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Now, French filmmaker François Ozone takes on the challenge of adapting the work to the screen, and he has succeeded masterfully. Beautifully shot in black and white, Ozone's screenplay is true to the novel's signature tone of emotional detachment, while thoughtfully expanding on themes the novel largely leaves unspoken, particularly colonialism and racial injustice. Lead actor Benjamin Voison delivers a powerful, restrained performance as the protagonist, Merceau, tamping down almost any display of emotion as befits the character. Rebecca Marder is also wonderful, as Marie exuding warmth and empathy as a counterweight to Merceau's cool plasticity. Nearly 30 years after his debut feature, See the Sea, first screened in U.S. art houses, François Ozone continues to be one of international cinema's most provocative and versatile voices. With The Stranger, he has once again crafted something that is both faithful and freshly relevant, well worth the price of admission. We couldn't be more honored to have François Ozone join us to talk about The Stranger on Inside the Art House, starting now. The End about his new film, The Stranger, which is going to be opening in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on April 10th. Thank you for joining us, Francois. Thank you to invite me. Francois, I absolutely love this movie. I've watched it twice now. I couldn't get enough of it. I was so taken in the press kit. You talk about how you took this wonderful novel and you adapted it, of course, for the screen. And you said that adaptation is an act of there's an element of betrayal. And I wonder, what did you have to betray in this case in order to make this movie? Well, I think when you adapt a book, you have to accept the idea that literary language and cinematic language are different experiences. This book was a big challenge to adapt because it's so very well known. It's the third most well known French book in the world. And one also has to accept that in adapting a book like this, you have as many directors as you have readers, which is to say that when someone reads a book like this one, one imagined the images, perhaps cast certain actors in their mind as the characters. And so there is, for me, there was a certain anxiety in making this film, but it was also very exciting. And it was very important for me that this film not be kept to 1942, but that it be a film of 2026, that it be seen with the eyes of today? In terms of the adaptation, my recollection of the novel is that there is not dialogue heavy. And yet it feels as if in certain scenes, the dialogue has been lifted directly from the film, from the novel, I should say. Is that correct? The book is an inner monologue. So one possibility for the adaptation would have been to have a voiceover the whole time. But in my opinion, that would have been betraying the idea of cinema because cinema recreates the literary experience in a different way as I see it. So when I started the adaptation, and in particular when dealing with the first part of the book, I told myself that perhaps I was going to make a silent film, that everything could be expressed through the images and that one would really feel who Meursault was simply through the images. But when I got to the second part of the novel, I realized once Meursault is in prison and he's having various philosophical reflections, that one really needs dialogue. So I chose to use Camus' dialogue, in particular in the scene with the priest. I want to follow up, I guess, what you said a moment ago about making it relevant to today to night to 2026 this is a a book that was written in 1941 or 43 somewhere in there and obviously under very specific circumstances it is as you say kind of an iconic film um and there's a lot of opinions about it um so it's laden with that how how did you struggle with getting to the place where you could find something in this in this novel that then spoke to today? And what did you change, I guess, or what did you focus on in order to be able to kind of really bring that forward? What particularly struck me when I reread this book is the degree to which the Arab people in the book were invisibilized. To readers today, this is very shocking. For instance, the Arab characters do not have names. Now, this was not a racist intention on Camus' part. In 1942, this had a great deal of meaning. But to me, it seemed clear that this needed to be contextualized for the present day. So I met with a great number of historians to be able to understand what French Algeria was like For me it was important to start the film with these archival images from the era that the novel was written to show what the French propaganda message on Algeria was. It was this idealized version of Algeria, when in fact, once I started doing research, I understood that it was an apartheid society where the Arab population were second-class citizens, were treated as the indigenous people, and that in fact, as Camus saw it, these were two parallel, separate communities, and it was not an ideal world at all. Camus didn't need to describe all this because this was simply