“For 30 years the film has been in the news every year”

Every day, a personality invites itself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Thursday October 10, 2024: actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz. From Thursday October 10, at the Seine Musicale, he is adapting his film “La Haine” into a musical comedy, 30 years after its release.

In 1993 at the age of 26, Mathieu Kassovitz directed his first feature film entitled Mixed race for which he wrote the screenplay. A film that allowed many to discover it. Two years later, he captured the profession and the public with the film Hate, which met with immediate success in France and later abroad, with three Caesars to boot. He is also an actor, with this César for best male hopeful who left his mark in 1994, thanks to his role as a young loser in Watch the men fall by Jacques Audiard. Today, he adapts his film Hate on stage. A musical which starts Thursday October 10 at the Seine Musicale, before a tour throughout France.

franceinfo: We are 30 years after the release of the film Hate and the statement about the city has absolutely not changed. We are always at the heart of the news.

Mathieu Kassovitz: Unfortunately, yes. For 30 years, the film has been in the news, every year three or four times a year, because there was a police blunder. So it never left me.

How was this film born?

It was born out of this need for the people I knew to be understood in a different way at that time. He was born, just, to try to make people understand that these young people who were placed in the ranks of wildlings, had poetry, a soul and a heart. They are not statistics.

When the film came out and in fact, we find it on the musical, what came out was a feeling of anger. This feeling still exists?

“I don’t see how you can not be angry in the world we live in.”

Mathieu Kassovitz

at franceinfo

Everyone deals with anger in their own way. It annoys me, I’m angry, I find it hard to live when I see everything that’s happening next to me. Now, I don’t really see how we can live in a completely happy way without looking around and telling ourselves that there are still things to be sorted out and that we can’t turn a blind eye to them.

Did the story of your father, a Holocaust survivor, play on the desire to tell stories and reach out to people and create discussions, communicate, say things?

You know, it’s not just the story of the Shoah. Pain is pain for everyone. Afterwards, we choose to treat it or not. I was educated by parents who were poor people who arrived in France in the 60s and 70s and there was no better environment at the time to be able to express one’s revolt. That was the 70s. I am the product of that. The product of my mother bringing home bums, my father making films about Venezuela. It’s always been part of my life, it’s not just the Shoah, it’s the whole thing.

Your mother was an editor, your father a director. Cinema was the soundtrack of your childhood. It was obvious that it would also become your language ?

Yes, because my parents were not stars in their field. I never encountered cinema through festivals or previews or things like that. My parents worked every weekend, I went to my mother’s editing room, spent the weekend because she couldn’t keep me anywhere else and so I lived in the pieces of film or I went to the filming of my father who made TV films. Cinema, for me, is work.

There is an integrity that has always existed in you. It seems that at no time did you go against what you wanted to do or not do.

Yes. I was lucky enough to have the career I wanted to have, both as an actor and as a director. I have made different films each time, which are more or less shocking films or more or less difficult to sell. I managed to do them, I’m very proud of it. Not everyone can afford that, because to allow myself that, I had to say no to a lot of things. To maintain integrity in this environment, in any environment, you have to accept eating a little shit. I’ve been through all that, but I prefer it to eating caviar with assholes.

Has cinema allowed you to protect yourself a little?

“The greatest wealth of cinema is what we experience while working with others.”

Mathieu Kassovitz

at franceinfo

No, I did not protect myself, on the contrary. On the other hand, what cinema has taught me as a director, and more as an actor, are all the magnificent people I have met over all these years. Whether it’s the stagehands or the people we’re going to shoot for, all the specialists we have to deal with. I worked with GIGN soldiers, astronauts, doctors, scientists, cleaners. I had the opportunity to meet them, to live lives that are not mine and to really interact with all these people.

Which is surprising, since you left school at 16, like the majority of self-taught people, you said that science was like a compass for you.

Either you are guided by religion or you find yourself alone and if you are alone, you have to have something to believe in. For me, my religion is science, because it is the only religion that is proven by all its peers. It built me ​​and it still builds me today.