Bruno Dumont Rarely does the same thing twice, although he prefers to put his projects near the home in northern France and Tinker with the same ideas over and over again. His latest filmography tackled a number of genres, from satirizing self-compliant COP procedures in “Li’l quinquin” To give an iconic martyr heavy metal treatment in “Jeanette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc” and Its sequel “Joan of Arc.”
His latest, “Empire“See that the French author applies its distinct touch to the Hollywood Space Operas. The science-fiction saga sees two strengths struggling for control of the galaxy, the noble and the evil zeros, which fall on the French fishing village with audio or try to recruit the locals for their respective causes. The filmwhich Won Silver Bear at 2024 Berlin International Film FestivalRiff at Kubrick and George Lucas but in the end have much more in common with Dumont’s other films trying to explain the evil we see around us. It is as creative as you can expect, complete with spaceships that look like recreations of Versailles and Saint-Chappelle and people who create with demons to get pregnant from a movie Dumont which was released almost 30 years ago.
Before the film’s release, Dumont spoke with IndieWire through a translator to explain his unique attitude to science fiction and themes that continue to fascinate him as an artist.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Indieview: “The Empire” sees that you water into yet another new genre. What was your relationship with science fiction before you started this project?
Bruno Dumont: I like it a lot. It is a world and a genre that I like because it is a world that allows me to deal with issues that are more difficult to deal with in nature. This means that I can go into zones that naturalism does not fit particularly. For example, I think science fiction films are very metaphysical. They handle apocalyptic, crucial questions about the origin of the world, the origin, the end of the time. There is a cataklysmic aspect that allows an abstraction that I find very interesting. It really is a mental space.
“The Empire” deals with how sci-fi films often handle these issues with a lot of moral simplicity about good and evil, while life on earth is so much more messier. How did you think of the balance between intergalactic history and life in the fishing village?
Science fiction interests me, but only with nature next to it. I am interested in the big questions I just talked about, good versus evil, but what science fiction does when it is put in parallel with the more complicated questions about existence that I have asked since I started making movies. We are dealing with a script that has real people on earth, and then this conjunction of heroes in the sky. And I am interested in what happens when a hero meets a regular fatal. So I had to write a script with this parallel writing where I would confront and put in relation to both these worlds. That is why Jony is both a regular fisherman and a demon. What I am actually interested in is coexistence.
That branching also extends to your casting. Some characters are played by famous actors, while others are played by non-professional. How do you decide which roles to play what kind of artist?
It is the characters in the script that define casting and the models I need to find. So if I am looking for a fisherman, I will not necessarily throw a fisherman, but someone close to it. So for example, the person who plays Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), in reality he is a mechanic and who interests me because he is the one who gives me what he is. And I have to know about it, not intellectualize it. A character like Belzebuth, it is a figure of the mind, so I will need a professional for that kind of character to compose the character, to build it through Artifice. And we will determine the character’s psychology and have dialogue for that character.
So it’s really the script and the characters in what defines my recruitment. Someone who Fabrice Luchini creates everything. Everything is made or made with him. While the people who play Jony or his wife, they will improvise on points. They see practically no written dialogue. For Fabrice Luchini it is impossible to improvise. He can’t do it. He must have the text. So these are two very different methods, but both are interesting.
Spaceships in this movie are unlike everything we have ever seen. How did you approach the construction of a visual language containing Gothic French architecture in science fiction?
I defined the visual language from the territory where I am, which is north of France. So I looked in the tradition of architecture here and looked at monuments and history from France, but also from Italy and more largely Europe and used it to build our space vessels. The biggest difficulty I encountered was when I realized that the workshop that was responsible, or the studio that was responsible for designing the spaceships for me, for them it was really difficult to get out of an American imagination of what a spaceship is, because it has been so defined for everyone. It’s Stanley Kubrick, it’s Star Wars. And that kind of spaceship has completely impressed themselves with people’s imagination, to the point that European creators also see it. So I tried to prevent them from doing it. I’m European, I’m not American.
And Americans have done it extremely well, but they don’t have to do the same. So I tried to make my own little contribution to this in the same way as, for example, a French car is not an American car. So I went into French history to make the spaceships. Making these conjunctions, for example, between Saint-Chapelle, which is this jewel of flamboyant middle-aged architecture and an abstract mobile. It is the conjunction that allowed me to, modestly, renew the genre, I hope. The second thing is that the bar is very high, not for flattering Americans, but they have placed the bar very high through the representation of space in American film. It is very impressive, it is very detailed. So we had to be careful about not being ridiculous. I didn’t want to be ironic either. I didn’t want to make fun of anything, so I had to remove myself from the story of American film to work in a pure French thunder.
You have described “The Empire” as a prequel to “Jesus’ life”, and it shares an environment with some of your other projects. How important is the narrative connection between your movies to you?
The action of making movies is to do and do it constantly and continue to go deeper. I return to the same place to dig deeper. I don’t think you have to go anywhere else. You can search for someone else in the same place. You are not forced to go far away to film something that is long. I have my little studio in northern France. I can put the camera elsewhere in that place, or I’ll take other people and tell other stories. It’s a bit like music. You have these mandatory figures in music such as Fugue, Canon. Things repeat themselves and they also change. I am not afraid of repetition because I believe that life without repeating itself is always similar.
And for example, I have since the beginning filmed the same questions. Since the beginning it has been good and evil, whether it is with Freddie in “Jesus’ life” or now “The Empire”, there is this repetition. But within that repetition there are degrees, there are changes.
My movies respond to each other and repair each other. They have a very special relationship. When I start a movie I always start that movie from the end of the previous movie. There is always a relationship. It is not always so clear, but I see, when I quit a movie, that I want to continue to make a movie that will improve and change the movie, which will relate to the previous movie. For example, this new film, “The Empire”, has a clear relationship with my very first film. When I decided to call the child in “The Empire”, Freddie, was it a way to answer these questions that I often ask “Jesus’ life”, why that name Jesus? Why evil? These are questions that are not easy to answer.
And so, this new film tells Freddie’s origin, why Freddie is bad, why he is a racist, why he is a killer. And I explain that through science fiction because science fiction allows us to seek deep into the roots of Freddy, ie. Evil roots, in this absolute evil world. That is why it is easier to tell these types of stories through extraordinary stories, through the myth. I could explain that Freddie was the son of Belzebuth with Jony. An extraordinary story that it helps us to explain the usual in our existence. I think that’s what movie does. That explains why the present is as it is. Extraordinary stories allow us to explain ordinary things.
A Kino Lorber edition, “The Empire” now plays in selected theaters.
