Seven Questions for Cedric Klapisch of "When the Cat’s Away"

Klapisch: It's really nice because I went to NYU and I was always expecting my films to come here. So it's my third one that finally gets to go to the United States. I'm really happy because, they took a long time to decide. They saw it at the Berlin Film festival a year ago. They really liked it and they had to wait, they were waiting to see it again in Toronto to see what was the reaction there and then it was released in London and then Japan and then they took a lot of time to decide themselves, because they wanted to have different reactions throughout the world. I think, finally, they decided to take it because they think it could work here.

iW: When I saw the film, I expected it to be more comedic. And I think this was because of the preview I saw. Have you seen this preview?

Klapisch: Well, I made it. I guess you're talking about that one. The trailer, you mean?

iW: Yes, the trailer.

Klapisch: Yes, well, it was a choice to do that in the trailer, because at the beginning I thought no one would go see this film, because it's such a simple story, and I thought it may be uninteresting to other people. It's so day-to-day life. It's so undramatic. And yet, in the story, I'm trying all the time to make things exist, and to be interesting all the time. There's an author in France who says in the TV news, they're only looking when there's a plane crash. And the author says, "What's interesting for me is not when the plane crashes, but when the plane doesn't crash." I have the same kind of idea whereas I want to show things which don't appear interesting at the beginning and then they're interesting... I think that's one of the problems I have with American movies is that because they want things to be interesting, they enhance the drama of everything and very often you lose the sense of reality, because planes don't crash every day.

iW: I want to get to this everydayness of "When the Cat's Away", but first I'm interested in American films being distributed overseas and taking over the markets. How do you see it in France, as far as American films taking up screens there?

Klapisch: It's really bad, the situation, I don't have anything against good films, good American films, of course, but the problem is that bad American films are taking over, and they take too many screens, and it become a "resistance" - you need to fight to get 10 screens in Paris whereas any bad American film will have 40 screens, so it's really bad. And also, culturally it's not good, because very often, people will know better Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, than any good French actor. It's unfair because it's not a question of quality, it's just a marketing thing.

iW: Let's go back to "When the Cat's Away". You incorporated a lot of what was happening in the moment when you were shooting. I imagine it was very difficult to stay so open to the moment.

Klapisch: It's true one of the hardest things on the shooting was to be receptive to everything and to avoid being drowned by opening up. Very often when you let people give you ideas, at the end, you're totally lost. But I think the story was so simple, that it gave structure to the film and then I knew somehow what I was doing, even though I didn't know what I was doing exactly during the shooting. It was a good combination between knowing what to do and being open to doing anything. That was hard.

iW: So each day, your set-ups were coming out of what the actors were doing?

Klapisch: It depends on the scene, some scenes were really written, and other scenes, like, when Chloe is helping moving out her neighbor, it was just written - she helps Bel Canto move out -- so I had to find ideas. I knew that there would be people going up and down in one shot like that, but then for the dialogue, I really tried things. It was not really improvisation, it was more me improvising with them, as if I was writing the dialogue in front of them, you know, seeing what was happening. In some scenes, they were really left alone improvising... In another case, I use very different techniques... I improvised with the actors one or two weeks before the shooting, and they came up with ideas and then I videotaped the improvisations for two or three hours and I wrote a text and used some of the ideas from the scene. But then I organized the scene so it would work together, so when we shot the scene, they had the text and stuck to the text.

iW: As far as the camera was concerned, were there the same strategies?

Klapisch: Yes, it was the same thing. We had to find the tone of the film at the beginning, with the D.P., which never happened before since I storyboard usually. The first two days were really important to find the right way to shoot the film. Before we had photography in the neighborhood, we found things like, how to frame, and how to light, that there would be always bright colors, in order to show it's a colorful neighborhood and that the differences in people would be stressed by the differences in colors and that very often, we use black somewhere in the picture to enhance the colors throughout the picture. Things like that, we found by taking pictures before, and then, when we'd be shooting, we had to find ideas that would be in the same direction. It's pretty easy once you find what's the tone and what's the style -- you find ideas everyday to support that... We had a craft and a skill that allowed us to do things in a no-matter way, but being very professional... I really needed experience to do that, and the D.P. also, because it looks like it's not throughtout or it's very loose, very improvised, and in fact, there's really a strong storyline, there's a strong structure, a strong aesthetic put into it, but it's done in a light way. It's sort of a strange combination.