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“I Always Make What I Can and Not What I Want”: Bruno Dumont on The Empire
The Empire With The Empire, French filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s career is now evenly split between two modes. His first seven films operated within an identifiably Bressonian tradition, while the five films and two mini-series following operate in a more comic, slapstick register. Conversations surrounding the starkness of this pivot—which began in 2014 with miniseries L’il Quinquin—are understandable yet potentially overstated, as there is strong connective tissue through all of his work. The two hapless detectives in L’il Quinquin and Coincoin and the Extra-humans (who reprise their roles in The Empire) drive their cop car on two wheels; a dune buggy wreck into a beach embankment sends the driver soaring high into the air in Slack Bay, and there’s a seemingly never-ending slow motion car crash in France, all demonstrating Dumont’s longstanding love for machinery’s comic possibilities. This dates back to Dumont’s 1997 debut, The Life of Jesus, when one character crashes his motorbike again and again in front of a cafe—a hilarious gag in an otherwise somber film.
In typical Dumontian fashion, the director’s first foray into science-fiction is set in the Audresselles, the rural fishing region in northern France where Dumont hails from and where he sets nearly all of his work. Two opposing alien factions are named “zeroes” and “ones,” literalizing binaristic dynamics of good and evil common in sci-fi narratives. An escalation toward war is sparked by the arrival of a cute blonde baby named “Wain” who is prophesied to be the eventual supreme leader of the evil zeros. The ones are divided between those who wish to kill the boy now while they can, and others who find this tactic morally reprehensible; Dumont tells Filmmaker that the sci-fi genre is uniquely built to tackle philosophical questions in a simplistic, entertaining manner.
New to their human bodies, both the zeros and ones are surprised at having to grapple with strong sexual urges, and “zero” warrior Jony (Brandon Vlieghe) finds himself trapped in a love triangle between devotee Line (The French Dispatch’s Lyna Khoudri) and “one” princess Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei from Happening). Sex and danger become linked as the act carries an added element of surrender for Jony and Jane whenever they meet for clandestine trysts, but a betrayal during copulation never arrives. There is violence elsewhere however, and it is amusing to witness a lightsaber behead someone against the naturalistic setting of Northern France’s farm fields and beach dunes. Further putting his own spin on the genre, spaceships are modeled after famous cathedrals, and a black hole sequence in the film’s climax reads as genuinely transcendent, recalling Hubble Space Telescope photographs or the work of Douglas Trumbull on The Tree of Life.
I spoke with Dumont over Zoom, with the aid of a translator, about audience expectations, taking responsibility for finding a performance, his philosophy on sound design and score and how the limitations of budget leads to greater creativity through choice.
Filmmaker: When you are making a new film, what comes first? Is there an image, an idea—what was it for The Empire?
Dumont: It’s never very clear, but you could say it’s an idea. With The Empire, it’s a little nebulous. I wanted to go places I’d never been. Science fiction is a genre that interests me, because I find it both spectacular and simplistic, in the good sense of the term. It simplifies deep metaphysical questions. It represents the human soul, like a spaceship plunging into the night of time. It’s very evocative of philosophy and metaphysics in cinema. Cinema is a wonderful way of going deep into the secrets of our being, but the only place where that can really be seen is science fiction. As soon as I see a spaceship plunging into the night of the universe, I feel that we’re asking fundamental questions. It’s an expressive genre. I told myself: let’s go deep. Let’s see what’s happening in space. That’s where it started.
Filmmaker: Was the process of getting this movie funded different compared with your other smaller scaled films? Did you experience any difficulty with a higher budget?
Dumont: I don’t work that way. I don’t work from the financing. The screenplay was budgeted for about 14 million euros, and we found half of that, so the film was made with half of that. The money that we find determines the ambition of the project, and that’s the way I’ve always worked. I adapt the screenplay based on the money that we’ve actually found. The initial screenplay had lots of intergalactic battles—those were impossible to do because we couldn’t find the money for them, so I focused on the primary spaceships. I like this way of working, because it forces me to make choices. Useless and superficial things go by the wayside. This frustration that I experience is good in making the right choices. It’s the same with actors. If there are actors that we can’t afford, then I don’t cast them. I have to make choices. Fabrice Luchini costs this amount. Well, then if I want Fabrice Luchini, there won’t be a small spaceship. It’s all choices. The film ultimately cost 7 or 8 million euros, and we had German and Italian co-producers. So, I adapted myself to that. The castle is a castle in Italy—the film takes the form of its production, and I’m, of course, ensuring and guaranteeing its quality. The Queen’s spaceship is a monument in Berlin. Initially we had Portuguese co-producers, so the inside of Jony’s spaceship was going to be something from Portugal. That’s always been my process. I always make what I can and not what I want.
Filmmaker: Can you talk about the visual approach? The sex scenes are wide shots using these faraway drone shots. Where did that idea originate?
