Claire Denis is gearing up to shoot her next film The Fence [working title], an Africa-set feature that has a completed script.
Speaking to Screen at the Qumra event in Doha, Qatar, Denis said, “The script is finished; I have to do some corrections because I’m not sure about locations until today. One person is missing in the cast, so I might have to rewrite some parts.”
Denis sparsely described the project as “a film with four main characters, three men and a woman.” Three of the four cast members are attached, although Denis would not confirm names.
“It takes place in Africa, on a construction site directed and held by white Occidental [Western] people, and the workers are African,” said Denis, who grew up in Cameroon.
“The script, I know it’s solidly built; there is something I could trust easily,” she added. “But I realised since December, I have described them, I know the way they look, I could even describe their clothes. But there is something missing, I don’t know them enough, I realise they are still characters.”
Finance is “more or less” in place for the film; when asked if it would shoot this year, Denis replied, “I guess; in the meantime, I’m doing something else so I don’t know.”
The 77-year-old filmmaker also gave a strong denial to reports that she considered retiring after directing 2022 titles Both Sides Of The Blade and Stars At Noon.
“I never said I was going to stop making films!” said Denis. “Stars At Noon made me so happy. I wish I can work once more with Margaret [Qualley, who led the film with Joe Alwyn]. Maybe I’m too old, that’s what they meant.
“Retiring in filmmaking, it’s strange because it’s a lot of work but it’s not a job. So retire from what? I don’t know. Each film is one solid thing that has a beginning and an end. I think the best way to retire is to die.
“I never thought I would retire – first of all, I’m not tired. Maybe I’d stop because I find something else interesting to do, who knows? But now, no. I would like to go on making films.”
Gaza
Responding to an audience question in her masterclass about how she would film the ongoing crisis in Gaza, Denis said, “The first thing I would need is to go there. I think I’m not ready to feel devastated…”
She referenced the work of French writer Jean Genet about the 1982 massacres in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila, about which Genet wrote Four Hours In Shatila. “He described the smell of death, and I think that would be the first thing I would try to imagine. Not the shell, not the bullets, but the result – the smell of death. It would be a way to enter something I have never experienced, that I know only through news.”
Violence is growing in the world, the director said, which is something she “feels deeply in my flesh, in my bones, and I suffer from it.”
“I started making films believing there will be less and less violence, that the future could be – not peaceful, but less violent. Today, we are in a world where the violence is not so obvious; it’s exploding and hurting our feelings, my hope. It’s as if my youth was a lie.”
In her two-hour Qumra masterclass, Denis explained she prefers to make the first steps on a new project solo before bringing in a working partner.
“The first movement towards a film, when it doesn’t have a shape but just a wish before finding a shape – it needs to be taken by me alone, like a secret wish,” said Denis, “not being sure but feeling this is the direction.
“When I see there is the beginning of a film, I love to work with someone; because I am a pessimistic person, and it’s great to be able to laugh about the work, to have this distance of a two-person relation.
“On my own I know my distance is not great. It’s good to be able to speak out loud the scenes, the dialogue – there’s nothing better. It’s maybe the best part, where everything is possible.”
Denis said she is “a very impatient person” whose patience is reserved for when she is on set. “Those actresses, actors or non-actors are the centre of interest,” said Denis. “Therefore my tolerance is maximum. Some directors like to direct in a violent way; I cannot. I have to wait for [the actors] to find their reason, their base in the film; it’s not for me to rush or push them.”
Denis’ best-known works include 1999 drama Beau Travail, in which an ex-Foreign Legion officer recalls his once-glorious life leading troops in Djibouti. The film took seventh place in UK film magaine Sight and Sound’s 2022 critics’ poll of the greatest films of all time.
“I never decided ‘let’s do a film about masculinity, let’s describe something that is so opposed to me’,” said Denis of the film 25 years on. “I tried to be as true as I could to those young men entering the foreign legion, suffering hell to be free.”
“There were moments when I was a girl when I thought it would be easier for me if I was a boy,” Denis said, adding that gender was not a political issue when she made her first film. “It was not considered as a political point of view, but only my own point of view. In that way, I felt free.”
“Human beings are a vast kingdom,” said Denis, who gave an anecdote about the “tenderness” of the drunk legionnaires from the foreign legion hospital she would see at dawn in Marseille while doing night shoots. “Because they were wounded, they were depressed, they wanted to go back [to fight]. They felt they were abandoned. That’s how I became interested in this.”
Asked for her advice to help actors improve their skills, Denis responded, “I don’t want to make fun of the question because it’s a very deep question but I’m tempted to say nothing. Since my second film I decided never to test actresses or actors, or non-actors or children. It’s not that I trust myself so much; it’s that I’m always afraid that testing them on a scene might destroy something. I’m afraid that maybe by doing that I will cheat that person; I will ask them to give me something for nothing.”
The final Qumra masterclass from Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan takes place tomorrow (Wednesday 6).
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