the French reality at the time. For French people, Algeria was France. It was a French department. And so I thought it was important to put this in a film today so that Camus' intentions would be understandable. The first choice that I made when I reread the book for the adaptation was in dealing with this very, very famous sentence that is in fact the first sentence of the book, which in 1942 was incredibly modern, which is, aujourd'hui, maman est morte, today, mom died. And all of France was watching me, waiting to see how I was going to adapt this particular sentence. But in fact, to me, there was another sentence that was much more important, which is this sentence, j'ai tué un Arabe, I killed an Arab, when Meursault arrives in prison and finds himself facing a group of Arab prisoners. It's an incredibly striking, direct, honest sentence that to me seems much more important in the context of today. And that's why I started the film with that sentence. Yeah, it's a fascinating, that is, you know, right there, a fascinating change from the novel because it is arguably one of the most famous, well, I guess, you know, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, maybe rings a little more familiar. But yes, Mother Died Today, which of course that translation is also not accurate. it. You talk about, you know, I have not, I did not reread the novel before watching the film. I'm curious, how old were you when you first read the novel? 16, I think, at school. Yeah, I was probably younger. But I didn't get the book when I read it. Well, I was going to say, exactly. I mean, for some reason, this is a book that people are encouraged to read at a very young age, an impressionable age. It's not a long book, So maybe that's why. And yet it opens itself up to so much misinterpretation. I just did a tour in France for the release of the film, and I met a great deal of high schoolers and various students. And I noted that they're absolutely fascinated by the character of Meursault. And I think there's something about this character that really relates to teenagers. When you're a teenager, you're discovering the world. It's a moment when you're kind of a spectator of the world and also of disillusion. You're exiting the cocoon of your family and you can enter a kind of depressive state regarding what the world is. And so I think that the distance that Meursault has from the world is something that really touches teenagers. I absolutely wondered about that because Greg and I were speaking prior to you coming on and we were talking about this way, particularly now with social media and then with COVID and with sort of the inability to be socialized and or kind of an internalized way in which I find many teenagers these days, the inability to socialize and or find words that are about relationships. And so, Merceau embodies something that feels very, very modern in that sense, as you say. And that's interesting about the teenagers that you met. Yes. Well, just the very start, the fact that he refers to, he doesn't say maman, it's maman, which is, you know, mommy. It was a big deal for the translation. And I think in the subtitles, we choose that maman is dead today and not mom or mother or, you know. I know a great American translator made an article about that, how to translate the first line of the book. Yeah. But it also, you know, he is referring to his mother as a grown man. He's referring to his mother almost in a way that he might have as a child. So is there a certain Freudian, you know, we link Camus to Sartre and the existentialist. And he never really considered himself to be an existentialist. The interesting thing about the sentence is that the word maman, mommy, is very intimate. It's very childlike, but the sentence is cold and factual. So there's this strong contrast. Normally, he should say, my mother died if he was really going to stay in that distance. So this sentence has the distance, the factual effect, but in the use of the word maman, there's also the tenderness of his relationship to his mother. I have to ask you about Benjamin Voisson. Am I pronouncing it correctly? Voisson. His performance is astounding. Astounding. and and he is able to inhabit this place in a in a way that feels uh he makes it look easy i guess i want to say and i know it's not it wasn't easy yeah no i i i i can't have been and and and to to to be able to uh again inhabit that in a way and not comment on it or to literally just be present and and do nothing and and receive what's happening how did you work with him how did you work with him between takes. What did you say to him? How did you evolve a language where you could get him to that place? Because it's so pure. I said to him, shut up. We had a great experience. You know, it's the second time we worked together. We met summer of 85. Some years ago, we are very close friends. But this film was a real challenge for him as an because I asked him not to act. And it's quite difficult to ask an actor not to act because he's paid for that usually. But it was a composition. He has really to create a character who is far away of his own personality. So it was a big challenge. And