< Home / Interview / Critic / Bio / My articles in Japanese >

A Prophet

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Actor Tahar Rahim, Director Jacques Audiard

Story : After falling in with his prison's Corsican gang, a young Arab (Tahar Rahim) begins to build his own criminal empire.

Opens February 26, 2010 | Runtime:2 hr. 29 min.

 

Q: Why are cinema audiences drawn to protagonists like Malik? We root for him and care for him so much.

JACQUES AUDIARD:: It’s the only way for him to survive. We adapted a screenplay by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit. We took the screenplay that they wrote and we spent three years adapting it. In the beginning, it was the story of a small gangster who became a big gangster. We weren’t interested in that. We were interested in telling the story of a homeless guy – he doesn’t even have words to tell his own story – and at the end, he has a home.

He has a family. It’s a complicated family, but all families are complicated. It’s more the story of a homeless guy who finds a home then a small gangster who becomes a big gangster. The first rule we had with Malik’s character was it was important to see him learn. The second rule was every action he did you had to see him learn. So, if he has to kill someone, we would send someone to teach him how to kill. If he has to do a drug deal, Jordi (Reda Kateb) would teach him. If he has to speak Corsican, you see him learn Corsican.

Q: Why did you make “A Prophet?”

JACQUES AUDIARD:: I made this film because I wanted to work with people I normally wouldn’t work with. I was rewarded for that. It was tiring and a very long process but I really learned things I didn’t know before. These are people that I socially or culturally would have never met, and I also worked with actors who are not well known or who aren’t actors at all. For me, it was a very interesting journey.

Q: I’m curious about the significance of the title of the film and the role that religion plays in the film. Could you talk about that?

JACQUES AUDIARD:: I’m not crazy about that title, to tell you the truth. If we had found anything better we may have used it. The title has too much signification. It imposes something on the viewer: what is the prophet? Where is the prophecy? We saw that title with a lot more irony. Malik announces a new type of gangster and a new type of man.

Q: But there are many religious images throughout the film. Malik sees glances of people praying in prison, he launders money through a mosque, etc.

JACQUES AUDIARD:: In French prisons people pray all the time. When we saw the title “A Prophet” we didn’t see it in a religious way. Yes, there are religious elements in the story of Malik. He’s a Muslim and the relationship with the ghost has to do with a certain spirituality. But that’s really not why the movie is called “A Prophet.” Maybe that’s the irony of it. For us,

“A Prophet” was more of a secular way of doing things – a new type of gangster, or a gangster surname. People would say, “Hey Long Face,” or “Hey Big Guy,” or “Hey Prophet.” It’s not a religious evocation. We would have loved to find another title. We actually found one in English: “Gotta Serve Somebody.” It’s difficult to translate in French but when we found it in English we were quite pleased with ourselves.

Q: There’s a touch of Sufism in the film and the ghost also does a Dervish dance. There seemed to be a whole spiritual journey that Malik goes through. He somehow becomes a good human being through that journey.

JACQUES AUDIARD:: At the beginning, Malik has nothing. He’s a wild child. He makes his way through the gangsters and his purpose changes throughout the film. Little by little, he develops a conscience. When he gets in that gunfight in the car he smiles. He has this revelation like he’s becoming the character. He’s becoming a movie character.

Q: Could you talk about building your own prison to shoot?

JACQUES AUDIARD: Yes, it would not have been possible to work in an actual prison because the prison director would have had to read the screenplay, and, by page 20, would have said, “Uh, no.” If I was in an actual jail there would have been a documentary temptation and the reality of the prison would have been a burden, actually. I would have needed to shoot the reality of the prison. By building a set, I limited myself to what we built. The set was a courtyard, a corridor, a few sets of stairs and 15 cells.

Q: Is Malik a unique character or is he a typical Arab prisoner?

TAHAR RAHIM: I think he’s really unique because he has the capacity to adapt in a very hostile environment. He doesn’t try to run or try to kill himself. He discovers his own intelligence and adapts himself to his environment. He’s an opportunist. A nice opportunist.

