interview de Jean-Loup Hubert concernant Marthe-619
Why did you want to place a romantic idyll in the heart of the First World War ?
For at least two reasons: the first, for purely structural reasons, was to place this love story in the context of dramatic events likely to transcend their passion through contrast, between the morbidity of a context that they are subjected to and the softness, beauty and hope that they choose to experience through their love. Loving then appears as an act of resistance. Marthe and Simon confront the logic of probable death imposed by the war with the power of their love, and so of life itself. The second reason for this choice is the unfortunately obvious similarity between this period and our current time. The Great War was brought about as a soft of firebreak to staunch the beginnings of social conflicts that were simmering simultaneously all over industrialized Europe. Something needed to be done urgently; the European left wing was forming into federations and the pre-revolutionary situation had even reached the gates of Moscow. After the assassination of Jean Jaurès, the best way of forcing the worker and peasant masses back into line was to mobilize them and pit them against teach other, to force them to make a sacrifice to defend a "homeland" behind which the interests and privileges of the ruling classes were protected!
Is today’s situation similar in some ways ?
Yes. Today, war is here again, once again to the advantage of a handful compared to the rest of humanity. This war may be more economic than military but it’s just as devastating. In the past, millions of young men were cast into suffering, mutilation and death whereas today a great many more people are cast into precariousness, exclusion and disguised slavery. Unemployment or precarious work fodder – as you wish – is barely distinguishable from the cannon fodder of the past. The idea of "globalization" has replaced that of patriotism but the result is the same: several generations will be sacrificed and forced to accept laws that do not serve them but that will rob them and debase them. No partisan or private interest should be able to justify the sacrifice of a twenty-year-old life, today no more than yesterday. That is my conviction. And the film’s approach.
Simon and Marthe, your two main characters, are also twenty.
We tend to imagine the soldiers of the Great War as bearded adults, older men. However, most of them were young men, married or engaged to young women or girls. These young lives were crushed out. There was a similar effect on their families. These men had the same age as our sons. They were driven by the same energy and hopes as the young people of today. The war hurled them into a world of privation and suffering. They were deprived of their future and their lives! That’s what I wanted to tell young people today through this film: they mustn’t accept as their forefathers did to have doors closed on them, to have their future and their lives whisked away. I’m sending out this message through a love story. Because love seems to me to mark our very first autonomy, the first claim to identity and freedom. Marthe and Simon take their strength from this to push back and defeat the idea of death that threatens to part them. The first to wager on this force, to resist through this force, is Marthe. Because she is a woman and so naturally opts for life in relation to death, something that men urges themselves mutually towards. Each generation recognizes itself in this thirst for absolute love and with increased power during times of humiliation and suffering. Love is an alternative to death. Instinctively, we fight, we resist, we attempt to live on through love, through the child that may be born.
Marthe is a very modern young woman.
Marthe has been raised by a freethinking father in the noble and generous sense of the term, in other words a man fascinated by the beauty of things, nature and literature. This wonderful person allowed her to play cards and have drinks in bars with men or go with him out to sea. He didn’t teach her what a girl needs to know in this society but what a human being needs to know. After her father’s death, the young adolescent was given a rigorous education and morals in a boarding school. After leaving school, she learnt the rigor of studying for a trade, that of a schoolteacher. Marthe is religious but with a great freedom of spirit. The addition of these two apparently opposing cultures, makes her unbelievably modern. Marthe is a free woman.
We learn less about Simon’s past.
I wanted the character to be virtually without a past. Simon is a Jew from Alsace, but his past is the immediacy of his story. His truth is that of all the soldiers who are on the front: fighting, suffering and risking death. Their past life has very little importance.
During the short respite of his convalescence on this spit of land that seems to exist outside of time, Simon chooses love like a last surge of survival.
The luck of being a survivor is sometimes unbearable. Either these men close themselves off and reject the world, with a feeling of paranoia, or they are totally antisocial and shut away in hospitals – after the Great War, the authorities concealed the existence of thousands of men who had gone mad! – or they have the strength to grasp at this second chance that is offered to them. The men who return from such a nightmare necessarily become aware of the precariousness of life. This thirst for life inevitably and instinctively passes through love. This need for love is expressed by Simon, but also by Lucien, Henri and all the other men who have returned from Hell. They are convinced that they have been given a chance to live again and to learn to love again. This is not only a feeling but also an absolute necessity. And I think that there is nothing deeper and more essential than experiencing a powerful love when you’re twenty.
Marthe, the teacher, shows up the female condition at a time of great change for it. In the love scenes, Marthe knows how to be audacious…
I believe that in terms of sensuality, love, eroticism and even pornography, our century hasn’t invented anything. Our grandmothers probably appreciated "the beauty and incredible softness of the male member" just as Marthe does.
