THE ARTIST written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, with Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman and James Cromwell. An Alliance Films release. 100 minutes. Opens Friday (December 9). For venues and times, see Movies.
Michel Hazanavicius isn’t interested in making movies about contemporary bourgeois Parisians.
“I like them. They are my friends, the people I see every day, but it’s boring for me to see them onscreen,” says the director in accented English. “To me, movies give you the possibility to go to other worlds, other periods. It’s like a time machine, so let’s use it.”
The director’s taken that literally in his own work, making his mark with two spy-movie parodies about a swinging 60s James Bond-style agent named OSS 117. Now he’s travelled even further back in cinematic time with The Artist, an homage to Hollywood silent films starring OSS’s Jean Dujardin as a dashing Douglas Fairbanks type whose career plummets during the transition to talkies.
In town for the Toronto Film Festival, where the movie’s getting lots of awards buzz, Hazanavicius says he always dreamed of making a silent film.
“It’s the ultimate way to tell a story,” he says, pointing out that many of his favourite directors – Hitchcock, Ford, Lang, Lubitsch – started out in silents.
Style, of course, dictates content, and he re-watched a lot of old movies to absorb the conventions.
“My main concern was not to be too complex with the story,” he says, “because if it gets too complicated you need words. What was liberating was that it didn’t have to be realistic. It’s in black-and-white, it’s period, and people are moving their lips but you’re not hearing them. This is not realistic. So you can play with other things that in normal movies might be considered ridiculous, too symbolic or clichéd.”
Actor Jean Dujardin, who copped the best-actor prize at Cannes and might be George Clooney’s biggest competition come Oscar time, did his own research, looking at Fairbanks and Murnau movies as well as photo exhibits and gangster/Mafia movies from the 1920s to study, as he puts it, “gestures and motions.”
But his biggest acting aid came from the wardrobe department.
“Every night when I got home, I saw the same face in the mirror,” he says, looking nothing like his onscreen character. “I lived with this slick black haircut, really short in the neck, the little thin moustache. That really got me into the skin of this actor. That, and spending time in those big houses in the Hollywood Hills.”
One of the film’s more poignant themes involves keeping up with progress, something director Hazanavicius admits everyone can relate to.
“Before the 20th century, you were born in a place and you died in the same place,” he says. “Now the world moves so quickly. You have to adapt, and when you don’t you’re ejected, a has-been. You see it in France, where 50-year-old factory workers who have been doing the same thing all their lives are now out of work.”
Interview Clips
Director Michel Hazanavicius on getting the film made:
On the title:
On casting, especially of John Goodman, and the idea of the film’s antagonist:
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