Since his emergence on the periphery of the “New French Extremity” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Bruno Dumont has continued to carve out a niche for himself in arthouse cinema as one of the more unpredictable and provocative filmmakers, moving between stark, philosophical dramas and absurdist comedies with equal conviction. With The Empire, he ventures into science fiction, blending cosmic rivalries with frenzied sex, spirituality, and his own signature deadpan humor and existential inquiry.
During a recent Zoom call, Dumont discussed his new film’s intricate mix of genres and thematic preoccupations; his reunion with the beloved detective characters from Li’l Quinquin; his ongoing fascination with the tension between the constructed and the natural, the artificial and the authentic; the mediating role of comedy in his more recent work; and his resistance to binary thinking in both cinema and politics. Finally, Dumont reflects on the late David Lynch, whose work strikes this writer, at least, as a more instructive reference point for The Empire than the Star Wars comparisons generated by its title.
Dumont’s latest “tragicomic” film is a synthesis of both the past and present concerns of his work — a quirky, sneaky-important entry in his oeuvre that, despite its genre-movie framing, remains very much rooted in the filmmaker’s heady philosophical vision of cinema, which he gives us a glimpse into here.
Sam C. Mac: When did you decide to create the “Li’l Quinquin Extended Universe”?
Bruno Dumont: I put in quite a few different narrative layers in The Empire, with things taking place in space and things taking place on earth, and I thought it would be fun to put in a police investigation, especially since there are such fantastic elements in the film. We’re talking about basically an extraterrestrial attack. I thought it would be fun to put these cops in to investigate, especially since that’s their job and they were unemployed. I told myself, “Let’s give these detectives some work”; they’re in secondary roles, but I thought it would be fun to have several layers…the detectives are the ones who brought the comic touch that wasn’t necessarily in the other layers. The comedy really comes from them, and in my “kitchen” of preparing the film, I wanted it to have that color. I wanted the film to have a lot of different dimensions, and since it’s an apocalyptic story, I thought, “Let’s put an end to these characters, too.”
SCM: It sounds like planning for The Empire came before the idea to do another film with the detectives?
BD: The first goal was to make a science fiction film. The second was that it not simply be a science fiction film, but that it have earthly elements in it, which is why it takes place on earth. Then, I wanted to have comedy, and that’s where the detectives came in.
SCM: Should we expect to see these detectives again? Are you planning anything else for them, or do you think that just might come about organically, depending on what other projects you work on?
BD: No, it was very hard to work with Bernard Pruvost, who plays the police commander, because he’s old and he has health problems. I’m not sure you noticed, but the commander does not speak at all in the film, and that’s not because I didn’t want him to speak, it’s because he’s no longer able to speak. But I told myself that I was going to adapt to this. I wasn’t going to not put him in the film, just because he has these difficulties. I was going to take him as he is, and that’s why [Philippe Jore’s character] Carpentier is the one who talks all the time, because the Commander has difficulty speaking.
I care a lot about these men, but I’m also dependent upon their vitality. What happens, happens. So, maybe, one day, Carpentier will take the Commander’s place, but I don’t think about that right now. My next projects do not feature the detectives, but they’re still in a corner of my head. Life moves forward, and life is what ultimately matters here; I care about them, and the proof is that they’re in this film. But life continues. They have their health problems. So as it is, I would have to consider them as they are at the moment. I’m not planning on using them in the future, but I don’t know.
SCM: I’d like to talk a little bit about comedy. You’re always on the international festival circuit with your films, so you are part of this arthouse world, but I think your comedy tends to find a way to sort of poke fun at the self-seriousness of a lot of arthouse filmmaking. For instance, in Twentynine Palms, the scene of the guy watching the TV and commenting, sort of very seriously, about the art-film that he’s watching, and how you were making fun of that a little bit. Do you see comedy as a way to prod at the self-seriousness of the arthouse world of which you’ve long been very much a part.
BD: Yes, certainly, when I started making films, I was making serious films, and I was taken seriously, and that was a pain in my ass! I didn’t like that. That’s probably why I made comedy, but now that’s a pain in my ass, too, because I actually… I like serious, I like stark things. I really like drama, but what I like most is tragicomedy. I like the mix of both, because I think that the truth of things is neither in tragedy nor in comedy, but in the tragicomic. And when I do a tragicomic film, I feel like I’m holding the entire complexity of things. Now, I may be wrong about that, but I think that it’s easier to say real things, or true things, by going from one to the other. In a serious film, you can easily start pontificating, and comedy can also be very light and extremely dumb.
There’s this balance, and that’s hard to find, but that’s what I’m looking for. I may not find it, but that’s interesting to me. For instance, in Camille Claudel, which is certainly a dramatic subject, the madness is funny too. There’s something that’s both funny and not funny about madness. In the Don Juan scene, with Juliet Binoche, we are laughing and crying, and I like that. I like to laugh and to cry, not necessarily at the same time, but I think there’s an accuracy there, and that’s why I like the film Camille Claudel. It’s tragic, like truly very dark, but there’s also a fantasy there that I find quite beautiful.
