Robin Campillo: ‘I love to film things that seem… | Little White Lies

Interviews

Robin Campil­lo: I love to film things that seem impure in cinema’

05 Apr 2018

Words by Manuela Lazic

Portrait of a middle-aged man with white hair and a serious expression, set against a geometric pattern background in shades of brown and yellow.
Portrait of a middle-aged man with white hair and a serious expression, set against a geometric pattern background in shades of brown and yellow.
The Moroc­can-born French direc­tor recalls the excite­ment of being a mem­ber of Act Up.

The Parisian chap­ter of Act Up – a rois­ter­ing anti-AIDS activist organ­i­sa­tion – is the sub­ject of 120 Beats Per Minute, the new film from writer/​director Robin Campil­lo and the fol­low-up to his laud­ed inter-gen­er­a­tional gay dra­ma East­ern Boys. We sat down with him recent­ly to find out more.

LWLies: Both in your pre­vi­ous film and 120 Beats Per Minute there is an notice­able devo­tion from the actors.

Campil­lo: It’s because I trust them immense­ly. I spend a long time on cast­ing. For me, it’s key, because there’s a moment when I for­get the char­ac­ters I’ve writ­ten and become more inter­est­ed in the actors. I try to go towards them as much as they go towards me. Because they know they’re being observed for who they real­ly are, they can be a lot more gen­er­ous with me.

I think we see a lot of the actors’ per­son­al­i­ties in the film, in par­tic­u­lar Nahuel Pérez Biscayart’s, who plays Sean.

There’s some­thing very inter­est­ing about the con­trast between Sean and Nathan. Sean looks at him­self act. The debate scenes could have been real­ly unpleas­ant, there need­ed to be some play, some feel­ings much more trou­bled than just the indig­na­tion of the activists, because the film also talks about the rela­tion to the dis­ease. Sean has this rhetor­i­cal intel­li­gence between him­self and the ill­ness, but he los­es it when the ill­ness over­pow­ers him. When he checks into hos­pi­tal, Nahuel and I made a pact that he’d stop over-act­ing. It’s com­pli­cat­ed for baroque actors because they have this amaz­ing com­plic­i­ty with their pub­lic. Nahuel accept­ed that chal­lenge, and fac­ing him was Arnaud Val­lois [play­ing Nathan], who doesn’t look at him­self act­ing at all, and that’s fas­ci­nat­ing too, and so rare. I find the ensem­ble very shim­mer­ing, so pleas­ing to watch.

The film has so many dif­fer­ent act­ing styles, yet they all work togeth­er. Just like in life, some peo­ple per­form a lot, oth­ers don’t…

There’s a prob­lem in cin­e­ma: we want every­thing to be absolute­ly always coher­ent. After 15 min­utes we want the entire aes­thet­ic cur­ricu­lum for the whole movie. I used to be para­noid about the cast and crew being obsta­cles to my vision. But I reversed that with East­ern Boys, and decid­ed that they would sug­gest bet­ter things than what I’d imag­ined. Now I bet every­thing on actors and loca­tions. Maybe I’m pre­ten­tious… but the rest I know how to do now. Espe­cial­ly on a film about the idea of embod­i­ment – of a polit­i­cal fight, of the ill­ness – actors are cru­cial. I think now I could almost make a film with­out a script if I had the right actors.

Your films often have debate scenes, which aren’t usu­al­ly thought of as cinematic.

Those scenes are like peo­ple form­ing a think­ing brain haunt­ed by images from the out­side. They’re almost seances of spir­i­tu­al­ism, where peo­ple judge and try to make hap­pen real­i­ty, but real­i­ty is also like an hal­lu­ci­na­tion. In the first meet­ing, the images haunt­ing the scene are those of this protest that some con­sid­er too vio­lent, and Sean, with his rhetor­i­cal agili­ty, man­ages to change per­cep­tions. But at his last meet­ing, the images are those of the ill­ness and he los­es con­trol. I love film­ing the voice at work, the voice that pro­duces. I love to film things that seem impure in cin­e­ma, like those meet­ings but also the scene after Sean has died and his body stays in the apart­ment for so long. We nev­er see that in films, even though it’s so con­crete, and to me fas­ci­nat­ing. I think I could tell the bleak­est sto­ries, they would still have some kind of enchant­ed air.

The sex scenes, too, are unusu­al­ly explicit.

In fact, I don’t show that much. I wrote a very explic­it script, but only to have the actors’ moral agree­ment. I nev­er do things to shock the bour­geoisie, and I tell the actors that a sex scene is like any scene and sex shouldn’t be a per­for­mance. Again, I let them take over and keep the cam­eras rolling, so I do show lots of things that usu­al­ly get cut. But in a film about HIV, it’s impos­si­ble to cut out some slight­ly embar­rass­ing things, like the need to get rid of the con­dom imme­di­ate­ly after. I want all these things to be shown, for instance how we need to get undressed and can’t reach the oth­er person’s body that quick­ly, which to me is joy­ous. Or how dur­ing the first inter­course, one comes, the oth­er doesn’t, and it leads to a con­ver­sa­tion. That’s very impor­tant, because what is this sex dimen­sion” we see in movies where sud­den­ly peo­ple stop talking?

What I also find so real­is­tic in the film is the char­ac­ters’ sense of humour.

When I joined Act Up in 1992, I found an extreme­ly jubi­lant group. The very gay self-mock­ery con­nect­ed with my inter­est in show­ing a group aware of its weak­ness­es. Because we had so many failed protests. There was also some­thing sur­re­al to these demon­stra­tions, like the haemophil­i­ac boy mak­ing fake blood in his mother’s bath­tub, which real­ly hap­pened. This humour and sur­re­al­ism meant that these peo­ple were dream­ing pol­i­tics as visu­al style. That’s why this spe­cif­ic sub­ject was more cin­e­mat­ic than oth­er AIDS-relat­ed top­ics, which often make for soci­etal, absolute­ly ter­ri­fy­ing movies.

120 Beats Per Minute is released 6 April. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review

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