An underwater exploration

HOW A FRENCH DIRECTOR BROUGHT HISTORY TO LIFE Jérôme Salle on his latest film release.

artly shot in Cape Town, this week’s release, The Odyssey, brings to life Jacques Cousteau. Here’s what director Jérôme Salle has to say about his latest work. It opens nationally today. It took me back to my childhood… I was brought up in the South of France, my parents had a sailing boat, and we used to sail to all the places where Cousteau first went diving – around the Embiez, Porquerolles, all those islands in the Var region.

I also remember his documentaries being shown on TV. Right from the start, the man and his work were linked to my life … It all began with one of my children. I was talking about Cousteau and saw my son had no idea who I was talking about.

He had never heard of the films, the Calypso, nor the crew’s red hats! It seems incredible, because for people of my generation, Captain Cousteau was almost like Jesus, one of the most famous men in the world… After talking about this with other people, I realised that he was sinking into oblivion as far as the under 20s and even the under 30s were concerned.

So I started to look at what had been written about him. I watched documentaries again and experienced tremendous childhood nostalgia. I also noticed that apart from Wes Anderson’s film The Life Aquatic, no movie had ever tackled the extraordinary life of this man… So I began to unravel the details.

He had total control over his image when filming himself with his crew, but never revealed anything intimate about himself. Absolutely, and I had such a hard job doing it, especially as in the meantime I directed two other films, Largo Winch and Zulu. It really took me several years to get a script I was happy with Laurent Turner, the film’s co-writer, and I read everything which had been written about the man, then met the people who had known him...

All the grey areas surrounding Cousteau were stopping me from seeing who he really was – a man who lived several lives in the space of a single lifetime.

First we had to carry out a huge amount of investigative journalism before we could begin the work of a scriptwriter. Once this space of three weeks.

Thanks to the new angle, I suddenly had a very clear idea of the story I wanted to tell.

But I have to emphasise that this was only possible because of all the hard work Laurent and I had been doing for several years!

I have been a scriptwriter, and I know only too well how often the authors of the early versions get forgotten – even though that is by far the most difficult part of the work.

I loved working with Laurent, but I think that at that point, for the re-writing, I needed to be alone with my subject.