Three boys, the Republic, a police « error », a country where everything’s fine, a fine mess. «Noise, smell and several stars» is an opera, sung by Zebda, the group from Toulouse. It’s a contemporary tale, a tragedy with plenty of « punch ». A film that sings – about what it means to be French today, about vigilance, diversity and harmony.

Why do you film reality ?

Why, do I film reality ?

Because the world makes me sick. I’m fed up of people and the way they lie. They’re always fighting, never satisfied. But I don’t want to end up hating everyone and everything, getting boring and cynical or turning into a sad, posing moraliser… so I do something ! I go and see people – just so I can say I’m part of the this world, really part of it. If you’re going to knock on people’s doors – people who aren’t expecting you – then you have to have a story to tell them first, so they’ll tell you one in exchange. My self-centred modesty takes a hammering in the process, and so does my shyness – not to mention my convictions ! That’s when reality gets a grip of you, with all its shambolic energy. It takes nerve to go to people’s houses and dare suggest they play a game which has no fixed rules. Filming reality has a lot to do with improvisation. Everybody thinks they know the theme… but often, because people lie to you or to themselves, they just throw ready-made answers back at you, there’s nothing genuine about it. So you get to work on true expression, on gesture, on performance. The camera and tape-recorder are instruments. You try a note, strike up a chord, it comes winging back at you, the others start listening, adding bits of their own… then the whole thing becomes a struggle, or a good laugh, people get melancholic, people get mad. We all lose our way – then we find it together. It’s exactly like a jam session. For me, filming « reality » means aiming at that kind of magical improvisation. I come away exhausted. The world doesn’t look any lovelier, but at least I’ve played my part and we’ve tried to build something, something impossible, together. Filming reality means trying to create something useless and essential – which is exactly what despots hate. They want things that are useful and non-essential. Confronting reality, in all its confusion, then filming it, working with it, and turning it into a performance is the nicest way I’ve found of fighting the status quo… and maybe of feeling I have a part to play in this crappy world.

What was the point of departure for the film ?

It’s hard to say exactly when a film project is born. What I do remember is being at La Place de la Nation, about two years ago, when a high-school demo turned into a riot : shops got looted, windows got smashed… I saw hooded youths going into a tobacconist’s and stealing scratchcards from the counter. I found myself faced with the kind of behaviour I would have called barbarian. What does « barbarian » mean ? People whose actions and behaviour you don’t understand, you have no way of explaining. At this demo, I realised I didn’t understand a thing about these youths, who are generally of immigrant origin and live in suburban council flats, who say things that are pertinent and raise the issues of poverty, housing, racism… but whose behaviour leaves me feeling uncomfortable.

As far as I’m concerned, the desire to tell this story came from my need to understand, to confront real experiences. When I heard press reports of the police « error » and its aftermath in Toulouse, I headed straight there.

What was it like, writing the screenplay ?

When I first arrived in the neighbourhood, I had to make my own investigation, to understand and be understood, to make my first contacts and begin to learn.

There was also the reality of the young people’s attitudes, the way they gave all the usual answers to questions I hadn’t even asked them. « Fuck ! We’ll show them ! You gotta talk about unemployment, racism… ». They were talking to me the way you talk when you’re of Arab origin and you’re interviewed for a news report or acting in a film like « Taxi 2 ». At this stage, it was all clichés and stereotypes. They were singing bad rap, coming out with a whole set of slogans that gave the illusion of reality. So at this point we decided, together, to start working on individual memory, so that everyone could tell his/her own version of what had happened. When we got back to the human side, a different kind of language emerged – simple, concrete, touching and complex.

I regularly had the various characters read sequences as I wrote them. The screenplay, in dialogue form, resulted from these exchanges. I saw them start wanting to act these scenes, and not just « give their evidence »… and I started wanting that too.

We stuck as close to the facts as we could, but as we worked together I was able to find ways of stringing the story together, of building a « genuinely » cinematic story.
The idea was not to reconstruct reality in a « naturalistic » way, or to recreate the riots with plenty of special effects and torched cars ; it was more to reproduce the chaos of situations, to revive the anger and emotion that everyone had shared.

What about your work with the actors during the shooting ?

They played the game. Pipo’s death, and their own fight to survive, had touched me. We were on the same wavelength, that’s how we managed to embark on this venture together. The basis of my work as a documentarist is to have the story told by those who experienced it, and this was at the heart of the approach I adopted with the inhabitants of the Reynerie neighbourhood – and with the lawyers.

There are no politicians in  your film ; why is that ?

Habib’s violent death and its consequences traumatised this district of Toulouse and shook the whole city. I met a lot of people when I was doing my investigating, including councillors of all political persuasions, but, contrary to the local people, many teachers and certain police officers, the « politicians » could come up with nothing but the usual speeches. Only Jean-Paul Fonvielle, Dominique Baudis’s political rival, behaved in a humane and dignified manner. Unfortunately, he had cancer ; he was already very weak when the film was being made, and he died shortly afterwards. As regards Dominique Baudis, who was mayor at the time, I didn’t want to set myself up as a prosecutor. The sequence in which the three youths recount their meeting with him speaks for itself ; I didn’t need to add anything else concerning this character, who was hardly a model of elegant behaviour. I would have liked to have filmed another police officer, apart from Hubert Lortet who features in the film, but the cabinet of the Interior Minister of the time, Daniel Vaillant, refused permission (although it was granted to television reporters, whose aim was to illustrate the theme of « insecurity »). Everybody wants peace, but there’s no peace without justice. Politicians don’t seem aware of that.

Documentary ? Fiction ?

  interview made in 2002