Initially considered the heir to Robert Bresson, Bruno Dumont shocked audiences in 2014 with the heel-turn of his Twin Peaks-inspired miniseries P’tit Quinquin, which (were it not television) would certainly earn the label of An Extremely Goofy Movie. His switch to incorporating laughs into the philosophical brew has produced works like the frenetic Joan of Arc musical Jeannette and bone-dry, Léa Seydoux-starring satire France. His latest, The Empire, sees him playing in the sandbox of the American space opera, affording room for both stunning effects work and some truly vulgar humor.
We were lucky enough to catch up with Dumont over Zoom on the occasion of The Empire’s American release, with interpretation provided by Nicholas Elliott.
The Film Stage: I’d say, more than past films of yours, The Empire heavily incorporates things like complex visual effects and production design. Was this film far more of a collaborative process than previous works?
Bruno Dumont: Yes, indeed it was. The entire special-effects part of the film was a new type of work for me, and I must say it took a little long; it was a little difficult for us to find our way together. The translation of what I wanted through the effects––and particularly in terms of how the spaceships were constructed––it took me a long time to get the people I was working with to where they’re used to going.
Regarding the design: I feel like there are medieval elements incorporated, such as the cathedrals, people riding horses, and whatnot. Did you see the film as almost encompassing a history of France– the past, present, and future?
Yes, I think that the film, in that aspect, refers to both a universal mythology, but is also directly inspired by local French architecture, which has a medieval tone to it. So the film goes very deeply into the history of human representation and it also connects with a local environment, that north of France in which I am used to filming. In that sense it’s truly a synthesis of these two aspects.
For example: in the north of France there are still a lot of vestiges of World War II, the war with the Germans. So for instance: there are a lot of bunkers, and we use these bunkers to build the spaceships, or the structures of the spaceships. And that was really interesting work to anchor this in the reality of the history of wars while building what remains a science fiction film.
You mentioned northern France, a location very familiar to you. Did the genre of The Empire, science fiction, allow you to work on not just a more epic canvas but also to shoot rural French landscapes depicted in many of your films in a new way? I noticed there were many overhead shots of these landscapes that you don’t necessarily see in your past films. So was that something exciting about the film: being able to shoot the familiar in a new fashion?
Absolutely. You know, I’ve filmed the north of France enough on ground level to want to find a different way to film it. So filming these spaceships was a way to approach themes and characters, also, in a different way––to transform these northerners whom I know into heroic people, celestial knights, which was really interesting for me. It was a question of finding a new dimension for these people and landscapes that I know so well––to transport them elsewhere.
The film deals in the concept of good and evil. Is there relevance in that to how contemporary politicians use that rhetoric, like Marine Le Pen referring to “the evil elites,” or things of that matter? Or were you not thinking of contemporary events at all when conceiving the film?
The subject of the film is the confrontation between good and evil. From a perspective, if I dare say, that is naturalist on the one hand, where it’s hard to know what exactly good is, what exactly evil is, and then another perspective that’s more intellectual and oriented toward fantasy, where it becomes very clear what is good and what is evil. And so the film is really about confronting these two perspectives. It’s also confronting characters who, on the one hand, are completely imaginary and are very clear representations of good or evil and really come out of the history of cinema––such as, for instance, Murnau’s Faust, who’s evil incarnate, and then characters like Freddy from my own Life of Jesus, where it’s a lot less clear, a lot less visible. What interested me here was the confrontation between these two worlds.
Bruno Dumont at Berlinale 2024
This film is certainly referencing American cinema’s favorite genre of the past few decades, the space opera. But in bringing in the two detective characters from Petit Quinquin, were you also directly poking fun at the idea of intellectual property? Or rather: sequels, franchises, and cinematic universes that have come to dominate American cinema as of late?
Well, first of all, I’m not looking to make fun of American cinema. American cinema really interests me because it’s very present in global culture, so I’m not mocking anything. For instance: the spaceships in the film are not ridiculous. I’m not doing what Mel Brooks did when he poked fun at Star Wars. On the contrary: I think this is a major genre, the space opera, that the Americans are currently masters of. But we have to remember that the sword-and-sandal film was born at the beginning of the 20th century in France and Italy. So that’s genre film at its birth, and genre film belongs to the world. What’s interesting is that American cinema is taking a European tradition. After all, what is Star Wars? Star Wars is basically the Roman Empire. It’s taking a historic genre and making it go galactic. That’s what American cinema is doing.
You know, it’s always been one story––it’s always been the same story––so in that sense I find the Americans making sequels is absolutely understandable and very interesting. What interests me in cinema is the fact that we have an American cinema, a French cinema, an Italian cinema, a South American cinema. It’s the exchanges between these different cinemas that interest me. That’s the spirit in which I work. I’m not at all caustic in my work. Now, it is true that I like comedies and Americans tend to make these kinds of films in a serious manner where I am working in a more comical vein, which probably is related to European cinema. What interests me is mixing genres, mixing colors, mixing countries. It’s in that maelstrom that we see human nature. You know, man is not simply European or simply American; man is both. We have to mix things or otherwise what we get is a pure race, and a pure race is never interesting.
I saw you say in another interview that star Fabrice Luchini, who you’ve worked with before, initially had some hesitancy about the character, or rather the right way to play it. How much of the job of the director is really working around actors’ insecurities or rather steering them just in the right direction?
You know, when I work with non-professionals, we build the character from that person’s nature. So that’s not so hard. It relativizes and limits the work, but I believe it gives the non-professional’s performance strength and ease. The work is a little bit harder with professional actors because a professional actor is looking to compose or construct the performance. The professional actor is looking for a model to make a composition or construction in the performance. Fabrice Luchini is not someone whose nature is film when he performs; he’s not going to give you his nature. He’s someone who is very nervous, generally, and so his nature forces him to look for a character that he’s going to compose or construct. It was the same thing with him when we worked together for the first time on Slack Bay, it took him time to find the character. But this is work that I find fascinating.
In the case of The Empire, it’s when Luchini found his costume. I’d mentioned Murnau’s Faust to you, and there’s something of Luchini’s hair in The Empire that resembles Faust. It’s when he found his costume that he was able to start composing his character and to understand him. The costume that Fabrice Luchini wears in The Empire is a copy of a costume worn by the great French theatre actor of the 1930s and 1940s, Louis Jouvet, that he wore in the role of Don Juan. So a theatre costume, and Fabrice Luchini loves Louis Jouvet. The mere fact that he wore a copy of something that Louis Jouvet wore structured his work. It gave him the momentum and the confidence to reassure him and take off and play this part.
It was the same thing when I worked with Juliette Binoche. That’s part of the work with a professional actor: you’re constructing something, and often it takes a little longer than it does with a non-professional. But the professional actors are richer because you have incredible possibilities of colors, but you first have to find them.
The Empire opens in theaters on March 7.