Director’s Cut: Five Questions with François Ozon (‘In the House’)

It can be hard to keep up with François Ozon, a prolific and prodigiously talented French filmmaker who’s been reliably churning out modern classics like “Swimming Pool” and “5 x 2? on a near-annual basis since the turn of the millennium. And it’s not like he’s slowing down – his latest film, “In the House,” hits theaters today, and it’s arguably the best thing he’s ever made. The story of a strange teenage boy who embeds himself in a friend’s house in order to mine material for his high school writing class, “In the House” won the San Sebastían Film Festival in 2012, and it finally arrives in American theaters today (here’s what our critic had to say about it).

Film.com had a brief opportunity to chat with Ozon at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, where he told us all about how much he wants to disturb you.

Film.com: Facts, perception, and subjectivity are integral ideas to this film. At a certain point, the reality of things starts to become unclear. Do you feel that there are certain points in the film that absolutely happened?

François Ozon: For me, everything is relative. Everything is relative because I think dreams are relative too. I think that things don’t need to happen … if they happen emotionally, they happen for me. So that’s what interests me. It’s up to the audience to feel what they want. But I tried my way of shooting the scenes to make no difference between what is relative and what is not to be relative.When you see Claude sleeping so you can think it’s a dream, it’s just a deep thought. We work on that in the editing. We try to subvert everything. But the audience has to work. You have to do your own work.

I like to work with genre, I like to disturb the audience using this kind of story and then suddenly changing … you think it will be sad and actually it’s funny. I know it’s disturbing, but that’s what I like.

Do you think that most audiences will rise to that challenge and embrace the ambiguity?

Well, this film is too ambiguous to be a blockbuster. But I know some American people have said to me this would be a very good remake…but they would change everything.

You have to decide – what [in the story] is true? What’s not true? What’s the reality of everything? I remember a film which I think was quite good but was a big flop in America. It was called … “Birth,” with Nicole Kidman. It’s quite a good film, except for the end which was totally remade. Because I think the script was very ambiguous but they decided to show everything at the end to give an explanation, which was so stupid because it kills the film at the end. I don’t need that.

Are there American directors that you’re interested in, or interested in their careers?

The movie directors I love are older European directors who came before or during the war. Especially all the Germans, the Jews …  They are really the directors I love. Yes, there are many good American directors. I like David Lynch, I like older people that have a different way. They are in the system and at the same time they have their own view, their own personality and they’re not totally used by the system. They try to keep their work and point of view.

The Hollywood machine is very restrictive and I think that’s a challenge. For you, is there a type of movie that you simply feel is not in your comfort zone?

For me I’m very open minded. I have no problem, as a spectator I can see many kinds of movies. I can see an art movie, I can see a blockbuster, I have pleasure with everything. As a director, I won’t be about to do an action movie, not in term of techniques but in terms of interest. It doesn’t interest me to shoot some cars, some explosions, those kind of things. It doesn’t interest me so I think I won’t be good to do an action movie. Maybe science fiction, I’m not sure. It would be a very twisted science fiction movie.

It would be the best kind of science fiction movie. The last thing I wanted to ask you is just about the young actor who played Claude. The role required a very nuanced performa … I couldn’t decide if he was a wounded bird or a very wicked boy. Was there something specific you were looking for in him?

Yes actually you know the boy is 16 in the film, so my first work doing the cast was to meet many boys of 16. And I realized they are babies. The girls at 16 are already very often women but the boys they are 16 and stuck to their mothers. So I was afraid, because I said this was the lead part, I have to find someone. So I decided to open the cast and to see older boys. And I saw a picture of Ernst and I thought he had a beautiful look in his eyes, a way of watching the camera. And so I met him, and actually he’s 21 but he looks even 14 or 12 sometimes.

I know the producer was not sure about him because he was not as good as some others who were technically much better but they didn’t have the ambiguity. I know it may have been more difficult with him, but he could be very good and we worked a lot and I learned to know from where he came. And actually he’s very close to the character because lives in a small country, in a small city, not in Paris, he has a difficult background with his family and it was good for the theme. So he had many links, many connections with the character of Claude and he was totally involved and I think at the end it was very good. He was the best choice.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Director's cut, Francois Ozon, In the House, Interview

5 Questions With ‘Struck By Lightning’ Star Chris Colfer

At only 22, Chris Colfer is already becoming a renaissance man.

Known primarily for his Golden Globe-winning turn as Kurt Hummel on Fox TV’s “Glee,” the actor surprised and impressed fans when it was announced nearly two years ago that the screenplay he penned, “Struck By Lightning,” was being made into a movie. Oh, and that he’d also be starring and executive producing the flick – which also stars Allison Janney, Christina Hendricks and “Modern Family”‘s Sarah Hyland – about an unpopular high school senior who blackmails his classmates into participating in a project that’ll better his odds of getting into college.

Fast forward to last April, when “Struck By Lightning” made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival. Colfer tells us he was “wearing long sleeves” because was “covered in welts” from pinching himself over his latest success.

