Was there also the desire to decompartmentalise french cinema ?
It’s inherent in the project. I don’t have a long filmography, I’ve only directed five films. I’ve worked with Matthieu Kassovitz, Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris, and other actors of formidable talent but after THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED, I wanted to work with unknowns. This idea went hand in hand with the feeling that cinema should have a strong social inscription that if it doesn’t recount the world as it is, as it plays out, then what use is it ? When i say that, it’s not a polemic, it’s just my way of registering fiction into what would seem to be reality. I think that in France today, cinema is incredibly reductive on this point of view. I don’t know of which reality French cinema speaks of. Therefore the film was to break down this idea of casting as much as it was to take into account the fact that the world changes and that heroic figures must evolve. In my mind there are new mythologies to build on new faces and new routes to follow. Malik seems to have a detached and opport
