Klára Muhi:

A César in the Dustbin

An interview in Eger with French film director Mathieu Kassovitz

Hatred
100 KBytes Mathieu Kassovitz is hardly thirty. So far, he has directed three major feature films. His first attempt at film-making was entitled "Fierrot, le pou" (Fierrot, the Flea). Supposedly, a homage to Godard.
His first major feature film, entitledThe Half-Blood (1993), is based on well-known clichés. In this frivolous, dynamic love-triangle a wealthy black man and a poor Jewish boy compete for one and a half hours for the love of a young, half-blooded woman. The arriving baby, however, is a source of joy for all the three of them. Kassovitz himself played the part of the Jewish boy, in a way reminiscent of Woody Allen, with explosive zest (for which he was nominated for a Cèsar).
His next film, entitledHatred (1995) was a great success. This clear, simply-structured film of documentary force grew into a social event in France, and in Cannes it brought Kassovitz the prize for the best director. Hatred is neither frivolous nor light-hearted. Only the explosive strength and the triangle of mixed-race protagonists is retained from The Half-Blood. The film is the story of a single day from the lives of Jewish Vincent, Arab Said and black Hubert, i.e. it depicts the hopeless Odyssey of three young men in the outskirts of Paris. Hatred is like a manifesto. It reminds us of the uncompromising freedom-fighter directors of the 60s, i.e. Anderson or Jancsó. And it is perhaps the most real moving picture of the increasingly virtual 90s.
Kassovitz's third film, the Murderers (1997), deeply divides audiences. During the premiere in Cannes, many were whistling or left the screening room, accusing the director of being much too brutal. Murderers was made by a mature man in greatly depressed spirits. Kassovitz seems to have become 20 years older since Hatred. As if his sense of reality and liveliness would have slipped away from this film. Its protagonist, the Murdering Father-Master, is obviously allegorical. The evil spirit in the world is slowly but surely working to initiate increasingly younger disciples into the mindless ritual of killing, and his activities are in some way connected to the television screen that is uninterruptedly pouring out images of violence. Kassovitz himself plays one of the disciples.
These three films have an absolutely breathtaking span. Other directors would have taken a life-time to go the road that you have gone in three films.
What I have done so far is like a bridge. It has a beginning, a mid-point and an end. I have three stories, almost a trilogy. The Half-Blood is a love-story, and I was twenty-four when I made it, and very happy that I had the chance to make a film, that I had work to do. While shooting Hatred, working itself no longer made me this euphoric, yet I think I was still very naive in my attitude. After Hatred, then, a lot of things happened that made me increasingly hardened. The film was well-received by the audience, but most people gave it a positive criticism for reasons other than the film's real merits. It was very snobbishly received...yes, I am quite sure of that. Many had to swallow it, especially in upper-class parlours, realising that if you did not like Hatred , you were a racist. I have been accepted in France because I am white-skinned, and I have been invited to the parlours. Yet my Arabic or black friends have not. However, the problems of the outskirts, those that are portrayed in Hatred, are a lot graver today than they were then. And what we really wanted to show with this film was not of interest to anybody. This film was in vogue for half a year. But nobody remedied the real problems. They came to ask me what the outskirts were like. But I am not from there, and I said they should go and have a look at it, that they should speak to the people there! But everybody only wanted to talk to me. Journalists were beginning to drive me crazy.
Murderers, then, was received as the worst film in film history. In the first critic I read they said that Murderers was the worst film in film history. A year before I had been proclaimed to be the best French director, then a year later the worst director in the world.... It was then that I asked myself the question why people had really liked Hatred.
What I understood fromMurderers is that you not only don't like critics, but that you are unhappy with the media in general. Murderers is saying that all the evil in the world is caused by television........
There is a lot that is wrong with the media, surely. The way information is abused and distorted is often not in the interest of the idea or the art of the film-maker or the artist, but their own. Television broadcasts a tremendous amount of sex and violence, in order to increase the numbers of viewers, and in this way it degrades people in a most meanly way. The games played for money, the violence that appears in reports, news-casts, series, then the fighting games that are only to be seen in television are - well, very brutal. Ultimately, I am not accusing television, for it just portrays society. And what I am really concerned about is that which happens out there, in the streets.
Hatred speaks out for those wretched lives in the housing estates. What makes you so familiar with the outskirts?
