Small Bulletin Lyon - Cinema Lyon: The borders of the world - Guillaume Nicloux: "Cinema is the treatment of lies" - Interview published by Vincent Raymond

The Indochina War is forgotten by history, but also of the cinema.How were you interested in this conflict? Guillaume Nicloux: First there is a date: March 9, 1945 which was murmured on several occasions insistently by my producer Sylvie Pialat and Olivier Radot, my artist artistic director.But it never resonated more than that.One day, they returned to the charge by telling me to look at what had happened.And I saw: the Japanese who at the time occupied Indochina because Hitler had authorized them to take possession of these territories to wage war at China by land had decided on the same day at thesame hour to invade the garrisons and kill soldiers, women and children.It was a terrible massacre, a kind of coup operated by the Japanese to convince de Gaulle to give up the colonies.As it was absolutely not supported not Roosevelt at the time, which did not want France to extend its colonial power, it was a kind of anarchy, stampede for the French army.

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The time that we send soldiers, that we bring together forces and minds, there was a very anarchic year and a half of reogeganizations where the French have taken up territories, forts, where they have reinstalled.Some, like my character of Gaspard in the film that is inspired by someone who existed, Van der Berg have decided to adopt a warlike methodology modeled on that of Viet Minh, forgetting the warrior reflexes of France, which followed procedures in the cord.The Viet Minh attacked columns, they cut the bodies and put them in front of the pediments to show that it was going to be terror and that they were fighting for something essential: freedom and independence.It was an indisputable postulate.

I tried to sail in this gray area, where we have to go through there for the noblest of the causes.By leaving Indochina, French power started the same errors again and underwent a bitter and deserved failure in the same way it is not a value judgment compared to those who have committed themselves;This is because colonialism is absurdity in itself.I tried to show that for this fight there, you have to go through all kinds of tests.At one point, my character realizes that he occupies this country as the Germans occupied France and that they have the same reflexes.

Is learning the guerrilla by Gaspard aware or instinctive? In your opinion?Instinctive?Let's go on this.For me, all the interest is to never force the spectator to have a unilateral vision of events.This is why my films refuse psychology a kind of logic that would force the characters to obey specific behavior.We can see that he is struck down by an obstinacy in revenge and his love passion, and that he is unable to choose.

Besides, it is not even a question of choice: it is an impossible cohabitation and it is this kind of lightning fate that interests me.This is why it is more an existential quest in a hostile environment, in a war time, this war which is defined by this date, but it could have happened elsewhere.It is a way to occupy the field because this moment is very little described and told: there are no images, films, very few testimonies.It left me a great freedom to reinvent this war, to fantasize it gets rid of its historical constraints.

Petit Bulletin LYON - Cinéma Lyon : Les Confins du monde - Guillaume Nicloux : « le cinéma, c’est le traitement du mensonge » - entretien publié par Vincent Raymond

This war was much documented later, when she was no longer French but American she became an American war from 1949, when they fully took care of its funding.These are the beginnings of the Cold War, we are starting to enter slowly in something that we are going to do wars by proxy, in other countries, politically fight a project…

If there is a lot of instinct, a character embodies a form of consciousness: that played by Gérard Depardieu yes: it is finally someone who tries to allow him to bring the dust back, to instill a little ofappeasement and a form of renunciation;in any case of abandonment.From a psychoanalytic point of view, it is interesting because abandonment is true freedom.It is a fairly emblematic figure because it is a kind of extension of the father of Valley of Love.Gaspard can become this disappeared son, resurge from the dead, who will accompany him and serve as a father as a substitution for the child he can have with Maï, the prostitute, the prostitute.So there is a weaving, a mise en abyme between each film that comes, the dream that this father of Valley of Love could do to access.A slightly underground network that we do not have to identify, but which is built in a very unconscious way.

His attachment to the Confessions of Saint-Augustin is not underground;It is a network between the actor and the character this not religious but mystical dimension is there between us in our intimate relationship with Gérard, in our pantheist vision of things.This joins my attempt to rid Diderot of his anticlerical image, especially on the nun, and to go towards a wider path which is not necessarily of the order of the religious but of the sacred, more graceful.

Between sacred and meditation, silence draws as two parentheses at the beginning (like 2001 and There Will Be Blood) and at the end.What is its meaning? The film immediately offers a rhythm, a temporality.We can feel that time will have an importance.The dilated time installs a proposal: when Gaspard's face gets up and he looks at the spectator, it is a direct invitation to enter his gaze, to live and to cross this moment, to make a trip with him.Therefore to install a clearly broken dynamic with the brutal way that we then enter the story.It has never been premeditated: this sequence has never been written, and it becomes emblematic.Like that of the cave, with the profile of Gaspard, she came spontaneously: we sat down and I let the whole store slip, not because I felt it but because I had thought about this possibility ofkeep up.

A moment of evidence? That's it;This is what I'm looking for while turning.To be rid in fact, I like the constraint to find the maximum freedom inside.Once I'm there, I have the feeling of feeling comfortable and just in what I live; so I let I feel what I feel.This is why desire becomes more important than the will to obtain something.I never have the desire to get something, but that of being surprised and of being a little jostled and above all to get rid of the scenario so that it becomes something alive.But it is also paradoxical since cinema is the treatment of lie, and that must be lying sincerely.

It is also the characteristic of the novel The difference is that cinema imposes an image for you, while reading allows you to fantasize it, to make it;and that the novel makes you free.Afterwards, you can fill the whites, that's why there are deliberately very elliptical moments to allow the spectator to invent his own journey the missing box…

You chain the achievements.After the borders of the world, you finished a series for Arte and Netflix, it was a second time, and you start filming this December 5 of a new film with Depardieu and Houellebecq for a few years that I found thebalance as fair as possible by manufacturing these films and writing them.So I'm trying to enjoy this chance to make movies.They are not easily done but for ten years thanks to Sylvie Pialat who agrees to produce films I want to write and make, or to people like Gregory Gajos and Alexandra Henochsberg of Ad Vitam Distribution.I consider myself extraordinarily lucky.Even: I can't believe that we could have put together all these films and that we continue.That I can shoot the beginning of a film the day it comes out, it's great, it's an incredible luxury!

Sometimes very different, your films display in their eclecticism an increasingly marked coherence I am convinced that it is for something, that it tells something if we put all end to end.That says things, especially from the moment they were written in a clearer way.I think they all tell the same thing, in a way.The genre film allows you to camouflage intrigue.I am sure that if we take this woman, we will find very strong resonances some of the last films.There are paths in the cellars that join the other pieces.

In the kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq also.We can see from Holiday that these are only confinement films, under the prism of the offbeat comedy or here in a forest, so it translates something well.Locked outside and there I contain them again, Depardieu and Houellebecq, in a thalasso, from start to finish.And in the series too, but on a temporality, a narrowing, even more formal.Gaspard has the first role;It is almost an extension of the character of the borders of the world, multiplied in something contemporary.It is as if he was now trying to find Maï who dropped him…


The borders of the world

De Guillaume Nicloux (FR, 1h43) with Gaspard Ulliel, Guillaume Gouix...

De Guillaume Nicloux (FR, 1h43) with Gaspard Ulliel, Guillaume Gouix...

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Indochina, 1945.Robert Tassen, a young French soldier, is the only survivor of a massacre in which his brother perished before his eyes.Blinded by his revenge, Robert engages in a lonely and secret quest in search of the assassins.But his meeting with Maï, a young Indochinese, will upset his beliefs.