They may have been rewarded with a Golden Palm last May, and who knows, could possibly run next for a Cesar, if not an Oscar in 2009, the young teenagers of Françoise Dolto Junior High (Paris - 20th ‘arrondissement’), caustic newlyborn actors of the last movie of French director Laurent Cantet, Entre les Murs (The Class), did head back to school this end of August! As the movie will be opening on the 24th of September in France to make sure it doesn’t get passed behind by its international release very much in process to happen soon, we met with its director and his main acting performer, François Bégaudeau, author as well of the book from which the script has been adapted. They speak to us about their journey…

In the Beginning

Laurent Cantet. Just before making Vers le sud (Heading South), I came up with the idea of doing a film about life in a junior high school. Very quickly, the project defined itself to never leave the establishment’s enclosure. At the time, more and more people were speaking about making a ‘sanctuary’ of schools. I wanted to show the opposite: a sounding board, a place affected by all the turbulences of the world, a microcosm of the world, where issues of equality or inequality - in regards to opportunity, work and power, cultural and social integration and exclusion, play out concretely. Of note, I had developed a scene about disciplinary counseling, which I saw as a kind of junior high ‘black box’. At the time of Heading South’s release, I met François who was presenting his new book, Entre les murs (Between The Walls) at that time. His discourse was a counterattack to the indictment on today’s schools: for once, a professor was not writing in order to get back at adolescents presented as savages or idiots. I read the book, and I immediately had the feeling that it would add to my initial project in two ways: first, material, the documentary support it needed, and which I set off to create myself by going to spend some time in a junior high school. Secondly, I was inspired by the character of François, by his direct relationship with his students. He summarized and incarnated the different aspects of teachers that I had first imagined.

François Bégaudeau. The aim of my book was to document one school year, sticking close to daily experiences. So there was no clear narrative line, no fictional plot centered around any one particular event. There were disciplinary meetings, but they were mostly events among many which followed their course. With this material, Laurent and his co-screenwriter Robin Campillo extracted the storyline that they were interested in. My book was the result of situations; Laurent and Robin chose some of these to mold into fictional form. They did not choose ‘characters’ in the strict sense of the term; they constructed them, sometimes by grafting together several kids from the book.

Laurent Cantet. We wrote an initial summary, a backbone of the film, destined to be irrigated and modified throughout the year of preparation according to a plan I had already tried out in Ressources humaines (Human Resources). The idea was to use an existing school and during the filmmaking process, to integrate all the players of academic life. All the adolescents of the film are students at the Françoise Dolto Junior High in Paris’ 20th arrondissement; all the teachers teach there. With the exception of Souleymane’s mother, whose role is the most fabricated, the parents in the film are those of the students in real life.

Born Actors

Laurent Cantet. Work with the adolescents began in November 2006 and lasted until the end of the school year. We ran open workshops every wednesday afternoon, and all the kids of eighth and ninth grade could participate. Not counting those who came just once, we saw some fifty students. Almost all the ones who make up the class in the film are the ones who stayed with us for the entire year. The others dropped out on their own.

François Bégaudeau. Most of the adolescents are created characters. At the end of the film, you think: “These kids are fantastic, but they are not really actors, they’re natural because they are just playing their lives.” Nothing could be farther from the truth!

Laurent Cantet. During the workshop improvisations, we tried to push the students as far as possible to see if they could handle this or that scene.The one who went the farthest in creating his role is certainly Franck (Souleymane in the film). He’s a very reserved, sweet guy, the exact opposite of the character. We had to fabricate with him this tough guy image. We totally transformed his look, to the point that, in the first fittings, he felt like he was in disguise.

The Dialogue

Laurent Cantet. The adolescents never had a script in hand. We noticed that when they improvised according to requested situations, they were able to come up with their own dialogue: certain exchanges, certain expressions, which François had in his book - as if it were a matter of archetypes of language and their preoccupations.

François Bégaudeau. Most films about adolescents show them as monosyllabic, with the exception of course of L’Esquive (Games of Love and Chance, dir. Abdel Kechiche). For us, without doubt, the dominant force of The Class is the loquacious and lively adolescent, rather than melancholic and inhibited. Each spectator is free to imagine Esmeralda daydreaming alone in her room, but the film only shows her in the classroom, where her presence makes her a pure slice of life. As for the question of language, the film’s attitude is a bit different than in Kechiche’s film. The world of L’Esquive is divided between those who have something to say about everything at every given moment and those who do not have this talent, who are thus lost, scholastically and socially. The Class deals with how the lacunae of language affect everyone. All the students are susceptible to masterful moments of talk, but this can be derailed at any moment. Not only for the students, but also for the teacher. We are constantly going from fluidity to impotence, and vice versa. In its own way, the film refuses generalities: neither lamentations about the supposed deficits of adolescent language, nor idealized marvel about the formidable genius of ‘those people.’