Music. I have never lived in the outskirts myself, but the quarter we used to live in had mixed races, colours and religions in a similar way. As a child, at the age of 12-13, I would listen to a great deal of punk music. I adored punk because it was revolutionary. Punk wanted to break everything in to pieces, and they were saying the things I was saying, e.g. : "fuck off, God save the Queen and fuck off" and the like, it was full of vitality. Then very suddenly I started to listen to rap, which said the very same thing, but to me even more excitingly. For fifteen years I have listened to rap music. Rap arrived to France in the middle of the 80s, and became the music of the ghettos. Rap became the music of the outskirts.
And what about these three young men in Hatred It was utterly beyond me to decide whether they were amateurs or professional actors...
That's great. Hubert also played in my first film, entitled The Half-Blood.
Vincent also played in it, he was my brother there. And I met Said, he was a friend of Vincent's. We used to be loafing about a lot, and then we made up our minds about making a film. Vincent happens to be an actor. Hubert started to act in The Half-Blood, while Said in Hatred. They were paid for it, so they are professionals.
To me, Hatred is reminiscent of the revolutionary films made around '68 in Paris, London, and in my country...
No, Hatred has nothing to do with '68. Sixty-eight was about something else. That was a revolution, made by students and workers. The intelligence together with the workers, against the state. In my film, however, the problem analysed is racism. The young people, now in their teens, i.e. the Arabs in the outskirts, are third generation Frenchmen, they have lived in France for three generations, and are still not considered French. They are called dirty Arabs. And this is nothing short of racism. Sixty-eight on the other hand, was not about racial hatred. Yet those demands are made, the revolutionary aspect of the thing, that is there. That everything must be started anew...
he title of your first film is reminiscent of "Crazy Pierrot" by Godard. Why is that? Is it a homage paid, or is it admitted kinship?
No, not at all. Godard is a very important person, and the art of film-making has to be grateful to him and his friends, Truffaut, Rohmer... New Wave changed many things, but that happened over twenty years ago! And for twenty years, these people have done nothing of interest! And Godard himself has grown quite brainless. And we are being accused of..... Godard saw two minutes of Hatred on video, and now he thinks that Hatred is nothing but a video-clip... He takes things just the way those stupid old men did who were around when he arrived... He has become a stupid old man himself... And this is very sad, because his first three films are marvellous.
Hatred starts with one of Bob Marley's revolutionary songs..
Bob Marley is a God to me. At the beginning of Hatred, Bob Marley sings a beautiful song, the lyrics is also of great importance. It was for good reasons that I chose that song, because what he is saying in it is exactly what the film is about. “You are not listening to us, and therefore tonight we are setting fire on everything and looting everything. We are fed up with being invisible to you". Not a single French journalist laboured to look into what Bob Marley is really saying. Yet that is just what Hatred is about. And what comes next is that if we are taken for nobodies, we have nothing to lose. Children have nothing to lose, either. And therefore they can kill anybody. They do not feel that politicians think of them, that the financial world considers them important, and they are not important to the media, either. Let us fight, then. We are at war. And that is what I have understood while making my first three films.
There are a few recurring motifs in your films. The cow in Hatred that appears to Vincent in the housing estate is like a surrealistic vision. And then in Murderers, on the wall of the general killer's home there seems to be a tapestry depicting a cow, too.
The cow, that is an old thing. There is an expression in French that says "Death on the cows", which means death on the cops. It is a very old saying, which comes from '36, coined by the members of the People's Front, and it was also used in '68.
Then the pistol, and the two hands holding out a gun against each other towards the end of Hatred, and in Murderers, too ...
I wanted to show that weapons are important. That weapons are no toys. Not just film accessories, but special and important objects.
In Murderers, the three protagonists own a pistol. And all the time the question is there; what are they going to do with it. Because a weapon is there to be used. And if we do not learn to accept those who are under, then inevitably somebody will pull the trigger. But who? I believe a policeman ought to study at least ten years before he is let out in to the streets with a gun. Just like a physician. But that is not the case. And if after a few months of training policemen are given a gun, the violence that is reigning in our streets necessarily drives them mad. He loses control once, and shoots at somebody. In Hatred the question all through is who is going to shoot at whom. And this is continued in Murderers. There are a great many young people today who have nothing to lose. I am often fearful in the streets, and I do not fear my peers, but little sixteen-year-olds. Because they are those who have nothing to lose.
And all this is also because we fail to educate them about how to use television, or such excellent things as the Internet. Adults give them a television to watch the simplest things on it. But the simplest are always the most stupid things.
