Film of my life: Campillo on his latest feature
Director shot film in sequence, giving actors plenty of room to dig deep into roles
“This is the film of my life,” said Robin Campillo with what was left of his voice, midway through the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
The Moroccan-French writer, editor and director was talking about his third feature, 120 battements par minute, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, where it premièred in competition in May. It has been a smash hit in France since opening there in August and being selected as the country’s Oscar submission in the best foreign language film category.
Campillo wasn’t referring to accolades or box office, however, but to the subject matter. His riveting ensemble drama revisits the network of young activists he encountered as a member of grassroots AIDS organization Act Up Paris in the early ’90s, drawing heavily on the filmmaker’s personal experience.
“The two big things in my life have been cinema and AIDS,” he said. “This film is in many ways a farewell to my youth.”
Campillo was barely 20 years old when he entered L’Institut des hautes etudes cinématographiques, alongside future collaborator Laurent Cantet. He would go on to work extensively with Cantet, cowriting and editing the latter’s 2008 Cannes Palme d’Or-winner Entre les murs.
As a filmmaker, Campillo has been less prolific, perhaps because from the outset he had other things on his mind.
“At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, in 1982, I was just entering film school,” he recalled. “It was very scary, as a young gay man. I said to myself, ‘Something terrible is going to happen.’ And that fear prevented me from thinking about cinema. It was so strong that cinema could no longer help me. I didn’t want to make films anymore. It was like winter passing through me.”
It took a decade before Campillo got his second wind. Arriving at Act Up Paris, in the early ’90s, he found power in numbers and in taking action versus living in fear.
“It was like a deliverance,” he said. “There was a sense of jubilation, even if it was a very hard time. There was a positive energy in the group. It was 1992-93, 10 years after the beginning of the epidemic. Even then, it took time for me to come back to cinema.”
His friend Cantet hired Campillo as an editor on his 1997 TV movie Les sanguinaires, beginning a lengthy and fruitful collaboration that continues to this day. But in 1992, Campillo still wasn’t thinking about cinema.
“It was as if through the lens of Act Up, I couldn’t see anything else,” he said.
It would be another 25 years before he turned his lens on the
time and people of an era that had marked him profoundly.
“It’s like if something is right in front of your eyes, you don’t realize it’s the subject of the film you want to make,” he said. “This isn’t a film about one sick person, it’s the story of a group. It took time to realize that.”
Campillo went to great lengths to capture that group dynamic in 120 battements par minutes. (The title is a reference to the tempo of house music, representing the festive side of gay culture.)
Shooting scenes in sequence — as opposed to out of order, which is the economical and practical norm in the film industry — and using multiple cameras, he gave his actors plenty of room to dig deep into their roles.
“Since my last film (2013’s Eastern Boys), I shoot each scene as a whole. I don’t do one shot at a time; that’s over for me. I work with Jeanne Lapoirie, my director of photography. We shoot fast, and we start shooting very early in the process. We leave actors a half-hour to prepare and we shoot the first take.
“As we keep shooting, the actors forget the camera. They start playing off each other and they don’t see us anymore. It creates its own kind of reality and allows them to breathe within the scene.”
For Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Arnaud Valois, who were with Campillo at TIFF, the director’s methodology allowed them to submerge themselves in the story.
“It was an adventure in cinema, but also a human adventure,” said Valois, who plays Nathan, a wide-eyed newcomer to the group who falls in love with the extroverted Sean, played by Pérez Biscayart.
“It made for an incredibly intense shoot, filled with intimate moments.”
“It was a beautiful journey,” Pérez Biscayart added. “It was very cathartic. (Campillo) let us get lost on set by surrounding us with inspiring people. He created a constellation of characters.”
On the day we spoke, in midSeptember, Campillo was still coming to terms with the rapturous critical reception and booming box-office results his film had been met with in France.
“The press has been completely delirious,” he said. “And the attendance — in the first twoand-a-half weeks, 500,000 people have seen it. It’s beyond anything we had hoped for. For me who has always made films in the margins, it’s a little strange. In one day, this film sold as many tickets as my last film in its entire run.
“I’m happy for the film; it’s important that it has found an audience. I’m touched because I didn’t hold back or constrain myself by trying to make a universal film. I didn’t round off the edges, and I feel like people were touched by that.”