I asked him to read the book of Robert Bresson Not on the Cinematograph in which Bresson explained he doesn look for actors For him actors come from theater but in cinema we need models. So it was interesting for Benjamin to watch the movies of Bresson, especially pickpocket, you know. And he was totally depressed during the shooting. He was very sad because he was so focused on his character and the spectator of everything, you know. He was really not an actor, except at the end of the film when he's in front of the priest. At this moment, he can really act and express his emotions like the character. But it was, yes, it was a real challenge for him. Yeah, it's interesting you say he's depressed because, again, what's so amazing about his performance is that we don't know ever what he's feeling. I mean, there would have been so many traps, essentially, for him to indicate or give a patina of an emotion, and he's just so present every stinking moment. It's just astounding what he did. I mean, the other, the counterpoint in the film, of course, is Rebecca Marder playing Marie, who also delivers an amazing performance, someone you worked with most recently in The Crime is Mine, and a character that I think is elevated or somewhat accentuated in your version of the story. For me, when I started to adapt the book, I realized that all the male characters are toxic. One hits his dog, one beats his female partner, and the other one kills an Arab because there's too much sun. So it's hard to identify with these guys. So I realized that I had to develop the female characters, and especially Marie, to whom I gave a conscience of what is actually happening. And of course, the sister of the Arab man who is murdered, on whom the film ends, and who, to a certain degree, gives the Arab community a voice. which allows you to carry the voice of Arabs in the film. over and over again so eloquently and reflections of of and then the curtains and the windows and the bodies are so uh gorgeous the two of them in in in the love scene and then on on the uh you know at the beach you said that uh that you don't know how you're going to you don't know what your film's going to look like until it's over and i something about the way it shot it it's so carefully, so elegantly painted each frame, I guess, without it being self-conscious. And I guess I just wonder how you found this language, because it's stunning, really stunning. I tried to be as simple as possible. For instance, there are very few camera movements. It seemed to me that in a way, we just needed to record, to record the world as mersot sees it. And to do that, one had to stay still. Meursault does not express things, but he does feel them. And so we needed to really make things felt, to feel the sensuality that is so important in Camus. We needed to feel the sea, the bodies. And so I really focused on that more than on the dialogue. In a sense, the work was work of observation. I think that when you're working in black and white, it contributes a graphic element that is not there in color. When you're filming in black and white, very quickly things appeared much more framed. You really feel the geometry and the symmetry. There's a graphic element there that you don't feel as much in color because very quickly you're distracted by the various colors. So with black and white, there's something that's very quickly much stronger visually. Well, so we can give the audience some sense of what we're talking about. Let's take a look at the trailer for the film. Again, this is François Ozan's adaptation of The Stranger, opening in theaters April 10th. I felt your head put on my head. When I opened my eyes, you weren't there. Why did you break the love that we were waiting for? Why did you kill this man? Mr. Morseau? Yes. You are wearing a sin that we must take away from you. There are things in your gesture that are coming out, and we need to help you. You understand? It was a coincidence. It was an accident. Why are you going to go to this place? Why were you armed with a rebel war? He was very calm. Calm. I also wonder if I was a kid. It's weird. Not like the others. Murso is innocent. First, regretting your act. I was moved by the story of you speaking to your composer Fatima Akatari, a Kowei musician, and you loved her music and you needed to explain to her your intentions about how you handled the Arab. She needed to understand my intentions. Yeah. As an Arab woman she needed to understand what was my goal and how I will adapt the book What did you say to her I explained to her my contextualization of the story because you realize many Arabs were shocked by the book and are disturbed by the book because they don't exist in the book. That's what an old Algerian woman told me after the screening of the film in Paris. She said, for me, this book hurted me when I read it because I didn't exist. I didn't have a voice in this story. So I explained to Fatima what I wanted to make and the fact to develop the female character. So she felt rassurée. Je ne sais pas comment on dit. Reassured. Reassured. Yes, yes. Reassured by my vision of the book. And we started to work together. And it