“Abbé Pierre was a revolutionary,” confides director Frédéric Tellier, author of a biopic on the founder of the Companions of Emmaüs

Frédéric Tellier is a screenwriter and director for cinema and television. There was also advertising. For television, he directed Paul Sauvage with Olivier Marchal in 2004, The Poor People’s Robins in 2011 with Michel Duchaussoy. He collaborated in the creation of the film 36 Quai des Goldsmiths by Olivier Marchal (2004), before directing in 2014 The SK1 affair which tells the true story of the police officer who tracked down Guy Georges. This film had a huge impact around the world and received almost all the festival awards. He also paid tribute to firefighters with his film Save or perish (2018) and then there was Goliath with Gilles Lellouche and Pierre Niney in 2022.

Wednesday November 8, 2023, his new film is released: Abbé Pierre, a life of struggle with Benjamin Lavernhe.

franceinfo: Why did you make a biopic on L’Abbé Pierre?

Frédéric Tellier: Out of admiration and lack of the Abbot, but also because I think I am very interested in the victims. This is my Ken Loach side. And there, I thought of the victims of the street and that took me to the Abbot. It could have ended there because the Abbot is such an icon who didn’t need me. But it is true that while rediscovering his great actions, notably the insurrection of kindness which I had forgotten, I remembered the call of 1954, but not this great popular movement and especially his life. private with Lucie Coutaz, all his contradictions, his paradoxes, it really made me want to tell the story of the life of this man who nevertheless changed the world.

“We are a little forgetting that Abbé Pierre was totally unsuited to this world, but that he still changed it.”

Frédéric Tellier

at franceinfo

I would like us to talk about Benjamin Lavernhe who is extraordinary in this film and who also has this voice, which also becomes a character in the film. You have decided to treat the call of winter 54 in its simplest form, that is to say a microphone and indeed, the voice of Abbé Pierre with a captivated audience behind the Radio-Luxembourg console. This voice played a role in what L’Abbé Pierre became.

Indeed, when we recorded the call from 54, we worked a lot with Benjamin on the fact of saying: “Let’s put everything back in time exactly as it happened“, that is to say at the call of 54, this rebellious little priest who managed to be indignant at what he saw in the street, did not know that it was going to give rise to the insurrection of kindness and that he was going to become a Rockstar. Benjamin worked on it a lot because he spent his life listening to the Abbot. He had earphones and listened to him, he looked at a whole bunch of archives that I had given him. I I think he became the space of a film, The Abbot. It stopped, he doesn’t have a problem with schizophrenia, but the space of this film, I think he was L ‘Abbe.

You also put a big spotlight on Lucie Coutaz who played an extremely important role alongside him. She was really the one who energized all of this and gave him the strength to come back. He really needed her. Nobody talks about Lucie Coutaz.

My first spark, really, was to say to myself: I am going to tell the story of one of the great men of our world. And then, upon arrival, I told the story of a couple. Their story shocked me. They lived in the same small apartment, then the same small house. She was older than him. She left before him. He never recovered.

“Lucie Coutaz and Abbé Pierre lived together for 40 years. They were two soul mates, extremely complementary. They got along extremely well, they argued quite a bit too. Their story is a story of incredible beauty.”

Frédéric Tellier

at franceinfo

He absolutely wanted to be a saint and yet he got kicked out of the Capuchins. This is how you start the film. He was also a resistance fighter, a deputy, a defender in his own way of the homeless. He was revolutionary at one point, his words had a lot of impact when he expressed himself, which he knew how to say to cowardice in any case, or to people who do nothing, “I prefer violence“.

He had sentences of radical generosity, but of incredible radicality. Maybe that’s what we’re also missing a little. There is one that I love when he said: ‘After the insurrection of goodness, if there does not come quickly the insurrection of justice, then it will be the insurrection of wrath’. These were some beautiful sentences from the Abbot which caused a lot of movement. He was a great speaker, he had an incredible vibration, he put people in a trance. There are a lot of his speeches that I took word for word in the film, which are simply vibrant, it’s very powerful to listen to him speak, to listen to what he said, the way he said it. said.

Abbé Pierre was a workaholic. So are you. For each of your films, you do a lot of research and documentation. Do you sometimes identify with him too?

Yes. Afterwards, I am not comparing myself to the Abbot who is incomparable, but for example, I am revealing to you a very small thing about my life. I know his hypersensitivity, I know what it is to be hypersensitive, hyper receptive to what is happening around, to suffer from it and to try to transform it, as Baudelaire said, “Transforming evil to do something beautiful.” As I also try to be in a trance with the actors to be in the sequence with them when they are filming, it’s quite exhausting, but that’s the price of doing honest work when you’re doing artistic work, for convey emotions to people.

On many sites today, Henri Grouès, known as L’Abbé Pierre, is listed as being a French priest. Who was he really?

A revolutionary. And I repeat his words in the film: “And above all we don’t forget to say that he was the brother of the poor”.

The fight continues, if you wish to give, donations are obviously welcome at Emmaüs.