Suzanne Houchin

What inspired you to keep pushing and get this movie made?
“Glee” fans, in short. When we were on the road for “Glee,” I met a lot of kids that were full of aspirations and had no drive themselves and had no self confidence to actually pursue what they wanted to do. I thought, there’s not too many movies made targeted toward that audience that really are uplifting and show you ways it could happen. I wanted to make a movie that was funny and had all the teenage raunchiness that kids want in a movie to be entertained and also had an underlying strong message, too.

I read that Allison Janney was who you pictured to play your mom when you first wrote the script. How surreal was actually getting her?
From the very beginning. It was insane. The only difference between her performance in the movie and what I pictured in my head was her hair was just a little shorter in my head. That’s all. Everything else is exactly how I had always imagined it.

What elements of your own high school experience did you bring into this movie?
I was not liked and I was president of Writer’s Club in my school, but that was it. I was more of a performing arts geek.

Also Check Out: ‘Glee’ Stars in Movies Photo GalleryAre you working on other screenplays?
My next project … we’re going the same exact production route, doing it as an independent movie. I have a director. It’s a very different movie for me – it takes place in an asylum in the 1930s, which is very similar to high school if you think about it. Crazy people running around with other people telling them what to do. Did you have restraints in your high school? Because I did.

I actually had to do tons and tons of research on it. I had these crazy, suggestive books that I was carrying around with me – like “Asylums for Dummies” and “Schizophrenia for Dummies” and “How to Deal With Mental Health” – all these things that I was reading and highlighting on set and people were giving me these weird looks like “He’s finally lost it.” I really immersed myself with the material.

So are all your “Glee” castmates begging for parts?
Jokingly, yes, but they’re all off doing their own things. They’re having albums coming out and little projects here and there. They don’t need me. They’re all busy too.

(Originally published on April 25, 2012, as part of our coverage of the Tribeca Film Festival)

Categories: Features

Tags: chris colfer, glee, interviews, Struck by Lightning, Struck By Lightning, Chris Colfer, Glee: Season 04

Unsettling Questions Raised by the Alternate Reality in Cars

John Lasseter, the chief nerd-wizard at Pixar, recently gave an interview to Box Office Magazine wherein he explained some of the mysteries surrounding the universe in which the Cars movies are set. We appreciate the effort, but we still have many questions, each more unsettling than the last.

1) Were there ever human beings in this world, or is it an alternate reality where cars evolved instead of people?
We suspect it is the latter. Everything in this world appears to have been made specifically for the use of sentient automobiles, not (as the opposing theory holds) retrofitted by the newly sentient autos after the people all died out. There’s no indication that humans were ever here, no references to them as fossils, nothing. Moreover, the closing credits in Cars showed that the Cars world has its own versions of Pixar movies. This supports the “alternate reality” theory, as it is not plausible that the cars would coincidentally produce films that happened to be exactly like specific films produced by their human predecessors. They could have done it on purpose, we suppose, as homages, the way Gus Van Sant redid Psycho, but we don’t think so.

2) If this is indeed a world that has never been populated by anything other than motor vehicles, then why do the cars have doors and door handles?
The seats and steering wheels could be the equivalent of their internal organs, filling some function other than what we would use a car’s seat and steering wheel for. So what does that make the doors? Some kind of easy access for car doctors to get inside a patient? That’s weird, but we suppose we can buy it.

3) Where do the cars come from?
Cars 2 mentions that cars are made in factories, which means we do not have to contemplate the logistics of automobile procreation. Instead, we are faced with larger questions. Who makes these cars? Why are there different makes and models of such varying degrees of quality and reliability? With humans, it makes sense that you’d have a few “clunkers” here and there, what with genetics and natural selection and dumb people breeding and everything. That isn’t the case here. These cars are presumably being manufactured by other cars, each one created on purpose, not at random like so many people are. You’d think any lemon that came off the line would be scrapped and rebuilt.

4) At what point in the manufacturing process do the cars become living things?
Is it when the first two pieces of the frame are welded together? When it first becomes recognizable as a “car”? When it rolls down the ramp out of the factory for the first time?

5) Why is automobile racing the predominant sport in this universe?
The equivalent in our world is running, and nobody cares about that.

6) How does the caste system work?
Cars 2 establishes that vehicles such as boats, planes, and trains are also living things in this universe. What’s curious is that they’re all subservient to the cars. Perhaps that cargo ship is being paid a reasonable salary for his labors, hauling cars and their stuff across oceans. But think about it: He was built as a cargo ship. What else was he going to do for a living? He was destined to be a cargo ship from the moment he came out of the cargo ship factory. It’s disturbing to contemplate a society where your life’s path is pre-determined based on how you’re built.

7) Out of respect for the late Paul Newman, they left the character of Doc Hudson out of Cars 2. But George Carlin is just as dead, and all they did was get somebody else to voice his character. What’s up with that?
His name even had the word “car” in it, and we know for a fact that the Cars people love crap like that.