“Acting is taking risks”. “The Almond Trees” by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi has that audacity that characterizes great films. The director, in the running for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, makes us relive the theatrical utopia of the 1980s, created in Nanterre by a Patrice Chéreau, whose very dark sides she does not hesitate to show. As for utopia, it persists in each shot inhabited by the madness and passion of today’s young actors and actresses.
RFI: The first scene of the film takes us through the entrance examination for young actors and actresses at the École des Amandiers, at the time one of the most renowned in Europe. All the passion, life and tragedy that will come later is already there. All this is expressed through images and a virtuosity that only cinema can offer us. Was it one of the challenges of your film to link the intensity of theater and the power of cinema? ?
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi: Yes, it was a challenge. I was afraid of being boring in theater scenes. But there aren’t a lot of them. During editing, we tried to balance. Sometimes it was a few more lines and it got boring. Theater in cinema is very complicated. We tried to be very precise each time in what the rehearsal scene or the theater scene told us. And, in my opinion, my cinematographer Julien Poupard filmed these scenes in an exceptional way. Sometimes he did it like in a documentary, that is to say sometimes very far away, sometimes very close, like in the cinema. We alternated. Suddenly, the scenes where Patrice Chéreau (played by Louis Garrel) makes them rehearse are filmed a bit from afar, a bit as if Julien was making a documentary. And (at other times) he really wanted to get closer. And that’s more fiction. It was a balance to find.
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The Almond Trees, it is a group of comedians in the making. It is a place, the Théâtre des Amandiers where there is also the École des Amandiers. And it is above all a utopia. For you, what was the singularity of this Almond Trees utopia at the time? ?
The utopia of managing to be stronger than drugs, stronger than disease. To be invincible. To have eternal youth. The utopia of our 20 years, that’s it. It was then, but also today. Fortunately, we have utopias. At the time, we were twelve [dans la promotion de l’École de théâtre] and we had the utopia that we were all going to succeed in life and in our desire to be an actor. There were plenty of utopias like that.
You were at the time, alongside Vincent Perez, Agnès Jaoui, Marianne Denicourt…, one of those actresses inhabited by the belief in the total power of theatre. Why did you wait 35 years before telling this story which nevertheless represents a decisive step for contemporary theater in France ?
I do not know at all. I hadn’t thought of telling it. He’s a friend of mine, Thierry de Perreti [acteur sous Patrice Chéreau, mais aussi réalisateur et metteur en scène, NDLR], who gave me this idea. The first time he told me about it, I said, “No, no, I don’t want to”. I was resisting about this. It seemed to me too difficult to tell this time, all these characters. I was afraid of it. But then he told me about it two years later. And what really gave me the impetus was to talk about people who are no longer there. It gives me courage and madness to have the courage to talk about people who are no longer there.
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In the beginning, very discreet in the image, but already omnipresent, there is Patrice Chéreau, played on screen by Louis Garrel. As co-founder of the Théâtre des Amandiers, Chéreau is at the heart of this story. And almost ten years after his death, he remains for many a living god of the theater. On the other hand, you show it in your completely different film. He appears there as a terribly lonely man, very irritable, very authoritarian, and often subject to his homosexual impulses which also guide him in the distribution of roles and the allocation of positions. Let’s find out in the almond trees the hidden face of Patrice Chéreau ?
No, just in the early drafts of the script, he was a very smooth character, with no flaws. Afterwards, it was absolutely necessary not to respect this character so much. Not to be so intimidated and respectful, because this character was not interesting, he was a bit theoretical. And then, Chéreau was not respectful with his characters when he was writing or directing the characters. So, out of respect for Chéreau, I had to be disrespectful towards this character who is called “Patrice Chéreau”, but who is not him. We kept the name, but it’s not because we kept the name that it’s him. He’s still a fictional director.
You revive the era of the 1980s, with the utopia of the Amandiers which ends with the departure of Patrice Chéreau for other adventures, but also with the appearance of AIDS and other historical turning points which also profoundly changed the approach to theatre. Today, with the Covid, the war in Ukraine and our times around us, your way of making cinema has also changed ?
I think everything around us changes us. So our way of playing is different, because we are not set in stone. Luckily we are changing. We get older, we absorb everything that happens in the world. We also feed on our wounds, our fears. Yes, everything changes, all the time.