Q: He’s so clever. Why was he so unformed all those years?

TAHAR RAHIM: Because he grew up on the street. He’s 19 when he arrives in jail. Before that, he was a kid. When you’re in the street and you’re a kid, you don’t think about stuff. You just worry about defending yourself, drinking and finding a place to sleep. He never had a chance to find out that he was smart. You could ask yourself, “What would happen to Malik if he hadn’t gone to jail?” He would have probably died in a squat somewhere. He wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn in the school of crime.

JACQUES AUDIARD: There’s one guy who worked in a big prison outside of Paris who worked with us, and he read the script and said that people like Malik are called the “over-adapted kind.” They are people who really spring up when they’re in jail. Outside reality is too confusing and discouraging. Inside prison, everything is much more simple and their intelligence can double up in an environment like jail.

Q: How did you find Tahar Rahim? He really is the soul of the film.

JACQUES AUDIARD: We asked ourselves the question, “Who is Malik?” at the beginning of writing and the answer was not Tahar. I met Tahar by accident in life. I was coming back from shooting on set and in the car there were a couple of actors. Tahar was one of them. He immediately attracted my attention. When we started casting, Tahar had arrived already. It’s very difficult to tell yourself the first person you see is the right one when you start casting.

So I had to see a lot of other actors – and non-actors – but something happened to me on the prior film. In “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” I was looking for an Asian girl that was a good actress and could also play the piano. Something that was seemingly impossible. And the first actress I saw [Linh Dan Pham] was the right one. But you can’t immediately believe it, so you have to see 30 of them to convince yourself.

Q: Could you also talk about the depiction of French Arabs in films? They’re almost always playing criminals, so were you at all preoccupied with catering to stereotypes?

JACQUES AUDIARD: We had this feeling that Malik is not a criminal, but it’s not true. It’s false. What was really important for me was to make a genre film and to propose, within the frame of the genre, a heavy budget with some faces you haven’t seen. For an American audience, it may not make a lot of sense because, aside from Brigitte Bardot and Vincent Cassel, we’re not very well-represented here. But in France, yes, it was important.

In a lot of films, the Arabic people are presented as criminals or presented as very positive characters who try to work hard, integrate and fight racism. We didn’t want to fall into either of these traps. We really wanted to make a film that’s not at all about integration. That would be the film after that. Problems are just territories or power or money.

Q: Did you watch any gangster films in preparation for this? Do you have any favorites?

JACQUES AUDIARD: I really like genre films. Noir, especially. In the process of writing we’ll detect a movie that’s coming out and we’ll say, “Oh, those guys are thinking the same things we’re thinking of.” When we saw “Gomorrah,” we were like, “Oh, they’re asking the same questions.” It’s very difficult to see films when you’re working because if they’re not good, then you double-up your ego, and, if it is really good, you spend 15 days in bed.

Q: Those old gangster films with Cagney and Edward G. Robinson – they were rise and fall movies. This is just a rise movie. Was your intention to put a spin on that gangster formula?

JACQUES AUDIARD: It’s true. He’s the Edward G. Robinson. “The Asphalt Jungle” is fall-and-fall. We come from a background of the gangster movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s – Raoul Walsh and James Cagney. But this is a much longer story than other gangster films. Usually those take place over weeks or months. This takes place over seven years and eight rolls of film. Because it’s not a rise and fall, we decided that we couldn’t tell the story over acts – act 1, act 2. A lot of people ask us about a sequel because this is just a presentation of the character.

Q: Was this part of a thematic trilogy along with your last two films: “The Beat That My Heart Skipped” and “Read My Lips?” The three protagonists in those films are very similar.

JACQUES AUDIARD: [Laughs] Ah! The only impression I have is the end of a cycle. So yes, looking backward, it may have been a cycle. I have a feeling after this film that I have to go do something else. It’s always the creation of a hero. A guy who has to extract himself from a poor condition. They are heroes. How many lives do you live? A hero maybe is someone who bets on his second life. His new situation.

