Abel and Marianne lead a pleasant lifestyle in Paris. Comfortable income allows them to live in a plush apartment. They lack for nothing, on the contrary, as evidenced by these collections of Abel’s watches and Marianne’s shoes. But, but… Where have the watches gone? And the shoes!!? It is that Joseph, their 13-year-old son, has, in concert with an international children’s organization, sold the property of his dear parents in order to finance a rescue plan for the planet. “You didn’t need it. The proof: I sold everything three months ago without you noticing anything! he tells them after informing them of his gesture. Tasty and burning relevance, The crusade is the result of a collaboration between the late screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and the filmmaker and actor Louis Garrel, with whom we spoke. Interview by François Lévesque.
It seems that initially, you were not convinced by the initial idea proposed by Jean-Claude Carrière. What bothered you?
We had made a film together and we were looking for a new subject. One day Jean-Claude said to me: here, I wrote a first scene. This first scene has remained in this case: it opens the film. I immediately found her brilliant, she had a great comic tempo, but afterwards, when I understood that the subject was these militant children, I found that utopian. It was like an idea of adults that we would have lent to children’s characters. My reaction upset him a bit, but even his wife agreed with me. Except that, shortly after, Greta Thunberg began to make headlines, suddenly validating Jean-Claude’s postulate. He was like that, Jean-Claude: he had a dowsing side; he felt things coming. And then, ecology had been a concern for him for a long time, since he had written a novel on it in the 1960s.
Once the news caught up with the concept of the film, you continued to doubt, but for other reasons…
Yes. It’s not at all my style to make political or militant films, so I had some apprehensions. At the same time, the tone of the first scene was completely burlesque: that’s how I managed to grab the film by the right end, if I may say so. With humor, and Jean-Claude was of this opinion too, we open more doors. What I also liked was the prospect of playing this father who is the most critical, even reactionary, character of the lot. Suddenly, with humor I mean, it allowed me to avoid the public having the feeling of being given a lesson in morality by an idiot Parisian.
You said you didn’t want to make an activist film. In what way do activism and cinema not go hand in hand, in your opinion?
That is to say that one pushes an open door a little. Especially on a subject like ecology, the environment: we all feel guilty and, while knowing we are wrong, when someone who is not a scientist or an expert comes to lecture us, that drives you crazy. We say to ourselves: “It’s okay, I know all that: don’t add to it when I already feel helpless. That was another reason why I was so reluctant to make the film: I didn’t want to look like someone who understood better than everyone else. This is also why I constantly told myself not to give into didacticism.
You give the reply to Laetitia Casta, your wife in the city, whom you had already directed in The faithful man — the young Joseph Engel was also in the cast of this film. As an actor, you gladly come back to certain filmmakers. Is it important for you, these sustained collaborations?
It’s probably because I come from a cinema family: my father [Philippe Garrel] is a director and my mother [Brigitte Sy] is an actress. And then, about Laetitia, I think the public likes to ask themselves, in front of a film which stages a real couple, what is true and what is fiction. It’s like a game. “Has this fight ever happened or did they just make it up?” When I was a teenager, I was fascinated by films where I perceived an autobiographical dimension in relation to the director’s life. I don’t know why, but I told myself that the other films were fake films. I have since changed my mind! I work with people close to me, but my films are purely fictional.
The crusade was not your first collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière. You have directed films co-written with him, as well as starred in films written by him but directed by others, such as his final project, The shattered moondirected recently by your father… Here, you are co-screenwriters: what was it like working with him?
I knew him for the last ten years of his life. Collaborating with him was a kind of perfection: he had traveled the whole world, read books from all over the world, worked with 150 film and theater directors [Luis Buñuel, Peter Brook, Jacques Deray, Pierre Étaix, Milos Forman, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, Louis Malle, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Volker Schlöndorff, Andrzej Wajda…]. His erudition was immense, but he managed to translate it into simple terms; it was reflected in his scripts. We became very good friends, so there was this little “Harold and Maude” side between us: the older guy and the younger one. We called each other every day. I miss him.