Feel empathy for monsters - A Prophet director

Multi-layered: French director Jacques Audiard behind the camera on the set of <i>A Prophet</i>. Photo / Supplied

French director Jacques Audiard calls his new film "an anti-Scarface".

He's plainly no great fan of Brian De Palma's blood-drenched 1983 drama in which Al Pacino, as Tony Montana, a Cuban refugee turned Miami gangster, stands almost knee-deep in gore.

"The problem is that De Palma never invites us to feel any empathy for Montana," he says. "And without empathy, the question of whether the character is good and bad becomes irrelevant.

"I wanted a character who is more ambiguous, so that I can relate to him."

He has certainly delivered that in A Prophet, a high-octane drama about a illiterate young prison inmate's slow metamorphosis from fresh meat, to survivor, to winner.

Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) is not the jailhouse cliche of a tough guy who beats the mob: he survives and ultimately flourishes through cunning and guile. And he makes some decidedly unheroic decisions along the way.

Audiard, whose stern countenance, close-cropped hair and horn-rims put you in mind of a philosopher or priest, first began thinking about making a film set in a prison when he visited one during research for his previous movie, 2005's excellent The Beat My Heart Skipped.

That film (itself a remake of the 1978 James Toback/Harvey Keitel film Fingers) explored the nature of the criminal temperament and was about a man reinventing himself. And that, says Audiard, is what this film is.

"A Prophet is set in a prison," he says, "but it's not a prison movie.

"Or if it is I didn't want to say that, because once the other screenplay writers [Audiard himself was one of four who worked on the script] find that out they try to outsmart me.

"It's a genre film and with a genre film, the audience immediately knows what they're watching. But then, the genre becomes like a magnifying glass. Everything becomes much sharper and you can start developing metaphors, specific themes, ideas and conflicts."

Audiard's problem is that too many genre films have genre characters.

"In a prison drama, the characters are tough, cold-blooded killers but I wanted to create in Malik a more complex character, one with an inner life, who is capable of dreaming or being haunted. With a psychotic character like Scarface, that's not possible."

Having made two films in a row about gangsters - a third, A Self-Made Hero, was about a man who invented a Resistance past once the war was over - Audiard might be regarded as being fascinated by the darker sides of human nature. He smiles faintly at the suggestion.

"The characters you are speaking of are all, in the end, quite likeable," he says. "So maybe it is trying to explore what is unacceptable. Part of the goal is to place the audience in the position where they feel some empathy with people who have committed reprehensible acts.

"Whether Tony Montana kills 10 people or 50, doesn't make any difference. Whereas when you feel empathy with the character, you always have to question the violence. Violence is not accepted as something that just goes without saying. I think perhaps I am the last French Catholic film-maker."

But surely Malik is a character who has to become worse than his enemies in order to triumph over them?

"Well, without wanting to be too Marxist, I would say that we are the product of our conditioning in both the good sense and the bad sense. We can wonder what this person would have been like outside of prison. He might have become a prostitute, or smoking crack at the metro station, so when we see things like this occurring we see that society has done its job. I think perhaps I'm the last French Catholic Marxist film-maker."

Indeed, he is concerned to stress that Malik is a virtuous character.

"He has qualities that few people have: intelligence, courage, adaptability, perseverance. And he has a highly ambivalent relationship to violence. He despises the prison gangsters and their full-frontal violence. Violence is always a lack of vocabulary and this is someone who has improved his vocabulary greatly - but, faced with people who have not made the same efforts as him, he is forced to be the way he is."

The film is notably short of explicit violence although there is a hard-to-watch sequence of a botched killing which is, one suspects, deeply realistic precisely because of its clumsy messiness.

"I don't find the film very violent," says Audiard. "You can see far more violence on TV with bodies that explode or in gore movies that are far more violent than this. But in this film, the few scenes of violence that there are are frontal violence, unvarnished. This is something disgusting and I an not going to make it aesthetic or prettify it or choreograph it. It is a kind of obscenity."

A Prophet opens today and is reviewed here.

-TimeOut