Are your films satires of American culture?
That came naturally to me, being so amazed by the United States. The satire has already started. You cannot even satirize it anymore. Of course, I’ve been thinking about what has happened now. How can you go further than what you have seen already, be better than, or more satirical, more artistic or whatever than just what happened the last year? You can’t compete with the reality anymore. I was thinking a moment like that was in history, like ‘33 or ‘34. You know it pretty well. Perhaps you have to do it in another way. Do it like ‘33 or ’34, without saying it is the United States. You cannot compete now with a movie. Reality is fascinating. Look at Oliver Stone and “Snowden.” The reality is almost impossible to improve or transcend. You are too much part of it, so you have to wait or use a metaphor of the past.
What about “Elle”?
I went back to Europe. I spent a lot of time on this Jesus book. It stopped the film career a bit for a couple of years. When I saw the book [that “Elle” was based on], I immediately said yes. It was unusual. Audacious. Perhaps controversial, and then it was presenting something I had not really done much of in my life, which was to show the interactions of so many people. It is like a musical composition, a Stravinsky with all the instruments doing that all the time. You don’t even know the characters in “Basic Instinct.” Does she have a father or mother? It’s all just American plotting.
I felt that the book had a certain plot that she gets raped. Who did this? She finds out. How will she react to that, but there were all these relationships people had that were not so related to the plot. What happens to the mother who has nothing to do with her being raped? They are crucial, but from the point of plotting, they are not connected. It is partially plotted in an American way. She’s raped. The man is masked. At the end of the second act, she finds out who he is. But the third act goes in the opposite direction of what American philosophy tells you. It should be a revenge movie, but it is not.
What’s the difference between filmmaking in the U.S. and Europe?
To give you an example, I did a lot of publicity for the movie in Europe. There was no discussion about rape. In none of these interviews. No one asked about the morality of the stories. No one asked if it was dangerous. But in every interview in the United States, it was all about rape, and how can you accept that when it is so horrible, this rape? All struggling with this important part of American life the past ten years, and the discussion on rape. It is on the front page. Ten years ago, twenty years ago. Even the director of “Birth of a Nation,” the film suffered under a rape situation, but it is continuously like that in the newspaper. It is front page news. Political correctness doesn’t mean you are politically correct. It is a certain part of hypocrisy to protest, but it is not different in the United States as to the rest of the world. There are 1900 rapes a day in the U.S. It is a rape a minute. Rape is there all the time. The United States has a problem talking about that violent sexuality. It happens anyway. It is not that we write about it, and it stops happening. They basically are talking about themselves. They have the problem.
If you go in such a politically incorrect direction, as her accepting this rape is on her own terms, and moving it to a sadomasochistic relationship, it is an anathema to American thinking. Sexuality is the most important thing in the whole world. Without it, there would be no species, so why would you not talk about it? Evolution is about babies. It doesn’t care about sex. It’s all about babies. Sexuality is the tool. It has created love and sex, because it wants babies. Not talking about it is winging it, because you are all there because of sex. Your parents went to bed together and boom, there is the baby.
You have been criticized for making “Elle” comic…
It is a wrong perception of the movie. There is no way you can connect the rape with fun. It is so violent, and there is no escape. I thought it should be done with all the violence that rape includes. Rape is a violent attack on another person. The scenes that are kind of funny about the half-black baby have nothing to do with the rape. The reproach is because I don’t stay in genre. I make all genres possible all the time. I have the feeling that I am trying to reproduce life as it is. Life is not genre. You are not living in a plot-driven world. There might be a rape happening in the next house, while you are sitting at dinner. In this film, I do not accept genres. I threw them out of the window. It is sometime horrible and sometimes funny, and I don’t know what is wrong with that. Life is not genre.
“Elle” is in theaters now.