe in a sarcastic/ironic way: the discussion about steak tartare in the shipyard kitchen, Timo trying to convince Traoré [about] buying a used TV, some of Fanny’s tongue-in-cheek comments on Traoré or her mother, the way some secondary characters talk or look (the cook, Francis-the-Douchebag that Fanny hooked up with).
Joseph: So why might it seem like the humor isn’t there, if it so clearly is?
Frédérick: I believe that if drama is universal, humor is very local and specific to the time and place—if I watch Quebec comic from the 70’s or 80’s, it’s not funny anymore (usually rather offensive). Same thing with most contemporary French comedies: the[y] are not funny at all. I think that maybe the humor in Diego Star is idiosyncratic to Québec culture and [is] totally lost in translation—or irrelevant outside of Québec.
Joseph: I think time and place is certainly key to understanding humor, and even more widely the film itself, in some cases. And, considering film more generally, could you speak about the process of writing a film? What does it look like, the day to day?
Frédérick: It’s a long and lonely process. So lonely that I now try to have a cowriter after the first draft—also because I know that my mind works better when exposed to dialectic, where ideas bounce and are question[ed] from another point of view.
On a daily basis, I try to write for two or three hours in the morning, sometimes late in the afternoon (I’m no good after lunch and will usually go for a walk, training or read/watch a film if I feel lazy). As much as I can, I try to break down in[to] little [goals] the whole process—today I work on this or that scene or I only write this dialogue, etc. On a good day, I usually try to stop before I run out of ideas, so the next day I know what to do (I stole this from Hemingway, along with his “write drunk, edit sober” process… just kidding: I write in the morning with black coffee only).Â
Joseph: On that note—not about writing drunk, of course—how much changes when you begin approaching the film on set, rather than “on paper”? Do things tend to change a lot, or a little? If so, what tends to change?
Chloé Bourgeois's Fanny on the left, her baby, and Traore
Frédérick: If a script is a blueprint you write to clarify your ideas and intentions for yourself and your crew, the film set is a construction site where you adapt to the reality of things. This is especially true with independent/low budget film[s] where your wiggle room for reshoot or endless takes is reduce[d]. I often say to my student[s] that “in filmmaking, reality is always right, even in fiction,” meaning that the perfect design you had on paper will have to find [a] way to survive the chaos of filming [with] your ability to adapt yourself.
So far, I find that the only way for your film script to survive the shooting process is through preparation: knowing your film inside out, enough to understand the essential core of every scene so if you are running late or the set or the actor are not what you expected them to be, you focus all of your energy on this core, cutting out things that were great idea[s] on paper but are not essential to your story. You need to trust your instinct and hope for the best!
Joseph: It seems like a tricky balance. I know that you are currently working on a documentary. Does writing a fictional film feel at all similar to crafting a documentary? What kind of overlap do you find with creating work in both genres?
Frédérick: Québec cinema is rooted in documentary film and there is a constant dialogue—a porosity!—between the two. Personally, I don’t see documentary and fiction as fundamentally different. I think that every film is the result of the creative process and pretty much all stor[ies] can be told as a documentary or fiction—it’s a matter of choices from the storyteller. I really like this quote that is in turn attributed to Godard, Rivette, Renais or Rohmer: “Ultimately, every film is the documentary of his filming.” It emphasi[zes] this idea that filmmaking is a process and that in the most fictional film, there is documentary, and that in the pure cinéma-vérité, there is mise en scène and artifice.
A portrait of filmmaker Michel Brault (1928-2013)
Joseph: These similarities are an important consideration, too, as though it would seem obvious the comparisons one could make, not many filmmakers dabble in both. Do you have any other general thoughts on the comparisons between fiction and documentary? What does it look like in your work?
Frédérick: In my works, someone once told me that my documentaries look like fictions with a formal device that circles the reality I try to film, and that my fictions use the code of documentaries, with non-professionals, on locations, handheld camera, etc. It was meant to be a criti[que], but for me it was a real compliment!
The documentary I’m currently working on is a biopic (or kind of) of Michel Brault—the most influential QuĂ©bec filmmaker who invented the handheld camera and was instrumental to the birth of cinema direct/cinema vĂ©ritĂ© by creating new cameras and influencing the French New Wave through his collaboration with Jean Rouch and Raoul Coutard, Godard and Truffaut’s cinematographer. His documentary masterpiece, Pour la suite du monde, is broadly discuss[ed] by Deleuze and scholars around the world. But Brault ended up winning a Prix de la Mise-en-scène at Cannes… for a fiction film!Â
To learn more about Frédérick's films and work, click here to visit his website which links to his IMDb page as well.