There a many who do not like Murderers....
Murderers is a very peculiar film. Some like it, some don't. Because there is a great amount of violence in it, and not everybody prefers to spend two hours in a room where he is repeatedly and continuously hit in the head....And also, the French have become used to films of violence coming from the USA or Sweden, and in addition, they strongly object to having their nose pushed into their own dirt.... Hatred , undoubtedly, is not a pleasant film. It was not made to be a pleasant past-time. Because I am deeply irritated by seeing violence portrayed in a specifically enjoyable way in films.
Murderers contains more political criticism, more of what is going on in our streets, it shows more of the lack of justice, the gap between the rich and the poor. When I was successful with Hatred, my eyes suddenly opened up to many things that I had not seen before. What is happening is all wrong ...and one must spit. And with Murderers, I spitted.
When Murderers came out, I dreamt of thousands and thousands of people going to see it, and that they would all go out to the streets then, and make a revolution, that everything would change, that everybody would have a lot of money, and nobody will be excluded any longer. That everybody would be full and satisfied and happy. But that is not what happened.
You have been repeatedly nominated for a César, and ultimately, for your acting in Jacques Audiard's film, (Men in Deep Aviation) you were duly given one ...
Yes, but I do not like the César. In France, the César is like the Oscar in the United States. The films that compete for it are in fact all "passé". Dead. I do not think there is anything to be prized in those. For my part, I want none of that.. ...And ... in Hatred there is a sound, a moment, when the skinheads drop something into the dustbin, and a metallic sound is heard. Well, that is the César, that we dropped to the ground.
Félix Kassovitz, the famous drawer, was your grandfather. And your father is Peter Kassovitz, the French film director, who left Hungary in 1956. Does this country mean anything to you?

Yes. Pastry...cabbage... There is such delicious pasty here as nowhere else.. Ever since I was one years old, I have come to visit Hungary every year, and my grandfather and I - as long as he lived - have been very good friends. He always took me to the Széchenyi Bath... Yet I did not learn to speak Hungarian as a child, my father committed a mistake there... By the way, the production company that we set up with my father is called "Kasso-ék" (Kassos). And as its logo, we use a drawing of my grandfather's.

Hatred
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Hatred
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Hatred
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Mathieu Kassovitz
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Hatred 100 KBytes	Mathieu Kassovitz is hardly thirty. So far, he has directed three major feature films. His first attempt at film-making was entitled "Fierrot, le pou" (Fierrot, the Flea). Supposedly, a homage to Godard. His first major feature film, entitledThe Half-Blood (1993), is based on well-known clichés. In this frivolous, dynamic love-triangle a wealthy black man and a poor Jewish boy compete for one and a half hours for the love of a young, half-blooded woman. The arriving baby, however, is a source of joy for all the three of them. Kassovitz himself played the part of the Jewish boy, in a way reminiscent of Woody Allen, with explosive zest (for which he was nominated for a Cèsar). His next film, entitledHatred (1995) was a great success. This clear, simply-structured film of documentary force grew into a social event in France, and in Cannes it brought Kassovitz the prize for the best director. Hatred is neither frivolous nor light-hearted. Only the explosive strength and the triangle of mixed-race protagonists is retained from The Half-Blood. The film is the story of a single day from the lives of Jewish Vincent, Arab Said and black Hubert, i.e. it depicts the hopeless Odyssey of three young men in the outskirts of Paris. Hatred is like a manifesto. It reminds us of the uncompromising freedom-fighter directors of the 60s, i.e. Anderson or Jancsó. And it is perhaps the most real moving picture of the increasingly virtual 90s. Kassovitz's third film, the Murderers (1997), deeply divides audiences. During the premiere in Cannes, many were whistling or left the screening room, accusing the director of being much too brutal. Murderers was made by a mature man in greatly depressed spirits. Kassovitz seems to have become 20 years older since Hatred. As if his sense of reality and liveliness would have slipped away from this film. Its protagonist, the Murdering Father-Master, is obviously allegorical. The evil spirit in the world is slowly but surely working to initiate increasingly younger disciples into the mindless ritual of killing, and his activities are in some way connected to the television screen that is uninterruptedly pouring out images of violence. Kassovitz himself plays one of the disciples. These three films have an absolutely breathtaking span. Other directors would have taken a life-time to go the road that you have gone in three films. What I have done so far is like a bridge. It has a beginning, a mid-point and an end. I have three stories, almost a trilogy. The Half-Blood is a love-story, and I was twenty-four when I made it, and very happy that I had the chance to make a film, that I had