The French director of the film "Body to Body", of a love story in a time of crisis, it talks about its contradictions and the golden ratio between quality and commercialism

"Don't call me an artist!» shouts Jacques Audiard. "It's a very difficult word and I can't define it. For’ that's why I prefer the term “creative”, word more tangible and specific. The creator constructs something, what exactly does the artist do?;». Writer Craig Ferguson and I sit in a room at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes a few days after the world premiere of Audiard's latest film Body to Body last May. There the wonderful Marion Cotillard plays a whale trainer who loses her legs after an accident but finds the will to live again after meeting a lonely sidewalk boxer (Matias Senerts), who circulates on the French Riviera with his minor son.
Although the term "artist" does not like Odyar, "Body to Body" is an artistic film. I point out to him that at the press conference the day before he had referred to cinema using the phrase "art form". "You're right," he replies immediately. "What should I do?, I am full of contradictions! But when I hear them call me a poet… what can i say; I'm not a poet. Rimbaud and Verlaine were poets, me not".
For "Body to Body" Odyar and Ferguson used many scattered ideas from the latter's collection of short stories. "I was interested in telling a love story in a crisis situation," says Jacques Audiard, whose previous film, "The Prophet", liked it a lot in Greece. "Crisis at all levels, not only the economic one. People who eat from the garbage, people who have lost their legs, children growing up without a family. In the novel “They kill the horses when they get old” of Horace McCoy, which refers to the period of the great crisis of '29, people had to dance themselves to the death in order to survive. Today they will have to fight until the end on the road. But they still kill the horses when they get old, it is not so; In a crisis man's only weapon is his physical strength. In a crisis instinct again prevails".
For Jacques Audiard cinema is a very democratic art but it still remains an industry. A film critic he holds in high esteem once told him that there are two doors you can walk through to enter the world of cinema: one big and pop and one small, better quality. "The ideal is to enter a little bit of both. You have to think about the audience when you write, not just yourself.  For me, fer’ they said, when you decide to end a tragic movie with a tragedy, you suffer from a lack of imagination".

When & where:
The movie "Body to Body" is shown in theaters from 29 November distributed by Seven Films.

Source : tovima.gr