Sometimes, I tell myself that TEN is a film that I could never make again. You cannot decide to make such a film... It's a little like CLOSE-UP. It's possible to continue along the same path but it requires a great deal of patience. Indeed, this is not something that can be repeated easily. It must occur of its own accord, like an incident or a happening...At the same time, it requires a great deal of preparation. Originally, this was the story of a psychoanalyst, her patients and her car, but that was two years ago...
I was invited to Beirut in Lebanon last week, for a film workshop with students. One of them told me, "You're the only one who can make such a film because of your reputation. If one of us had made it, no one would have accepted it." I replied that, as his teacher, I owed him the truth: making something simple requires a great deal of experience. And, first of all, you need to understand that simplicity isn't the same as facility.
Kundera tells a fascinating story that genuinely impressed me: he relates how his father's lexical range diminished with age and, at the end of his life, was reduced to two words: "It's strange! It's strange!" Of course, he hadn't reached that point because he had nothing much to say anymore but because those two words effectively summed up his life's experience. They were the very essence of it. Perhaps that's the story behind minimalism too...
The disappearance of direction. That's what is at stake: the rejection of all elements vital to ordinary cinema. I state, with a great deal of caution, that direction, in the usual sense of the word, can vanish in this kind of process. In this form of cinema, the director is more like a football coach. He has to do most of his work before the take starts. Indeed, for me, the film always starts well before the initial preparation and is almost never over. It's a never-ending game. Each time I show it, I await the audience's reactions. The discussions following the screening take on a new turn each time... For me, the beauty of art resides in the reactions that it causes.
This film was created without being made as such. Even so, it isn't a documentary. Neither a documentary nor a purely fabricated film. Mid-way between the two perhaps... A scene occurs and I decide that it suits me. Later, I realize that one particular element was vital for the integration of the whole.
In TEN, we have a shot in the car with the little boy facing the camera. The scene takes place in front of the camera. And yet there are also people who come over, lower the window and peer into the car. That's documentary. This background. They look at the camera. But what happens in front of the camera isn't documentary because it's guided and controlled in a way. The person in front of the camera manages to forget its presence, it vanishes for him. Emotion is created in this way, the result of a certain quantity of energy and information that we give and then recover later. It circulates... Resulting in the complexity of the situation. This flow must be controlled in order to be released at the right moment.
You cannot promise yourself that you'll make another film like this. It's like wavering in your staunchest convictions and ideas. Sometimes it's easier to protect yourself with good old direction, the scenery, the set...
If anyone were to ask me what I did as a director on this film, I'd say, "Nothing and yet if I didn't exist, this film wouldn't have existed."
In all my films, there are shots where the emotional impact goes beyond direction, triumphing over it, and the emotion becomes more powerful than cinema itself. There's the shot in TASTE OF CHERRY where Mr. Badii, while talking about himself, refuses to let out his emotion. And the corners of his mouth start trembling as he begins to sob. These are shots that I do not claim to have created. They deserve better than that. I was able to provoke them and seize them at the right moment. That's all.
This film is my own "two words". It resumes almost everything. I say "almost" because I'm already thinking about my next film. A one-word film perhaps...