work to do. While shooting Hatred, working itself no longer made me this euphoric, yet I think I was still very naive in my attitude. After Hatred, then, a lot of things happened that made me increasingly hardened. The film was well-received by the audience, but most people gave it a positive criticism for reasons other than the film's real merits. It was very snobbishly received...yes, I am quite sure of that. Many had to swallow it, especially in upper-class parlours, realising that if you did not like Hatred , you were a racist. I have been accepted in France because I am white-skinned, and I have been invited to the parlours. Yet my Arabic or black friends have not. However, the problems of the outskirts, those that are portrayed in Hatred, are a lot graver today than they were then. And what we really wanted to show with this film was not of interest to anybody. This film was in vogue for half a year. But nobody remedied the real problems. They came to ask me what the outskirts were like. But I am not from there, and I said they should go and have a look at it, that they should speak to the people there! But everybody only wanted to talk to me. Journalists were beginning to drive me crazy. Murderers, then, was received as the worst film in film history. In the first critic I read they said that Murderers was the worst film in film history. A year before I had been proclaimed to be the best French director, then a year later the worst director in the world.... It was then that I asked myself the question why people had really liked Hatred. What I understood fromMurderers is that you not only don't like critics, but that you are unhappy with the media in general. Murderers is saying that all the evil in the world is caused by television........ There is a lot that is wrong with the media, surely. The way information is abused and distorted is often not in the interest of the idea or the art of the film-maker or the artist, but their own. Television broadcasts a tremendous amount of sex and violence, in order to increase the numbers of viewers, and in this way it degrades people in a most meanly way. The games played for money, the violence that appears in reports, news-casts, series, then the fighting games that are only to be seen in television are - well, very brutal. Ultimately, I am not accusing television, for it just portrays society. And what I am really concerned about is that which happens out there, in the streets. Hatred speaks out for those wretched lives in the housing estates. What makes you so familiar with the outskirts? Music. I have never lived in the outskirts myself, but the quarter we used to live in had mixed races, colours and religions in a similar way. As a child, at the age of 12-13, I would listen to a great deal of punk music. I adored punk because it was revolutionary. Punk wanted to break everything in to pieces, and they were saying the things I was saying, e.g. : "fuck off, God save the Queen and fuck off" and the like, it was full of vitality. Then very suddenly I started to listen to rap, which said the very same thing, but to me even more excitingly. For fifteen years I have listened to rap music. Rap arrived to France in the middle of the 80s, and became the music of the ghettos. Rap became the music of the outskirts. And what about these three young men in Hatred It was utterly beyond me to decide whether they were amateurs or professional actors... That's great. Hubert also played in my first film, entitled The Half-Blood. Vincent also played in it, he was my brother there. And I met Said, he was a friend of Vincent's. We used to be loafing about a lot, and then we made up our minds about making a film. Vincent happens to be an actor. Hubert started to act in The Half-Blood, while Said in Hatred. They were paid for it, so they are professionals. **To me, Hatred is reminiscent of the revolutionary films made around '68 in Paris, London, and in my country...** No, Hatred has nothing to do with '68. Sixty-eight was about something else. That was a revolution, made by students and workers. The intelligence together with the workers, against the state. In my film, however, the problem analysed is racism. The young people, now in their teens, i.e. the Arabs in the outskirts, are third generation Frenchmen, they have lived in France for three generations, and are still not considered French. They are called dirty Arabs. And this is nothing short of racism. Sixty-eight on the other hand, was not about racial hatred. Yet those demands are made, the revolutionary aspect of the thing, that is there. That everything must be started anew... he title of your first film is reminiscent of "Crazy Pierrot" by Godard. Why is that? Is it a homage paid, or is it admitted kinship? No, not at all. Godard is a very important person, and the art of film-making has to be grateful to him and his friends, Truffaut, Rohmer... New Wave changed many things, but that happened over twenty years ago! And for twenty years, these people have done nothing of interest! And Godard himself has grown quite brainless. And we are being accused of..... Godard saw two minutes of Hatred on video, and now he thinks that Hatred is nothing but a video-clip... He takes things just the way those stupid old men did who were around when he arrived... He has become a stupid old man himself... And this is very sad, because his first three films are marvellous. Hatred starts with one of Bob Marley's revolutionary songs.. Bob Marley is a God to me. At the beginning