As a well-known figure on the French investigative TV scene for chronicling the underworld, Jérôme Pierrat co-wrote the screenplay for The King of Algiers (selected for Cannes’ Midnight Screenings in 2023). His first fiction feature as a director, Moolah (in which he also plays the lead), has just premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, in the Orizzonti sidebar.

Cineuropa: How did you get the idea of building this fiction around a mock investigative documentary?
Jérôme Pierrat: It's a kind of mise en abyme of the documentaries I made on the underworld as an "embedded" journalist. The idea was to show what you never see, what you can only assume happens behind the scenes. It's also a reflection on the red line a journalist chasing a scoop is not supposed to cross. The main character, the director I play, is in a bit of a rough patch in the beginning and he wants to get back in the saddle, so he's more willing to overstep. As I was already writing screenplays for fiction features while continuing my documentary work, it was my producer Mourad Belkeddar (Iconoclast Films) who encouraged me to try directing one. What interested me was to take what I do as a journalist to something more extreme and make a fiction out of it and show what you never get to see – as in a documentary, you end up seeing only 10% of what was shot. And since I've always been a fan of Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch, that’s the direction I went with.

How close is it to reality?
First of all, everyone here plays what they are in real life: the gangsters you see in the film are real gangsters, high pedigree ones too, and the police officers are real [retired] cops. What is more, at a broadcaster's request, I ended up playing the journalist myself, which I hadn't initially planned. I also wanted to invalidate the way gangsters have been represented and fantasised about in the heightened world of movies. People always imagine that they look like Alain Delon in Le Samouraï when in real life, they look more like the guys from The Sopranos. I cast real gangsters so they could be themselves. The situations in the script are all written, but what interested me was to see how they were going to play them, because all of them have more or less been in this kind of situation. When they call each other out, when they cook, when they spiral into paranoia, when they get psychotic, which happens at times — only they could perform like that. I gave them a lot of freedom; it was guided improvisation, if you will. Of course, the needle tips slightly towards commedia all’italiana, but we're not far from reality.

The plot itself (about cocaine flooding in via big ports) and the criminological side of the film are based on facts. It’s a fictionalised journalistic report – they don't actually take you to their cocaine containers and they certainly will not let you live with them without asking you to stop filming. It could have been a documentary, but that documentary would be almost impossible to make, because you can never see that far behind the scenes, not to that extent.

It's also a film about journalistic ethics.
At the start, the director states his rules regarding the red line – ie. just be an observer, don't film violence, don't talk to the gangsters about the police or to the latter about the former –, to then completely break his word over the course of the film. This reflects questions I have had to ask myself in my own work as well as questions raised from the outside. When I started making "embedded" documentaries, it was fairly new but given my level of access, some people thought I had to be a criminal myself, otherwise it would be impossible. But no, it is just field sociology: I’d rather see the wolf than hear from someone who saw the wolf. But it does raise questions. Can you film that? It is something to ponder in an age where everything is filmed and everyone is racing for exclusives while we watch 24-hour news channels and infotainment shows.

Films about criminals are fascinating. What do you make of the way they can end up glorifying them?
That's why I wanted to show that there is still a degree of underlying psychopathy. Gangsters are often likeable and pretty funny. That's the whole ambiguity. They can be your friends but the next second, they can do horrible things. For a start, they import drugs – which to be fair, without getting preachy, is not exactly a good thing to do with your life. They also kill each other fairly easily and without too many qualms, on the basis of a mere suspicion. Their line of work is built on violence and paranoia, and 99.99% of the time, it lands them in prison or in a cemetery, so they have a rather peculiar psychological profile, and that's also what I wanted to show – there is laughter indeed, but behind all that, there are dangerous, toxic men.