» Mathieu Amalric interview
Latest 7 talks to Mathieu Amalric about his roles in Heartbeat Detector and the new James Bond film
I don’t know if you’ve had a corporate office job in France, but would you say that SC Farb is typical of a French corporation?Nicolas Klotz, the director, didn’t ask me to go spend six months in a real company to know exactly how it really worked. I wanted to do that but he said: “No, this is not what I’m looking for.” And as you can notice in the film it’s really fiction, because sometimes you don’t really know in what time you are. Some locations look like the 60s, sometimes you feel that you are in modern times. It’s not naturalistic, it’s not a documentary. Even the way we speak is very, very ‘written’.
In a company it’s always dangerous to say what you really think. You have to disguise, and you have to smile or shut up. That’s the best way to be powerful in France sometimes. We’re not asking people to be human sometimes. There’s a big company in France where there have been six suicides in two years and they are asking themselves “Why? What’s happening?” There’s a lot of suicides in companies in France. With the right wing now in France it’s even stronger, unions don’t have that much power and solidarity. It’s very difficult.
What drew you to Heartbeat Detector? It’s a film that deals with the Holocaust, but in a very indirect way.
We spent almost four or five years before making the film to find the money and all those sorts of things. Usually I’m more attracted by people than by paper, let’s say, so it’s really Nicolas Klotz; the meeting with him and the films that he has already done that I had seen and how he works. We never spoke about the Holocaust or things like that. When you say ‘indirectly,’ it was more, I think, about the use of words. The language – the technical, professional language, the way to manage, to erase the violence of society. You just have a job, nobody has any responsibility anymore. You’re just a soldier, You’re just a good soldier – you obey. I think we talked more about today than the resonance of the holocaust. My character Simon isn’t a monster; just a guy that had a job.
If you look at the film you realise that he almost never speaks, he’s just listening. He’s almost like a confessor or a denouncer. His job is to make people speak, like a priest sometimes. I was thinking of Montgomery Clift in the Hitchcock film where he has a secret and he’s not allowed to say it. That’s a strange position.
Language is very important in this film. I mean – I’m watching CNN. There is a language at CNN, if you see what I mean? Now let’s say that when people have the power, in France mostly, they disguise their actions. For example, immigration in France. We have a ministry called Ministry of Immigration and Integration and French Nationality, something like that. But of course they created that ministry just to kick more people out of the country. But they’re going to call it ‘integration.’ And then they say: “No, it’s to help those people.” They’re never going to say: “We have to kick 25,000 people out of the country”, they just say: “We didn’t achieve our numbers or plan”. It’s this way of talking that minimises the violence.
I know you’ve said before that you never intended to become an actor and that you were originally a director. I was curious to hear a bit about what you’ve done in that regard and what you have planned, if anything, in a director’s role?
Yes, in fact, I had refused all acting stuff to do my own film. I was supposed to shoot my film in March, but when this James Bond thing just fell on me it was an accident. You can’t refuse to be a villain in a James Bond film, it’s too funny.
