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Interview: Jacques Audiard on Filming Modern Love in Paris, 13th District

Jacques Audiard discusses how he avoided packaging Paris in nostalgic trappings, and what motivated his stylistic choices.

Jacques Audiard on Filming Modern Love in Paris, 13th District
Photo: Eponine Momenceau

Senior moment!” exclaims Jacques Audiard at one point during our interview, miming an act of self-flagellation after briefly blanking on the name of an iconic film star. As the French director approaches 70, though, his artistic prowess and curiosity show no signs of aging. Audiard’s latest feature, the black-and-white contemporary romance Paris, 13th District, marks a notable change of pace and focus from such brawnier, grittier works like A Prophet and the Palme d’Or-winning Dheepan.

The film’s original French title, Les Olympiades, refers to the 13th arrondissement’s residential towers, whose brutalist architecture stands in contrast to the extravagant Haussmannian style that dominates the Parisian city center. Such a juxtaposition of modernity and classicism plays out in the very fiber of Paris, 13th District. Without feeling disjointed, Audiard’s film offers sterling black-and-white images that evoke a Paris of the past while French electronic producer and artist Rone’s EDM score pulses on the soundtrack.

These clashing sensibilities also apply to the film’s romantic core. Audiard, alongside co-writers Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius, transposes several of American cartoonist Adrian Tomine’s graphic short stories into a contemporary Parisian setting. Through its intertwined quartet of millennial lovers, Paris, 13th District probes changing attitudes toward sexuality and relationships as affected by forces like diversification and digitization. And yet, even as Audiard immerses himself in the minutiae of that scenario, his film recognizes these conflicts as merely modern manifestations of age-old amorous dilemmas.

I spoke with Audiard after Paris, 13th District’s premiere at Rendez-Vous with French Cinema last month. Our talk covered why he chose to center the film in the titular neighborhood, how he avoided packaging Paris in nostalgic trappings, and what motivated his stylistic choices.

I find it interesting that after you leave France to make a film about the American West—even though it was shot in Europe—you follow it up with what feels to me like your most urban film. Did The Sisters Brothers give you any unexpected insights into how a landscape can imprint itself on people and influence their behavior?

If there are no horses in Paris, 13th District, it’s because I made The Sisters Brothers before it. As Truffaut said, usually when you make a film, it’s contrary to the previous one. And I think that in that film I was focusing on opening all the drawers for action: men, horses, violence. But once I started to close them, others opened: women, a nicer landscape, love. So, yes, it’s the process of going from one to the opposite. Also, I’ve wanted to make a film about the way we speak about love, the way we speak love. I’ve wanted to make a film about that for a while.

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Why so specifically the 13th arrondissement when adapting Adrian Tomine’s text? From my research, it seems like location came before the characters.

It wasn’t really that I had chosen the place first, but I did live in the 13th arrondissement for more than 10 years. I found that it was possibly the most modern neighborhood because in recent eras it had undergone urban renewal. A lot of new buildings were built, a lot of high-rises were all around, and there was a kind of new architecture that gave it a different look from perhaps the rest of Paris. And I had the feeling that while I was shooting there, I was shooting something that was very Parisian. But, at the same time when you’re there, you also have a feeling that you’re not in Paris. The black and white also helped me a lot with that.

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Lucie Zhang, Noémie Merlant, and Makita Samba in Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District.. © IFC Films.

There’s a certain romanticized view of Paris in black and white from the Nouvelle Vague, and even some more contemporary images that are consciously showing something grimier in films like La Haine. Are you conscious of how your black and white Paris fits into the larger body of cinematic images of the city?

I love my city, but I understand that Paris has certain photogenic limits to it. It has a closed-in feeling. It almost has a museum-like quality to it. There are not a lot of different perspectives that you can get as you move around the city. I think that when I was doing this, I wasn’t filming it thinking about putting it in a context of other films that have been filmed in black and white. I mean, for me, what I wanted to do is shoot a modern story. My characters are evolving, and they’re evolving in a modern city, which happens to be Paris. I wanted to avoid that nostalgia that sometimes goes along with that idea when you film in black and white. I think one of the things that also helps with this is Rone’s music. Because it’s electronic, very modern, and fits in with that concept of Paris as being a very modern city. I think when you film in black and white, there’s always a danger that there’s a kind of preciousness and nostalgia to it. I wanted to avoid this. I neither wanted to be precious nor nostalgic.

You asked Noémie Merlant to watch Annie Hall before filming Paris, 13th District. How did it influence you or her character of Nora?

I think that Diane Keaton is the prototype of what comedy is. She just is. It’s very much in the style of comedies from the 1930s. It’s a way of being both beautiful and intelligent, which she is, but also being slightly idiotic in certain points. And I think this is probably the reason why I suggested her as a model. In a comedy, it’s actually very hard to present a female character who is going to be both ridiculous but also seductive at the same time.

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How did you settle on a visual language where people talking on phones are in split-screen but conversations in video chat show the screen itself?

I don’t know that I have an intellectual or aesthetic justification for doing that. But when I was thinking about how much I wanted to say, I wanted to have a feeling of being as free as I could be. And I think that, in this respect, filming in black and white was really very helpful. When you film something in black and white, your focus is on the characters. To do the split-screen in color, for example, you would see the characters. But there would also be a lot of other things that could be distracting. It’s a more complicated reading of the image. I think that, for that reason, the black and white really helped me. While I’m talking to you, I’m thinking about the way things are framed, and all of that also comes from the comic book images, the way those are presented. Of all the different things that I use, in some cases they were done simply for reasons of speed or for fantasy. There’s really not an intellectual or aesthetic justification for specifically why. But I think a lot of things come from my memory of comic books and the visual language. Putting a frame within a frame, or dividing a frame into two frames.

What motivated the flash of color we get in the middle of the film with the camgirl? It reminds me a bit of how you used some GoPro footage in The Sisters Brothers. Are you enticed by these stylistic flourishes that can stand out and make a big impact?

I think what I wanted to do in this scene is to really use this as a way of indicating that this was one chapter that was closing on a new chapter that was opening. I really wanted to mark it in some way. So, by using color, particularly these very bright colors, the reds, the yellows, it’s like somebody being offered a present. These are the bright colors of the wrapping paper. I think it was really to have that moment of marking a change that perhaps would not have been possible if I had continued to film it in black and white.

Why linger on the intercom phone as the film’s final image? Were you making a statement about analog versus digital?

I wanted to highlight this sort of prehistoric device, the intercom, as the—at one point—perhaps stable way of being a bearer of romantic confession. And because I used the song “Falling In Love Again,” it’s the song that Marlene Dietrich sang in The Blue Angel in 1930. And so, in a way, it’s my glance back at the past as well.

Translation by Ellen Sowchek

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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