François Ozon, interview with director and screenwriter at Marrakech IFF

FRED Film Radio - English Channel

Acclaimed French director François Ozon, whose incredibly versatile and prolific career is the focus of one of the captivating Conversations curated by the 21st Marrakech International Film Festival, sheds light on what has guided him through his formidable, and formidably multifaceted career since his first short films and his debut feature “Sitcom” (1998). The author of “Under the Sand” (2000), “Swimming Pool” (2003), “Potiche” (2010), and “By the Grace of God” (2019), to name but a few, explains how he relies on his instincts and how he knew very early on he wanted to be a filmmaker.

Ozon, a regular at Cannes, Berlin, and the European Film Awards, winner of the Golden Shell in San Sebastián for In the House (2012), reminisces about the shooting of 8 Women (2002) and his classes with Éric Rohmer, whose awareness of production-related matters he retained as a crucial lesson for the rest of his own career. He also underlines the virtues of trying one’s hand at short film first, to give one’s cinema solid foundations.

On frequently exploring the female universe

“Maybe it’s a way to hide myself, you know. One of my first films, ‘Under the Sand’, was about a fifty-year-old woman. The film was about my own experience, about grief, and working with a fifty-year-old woman like Charlotte Rampling gave me the opportunity, maybe, to show more easily some very personal things. Because I’m not the kind of director who makes autobiographical movies – I need to keep a kind of distance, and maybe with women, it’s easier for me.”

On the first film experience which changed his life

“It was Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero. I saw the film when I was eight years old, on television, on the programme ‘Cinéma de minuit’, at midnight, although my parents had said no… The films I used to watch were Walt Disney movies, films for children, and at this moment, for the first time, I was watching a film for adults, but about a young boy who was my age, and suddenly, I discovered that cinema could be something else, other than entertainment, and I was so deeply touched by this young boy who tries to survive in the ruins of Germany, and at the end commits suicide. It was so powerful, so disturbing, but I loved it! I think it is at this moment that I realised that cinema could be something else, and I think my desire to make movies unconsciously started at this point.“

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