Albert Ser­ra: ​‘What am I try­ing to say, I don’t know. I just cre­ate images’

A French diplo­mat with elu­sive moti­va­tions in even more elu­sive cir­cum­stances wan­ders the island of Tahi­ti in Paci­fic­tion, the lat­est exer­cise in lan­guorous, max­i­mal­ist cin­e­ma from Span­ish film­mak­er Albert Ser­ra. The film focus­es on pro­tag­o­nist De Roller and his murky polit­i­cal engage­ments, and though nar­ra­tive­ly sparse, Ser­ra leans into extreme aes­thet­ics; the French Poly­ne­sian par­adise is so sat­u­rat­ed with colour (and colo­nial­ism) it appears to be rotting.

LWLies: Many of your pre­vi­ous films have focused on his­tor­i­cal fig­ures and char­ac­ters such as Don Quixote or Louis XIV. Were you keen to try some­thing new?

Ser­ra: I was tired of it. At the begin­ning, I was drawn towards his­tor­i­cal films because we all knew the main char­ac­ter and so I didn’t have to explain any­thing. I could focus on details and atmos­phere and crazy things, instead of being oblig­ed to lose time over obvi­ous details about the char­ac­ters. But with Paci­fic­tion, I liked the idea of explor­ing coloni­sa­tion and pow­er and hier­ar­chy – these ten­sions, this lack of har­mo­ny in the rela­tion­ship between human beings. These are sub­jects that have been con­stant­ly there in all my films.

Paci­fic­tion has quite an ellip­ti­cal and abstract style that plays out over near­ly 3 hours. How did you begin to craft this?

I don’t fol­low any kind of rules. The shoot­ing doesn’t fol­low the script; the edit doesn’t fol­low the shoot. It’s the oppo­site. My sys­tem is based on destruc­tion in order to avoid cliché. It’s one of my obses­sions to go against your own ideas, espe­cial­ly what­ev­er you thought was good in the pre­vi­ous phas­es of the script and in the orig­i­nal idea. For this film, I had more than 500 hours of rush­es across three cam­eras, almost 200 hours of sound. Dur­ing edit­ing, I would choose what I liked in every scene, very strange things that are not con­nect­ed: here I like the yel­low colour of the light on the win­dow; here I like this dia­logue; here I like that you can see his tattoo.

Then I tried to build the scene with the edi­tors using only these organ­ic ele­ments. It’s so dif­fi­cult and so crazy that you nev­er focus on the length or the mean­ings of the film because you just don’t know. You are edit­ing the scene and you have so many strug­gles to make it organ­ic with the ele­ments you’ve cho­sen that you don’t care. What you arrive at by the end is quite spon­ta­neous. When I fin­ish a film, I don’t know what it means. What am I try­ing to say, I don’t know. I just cre­ate images.

How did you approach writ­ing the char­ac­ter of De Roller?

With politi­cians, you nev­er know how much of what they say and do is the ide­al­ism of real­ly serv­ing the peo­ple or the pri­vate inter­est of sav­ing them­selves. Because if the world were per­fect, a politi­cian would always mean what he says. Since the very begin­ning, I liked the idea of not know­ing if he’s a liar or if he’s real­ly attached to the local pop­u­la­tion. This idea was in the script, as was the idea that we will cre­ate the plot just by him mov­ing from place to place and there will be the sen­sa­tion of things hap­pen­ing in the back­ground. What is fas­ci­nat­ing is the way Benoît Mag­imel per­forms. It’s hyper­re­al­is­tic. It’s more real­is­tic than life.

He’s too believable! 

I’ll tell you the trick. First of all, Mag­imel didn’t read the script. Obvi­ous­ly he had the script, but he was a lit­tle bit lazy. So in fact, he doesn’t know what’s going on in the film. We had the idea to give him an ear­piece for his lines. So Benoit would be in these sce­nar­ios hav­ing not read the script, not know­ing what he’s about to say, not know­ing who he even is! He was very brave and very gift­ed. Each time, he would realise what’s hap­pen­ing in real time. We would give him dif­fi­cult lines to fur­ther con­fuse him. You can’t con­trol your body in that sce­nario – it’s impos­si­ble to give some­thing con­crete to the cam­era. The flu­id­i­ty of what he does with his body, he will nev­er be able to make this beau­ti­ful, planned ges­ture. It’s total­ly free. He did it in such a wild way.

In one scene between De Roller and the young, local leader, Mag­imel didn’t know that I’d already pre­pared with the oth­er actor and we were going to aban­don the ear­piece for him. He was con­fi­dent, he had done one take already and knew the dia­logue. But I gave the ear­piece to the oth­er actor with­out him know­ing. Sud­den­ly, we do the sec­ond take and the oth­er guy is say­ing very intel­li­gent, aggres­sive things and Mag­imel feels he doesn’t know how to answer and is total­ly vul­ner­a­ble. It worked so beau­ti­ful­ly. He was so upset, he said, ​‘Albert, I nev­er allow any­body to talk to me like this, even inside fiction.’