Dumont: I used a lot of drones because this was a situation where space had to be present—there was a requirement to go up high. The drone is an easy and relatively affordable means to do that. I like wide shots. Landscapes are very important to me, and the drone gives me a way to split open the view of the landscape in an intense way. I use a drone when Jony goes fishing, and—as you mentioned—when they make love, those scenes are seen from above. But in the scene where they’re making love, I’m nearly filming the landscape more than the fact that they’re making love. I like wide shots because nature says a lot about who we are as people, and they’re relatively inexpensive. For the spaceships, again, I needed wide shots, so we used the World War II bunkers that the Germans left behind in the region where we were filming. A major influence on the space genre is the epic, the sword and sandal film, which is originally an ancient Greco-Roman narrative which came out of French and Italian cinema in the early 20th century. When thinking about the costumes, we went to the costumes that one sees in these sword and sandal epics. Similarly, we took the idea of Roman horses and adapted that with local horses. We adapted the genre to the local. Star Wars is basically this Roman genre adapted to outer space, and I adapted it within the north of France.
Filmmaker: What is your philosophy about how the sound design and film score work with the image? Should they be in unison? When do you put them in juxtaposition with each other? Here you have a traditional score against a narrative that can be quite ridiculous at times. What were you attempting to accomplish by putting those together?
Dumont: They’re quite contradictory, the sound and image. I have a taste for ambient sound, for sync sound, but I quickly dissociate sounds from the image. I don’t need to hear what the images say. I often do direct sound, then I dissociate it. We have enough naturalism with the actors’ bodies and the locations to be able to dissociate sounds. So I take sounds away or add sounds. As for the music, it plays a psychological role, much like music did in the films of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s that classic thing of music telling us what is happening. It’s providing a commentary on the narrative that is somewhat exaggerated, somewhat simplistic. It emphasizes the emotions. It’s doing something to make ordinary things take on a forced tone. The music tells us what characters are experiencing that can’t actually be seen. The music is deeper than what is seen. There’s a melodramatic side to it in that way, something that’s added on that I quite like. I like when things don’t quite correspond—I like to add colors. Doing that allows me to create an extraordinary object and all the sounds together make a symphony while the image is saying something else. The image is relatively raw, and the sound can be very sophisticated. For example, the sound of the spaceship’s engine is music by Bach, but it’s so compressed that it’s basically just noise. But within that noise there are variations, and those variations are Bach. It’s nearly imperceptible, but it’s there. The sound is destroyed, but from a construction. When you see the ship going by, into the distance, there is a musical construction that is practically inaudible, but it remains Bach. There’s a modulation there.
Filmmaker: This film works so well, because it is over the top at times, but the emotional core with these characters and their journeys is always present. When you’re working with professional actors alongside nonprofessional actors, how do you keep the film from devolving into parody? It’s not Spaceballs. The emotional core of what the characters are going through with each other is treated seriously.
Dumont: In the shoot, it’s very hard to find. It takes different colors to make the actors go every which way. I’ll do a normal take with normal acting, and then on the second take, I’ll push them further. But, where is the limit? That’s what we don’t know. I push and push and push, because on the shoot, I don’t know what color I want. I’m preparing for the edit, so that I have a spectrum with black, white and gray. In the edit I choose which twist or turn to use, but it can’t go too far. In the edit, I find the sweet spot. But to get there, I have to push them on the shoot, where we’re searching and going every which way. When the actors say to me, “What am I supposed to do?” I say, “I have no idea. Try here, try there, try everywhere.” Actors like to play—it becomes a game. So we say, “Play it all red. Play it all green. Play it all white.” It’s fun. This is practical for the edit, because then I’m able to take the film in all sorts of directions. I like this method, and I think that actors do too. I like naturalistic acting, but I don’t want it to be too much, because if it’s too natural, it becomes a pain in my ass. But like you said, it also can’t be too ridiculous—it is a very fragile thing.
Filmmaker: What film did you figure out this method?
Dumont: I quickly realized that when you’re directing an actor, saying “Do this” never works. It’s never going to be this. You can’t direct actors with a given direction. You have to find it. The guy who plays Jony has his own color, his own tone—I have to learn how to direct him, and that’s through doing different takes. It’s not that I do so many, but I do these takes to learn how to direct him, and then it’s up to me to regulate him. I started to do this beginning with Hadewijch [2009]. The truth is in the actor, and it’s up to me to find it. I’m not some scientist or scholar—that’s of no interest to me. I have to find it in the actor, I have to regulate him. I push him a little to the left, I push him a little bit to the right. And then in the edit, you can regulate some more. I learned to do this by spending time with actors. When actors can’t do something, that’s my fault. It’s up to me to find out when they’re good. If an actor can’t say something, that’s my fault. We cut it. The actor can’t act badly. Anything bad is my fault. If something’s not working, I have to find a way to make him good. It’s a bit like tuning the actor, like with a musical instrument, and I find that work fascinating.
Filmmaker: When you’re making something, are you thinking about audience expectation within a certain genre, like with science fiction for The Empire—how to play into those expectations versus when to subvert them?
Dumont: I’m a spectator, a viewer of films. I trust what I think. I don’t make films for an audience—that makes no sense at all, because I’m part of the audience. I choose a path and follow it, and I’m sincere. General audience movies, or big movies, are often bad because they’re not sincere. When Proust was writing, he said, “I’m writing for me,” and that’s the right way to think of it. When Richter plays piano, he’s playing for himself. You can’t play for an audience. You’re not working for the audience. You’re working sincerely. The audience sees when you’re sincere, and it sees when you’re insincere. Audiences feel when a film is impure. They feel when it’s made for money. They feel when it’s fake. I focus on sincerity, and nothing can replace that. It’s like when you go to spend time with people. Do you think of the people that you’re going to see? Of course not. You have to believe in sincerity, not marketing, because that’s bullshit.