"Shit, what a pain! I’ve never screwed!…" says Pierrot, the young soldier, just before dying. You show young people confronted with death, struck down with their desire for love. This link between love and death is very modern.
Today death is on the prowl in a different shape. Aids threatens young people at the most precious moment of their discovery of love, just as war mutilated millions of young people barely out of adolescence. Loving a man on leave or someone who had been called up to the front meant brushing against death. In the dance scene, Henri, the soldier played by Gérard Jugnot, says "To think that the girls were throwing their arms around our necks at the start of the war! We were heroes! Today, we mean bad luck…" Simon, desperately in love with Marthe, wonders, "Do I have the right to love her, to get her involved in this?" He knows that he cannot promise her that he will still be alive tomorrow. But I should like to say that there is more risk and danger in not loving each other. These two young people have the strength to give themselves to each other in a total way even though they know full well that they are taking all kinds of risks. Obviously, it’s not a question of young people today taking risks, except for the risk of loving. And truly loving. If one stops loving at such times, barbarity will triumph..
For Simon, Marthe is softness and tenderness. The love scenes are filmed as peaceful moment.
There’s a sort of equity in their passion, a sort of mutual generosity that makes their love story total and absolute. Simon gives himself completely. He takes the risk of truly loving as only women usually know how to do. Marthe and Simon transcend their morbid environment through their love. It’s their response to this abomination. They love in a divine way, and that’s a lay person telling you that!
You don’t stage the spectacle of war, you show its consequences. The film opens on a tracking shot showing the horror of the trenches, a pitiless assessment, with hundreds of huddled corpses. Then the camera tracks in on one of these men…
During this long tracking shot, each man is inside himself, walled up in terrible silence. The soldiers are lined up side by side, they look alike, they are all racked by the intense awareness of facing an inevitable dilemma: to live or to die. I wanted to show the intense suffering and loneliness of these sacrificed men, these men of flesh and blood, capable of going beyond their fear, capable of shitting in their pants, of calling for their mothers before dying, and not shoot spectacular scenes with killing machines and tomato juice spattering across the lens! These men quickly understood that defending their lives, virtually barehanded, depended mostly on chance…
"There’s no sense to this slaughter! You’ll see, in the end we’ll see they’ve taking us for a ride!" says Lucien. "All this for nothing…", Simon writes in one of his letters.
Yes and, at the same time, there a powerful humanistic awareness in these men. They were convinced that their sacrifice would help future generations. This war would be the "war to end all wars". The expression was invented by them, not by army propaganda!
What were the main research documents for the screenplay ?
I consulted some exceptional documents. For example, I discovered that colour photography existed during the Great War. It was a process developed by the Lumière Brothers, a sort of emulsion on a glass plate made with potato starch. These documents are incredibly beautiful. I asked my director of photography to use them as his inspiration for the scenes at the Front. I read "Le Feu", the novel by Henri Barbusse which is the most terrifying and humanistic document in existence on the Great War. It’s the daily account that Barbusse kept at the request of his comrades in the trenches. The soldiers viewed it as a way of leaving a mark or at least an explanation for their disappearance. Barbusse relates the life in the mud, the rat devouring the bodies of friends killed the day before… It’s totally overwhelming. The book, published at the end of 1915, won the Prix Goncourt.
Tell us how you chose your actors. Clotilde Courau and Guillaume Depardieu are remarkable, they give their characters all the necessary sensitivity.
There’s a sort of empathy between Clotilde and Guillaume. I wanted the love between Marthe and Simon to be born and perpetuate itself in a sort of equity. Two in one, each experiencing the other as part of themselves. An ideal love… Clotilde and Guillaume were able to give me that. My work consists in making the actors forget themselves to become their characters. I had to make Clotilde think she was Marthe and love like Marthe, which she did; Guillaume had to be crazy with anxiety and suffer in his flesh but love like he has never loved… which he did. They discovered happiness through these two roles. They wanted to love like this. Only the future will tell if they succeed but they’re trying… I’d like moviegoers of their age to say, "I want to love and be loved like that." Gérard Jugnot, whom is usually seen as a comic character, is an extraordinary and amazingly human man. He is a worthy descendant of Harry Baur or Raimu. During mixing, when I had plenty of time to view each frame, I was struck by the accuracy of his performance. He expresses emotions with unbelievable subtlety. I think that he has attained a sort of maturity, just like Bernard Giraudeau, who is just as extraordinary. With actors of the talent of Gérard Jugnot, Bernard Giraudeau or Thérèse Liotard, I try to get them to feed not off the screenplay, the characters or the dialogue, but off a sort of double that they would have been. I like them to give me their flesh and their soul as well!
