Zombi Child and the Spaces of Cinema: An Interview with Bertrand Bonello (Web Exclusive)
by Joe McElhaney and David A. Gerstner

The interview that follows took place on October 9, 2019 at the Hudson Hotel in Manhattan. The hotel is close to Lincoln Center where Bertrand Bonello’s latest film, Zombi Child, had been shown the night before as part of the 57th New York Film Festival. The morning after that screening, Bonello spoke for two hours to a group of (enchanted) film students and faculty at the City University of New York’s Hunter College. That afternoon he graciously agreed to speak even further, to the two of us, for Cineaste, returning to and extending some of the topics of the Hunter event. Zombi Child remained central to the discussion but we also, as will be apparent, moved across the span of his twenty-year career. From such early films as The Pornographer (2001), Tiresia (2003) and On War (2008), to more recent efforts such as House of Pleasures (2011), Saint Laurent (2014) and Nocturama (2016), Bonello repeatedly tests himself in relation to not simply new subject matter but also new forms, including Zombi Child where he comes the closest to the genre that was formative for him, the horror film. But it’s not quite a horror film but something that, as with all of Bonello, resists easy categorization. With Zombi Child, Bonello moves beyond his familiar landscapes in France and travels to Haiti where he re-engages the specificity of genre so as to further expand his longstanding interests in the tension between literal and metaphoric space, the unsettled ground on which life and death permeate one another, and the significance of ritual as it is transformed through the new technologies of younger generations.

Cineaste: In a recent interview you said that only two films were important for you in preparation for Zombi Child—I Walked with a Zombie [Jacques Tourneur, 1943] and Les maîtres fous [Jean Rouch, 1955]. Last night at the New York Film Festival, though, you mentioned Maya Deren’s Haiti film [Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, 1985]. So, could we say all three, in different ways, were important?

Bonello: I wouldn’t say they were important but they were the ones I watched again. I Walked with a Zombie because, of course, it deals with zombies, and I wanted to see again how Tourneur shot the sugar cane plantations. With the Maya Deren, even though the text is a little dated, the images are fantastic. I was talking this morning [at Hunter College] about trying to find the right distance when you are filming something in a country that is not yours, especially a country like Haiti and that kind of culture. And I wanted to know how far and how close Deren was from the people she was filming. And of course Jean Rouch, always, because he was really close to the possession ceremonies he was filming and I wanted to see what kinds of distances he created.

Cineaste: For Tourneur the zombie is often immobile or, in the case of the white zombie woman, she has to be forced to move. Your zombie doesn’t seem to have quite the same limitations of movement.

Bonello: When I was doing the casting, I met thirty to forty men and I said to them, “Okay, you’re playing a zombie.” And they all moved the same way. It’s how they learned the way a zombie walks from the time they were kids—and also they all made that kind of nasal sound a zombie makes. That doesn’t come from me. It really comes from them. And I think of course they know better than I. So I wasn’t going to direct them. And also my zombies are workers because the film is mostly about slavery, so they have to move a little, even if it’s slowly.

Cineaste: One of the things I was curious about in terms of walking and mobility and stillness in your films is that you seem to be fascinated with mannequins and statuary and busts. I wonder if the zombie was another way for you to address this tension between the mobile human figure and the static human figure.

Bonello: Well, I know I’ve filmed a lot of mannequins, masks, dolls, things like that. It’s just because they are something that scare me, and the zombie is somewhere between them. The zombie is between everything, between life and death, between night and day. But sometimes I do shots of things that ring bells in terms of my own fears. Not talking about me for a moment, in the last sequence of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me [David Lynch, 1992], there is a very close shot of someone eating corn. I don’t know if you remember this. And a journalist told David Lynch that he didn’t understand the shot. And David said, “I hate corn.” So for him it was the ultimate image of nightmare.

Cineaste: The men in your films are presented in rather complicated, arguably seductive, ways. The same, of course, can be said of the women in your films but a particular tension is created by the way your men are framed, whether on their own or in the company of other men. Do you approach the framing of men differently than when you frame women in your films?

