A latter-day neorealist working in the tradition of Roberto Rossellini and Robert Bresson, writer-director Laurent Cantet mixes professional actors with nonprofessionals to explore forces like class, race, and gender through fictional narratives. His latest, The Workshop, is set in La Ciotat, a seaside town in southern France whose once-thriving shipyard closed a generation ago, after years of struggle between the owners and the workers. The film gets its title from one of its main activities: a multicultural group of young people from the area, including the angry and alienated Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), participate in a novel-writing workshop taught by a Parisian writer named Olivia (Marina Foïs). As the class progresses and we learn more about the nationalistic, anti-immigrant propaganda Antoine is soaking up online, the violence the students are working into their story threatens to spill over into their lives.
Although he won the 2008 Palme d’Or for The Class, there’s no hint of egotism or self-importance in Cantet, who started our interview by pouring me a cup of coffee. Despite the filmmaker’s frequent frustration at being unable to find the exact word he was searching for in English, he was urgently articulate about his work, which he clearly does as much to educate himself as to encourage his audience to question their own beliefs.
I love the way your films explore social issues through fictional narratives.
I’m always interested in showing the complexity of our world. What’s always difficult is making a film that deals with reality without being too…dialectique?
Too didactic?
Yeah, yeah. That’s why fiction is really important in my films, even if it deals with something very real and very social. I think that putting political and social issues first would make people afraid to come and watch the film. And also because I am not militant. I am quite involved in what’s happening in our society, but I [just] ask questions and share it with the audience. I don’t have any answer to give, so it’s important to me that political issues are seen through the way a character feels it and lives the story.
When you’re developing a film, do you usually start with an issue you want to explore and then come up with the characters and plot?
Not necessarily. I don’t like the idea of using a character to say what I have to say. What interests me is individual stories that can speak of the whole society. That’s why I’m always focusing on a small group, the school that was [at the center of] The Class, here [in The Workshop] just this group of seven young adults, the factory in Human Resources. Looking at this small group—or one individual, in Time Out—
Though that one was also about the main character’s family to some degree, so you could say it was also a small group.
I like when the components of a story come together [and suddenly] make sense. That’s also why I like to focus on one character, because a character doesn’t always have a straight itinerary. There can be contradictions in the character, which for me is the characteristic of human beings.
How did you come up with the idea for The Workshop?
I really wanted to look at people in the city of La Ciotat. I started to write this story 20 years ago, when it was very different.
How so? Were the shipyards still operating then?
Just closed, after 10 years of really strong fighting between the workers and the shipyard. The municipality of La Ciotat organized this kind of workshop in order to help young people connect with their own story. Robin Campillo, my co-writer and friend, edited a small report for TV on this workshop at this moment. I think it was just after Human Resources. I was interested to see the link young people could have with working-class culture, and I felt the workshop was a good device for young people to find out about their relationship with their parents, their relationship with this past. The workers were very proud of being workers, but this pride was disappearing at that moment. So that was the idea for The Workshop.
Three years ago, just after [the terrorist attack on] Charlie Hebdo, I asked myself how it is to be 20 in such a world. I thought back to this idea of a workshop, and we started to work on that. This time I think I found what I didn’t find 20 years ago, which was a way to make that workshop and real life get mixed through this story between Olivia and Antoine. I think I found the film the day I could say to myself that the fiction that Antoine always asks for in the workshop will bring the fiction to the film. Since they are working on a story about murder, it’s easy for him to express violence, and that was a good way to analyze the border between literary violence and real violence.
Is the difference you found in this area 20 years later that violence has permeated the culture more? Or is it that there’s a fear and vilification of immigrants, particularly people from Muslim countries, that’s feeding this growing wave of right-wing nationalism?
All of that. All that is new. Twenty years ago it wouldn’t have been an issue, but, especially in the south of France, the extreme right is growing up and a lot of young people are attracted by it. I don’t think they are attracted by the ideas. Just feeling that you exist, you know? What interests me in the film is to look at the seduction process of the extremism on people who don’t have any hope, who get bored by their own life. Read the rest in Slant Magazine
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