For at least two reasons: the first, for purely structural reasons, was to place this love story in the context of dramatic events likely to transcend their passion through contrast, between the morbidity of a context that they are subjected to and the softness, beauty and hope that they choose to experience through their love. Loving then appears as an act of resistance. Marthe and Simon confront the logic of probable death imposed by the war with the power of their love, and so of life itself. The second reason for this choice is the unfortunately obvious similarity between this period and our current time. The Great War was brought about as a soft of firebreak to staunch the beginnings of social conflicts that were simmering simultaneously all over industrialized Europe. Something needed to be done urgently; the European left wing was forming into federations and the pre-revolutionary situation had even reached the gates of Moscow. After the assassination of Jean Jaurès, the best way of forcing the worker and peasant masses back into line was to mobilize them and pit them against teach other, to force them to make a sacrifice to defend a "homeland" behind which the interests and privileges of the ruling classes were protected!
Is today’s situation similar in some ways ?
Yes. Today, war is here again, once again to the advantage of a handful compared to the rest of humanity. This war may be more economic than military but it’s just as devastating. In the past, millions of young men were cast into suffering, mutilation and death whereas today a great many more people are cast into precariousness, exclusion and disguised slavery. Unemployment or precarious work fodder – as you wish – is barely distinguishable from the cannon fodder of the past. The idea of "globalization" has replaced that of patriotism but the result is the same: several generations will be sacrificed and forced to accept laws that do not serve them but that will rob them and debase them. No partisan or private interest should be able to justify the sacrifice of a twenty-year-old life, today no more than yesterday. That is my conviction. And the film’s approach.
Simon and Marthe, your two main characters, are also twenty.
We tend to imagine the soldiers of the Great War as bearded adults, older men. However, most of them were young men, married or engaged to young women or girls. These young lives were crushed out. There was a similar effect on their families. These men had the same age as our sons. They were driven by the same energy and hopes as the young people of today. The war hurled them into a world of privation and suffering. They were deprived of their future and their lives! That’s what I wanted to tell young people today through this film: they mustn’t accept as their forefathers did to have doors closed on them, to have their future and their lives whisked away. I’m sending out this message through a love story. Because love seems to me to mark our very first autonomy, the first claim to identity and freedom. Marthe and Simon take their strength from this to push back and defeat the idea of death that threatens to part them. The first to wager on this force, to resist through this force, is Marthe. Because she is a woman and so naturally opts for life in relation to death, something that men urges themselves mutually towards. Each generation recognizes itself in this thirst for absolute love and with increased power during times of humiliation and suffering. Love is an alternative to death. Instinctively, we fight, we resist, we attempt to live on through love, through the child that may be born.
Marthe is a very modern young woman.
Marthe has been raised by a freethinking father in the noble and generous sense of the term, in other words a man fascinated by the beauty of things, nature and literature. This wonderful person allowed her to play cards and have drinks in bars with men or go with him out to sea. He didn’t teach her what a girl needs to know in this society but what a human being needs to know. After her father’s death, the young adolescent was given a rigorous education and morals in a boarding school. After leaving school, she learnt the rigor of studying for a trade, that of a schoolteacher. Marthe is religious but with a great freedom of spirit. The addition of these two apparently opposing cultures, makes her unbelievably modern. Marthe is a free woman.
We learn less about Simon’s past.
I wanted the character to be virtually without a past. Simon is a Jew from Alsace, but his past is the immediacy of his story. His truth is that of all the soldiers who are on the front: fighting, suffering and risking death. Their past life has very little importance.
During the short respite of his convalescence on this spit of land that seems to exist outside of time, Simon chooses love like a last surge of survival.
The luck of being a survivor is sometimes unbearable. Either these men close themselves off and reject the world, with a feeling of paranoia, or they are totally antisocial and shut away in hospitals – after the Great War, the authorities concealed the existence of thousands of men who had gone mad! – or they have the strength to grasp at this second chance that is offered to them. The men who return from such a nightmare necessarily become aware of the precariousness of life. This thirst for life inevitably and instinctively passes through love. This need for love is expressed by Simon, but also by Lucien, Henri and all the other men who have returned from Hell. They are convinced that they have been given a chance to live again and to learn to love again. This is not only a feeling but also an absolute necessity. And I think that there is nothing deeper and more essential than experiencing a powerful love when you’re twenty.
Marthe, the teacher, shows up the female condition at a time of great change for it. In the love scenes, Marthe knows how to be audacious…
I believe that in terms of sensuality, love, eroticism and even pornography, our century hasn’t invented anything. Our grandmothers probably appreciated "the beauty and incredible softness of the male member" just as Marthe does.
