07/11/2023 - The French filmmaker chatted to us about his new film, which centres on the famous, revolutionary and iconoclast priest who was at once a Resistance fighter, a deputy and an advocate for the homeless

Abbé Pierre – A Century of Devotion [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Frédéric Tellier
film profile] is Frédéric Tellier’s 4th feature film, which was presented out of competition in the 76th Cannes Film Festival and is due for release in France on 8 November, courtesy of SND.

Cineuropa: How did Abbé Pierre come into your life as a filmmaker?
Frédéric Tellier: I’d always wanted to explore a character who was full of spirituality and who reflected upon the world, against an empathic backdrop of sorts. During discussions with producers, the idea arose of a potential film about Abbé Pierre. It was only a very small starting point because I didn’t know much about him and I wasn’t sure there’d be enough material for a film. So I had to do a lot of research and draw up the initial framework for the writing.

What approach did you and co-screenwriter Olivier Gorce take towards the timeline of the Abbé’s life (who was born in 1912 and who died in 2007)?
There were several layers of work involved. The first and most obvious one was to establish a timeline of everything that had taken place in his lifetime, his milestone moments: his birth, his father, his large family, the Resistance, his 1954 appeal, etc. Then we thought about how we should order it, the facts and who he really was, the human being behind it all that we wanted to get to know. So we devised another more personal timeline, more intimist in respect of him as a person: his feelings, his doubts, his writings on the questions he had. We tried to communicate all that whilst also condensing it, as we went along, from a 500-page draft to a screenplay of a hundred or so pages.

What about the contradictions inherent to the man, who experienced setbacks and was able to acknowledge his mistakes, who was incredibly tenacious, sometimes to the point of aggressiveness, and who never sought success but was nevertheless attracted to the limelight?
It was those contradictions that I wanted to explore to make him totally human, just like us. He had his contradictions and some incredibly powerful internal drivers, but he also had his doubts. And he experienced plenty of setbacks in his life: firstly on account of his health, because he was never a very well man, he was always ill. In fact, the film opens with a resounding failure, when he’s dismissed from the monastery. And later, when he’s a little older, he says: I haven’t had many ideas of my own, I’ve just been able to listen to other people’s. If there’s anything we should remember about his character, it’s his great open-mindedness over the things that happened to him. It’s true that he was very generous, very affectionate, very emotional, but he could also be very unfair at times, and sometimes very prone to anger. It’s what makes him really human, and that’s what appealed to me when I heard the accounts of those who knew him: he wasn’t a legend anymore, he was a human being.

The film blends fiction with sequences of archive footage.
That was something we decided upon as soon as we entered the writing phase in order to fully immerse the story in the times we were focusing on, and to testify directly, in a head-on fashion, to what happened in those various eras, rather than verbalising it all through dialogue or reconstructions (although these are a part of the film too, they’re the essence of it). I’ve always liked including archive images in my films, in the format and quality characteristic of the time: it’s a storytelling principle that means a lot to me.

What made you choose Benjamin Lavernhe for the lead role?
I already knew him, as he’d played a small part in my first film, SK1 [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. We needed a really solid actor to play this character, because there’d be a lot of fatigue involved further down the line, and he also needed to convey the slight fragility of Abbé Pierre’s soul.

The characters who try to save him and, generally, heroes who aren’t born to be heroes, tend to be at the heart of all your films, and Abbé Pierre seems to be the epitome of these.
I’m realising over time that I’ve only ever explored true stories. So there must be something about them that appeals to me and moves me. I think there’s something special about the truth. And it’s true that I’m interested in the little people who become extraordinary heroes, who try to fix things, and themselves in the process. And I also like experimenting, changing my mise en scène approach and the style of the subjects, characters, actors, etc. that I use.

(Translated from French)