Bonello: Well, first I think it depends on the film. For example, when I shoot a film such as Saint Laurent, the topic of this particular man interested me because it allowed me to make a film that escaped the confines of the classical biopic. To do this, I thought to myself, “Okay! Saint Laurent is me.” So, I approached him as if I were Yves, as if I were him in every situation. When I do a film like Zombi Child or House of Pleasures, however, I approach the shoot differently. It’s very difficult to know how to shoot the group of women in Zombi Child or House of Pleasures. It’s a question, again, of distance. If you’re too close to them—I’m not their friend, I’m not their father—I must find the appropriate distance. You know, I’m always obsessed with this question: What is a good distance for the scene? And so when I do a film with men at its center—Saint Laurent for example or The Pornographer—I’m really in the middle. I am between Jean-Pierre [Léaud) and Jérémie [Renier]; or I try to think like Yves, I move between myself and him. For Zombi Child, or House of Pleasure, where women are at the center, I try to be very close but only to observe. With all these films, I try to find my place in the scene.

Cineaste: It’s interesting that in searching for your place as the director—somewhere in the middle, in between—a dynamic shift occurs in scenes where men occupy the space. For example, when we see Yacine (Hamza Meziani) in the bathtub in Nocturama and he asks Samir (Ilias le Doré) to join him, the scene is casual, seductive, strangely natural. At that moment, Yacine’s and Samir’s friendship tilts differently. Given that the sequence follows on the heels of Yacine’s drag performance where he lip-syncs to Shirley Bassey’s “My Way,” Yacine’s invitation is anticipated by the viewer. But the scene is still surprising even though Yacine’s gesture and Samir’s response seem to flow naturally from within the film’s course of events.

Bonello: Yes, for me, what takes place here is because it takes place on this day, this place, this time of the night. Yacine decides to act on something he’s never done before.

Cineaste: So, it’s a question of how desires take place within particular moment.

Bonello: Exactly.

Cineaste: Zombi Child continues your exploration of the way confined space and time moves characters to act. And Zombi Child is not your first film in which a body escapes a coffin—On War, for instance.

Bonello: Yes.

Cineaste: It seems, moreover, that the coffin serves as a metaphor in your films. Confined spaces are tomb-like, in the classical sense of entombment where Pharaohs were buried in enclosed sarcophaguses along with their personal treasures, and so forth. In House of Pleasures, the women are similarly enclosed in luxurious surroundings, unable to leave the brothel in which they live and work. They’re told, in fact, that if they leave the space they may very well be arrested. Yves, in Saint Laurent, is also confined to the elaborately decorated interiors. But, even more significantly, he is confined in the exterior world when he’s in the bushes cruising for men with Jacques. Ultimately, confinement is of the character’s own choosing.

Bonello: For Yves Saint Laurent, it’s a kind of prison, a golden prison. He has a fear of reality, a fear of the outside world.

Cineaste: It’s as if because of their fears, characters seek out, or create a utopia.

Bonello: On War works on this kind of utopia. One re-creates a world, and as it is re-created it is recreated with new rules. But, in fact, the new utopia still does not work. So, I think a lot of my films—since The Pornographer—deal with a search for utopia while realizing it is the end of utopia. In trying to build a new utopia, characters only discover the limits of what they created.

Cineaste: How do you execute your vision? In other words, how do you prepare and then create your vision on film, especially where you make dynamic confined spaces?

Bonello: What I do, and while I’m writing, is that I keep a separate document that holds my notes. It’s not a shot list. It’s different. It’s where I write questions—or answers—about a scene. For example, do I need one shot for the scene, or several shots? Am I close to the scene? Or am I far? Music, or not music? What kind of color works for the scene? What is the heart of the sequence? What is the thing that I shouldn’t miss when shooting? Is there something I am overlooking in order to understand the scene? So, I have this big, big document, like—I don’t know—sixty pages that I give to my DP, continuity person, and assistants. And then we have all the questions we need to prepare the scene before shooting, including, how do we deal with the space, the tempo, and stuff like that. I’m quite precise about all this.

