Posted at 7:00 a.m.
Marc Cassivi: The only time I interviewed you for The Pressit was in 1994 while you were doing The world destination race. We were 21 years old. You were doing documentaries on the other side of the world. We find ourselves almost 30 years later doing essentially the same thing. How do you view that? Do you tell yourself that you held your line, worthy heir to Pierre Perrault, or that you haven’t explored something else?
Hugo Latulippe: It’s interesting when you look at what Perrault said of his companions: Denys Arcand, Pierre Falardeau, Gilles Carle, whom I knew well when we both lived in L’Isle-Verte. Perrault said that he had never lost interest in direct cinema. He fought his whole life against fiction, which was borderline absurd. He didn’t need to oppose the two. But I recognize myself in his love of ordinary speech. To find cinema in people’s everyday lives, there’s a beauty there that I never got tired of.
M.C.: Have you thought about doing fiction as well?
HL: At one point, I submitted projects in fiction. A little after my good friend Philippe Falardeau. We talked about it, we played hockey together. At some point, I submit a screenplay to one of the institutions, and as you know, the projects are evaluated anonymously by reading committees. One evening after hockey, Philippe tells me that he read a script from shit. I was laughing. I let him go quite far, before raising my hand and saying, “Phil…”
M.C.: You let him sink! (Laughs)
H.L: (Laughs) Brilliant as he is, he quickly understood. I had nothing to add. It didn’t change my desire to make fiction, but I didn’t have the patience to rewrite a screenplay 35 times. What Philippe, who is obsessed with dramaturgy, has. Already in documentary, I find it too long. What is happening in Ukraine right now, probably needs to be documented better.
M.C.: You talk about the length of the process. There are also many obstacles to documentaries. We’re talking about it right now, with this letter from filmmakers who regret SODEC’s withdrawal from documentary film budgets. Documentary cinema has been the poor relation for several years. It’s discouraging, when you’ve been doing this job for 25 years and you have to fight to do it?
HL: Discouraging sometimes. I lift myself up is probably the most modest project of my career, in terms of means. There is a humiliating aspect to that, from a personal point of view. I remember when Robert Lepage stopped making fiction films because he was told at SODEC that one of his characters was implausible.
The collapse of documentary cinema is contemporaneous with my own journey. My first films were the most filled. There is for me in there the oblivion of our cinematographic tradition and what is the base of the Quebec cinema.
Hugo Latulippe
M.C.: And what is the international reputation of our cinema based on?
HL: I repeat it for 10-15 years. It becomes absurd. What you have to realize is that you’re not necessarily fighting against people who are against documentaries, but against a strong tendency to offer little depth. Of course, the lobby of private producers of fiction films is organized and powerful, it has resources. While we are all freelancers. I have just come from a meeting of our coalition, which all of a sudden brings together 700 people.
M.C.: It means something.
HL: Yes, 3.4% of SODEC’s envelope that goes to documentaries means almost 97% of the funds that go to fiction. It doesn’t make sense. There is a lack of vision on the part of the institutions, I think, to believe that fiction, whether it be the films of Louis Morissette or Sarah Fortin – the whole spectrum –, will always interest and rally the general public more than the documentary. I think that’s wrong.
M.C.: When we consider the success of Pinkfor example, which was a real success by word of mouth.
HL: Yes. We forget the power of the documentary. The Roses is an altogether classic film, but which speaks so much of our history from a new angle. We enter the Rose clan in the way that only documentaries can do. It is a richness, the documentary.
PHOTO FROM THE FIFA WEBSITE
scene of I lift myself upby Hugo Latulippe
M.C.: I lift myself up is a film about poetry, in which politics is integrated. There is no break, but there is something that materializes on the side of Catherine Dorion, who was first in the show, then who was elected MP during the filming of the documentary. Politics is also found in the concerns and worries expressed by the twenty or so young artists in the troupe.
H.L.: It brings me to tears to see the Quebec project transform and become more complex with the generations that follow us. I’m not talking about sovereignty, but just the fact of being a complex, French-speaking society, aware of where it comes from, welded together. This is my true political passion. Trying to express it in a project is very difficult, because we are at a time when we are divided at the slightest opportunity.
M.C.: And where many people want it to be black or white, for or against, sliced with a knife. When we are in the nuance, we are accused of not choosing a side. Most young people, fortunately, are less in this logic than many boomers. There is hope.
HL: They are less rigid. When I realized Troll the trolls (with Pénélope McQuade), I worked with hackers who all spoke to me about the “Angry PQ”. I know some. We share certain values, in particular the project of a French-speaking society in North America, but they often have rigidity and anger in the face of what the world is like in 2022. My interest in politics is to first of all its humanist character. That’s why I mix politics in my films. The fact remains that it is our propensity to divide ourselves, whether between Quebecers or between humans, that must be remedied. It’s a bad job! Politically, in Quebec and in Canada, I find it complicated to do. Who’s gonna do this? I made a little bet at one point [il a été candidat du NPD en 2019, dans le Bas-Saint-Laurent, où il vit] saying to myself: maybe him? (Laughs)
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
Hugo Latulippe
To see this young generation who inevitably talks about the environment, inevitably talks about gender equality, inevitably talks about hearing the voice of the First Nations, hearing the voice of people born elsewhere, it makes you want to make films.
Hugo Latulippe
M.C.: What did you learn from this political experience? Was it to play the game? Did you believe it?
HL: Listen… by doing it, I may have started to believe it! (Laughs) I didn’t believe it before or towards the end. I went there like Obelix to the Romans. In Bas-du-Fleuve, where I still know a lot of people and where I am at home. Also knowing that I would be completely off in my angle of attack. I often tell my girlfriend that I will run for all the elections, provincial and federal. I will occupy the space. Even if I had 6% of the votes. It was ridiculous. But I think that the 3500 people who voted for me, and whom I meet in the markets in the summer, are happy that their ideas are represented. I believe in this conception of Quebec. I did it as a Quebecer, even if it was for a federal party. I think the Bloc and the Parti Québécois are sinking vehicles.
M.C.: The PQ is last in the polls…
HL: A René Lévesque, capable of appealing as much to intellectuals as to the guys in the local tavern, there aren’t that many. If I come back to cinema… There is a rational framework that has taken us where we are, to the limits of civilization as we know it. industrial society. Maybe we have to go back to what we feel very simply, even if there is a danger in giving ourselves only to our passions. This is where in cinema and in I lift myself up, there is something profoundly human. Véro Côté, it may be a big deal what I’m going to say, but for me she brings a form of civilization. I recognize myself in his humanism. To see Elkahna Talbi, who has a completely different story and perspective, to see Leila Donabelle Kaze, whose parents lived through the genocide, read Marie-André Gill, there is great beauty in that. There is what can be achieved.