of Hatred, Bob Marley sings a beautiful song, the lyrics is also of great importance. It was for good reasons that I chose that song, because what he is saying in it is exactly what the film is about. “You are not listening to us, and therefore tonight we are setting fire on everything and looting everything. We are fed up with being invisible to you". Not a single French journalist laboured to look into what Bob Marley is really saying. Yet that is just what Hatred is about. And what comes next is that if we are taken for nobodies, we have nothing to lose. Children have nothing to lose, either. And therefore they can kill anybody. They do not feel that politicians think of them, that the financial world considers them important, and they are not important to the media, either. Let us fight, then. We are at war. And that is what I have understood while making my first three films. There are a few recurring motifs in your films. The cow in Hatred that appears to Vincent in the housing estate is like a surrealistic vision. And then in Murderers, on the wall of the general killer's home there seems to be a tapestry depicting a cow, too. The cow, that is an old thing. There is an expression in French that says "Death on the cows", which means death on the cops. It is a very old saying, which comes from '36, coined by the members of the People's Front, and it was also used in '68. Then the pistol, and the two hands holding out a gun against each other towards the end of Hatred, and in Murderers, too ... I wanted to show that weapons are important. That weapons are no toys. Not just film accessories, but special and important objects. In Murderers, the three protagonists own a pistol. And all the time the question is there; what are they going to do with it. Because a weapon is there to be used. And if we do not learn to accept those who are under, then inevitably somebody will pull the trigger. But who? I believe a policeman ought to study at least ten years before he is let out in to the streets with a gun. Just like a physician. But that is not the case. And if after a few months of training policemen are given a gun, the violence that is reigning in our streets necessarily drives them mad. He loses control once, and shoots at somebody. In Hatred the question all through is who is going to shoot at whom. And this is continued in Murderers. There are a great many young people today who have nothing to lose. I am often fearful in the streets, and I do not fear my peers, but little sixteen-year-olds. Because they are those who have nothing to lose. And all this is also because we fail to educate them about how to use television, or such excellent things as the Internet. Adults give them a television to watch the simplest things on it. But the simplest are always the most stupid things. There a many who do not like Murderers.... Murderers is a very peculiar film. Some like it, some don't. Because there is a great amount of violence in it, and not everybody prefers to spend two hours in a room where he is repeatedly and continuously hit in the head....And also, the French have become used to films of violence coming from the USA or Sweden, and in addition, they strongly object to having their nose pushed into their own dirt.... Hatred , undoubtedly, is not a pleasant film. It was not made to be a pleasant past-time. Because I am deeply irritated by seeing violence portrayed in a specifically enjoyable way in films. Murderers contains more political criticism, more of what is going on in our streets, it shows more of the lack of justice, the gap between the rich and the poor. When I was successful with Hatred, my eyes suddenly opened up to many things that I had not seen before. What is happening is all wrong ...and one must spit. And with Murderers, I spitted. When Murderers came out, I dreamt of thousands and thousands of people going to see it, and that they would all go out to the streets then, and make a revolution, that everything would change, that everybody would have a lot of money, and nobody will be excluded any longer. That everybody would be full and satisfied and happy. But that is not what happened. You have been repeatedly nominated for a César, and ultimately, for your acting in Jacques Audiard's film, (Men in Deep Aviation) you were duly given one ... Yes, but I do not like the César. In France, the César is like the Oscar in the United States. The films that compete for it are in fact all "passé". Dead. I do not think there is anything to be prized in those. For my part, I want none of that.. ...And ... in Hatred there is a sound, a moment, when the skinheads drop something into the dustbin, and a metallic sound is heard. Well, that is the César, that we dropped to the ground. Félix Kassovitz, the famous drawer, was your grandfather. And your father is Peter Kassovitz, the French film director, who left Hungary in 1956. Does this country mean anything to you? Yes. Pastry...cabbage... There is such delicious pasty here as nowhere else.. Ever since I was one years old, I have come to visit Hungary every year, and my grandfather and I - as long as he lived - have been very good friends. He always took me to the Széchenyi Bath... Yet I did not learn to speak Hungarian as a child, my father committed a mistake there... By the way, the production company that we set up with my father is called "Kasso-ék" (Kassos). And as its logo, we use a drawing of my grandfather's.
Hatred 106 KBytes
Hatred 107 KBytes
Hatred 105 KBytes
Mathieu Kassovitz 232 KBytes