Jacques Audiard: 'My work is like rolling thunder'

For a man who is a bundle of intense, nervous energy, Jacques Audiard is a surprisingly slow worker. Since he started directing, in 1994, he has completed just six features, with lengthy gaps between them. Indeed, the three-year run up to his new film, Rust and Bone, represents something of an acceleration. "I am free," Audiard shrugs, "because I work for a producer [Pascal Caucheteux] who says, 'We'll go when it's ready.' He doesn't give me a deadline. The films take a long time to write – too long, perhaps. That is where the time is spent."

But what films they are. His last, A Prophet, the coruscating study of a French-Arab convict who becomes a player in the Corsican mafia, was four years in the making, and won a runner-up prize at Cannes in 2009; it also made a star of its lead, Tahar Rahim. Before that, in 2005, there was The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a nerve-shredding remake of James Toback's seminal New Hollywood film, Fingers; again, it made a huge star of its lead, Romain Duris, in a role originally played by Harvey Keitel. Rewind another four years and there was Read My Lips, in 2001, in which deaf office worker Emmanuelle Devos falls for hoodlum Vincent Cassel and takes part in a brutal robbery. Read My Lips emerged a full five years after the film that put Audiard on the map: A Self-Made Hero, his fantastically watchable account of a fake Resistance fighter, with a liquidly brilliant central performance by Mathieu Kassovitz.

Rust and Bone is a reworking of a book of short stories by Canadian writer Craig Davidson, and of two in particular: the title story and another called Rocket Ride. It's a substantial rewrite: the killer-whale trainer played by Marion Cotillard was originally male; an accident that is a backstory in the book becomes the climax of the film; the film's two central characters live in entirely separate worlds in Davidson's original, and never meet (Audiard's film has them conducting a complex, passionate relationship). Moreover, the film is set in France, in an anti-glamour Riviera of ramshackle workshops, grubby flats and battered wastelands. (This is not, as Audiard is at pains to point out, an assault on the plushness of the Côte d'Azur; it is simply because the only killer-whale aquarium in France is located in Antibes.)

Key to this part of the process is Audiard's scriptwriter, Thomas Bidegain, who worked on A Prophet and also acts as the director's unofficial translator. Sitting in on our interview, he chips in, amplifying his director's words. "The way we work is to talk about what the film should be, the kind of film we want to do. We were coming out of A Prophet – a jail movie – no women, no space, no light, no love. So the idea we had was to do a love story."

But Audiard, twitching with auteurist pride, cannot be talked over. "I really believe the form of the film must be in the scenario; cinema is not just added value to the scripting. I believe in it as a totality. There was a specific problem with this film, which we saw often during the writing: the clash between realism and stylisation. You had constantly to be looking for an equilibrium. If it's too realistic, it's boring. If it's too stylised, you don't believe it." Bidegain adds: "What attracted us to the short stories was the universe they described, a universe of catastrophe – a world where people just have their body left to sell. The characters were normal people, but their destiny is magnified by accidents."

But this is the director's show, and Audiard wants to talk about a key scene in which Cotillard's character, Stéphanie, loses her legs. In Davidson's story, the incident is described with gruesome precision: the trainer stands on the killer whale's lip, slips, and is horribly mutilated as the animal attempts to eject him from its throat. The film's treatment of this central moment is, in sharp contrast, cryptic and impressionistic; a chaotic, dream-like sequence, slowed down to the point of abstraction. "We start out very realistic," Audiard says. "We shot the marine show just as it is, very natural. But if you do the accident like that, it would be over so fast. So we go outside the point of view of the character: what we make is more like a fantasy. It could be an image a child dreamed, after the story was told to him."

That seems as good a rationalisation of Audiard's extraordinarily fluid image-making as you're likely to get from the director. His is an ability that is as confident as cinema has seen for decades. It is not for nothing that Audiard has been repeatedly compared to Martin Scorsese in his Taxi Driver and Raging Bull period; he has the same restless imagination, the same unerring confidence in handling the camera. Audiard is reluctant to explain details – "It is immodest, like I am God!" – but rather poetically likens his scene-building to "rolling thunder", a tension crackling away in the background before the climactic moment.

He used CGI for Cotillard's post-amputation scenes, digitally removing her legs. "It's just a cheap computer manipulation, you know. When we shoot, she's just wearing green socks. You get used to the green socks, then one day we saw the first finished CGI, and you think: Wow! It's really erotic." He expands on this: "We know this from the original story – that's what the film is about – she is someone who doesn't like sex before the accident: she's too controlled. She finds in love the possibility to be abandoned, to let go – she finds out what love is."

Audiard has been here before. In Read My Lips, the disability is deafness, but the film has a near-identical dramatic drive: a woman whose impairment is an analogue to a repressed emotional life; an insensitive, inarticulate man; a relationship that unlocks them both. Audiard says he never noticed the similarities; it was his editor who pointed them out. But it is this inquisitiveness about his characters' inner lives that really marks Audiard out as a director. For a long time regarded as essentially a crime guy, a modern Jean-Pierre Melville (perhaps due to his predilection for spiffy trilby hats and a pipe), Audiard looks very much like a director with a yen for intense, emotional romances. "Maybe it's a problem of vocabulary – 'crime' is perhaps too specific a term for what I do."

Be that as it may, you would have thought Audiard would be a natural candidate for a Hollywood – or at least an English-language – transfer, like so many of his French colleagues, with varying degrees of success: everyone from Renoir and Truffaut to Besson and Audiard's former star Mathieu Kassovitz have tried it. The Beat That My Heart Skipped cleverly aligned him with the cultier end of 70s American cinema; and Rust and Bone, after all, could easily have been a boutique Hollywood production, with an Oscar-winning lead. But Audiard remains wary; partly, his sketchy English makes it a tad tricky; and partly he genuinely seems to prefer the unploughed pastures of his homeland. "If you open the door of a boxing gym in Brooklyn, you know what is behind it. You've seen it 200 times, in 200 films. If you open it in Antibes, it's all new. There is curiosity. Had we set set it in America, it would be a kind of cliche, somehow. You need something to say about the place where you make films. I know Europe. The US I don't know so well. I need a film that sees something, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest did for Milos Forman. It makes it worth the trip."

@Guardian

by: Andrew Pulver