SCM: What you’re talking about, I think, is what I always see in your films: an impulse to not want to be binary in your thinking, especially when it comes to moral thinking.
In The Empire, that’s represented by the Zeros and Ones — two sides of this good and evil fight. I appreciate that impulse to not want to create a binary in the way that you think about things, but at the same time, I also feel like the world we live in right now is so driven by these divisive attitudes, especially in politics. And I find myself pushed to one side more than I would like to be. Do you feel like you’re sincere in your belief that we shouldn’t think in these binary terms, or do you think it is difficult, in your own experience of these things, to force yourself out of that binary thinking and to even, especially when it comes to politics, think about things in a more nuanced and pragmatic way?
BD: Well, that’s the entire problem. The film represents both. There’s the representation of this binary world of good versus evil, but that’s a view of the mind. The mind generates that, so it’s natural, but the film tells us that reality is not like that. Reality is blurry. The film is about this struggle between the ideal — those who believe that white is white and black is black — against those who don’t believe. And that’s probably the whole history of the world. I don’t choose between the two. I do understand the need to idealize, and that’s why [the film has] the Zeros and the Ones, but I temper that with the reality of things. People are neither good nor evil. We must understand that, and cinema helps us with that. It helps us to get rid of the idea. We go into the movie theater to purge this idea of good and evil.
It’s probably a good thing that we have these heroes [and villains], Batman or clowns. These are necessities that can’t be embodied in reality, and that’s what theater is for — catharsis. We need to purge our need to separate things. This is human nature, whereas the reality of things is much more chiaroscuro. These are very philosophical questions we’re raising, but cinema is philosophical. I don’t make films to say what is good and what is evil. I make films to look very closely at things. I make films to entertain, also, but I have to be modest. I’m asking questions that we’ve always asked. Are there answers? I don’t know. Look at what’s happening in the world today. There are empires today, the American Empire, the Russian Empire. It’s in our nature. We can’t help feeling that we are right.
SCM: So let’s talk a little bit about the visual design of The Empire and how it relates to your other films. I don’t know if you’ll agree with this characterization, but I’ve always felt that in the early films of yours, which are set in rural towns and are relatively earthly and grounded in their concerns, the visual art of your filmmaking comes through in composition. Whereas in these later films, I’ve been much more aware of the set design, and the mise en scène. In this film, I’m thinking of the two spaceships — the Zeros’ and the Ones’ — which have very defined visual characters, one very vertical and one horizontal. What was your thinking going into the set design of this film, and do you see that change in how you’re thinking about set design between this later work and your earlier films?
BD: Of course it’s changed, because of what you just said. This film represents a space world, so it’s extremely constructed, extremely intellectual, extremely architectural. It’s a world of pure construction and so, of course, in this case, the mise en scène is very invasive. It takes up a lot of space, because so much has to be invented, whereas when I’m filming nature, I don’t have to think about anything. It’s just there. There’s direct sound. So in the constructed world, there’s a mise en scène that is not constructed, and I have to adapt my mise en scène to the representation. The mise en scène must represent what I film. So here, of course, the spaceships are hyper-intellectualized, architectural constructions. But beauty is not necessarily a good thing either. It’s very constructed and it’s dead. It can be dead. Personally, I prefer cows, prairies, little birds, small accidents. The subject of this film is the confrontation between both. That’s why I work with non-professional actors — whom I take for who they are, with their accents — and artificial actors. I like to do both. The film is the collision between both. That’s why I’m so interested in filming Anamaria Vartolomei in Brandon Vlieghe’s arms. It’s because these are two worlds that I’ve put together and I’m looking at them and seeing, indeed, they are different worlds. So my mise en scène is made by these representations of these two worlds.
SCM: How involved were you in the CGI design?
BD: I’m enormously involved. The spaceships are described in the screenplay. The screenplay is where this conjunction of, for instance, the Sainte-Chapelle with spaceship elements, was conceived. So the description is there. Then I hired an architect for the graphic conception, but the descriptive conception — for instance, this idea of associating mobiles with European architecture — that’s in the screenplay.
SCM: Star Wars is getting thrown around a lot with this film, but what I constantly was thinking about was David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return in particular, especially with the CGI-ed globby stuff, and even just the spaceship design… it felt very Red Room-esque. Obviously, we lost Lynch recently. I don’t know if you were thinking actively about Lynch in the process of this film or not. I do know other films of yours have been compared to him in the past. What did we lose in the cinema with Lynch gone?
BD: Well, you lost a great American filmmaker. Obviously, he’s a model of an American filmmaker — which means he’s a model of a filmmaker and a model of an American, an artist who took art to the highest level, while integrating his culture and his environment. Which is to say he took his culture to the highest possible point to explore the human soul. David Lynch was an explorer of the human soul and that’s what a filmmaker should do. If he’s Japanese, he does it through Japanese culture; if he’s Indian, through Indian culture. So David Lynch was a great model of what cinema can do. I’m not sure he had that much of a direct influence on me, but I certainly liked his films a great deal.
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