Cineaste: This, after you’ve done location scouting?

Bonello: No, before. And, of course, it has to be corrected, like I correct my drafts of scripts. I do several drafts of this document.

Cineaste: So, when preparing the opening shot for House of Pleasures—where we see the women who work in the brothel, crisscrossing the coffin-like corridor, and in and out of rooms—how did you organize and prepare the shot?

Bonello: Well, when I found the location, I was not searching for something specific, I was just visiting many places. I discovered this chateau, a small chateau and chose it because of the kind of corridor you describe. So, I said, “Okay, if I want to do something that moves geographically and mentally, I think the chateau’s corridor is a perfect location.” But I really compare the brothel to a movie theater. You don’t see the outside. You don’t hear what’s happening. So, to get this kind of geographical and mental movement I simply say, “Okay, let’s go, let’s go inside.”

Cineaste: Similar to Flowers of Shanghai [Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998].

Bonello: Exactly. The space is like a box, which is open to fantasies, my fantasies. And it’s like a brain. There is this expression in French, un film cerveau, a brain movie. It’s like a Kubrick film, for example. Something very mental and—

Cineaste: Gilles Deleuze’s argument that Kubrick’s films are like a giant brain.

Bonello: Exactly. And when you have spaces without a relationship to the outside, it fully develops this concept, which is the case for On War. And, of course, Nocturama, which is why it took so long to make the mise en scène so precise.

Cineaste: But also, for you, always the space within the space, boxes within boxes, like the school in Zombi Child that’s in that strange location in Paris. It seems very incongruous, this kind of school in that location. But that school exists in reality and precisely in the way you show.

Bonello: It’s a world inside of a world and in this first world you have rules, the boss. And something doesn’t fit because you need some reality, in a way.

Cineaste: Many worlds kind of fold into each other. The exterior world of a “Paris-on-alert” in Nocturama, for example, creeps into the sealed-off interior of the department store via electronic devices such as television screens.

Bonello: You’re totally right. The enclosed world takes place only in its relationship with the outside. And that’s why I wanted for the first time they turn on the TV they hear and see the music video of Willow Smith, something very unreal that’s also very real.

Cineaste: That’s a very strange assortment of young people in Nocturama. It doesn’t feel like a terrorist group of today, which will tend to be much more unified. Their diverse backgrounds evoke a political group from the Sixties or Seventies.

Bonello: That was one of the criticisms made about the film, that the characters come from tough suburbs and from the bourgeoisie and critics said it’s impossible. But two years later we have in France the Yellow Jackets, which is precisely that. No one can say with certainty, “Who are the Yellow Jackets?” Some are of the extreme right; some are anarchists. It’s the same in Nocturama.

Cineaste: Can we talk a little bit about the actors in Zombi Child? Are they all nonprofessional?

Bonello: In France, yes. In Haiti, they are professional. But that doesn’t mean a lot because when you are an actor there, it means that you make telenovelas, you sing, you dance. So, when I went to Haiti, the producers said, “Please try to take some actors and give them work.” So, I met some and they are great, so it was no problem.

Cineaste: And the girl who plays Mélissa [Wislanda Louimat] was somebody you discovered in Paris. But is the woman who plays her aunt [Katiana Milford] a professional?

Bonello: Yes, the aunt came from Port-au-Prince.

Cineaste: She does have a professional actor’s intent that worked very well for that character.

Bonello: I tried to find a professional actress for that role in Paris, but I couldn’t, so we did the casting on Skype, in fact.

Cineaste: Why did you want nonprofessionals for all the young girls?

Bonello: It’s difficult to find fifteen-year-old professional actresses. And if you find maybe one, she’s the one you notice only because she’s more famous than the others. And the idea of the group was very important to me on the film.

Cineaste: And one professional would stand out.

Bonello: Yes.

Cineaste: And, also, I would imagine a teenage actor is a bit like a child actor in which everything might feel a little calculated.

Bonello: A little too accomplished. There is something that’s fragile with a nonprofessional that I really like.

