Jacques Audiard Interview – Director Of A Prophet

I’ve made it no secret how much I loved A Prophet. It is hands down one of my favourite films of the last few years. The film fully deserves all the praise it’s been getting. Check out a Q & A with the acclaimed Director of A Prophet Jacques Audiard. A Prophet is released in cinemas January 22^nd go check it out, it’s worth it!

At the Cannes press conference you spoke a little about the irony in the title of A PROPHET.

Because this dimension is real but apparently it isn’t evident. The film could be called LITTLE BIG MAN for example. The title acts as a sort of injunction, obliging someone to understand something which isn’t necessarily developed in the film, namely, that we’re dealing with a little prophet, a new prototype of guy. Originally I wanted to find a French equivalent of “You Gotta Serve Somebody” a Bob Dylan song that says that we are always in the service of someone. I liked the fatalism and the moral dimension of this title but I simply never found a satisfying translation, so it stayed A PROPHET.

How did you come to tell the story?

What interested both myself and my co-writer Thomas Bidegain was to ask how we could begin with the subject by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit and create a pertinent cinematic story. We had to find a manner to make A Prophet resonate in a contemporary way. We wanted to create heroes from people that we didn’t know, that didn’t already have an iconic representation in cinema, like the Arabs for example. In France the tendency in cinema is to put them in representations that are naturalistic or sociological. So we wanted to do a pure genre film, a little in the manner of a western that spotlights people we don’t know and transforms them into heroes.

Through the character of Malik, the film conveys the idea that the knowledge and know how give access to power.

Yes, and it’s this that I find the most interesting. This type of person breaks the mould, he’s not your usual hooligan. Following Malik, we see his mind at work, a mind that shows phenomenal adaptability, that this character will use for any opportunistic possibility, at first to save his skin, then to survive and improve his lot, and finally to reach another level of power.

Malik seems to have a detached and opportunist rapport with his identity.

The Corsicans consider him an Arab and the Arabs as a Corsican. He is permanently between the two camps. However he will naturally lean towards his community. It’s here that he will discover something he has been ignoring. The same as he’s a particular kind of hooligan he’s also a particular kind of believer.

Can you talk to us about the ghost that accompanies Malik and that inspires his mystical visions?

The film does have fantastical moments but it’s not because of an intention to be mystical. Reyeb’s ghost comes from the scriptwriters as a way of helping us into the possibilities, a way of to passing into a level of imagination that helps us free what has already been told. It’s also thanks to him that we also invoke the ideas of Sufism and the Dervishes and allows the screenplay to take on another dimension.

There is a trend in current cinema for darker, more damaged heroes.  In A Prophet you take someone who is damaged yet lead them toward a kind of redemption.

And with tools that wouldn’t be recommendable. There is always a default way of making anti-heroes. This doesn’t interest me so much. Me, I like my heroes to learn something, to put it to use. I find that Cinema has that function: it looks at the real to teach us how to use it. Perhaps the lesson which strikes Malik is paradoxical, but it’s this which interests me.

In any case it says that you have to learn…

To learn, to be attentive, to not open one’s mouth all the time, to be reserved and most of all to not make the same mistake twice because the third time you’ll be dead.

Is A Prophet, according to you, a moral film ?

Yes, what would have been immoral would have been to create a character without conscience.  However he is conscious of both good and evil precisely because evil has been done to him.

How do you explain Malikʼs mysterious smile at the moment of the shooting?

Malik suddenly has the feeling of being in a film and has the feeling of invulnerability, like a fictional character whereas the others are reaching a stalemate in the events which are unfolding. Malik is a person who, instead of getting heavier under the weight of things he lives through, he gets lighter, and will free himself, little by little.

Is the prison a metaphor ?

Evidently, genre films always present themselves as metaphor. The character was incarcerated for a long sentence. The intention was that he would understand within himself that which would serve him later, on the outside, therefore arriving at a parallel between the two universes.

The ending of the film suggests there could be a sequel.

Indeed. It does induce us to question Malik’s destiny with this woman, this child and his life stretched out before him. Especially since Malik is a hooligan that hates hooligans, finding them unreliable, stupid and dangerous. He is someone with a very critical viewpoint. He wouldn’t tolerate bling or outward signs of hooliganism.

If there was a sequel, what would it be about ?

I would like to see Malik continue to develop his skills and watch him learn. A little like in The Beat That My Heart Skipped. That through trying to become a concert pianist the hero becomes really competent. He’s like Malik, we leave everything just formed and we sense that he has an interesting future…

Were you conscious while making A Prophet that you were making a film that was anchored in popular culture?

This is what I wanted to do. For as much, we wanted to make an anti SCARFACE. For me neurotics are pure cretins and simply cant be objects for identification. The rise to power of an absolute crazy person doest interest me at all. On the other hand a film like LA HAINE by Matthieu Kassovitz touches on something that I’m sensitive to. It’s no co-incidence that A Prophet occasionally inhabits the same terrain. These two films a looking to denounce that there is something missing in cinema.