was important to work in the same direction, you know, especially for the music. Yes, there's the character of the sister to the Arab who is, of course, and she says so much just by her face, just by the exchange of how she looks at the character of Marie. That was really beautiful, and it said so much. I wonder how the Algerian woman responded to that relationship, or what kind of response you've got. Well, that's a scene that's not in the novel. And from a historical perspective, I think it would be very unlikely for an Arab woman to be in this courtroom where there are only French people. But it was a very important moment, in my opinion, to show the absurdity of French colonialism to have this one Arab woman spectator so that French spectators today could understand the absurdity of French colonialism. in this courtroom where the name of the victim is never pronounced. They never talk about the victim. They talk about the sun. They talk about the sea. They talk about the killer. But the victim is never talked about. He is invisibilized. And so the presence of Djemila was, in my opinion, extremely important and political. I mean, there are definitely problems with the novel, with the source material, but it is a product of its time. And yet speaking of that time, I guess, it was written in 1941 or the first manuscript was finished in 1941, published in 1942, at a time when France was either occupied by the Nazis or under the rule of a Vichy government, which was complicit with the Nazis. The film comes to us today at a time, arguably, of rising authoritarianism in the world. What is the universal message, and is there a connection between the time at which Camus wrote the novel and the time in which you're making the film? Well, I think it's very wise to look at Camus today to understand the folly and absurdity of the world today, whether it's the wars in Iran, in Ukraine, the rise of authoritarianism, the rise of the extreme right around the world. It's very good to look at Camus because Camus was not in favor of nihilism the way Meursault was. What Camus championed was revolt. His very famous book, L'homme révolté, Man in Revolt, was very important. And it's important to look at a philosopher like Camus today, because though he was much criticized in his era, because he did not accept any of the dominant ideologies, communism, fascism, etc. And Sartre, on the other hand, was considered the great philosopher because he was politically aligned. We realize today that it was Camus who was right. I guess I just follow that up to say is that does the character of Marceau and his way of seeing the world, I mean, is Marceau a moral void? Or is he a character just refusing to lie about the world that he's living in? living in. Well, that's really the power of this novel, and it's why it's a masterpiece. It's that anyone can interpret it any way he or she wants. And so both things you suggested are possible. But I do think that the scene with the priest at the end of the novel is very important. And I think that without this scene, I may not have made the film. In that scene, Meursault explodes. As he puts it himself, he wakes up to the world and he expresses his revolt. He becomes an actor or player of his life rather than simply a spectator. He realizes that he may once have been happy. Meursault's revolt in this scene is against Catholicism, because that was the dominant ideology in France at the time. But he's really revolting against all ideologies. And I think this is really a key to the character of Meursault, who has evolved over the course of the novel. It's an amazing scene. It's a very powerful film. And I'm honored and proud to be presenting it at this time. And I really hope that audiences come out. You have delivered some of the key art house films of the past 20 years from Swimming Pool and Eight Women through In the House, a personal favorite, and right through to some of the more recent films. and this film arrives at a time when it's, we are rebuilding the art house audience in the post-COVID world and I really hope that it is a picture that brings audiences out because it is both thoughtful, provoking and entertaining, just beautiful to watch. So again, the film is The Stranger. It's directed by Francois Luzon and it's going to be opening in New York and Los Angeles on April 10th. It's coming to us from Music Box Films and you can find out on their website where it will be opening as it rolls out around the rest of the country. Francois Auzon, it's a great honor. Thank you for joining us Inside the Art House. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. This episode of Inside the Art House was produced by Wishing Well Entertainment and Raphael Sparge with on-site production by Naren Dickerson. Our supervising producers are Thomas Cassetta and Miles McCreary. The episode was edited by Rick Pratt with sound mixing by Thomas Cassetta. Our musical theme was composed by Isabel Engman and Gerardo Garcia Jr. Graphics by Jenna DeAngelis and social media marketing and web design by Stephanie Peters. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing. See you next time on Inside the Art House.