Cineaste: Earlier today you were talking about how you taught yourself the cinema, and how to be a filmmaker, by seeing films and reading interviews with filmmakers. But you also mentioned critics being important to you, although I’m not sure our students were interested in the critics so we didn’t pursue that. [Laughter] But what critics were important to you?

Bonello: I guess it’s more difficult to be influenced by a critic today than it was in the 1990s, so basically, the critics that were very important to me—I was reading Libération at the time—were people like Gérard Lefort, Didier Péron and then, of course, Serge Daney. And for me that was enough. If you have Serge Daney next to you, you understand the cinema so differently. So that’s enough. And then someone like Manny Farber. Yes, they were my teachers, my teachers alone in my bed.

Cineaste: What about Daney in particular was important for you?

Bonello: Because he made things so personal, when he’s talking about film he’s talking about himself and he made me understand a lot of things this way.

Cineaste: Is time for you fundamentally tied to history? And perhaps even connected to 1968 and this idea of a certain lost history that you’re trying to reclaim?

Bonello: I think the fact that I was born in ’68 and in a way I’m the son of ’68 is important in the way I think, in the way I do films and choose subjects. And that’s the subject of The Pornographer. In The Pornographer, when I was writing the film, of course I am the “son.” I am the son who asks his father, “Okay, now you’ve done everything. What is left for us?” And I was talking politically and I was talking in terms of cinema: What do you do with your fathers? Then during the shoot, something really strong happened between Jean-Pierre Léaud and me. And I became more Jean-Pierre than the son—and that was eighteen years ago. And I think I’m still running after this question. And when I do On War, it’s really obvious.

Cineaste: The filmmaker protagonist is named Bertrand, who watches another favorite film of yours, Existenz (David Cronenberg, 1999). In terms of learning from other filmmakers, what French filmmakers have been important for you? And how do you see your own work in relation to them?

Bonello: Okay. I’m going to say something a little schematic about French cinema. But if we imagine two lines, we can say there is [Jean] Renoir and [Robert] Bresson that gave us [François] Truffaut and [Jean-Luc] Godard, that gave us [Maurice] Pialat and [Jean] Eustache, that gave us [Arnaud] Desplechin and [Leos] Carax. I fall more on the Bresson/Godard/Eustache/Carax side than the other one. But it’s complicated to find your place, and to find how to change things, because our “fathers” changed things, and not just politically but also in terms of cinema. For our generation in France it was not easy to find our place. But it was the same in Italy for all the directors that came after this huge generation of the Sixties. You’re overwhelmed by this history. It takes time.

Cineaste: There’s a quote you use from Pasolini in the end credits for The Pornographer that history is about sons trying to understand the father.

Bonello: That is an amazing quote. I put it at the end because it’s so great it would crush the film. But he said in one sentence what I’m trying to say in an hour and forty minutes. The other day I read a beautiful and very long interview with James Gray. And, of course, I felt very close to what he said. I think we are the same age and he was talking about fathers, and that’s very important to his films, fathers in the stories but also his cinematic fathers. And the interview was very melancholic and he was just saying, “Okay, yeah, all this is impossible now. I just do what I can.” And I feel the same way. I do what I can with our possibilities. I think a film is really the mix of your possibilities and your impossibilities. And that’s what’s beautiful.

When you see the making of Apocalypse Now [Francis Ford Coppola, 1979], you see that the director doesn’t know what to do. He’s totally lost and it’s beautiful. You know what I mean? Today, if you make a film and you say in the middle of the shoot, “I’m lost,” you’re fucking fired. But I was talking with a friend the other day and we said it’s a pity that that will never exist again, an adventure like Apocalypse Now or Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980]. Yes, we will have some expensive films again, but not these crazy adventures. It’s done.

Cineaste: That’s the end of On War, when Bertrand relives Apocalypse Now.

Bonello: Yeah.

Cineaste: Is your fascination with death and resurrection tied to this?