"Shit, what a pain! I’ve never screwed!…" says Pierrot, the young soldier, just before dying. You show young people confronted with death, struck down with their desire for love. This link between love and death is very modern.
Today death is on the prowl in a different shape. Aids threatens young people at the most precious moment of their discovery of love, just as war mutilated millions of young people barely out of adolescence. Loving a man on leave or someone who had been called up to the front meant brushing against death. In the dance scene, Henri, the soldier played by Gérard Jugnot, says "To think that the girls were throwing their arms around our necks at the start of the war! We were heroes! Today, we mean bad luck…" Simon, desperately in love with Marthe, wonders, "Do I have the right to love her, to get her involved in this?" He knows that he cannot promise her that he will still be alive tomorrow. But I should like to say that there is more risk and danger in not loving each other. These two young people have the strength to give themselves to each other in a total way even though they know full well that they are taking all kinds of risks. Obviously, it’s not a question of young people today taking risks, except for the risk of loving. And truly loving. If one stops loving at such times, barbarity will triumph..
For Simon, Marthe is softness and tenderness. The love scenes are filmed as peaceful moment.
There’s a sort of equity in their passion, a sort of mutual generosity that makes their love story total and absolute. Simon gives himself completely. He takes the risk of truly loving as only women usually know how to do. Marthe and Simon transcend their morbid environment through their love. It’s their response to this abomination. They love in a divine way, and that’s a lay person telling you that!
You don’t stage the spectacle of war, you show its consequences. The film opens on a tracking shot showing the horror of the trenches, a pitiless assessment, with hundreds of huddled corpses. Then the camera tracks in on one of these men…
During this long tracking shot, each man is inside himself, walled up in terrible silence. The soldiers are lined up side by side, they look alike, they are all racked by the intense awareness of facing an inevitable dilemma: to live or to die. I wanted to show the intense suffering and loneliness of these sacrificed men, these men of flesh and blood, capable of going beyond their fear, capable of shitting in their pants, of calling for their mothers before dying, and not shoot spectacular scenes with killing machines and tomato juice spattering across the lens! These men quickly understood that defending their lives, virtually barehanded, depended mostly on chance…
"There’s no sense to this slaughter! You’ll see, in the end we’ll see they’ve taking us for a ride!" says Lucien. "All this for nothing…", Simon writes in one of his letters.
Yes and, at the same time, there a powerful humanistic awareness in these men. They were convinced that their sacrifice would help future generations. This war would be the "war to end all wars". The expression was invented by them, not by army propaganda!
What were the main research documents for the screenplay ?
I consulted some exceptional documents. For example, I discovered that colour photography existed during the Great War. It was a process developed by the Lumière Brothers, a sort of emulsion on a glass plate made with potato starch. These documents are incredibly beautiful. I asked my director of photography to use them as his inspiration for the scenes at the Front. I read "Le Feu", the novel by Henri Barbusse which is the most terrifying and humanistic document in existence on the Great War. It’s the daily account that Barbusse kept at the request of his comrades in the trenches. The soldiers viewed it as a way of leaving a mark or at least an explanation for their disappearance. Barbusse relates the life in the mud, the rat devouring the bodies of friends killed the day before… It’s totally overwhelming. The book, published at the end of 1915, won the Prix Goncourt.
Tell us how you chose your actors. Clotilde Courau and Guillaume Depardieu are remarkable, they give their characters all the necessary sensitivity.
There’s a sort of empathy between Clotilde and Guillaume. I wanted the love between Marthe and Simon to be born and perpetuate itself in a sort of equity. Two in one, each experiencing the other as part of themselves. An ideal love… Clotilde and Guillaume were able to give me that. My work consists in making the actors forget themselves to become their characters. I had to make Clotilde think she was Marthe and love like Marthe, which she did; Guillaume had to be crazy with anxiety and suffer in his flesh but love like he has never loved… which he did. They discovered happiness through these two roles. They wanted to love like this. Only the future will tell if they succeed but they’re trying… I’d like moviegoers of their age to say, "I want to love and be loved like that." Gérard Jugnot, whom is usually seen as a comic character, is an extraordinary and amazingly human man. He is a worthy descendant of Harry Baur or Raimu. During mixing, when I had plenty of time to view each frame, I was struck by the accuracy of his performance. He expresses emotions with unbelievable subtlety. I think that he has attained a sort of maturity, just like Bernard Giraudeau, who is just as extraordinary. With actors of the talent of Gérard Jugnot, Bernard Giraudeau or Thérèse Liotard, I try to get them to feed not off the screenplay, the characters or the dialogue, but off a sort of double that they would have been. I like them to give me their flesh and their soul as well!