ing method is not the same. Sometimes you are in a team of only two people while on TV productions there are 30 of you, but the principle remains the same: how to tell a story. Going from one style to another was rather beneficial for me, particularly because in both cases something that I was doing initially to pay the rent became personally enriching. I get the feeling that this is a priority in your work. What comes through, whether you are filming a Le Corbusier building in La maison du Fada or Umeda dancing, is this search for a meeting, for a contact with others, for this enrichment.
That’s a very theoretical way of seeing my films, but it is correct that they are guided by my feelings towards what I’m filming. In any case, people with personalities that are a bit out of the ordinary are always singled out by the camera. When you start to film someone and you can’t stop, it’s a good sign, it shows that something interesting is coming from the person in front of the lens. The fiction process is clearly another approach, because you are looking to control things beforehand. Documentary takes place much more through a wave of emotion prompted by what you film and which takes the story by the hand. You are there for three or four weeks, day after day trying to capture something of a real situation. Obviously you don’t know right away which direction to go in, until a moment when it suddenly becomes clear. However, your documentaries are as much about people as their particu lar contexts.
All the films that I make are more or less about the human condition. I’m not a documentary maker who films landscapes. The human element is evidently central to the stories that I want to tell, but it is obviously linked to the places where people live. I don’t know if it is a coincidence, but Swooni, the fiction feature that I’m working on, takes place in a hotel, which is at once a particular building and a place of transit… In the case of La maison du Fada, we went there without really knowing where the film would lead us. It was such a strange place. What’s more, we filmed in the summer, while the majority of people were on holiday. Finding a common thread was difficult, until we decided to tell several stories, as if this building was an immense body and its inhabitants were the blood vessels. It is not out of the question that this structure unconsciously led me to Swooni, which is not so very different. In any case, I’ve always been fascinated by hotels, because they are places which draw in so many lives and different histories. When you open the door to a hotel room, you can begin to think you are someone else, because you are in a context that is not your own. There is something similar with cinema: it’s a way of opening doors to lives we fantasise about. Which to a certain extent is also the subject of Cologne and Bruxelles, mon amour: people who dream of a life that they cannot have.
The fact that you can only have one life is one of my greatest frustrations. I’d easily swap one long life for seven shorter ones, if only to see what it would be like to live a different life from the one I know, to experience things that I can never do in my life. I’m a director, but I would love to know what I would do, what I would experience if I was an architect, for example. It’s clearly a theme which haunts me, which will always be at the heart of my films. I have no idea why the idea obsesses me.
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