Bonello: No, I think this has to do with something that works well in cinema, more so than in literature. For example, I’m working now on a film of a woman who is in deep mourning over a love affair. And she kills herself. But since she doesn’t face her mourning, she is reborn and obliged to face it. This could work in literature, but in movies it’s visually stronger, I think.

Cineaste: Do you find as you’re getting older and you’re making films in which you deal with younger people engaged with new technologies that your conceptual framework for filmmaking has changed?

Bonello: Maybe it’s related to my being more obsessed with what’s happening now. And as I was saying this morning, it’s more and more difficult to maintain innocence because while we have more knowledge and knowledge is good, it is also dangerous. As I go deeper and deeper inside myself to find an emotion or an idea when writing I find myself saying, “Okay, I’ve done this already.” More and more knowledge makes it difficult to go deeper and deeper to discover something that really can interest you.

Cineaste: So many people today are always attached to their phones, and you see that in Zombi Child. By way of contrast, in The Pornographer you get a sense of Léaud’s historical dislocation when he can’t even remember what the name for a cell phone is. And when he borrows one he’s afraid it will give him brain cancer.

Bonello: It’s sometimes very, very difficult to have a scene without a cell phone in it because it doesn’t look realistic. Everyone has cell phones in their hands today.

Cineaste: Your daughter was a consultant on the dialogue for the girls. She’s fifteen and she was saying to you in relation to what you’d written in the film, “Oh, that’s two years ago.” But that means that maybe two years from now, everything those girls are saying will be out of date.

Bonello: I’m happy my next film is set in 1936 because I won’t have any of that technology. If you make a film in the present day and avoid it, it becomes a statement.

Cineaste: Are young audiences attracted to Zombi Child so far?

Bonello: Well, at some of the screenings in Paris, yes, they were very young. Like between, I would say, eighteen and twenty-five. And I’m not trying to make films for young people. For example, for The Pornographer and even On War, the audience was quite old, I mean like from forty-five to seventy-five, and then beginning with House of Pleasures my audiences began to get younger and younger and I don’t know why. But it’s something I really appreciate.

Cineaste: The experience of new technology and young people is also presented through the use of split-screen in your films. I am thinking of Nocturama but other films use the effect as well on multiple occasions. Zombi Child, however, uses it once. Here, the split-screen effect occurs when the character does a simple search on her cell phone.

Bonello: Yeah, it’s a very simple use in Zombi Child. I use the effect because if you simply cut this shot with that shot, it gets a little boring. So, I thought, let’s do both! And at the same time!

Cineaste: And, also, while the split-screen effect provides an interesting way to deal with the simultaneity of a moment, you also achieve something similar when you repeat an action from multiple angles. It’s as if you ask the spectator to grasp as much information as possible even though it is impossible to know everything there is to know about any one particular moment.

Bonello: Yeah. It’s something very mathematical in a way, but at the same time, mathematical and musical. But it’s quite well known that great musicians are often good at mathematics. But I have a very simple way of thinking about it. When I edit for example, I am not thinking about the story—well, a little but not that much. I sometimes just change a shot when I get bored. It’s always the same. If I see the sequence and it’s not that great—the cut is too early or too late for example—I pull a little surprise from the cards. Maybe this is where I lose some spectators, but it’s my sensation of the film when I sit in front it, when making it. It’s the same with music.

Cineaste: After you left the event today at Hunter College, everyone was very excited. The students and faculty were thrilled by your appearance. You were very personal in terms of your own experiences but also gave the students such practical advice. After the event this morning, a student told me that he was sixteen when he saw House of Pleasures in Canada. And he said it completely changed his life. He decided to become a filmmaker after that.

Bonello: If I was a teacher, I would put on the audio commentary of The Godfather, nine hours of Francis Coppola talking about the film and after the nine hours I would say, “School is finished. Go make films!”

David A. Gerstner is Professor of Cinema Studies at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island and editor of the book series, Queer Screens, for Wayne State University Press.

Joe McElhaney is Professor of Film Studies at Hunter College and his most recent book, Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema, will be published in the spring of 2021 by Wayne State University Press.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste, Inc. 

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 2