Q: Do you have a vision for Malik after the movie in terms of a possible sequel?

JACQUES AUDIARD: He gets into politics! It’s possible!

TAHAR RAHIM: What I tell myself is he’s going to run away from everything he built, but they’ll get him. And then he’ll have to go back to what he knows best, which is his criminal life.

JACQUES AUDIARD: When I saw politics there’s no irony in it. He could really use the skills he learned in prison to serve the public good. He knows a lot about organization, the human soul and he’s made in such a matter that he could really be interested in the public good. What would be terrible is if his past gets back to him.

At one point, we had the idea that he became the lover of a woman in politics and would help her professionally. Then, at one point, she would present herself to become president and the film starts the night of the election. Malik arrives at the office of the girl with suitcases and brings back all the bad files!

Q: Having a father as a filmmaker, how much did he influence you?

JACQUES AUDIARD: I am absolutely the son of my father. When you are a child and you see someone like my father, who’s writing all the time, cinema was really a profession. It was not an art at all. It was just a job. You start at 8:00 a.m. and finish at 6 p.m. It was a very prosaic and demystified vision of cinema.

That’s why I didn’t want to go into cinema at first. At first, I studied literature. My father belonged to a generation in France that had very little respect for cinema. The fascination went toward literature or theatre. The cinema was just a joke.

Q: You got your start editing for Roman Polanski. What sort of influence was that on you?

JACQUES AUDIARD: I was Assistant Editor [on “The Tenant”], and the person who really influenced me was the lead Editor [Françoise Bonnot]. I learned a lot from her.

Q: I heard that you employed criminals to be in a lot of the scenes of the film as background actors. What was that experience like? Were there any difficulties?

TAHAR RAHIM: No, there weren’t. It helped us. They were very sweet. When you use the word “criminal” it’s very surprising because they were just friends! Ex-convicts who knew how to operate in a prison environment. When you meet someone new, you don’t think of their past.

JACQUES AUDIARD: They forced us to be real and set the tone within the jail environment. When we arrived onset in the morning there was all the noise and it made the place come alive. When you told a guy to give someone cigarettes or a baguette they immediately did it. They were the smartest background actors I’ve had. They were in groups and they knew how to behave.

Q: Tahar, what did you learn from making this film?

TAHAR RAHIM: Almost everything that I know in my experience about acting I learned from that film. I also learned how to read a script and learned the difficulty of being part of an enterprise. It looks very simple on the screen but it’s very difficult to make.

Q: Could you also talk about your character’s growth throughout the film?

TAHAR RAHIM: I didn’t want it to be too complicated and didn’t want to think about the beginning, middle or end. It’s a mistake I made at the beginning of the shooting. I would just close myself and become really secluded. I should have stopped and asked the right questions about what would help me between one scene and another.

What I remember about building the character is I would go in one direction proposing stuff, but, to stay in the truth of the scenario, I had to think everything that happened after did not exist and I just had to exist in the moment. In that sequence.

Q: Was the movie filmed chronologically?

JACQUES AUDIARD: No. He has a beard at the beginning so we shot the part with the beard, then the part with the regular hair, then the shaved head part. We could not have shot scenes like the murder at the beginning because his head was shaved during the murder.

Q: What do you think your Oscar chances are?

JACQUES AUDIARD: Since we finished the film, we go on the plane, we dress well, we go in the big rooms, applaud Michael Haneke, have a few drinks. “Oh, Michael! Made a good movie!” Each time I don’t get a prize, I have a 20-minute conversation with Michael Haneke. I love this director. We’ve seen all of his films. One thing I’d like to see is him applauding us, but maybe one day.

Q: I’m curious to know what the reception to “A Prophet” was like among Arab communities in France? This is one of very few film heroes they have.

JACQUES AUDIARD: It was very good. That was the purpose for us when writing this film – to make an Arab hero.

TAHAR RAHIM: They were happy to be considered and portrayed by a movie industry that seems so far from them. Happy to be part of the dream.

End.