No./6 From the streets to the screen
The director behind Les Misérables (no, not that one) on how his filmmaking is influencing French politics
“MY FIRST DOCUMENTARY was about the riots,” says French-malian filmmaker Ladj Ly, discussing France’s three-week unrest in 2005. He’s been chronicling reality for years, and Les Misérables, his thrilling debut dramatic feature, leans into his non-fiction background, the social issues he’s experienced, and his own life.
Les Misérables — not an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel or the subsequent musical, the title just a nod to political parallels — follows an anticrime police squad over 24 hours in Paris suburb Montfermeil. After a lion cub is stolen from a travelling circus, tensions rise, warring factions clash, and an uprising gets ugly. Ly, now 40, grew up in Montfermeil, the only person on the block with a video camera, and from 2002 he used it to film cop corruption. He often ended up in custody.
Since that first documentary (365 Jours À Clichy-montfermeil), his films have blended documentary with fiction, but now he’s embarked on his first dramatic feature. Les Misérables is infused with personal elements — his own son plays the kid who, with a drone, documents an inciting incident. “I drew from real life,” says Ly. “My film is fictional but it’s truthful to reality, and image-wise it uses documentary techniques.”
Les Misérables — France’s official submission for the Best International Feature at this year’s Oscars — is being compared to Spike
Lee’s Do The Right Thing and Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine. Ly is comfortable with this. “Spike Lee spoke about the problem that his generation was faced with, as did Mathieu Kassovitz, and I do the same,” he says. He made the film to spread awareness of what’s going on in suburbs like Montfermeil. “I believe we can change things at this level, I made the film for this purpose,” he says. “This is why I invited Emmanuel Macron to see the film. Because then he won’t be able to pretend he didn’t know what is about to happen.”
The French President did see the film and was, says Ly, moved so much that he intends to take measures to improve life in such neighbourhoods. It’s just continuing what Ly has been doing since he was a teenager, using cameras to affect change — only now, on a grander scale.
START WITH A BIG QUESTION
The initial idea for Soul, which will be the 23rd film from Pixar Animation Studios, came from a big, juicy, existential head-scratcher. “We were thinking about why we are here, and what our purpose in life is,” says Pete Docter, chief creative officer at Pixar and Soul’s director. “For example, I’ve always felt like I was born to be an animator. Could we question that? And that’s where this idea of souls came up.”
From there, Docter — along with co-director Kemp Powers and their creative team — developed a story about a music teacher passionate about jazz named Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) who suddenly falls down a manhole, and finds his soul separated from his body. But instead of going to the afterlife, he accidentally goes to the beforelife. “He ends up in a place he wasn’t supposed to end up in,” Docter explains. “We call it ‘The
Great Before’, where we all came from — where we got our personality and attributes from.” The Great Before, Docter explains, explores the idea of souls, and how much of you is inherently you. “The instant my kids were born, they seemed to have a very specific, unique personality; this is a deep dive into why that’s the case.” Though the exact fate of Joe remains a trade secret, for now: “He might be alive or he might not be... We’re trying not to give away the whole film!”
DO YOUR RESEARCH
Central to any Pixar film is a fact-finding mission. (“It’s always kind of secretly the reason we do these films,” chuckles Docter.) And with an especially deep philosophical concept behind the film — a dualistic vision of body and soul, life and death — the Pixar team decided to consult a variety of religious figures to help understand what a soul is. “We talked with a local Buddhist instructor, a rabbi, a number of different pastors in the Christian tradition... we even spoke with a couple of shamans.” Though the film ultimately avoids a religious approach, all the consultants agreed that the soul was “nonphysical, ethereal and either light or gas”, which influenced the design of the characters.
BUILD A CONVINCING WORLD
Initially set in the grounded location of New York City, the film flips to the more abstract setting of ‘The Great
Before’ — like Coco or Inside Out before it, conjuring a vast, imagined plane of existence to help unravel a weighty concept. “It involves a lot of world-building, to use a jargony word,” admits Powers. “We made a list of words that were specific to the way souls are described: vaporous, cloud-like, ethereal...” Docter credits the army of animators and creatives at the studio for their uncanny ability to translate the concepts visually. “The people here are just amazing at being able to capture these complex ideas in clear visual ways,” he says.
DON’T TALK DOWN TO KIDS
Ultimately, the trick to making a tough subject palatable to ankle-biters is to not condescend. And from the grief-driven Up to the melancholy gutter-punch of Inside Out (both also directed by Docter), Pixar have mastered a family-friendly approach to tricky conversations. “We love making movies and we want to make them engaging and interesting to us as audience members as well as filmmakers,” Docter explains. “We also know that our kids are going to be watching. So we start with something that is engaging and interesting to us as adults.” Again, the animated form helps: “If I had to explain to you the story in words, you would scratch your head and wrinkle your nose. But when you can show it visually, even the five-year-olds get it.”
Plus, subjects like death don’t always need to be treated with the seriousness they usually get. “Death has always been a great source of comedy!” laughs Powers. “I mean, do you remember [1978 Warren Beatty film] Heaven Can Wait? Exploring death in a disarming, funny way is not unprecedented.” Sounds like a funeral worth attending.