INTERVIEW: Mathieu Amalric
by Steve Dollar 
Everyone's favorite French leading man,
Mathieu Amalric, won the best director prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival for
Tourn�e (also known as
On Tour), an ambling backstage saga about an American burlesque troupe on the road in France, playing the creaky-theater circuit in a string of port towns as their manager Joachim (Amalric) sorts out his own personal drama. Many of the performers will be familiar to fans of the latter-day burlesque revival: Julie Atlas Muz, Kitten on the Keys, Dirty Martini, Mimi Le Meaux. They'll join Amalric for a screening and party as part of the third annual
BAMcinemaFest's closing weekend. Earlier this week, Amalric spoke about his profound fascination with the ecdysiasts' art from Toronto, where he'd just arrived to begin shooting in
David Cronenberg's
Cosmopolis.
How did you discover the neo-burlesque ladies? It's a very strange way. I started to write something based on a diary that Colette wrote when she was on the road. Colette was a woman at the beginning of the 20th Century and she would do naked pantomimes. There was something in the way she would free herself by showing herself naked at that time that just struck me. I was looking for a spirit that had something to do with politics in a generous and funny way. Completely by chance, I fell on an article in a French newspaper about a world I had never heard about called New Burlesque. There were two photographs and I could see that the bodies were not exactly what they were supposed to be for women who were there to get naked, and it was close to what Colette was saying.
We started to write with a friend, and I saw burlesque for the first time in Nantes. We always wanted to do something that had to do with fiction. But I never asked them, for instance, what was private about their life. We tried to imagine something, and then we were really on tour. In France, people are not aware of burlesque like they are in America, and those women that think they are going to see France are not going to see anything but theaters, hotels and trains. And there's Joachim, who must have fantasized America [like] how the girls fantasized Paris and France. Two lies. It's about how they lie to each other.
Paris is associated with burlesque historically. It's funny to hear that they don't know much about it now. Oh, no. Now it's starting. There is burlesque in France. But it's really because they came to Nantes. That's where it started, in 2006.
Where did you go from there? We tried to write a lot before, not with the girls. We tried to imagine a film, like boys imagining what's happening in the girl's room, where you never can enter. We tried to imagine their past, their shyness, their anger. They're queens during the night and shit in the morning and they have to start again, all the things you can feel when you spend time with them and that moved me a lot.
They were generously giving me something of their own life. But in the same time, they were always acting. There was no shot that was stolen. There is no improvisation, they were really acting, and they had to learn lines, play in a certain rhythm, and give that information at that moment, like actresses. It was a very strange experience for them. And something very warm happened with the crew. It was like an exchange we gave each other.
I can see that. Even though the moments have an unguarded feel, it's also like watching a charade. Onstage, it was a real show. There was a real public, they are in the situation of performing. How to grab their energy: They need the public, they offered a free show, so we had all these people who came to see and we would shoot during that moment. All the other scenes were in hotels and behind the scenes. The work was to hide the work. Also, I had so much confidence in them, I would tell the story only orally. They didn't read anything,
They made up their own dialogue? Not really. In the morning there was something written. But that?s because I had wrote a lot before. Years before! [
laughs] Because it was a long time with this film. How to give the impression that there's no director? You're just with people, and they don't know what?s going to happen.
So how did you accomplish that goal? It's like free jazz. To improvise, you have to be all together, and to have the same chords, places where you're going to meet. Between those points, it's not improvising. You're in a scale, like a harmony. They knew that in particular moments we had to learn information, they had to go quicker, things very precise. But, in the middle, they would be themselves. We wouldn't rehearse. We'd do a long
mise en place, and we would shoot. It would be too long, of course. It would be seven minutes. Then we would use that material to go quicker, down to two minutes, one minute. That's where they were really actresses, using things that come from them. It's a strange mixture, but there was a story all the time.
Were they a hit at the shows? Oh, yes. What you hear in the film is direct sound, the way the public reacts. We didn't ask anything to the public. They knew there was a film but we were hidden. If the theater would have been empty, that would be part of the story. If the audience would boo, that would be part of the story. Something happens, it's contagious. In France, it is incredible for women to see those bodies, being so free and beautiful and generous and funny. I was inspired completely by their spirit. That comes from them. I found it interesting: it would be nice if there was a man in this company because they don't need a man. He doesn't know how to be in the moment yet, like them. He's not there. He's dead. We talked about that a lot, how to make jokes about Joachim, this man.
It was funny to discover that you had never intended to play Joachim yourself. I didn?t write it for me. I was inspired by producers with who I worked a lot. Paolo Branco. In fact, I am in Toronto for the Cronenberg film
Cosmopolis. DeLillo. We are shooting now. And it's Paolo Branco who is producing. I was inspired by this man, and by producers that would take crazy risks. I didn't think I was going to act.
You grew a moustache in homage? [
Laughs]. In fact, I had a beard and we did screen tests like that. Then I said: "What about the moustache?" OK, let's try the moustache. I really didn't want to do it. All my friends knew that I was going to do it but not me, My producers, who are two women, knew but I didn?t. I didn't want to do it. It's not my life to act. It's just like that. It was a good thing to be in the frames with the girls because we could do surprises to each other. How could I exist as a man in the middle of those incredible bodies? That's why it's so funny [for him] to be rude, and to speak
Manlish... you know, when a man feels he's aggressed in his virility, he becomes a bit stupid. In the times we're in, it's so complicated between men and women. We don't know how to be with each other anymore. There's attraction and we're afraid of that and it's dangerous. So it was funny to have to do that myself in the middle of those girls, those women.
In the one scene, at least, when Joachim seduces the woman in the kiosk at the truck stop, he certainly knows how to communicate. That's a magical scene. Mmmm. Mmmm. Yeah. Well, we all dreamt about that. It never happens in real life. That's why you do movies. Me, it never happened to me.
You're not that smooth in real life? It never happens. That's what a film is often constructed with, your worst nightmares. To be angry with your kids. The violence we all have in ourselves. Also, dreams like that. To be on the road and leave the family and live with women, it's great. You do a film!
How many performances did you see of these women, before you began filming? I came to San Francisco, to Tease-O-Rama, and I saw, in two or three days, 150 numbers. There's one in Las Vegas also. Exotic World. I went there...
And then they had you hook, line and sinker. What is it that you find most fascinating about all of them? You know what I told you about using generosity, humor and show to be more contagious and political than through words? I think it's more efficient than political speech. The times we're living in, we're all supposed to be perfection?if everybody could be the same, have the same body, have the same mind. There's something maybe a bit sick in our times, about this. I think they are really angry and sad against that. But they use something very energetic and full of sensuality and humor to transmit that in a way: the body is imprisoned by "everybody must be perfect." That's what really struck me, because you're laughing, and you are thinking about society and lots of things. You think and you laugh, in the same time. It's great.
[Tourn�e makes its NY premiere tonight at BAMcin�matek as part of BAMcinemaFest, which continues through June 26]. 
Posted by ahillis at June 24, 2011 11:18 AM
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