Holy Motors: the weird world of Leos Carax

The surrealist sci-fi movie, starring Kylie Minogue, is already being described as the best film of 2012. Its reclusive director explains why he made it

Leos Carax stands alone outside the London hotel, smoking cigarettes with grim resolve and dearly wishing he were somewhere else or someone else, whatever comes easier. His coat collar is turned up. His eyes dart nervously behind prescription shades. He warns me that he has nothing to say, he hates doing interviews, he feels like a fraud. Driving to Cannes for the premiere of his latest film, Carax was hit by a lorry and forced off the road. It was a miracle he wasn't killed; by rights he should be dead. The thought makes him wistful and he very nearly smiles.

Perhaps it's the fate of all enfants-terribles to burn too brightly and then wink out. Carax is a case in point; a prodigiously talented little prince who arrived on the scene in a blaze of precocity, with Juliette Binoche on his arm. The director doffed his cap to the nouvelle-vague on Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (1986) before rustling up a bruised Parisian Valentine with the luscious Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991). The problem, he claims, was that he didn't pay his dues, didn't court the press and the French establishment has hated him ever since. For the past two decades he has been winding down and down and almost out. "From the age of 20-30 I made three films. From 30-40 I made one film. From 40-50 I made zero films." He pulls a face. "I'm 51. It's not looking good."

All of which may well be true, although it rather ignores the sudden, left-field arrival of Holy Motors, which was shot in a rush and then exploded in the midst of the Cannes film festival like a demented firework display. How does one begin to pin down Holy Motors, a scattershot thesis on the nature of performance that finds room for mo-cap monsters and a singing Kylie Minogue? It's not only the year's most outrageous film, it's also one of the best. Denis Lavant plays M Oscar, a chameleonic actor ferried through a play-house Paris by his serene, sad-eyed chauffeur (Edith Scob) and variously disguising himself as a beggar-woman, a lusty satyr, a doleful dad and a dying man. Near the end, the white limousines repair to an underground garage and start talking among themselves, their tail-lights blinking, their daily chores complete.

For Carax, poor soul, the ordeal has just begun. Upstairs at the hotel, he curls into an armchair and orders jasmine tea. What he'd really like is another cigarette, so he takes one from the packet and twirls it endlessly in his free hand, constantly threatening to fire it up. What he really wants, I think, is for the interview to be over.

On wrapping his role in Holy Motors, Denis Lavant described the film as "a great poetic declaration of love for mankind today". Is this how Carax sees it? "No," he says. "But that's OK." He insists that it was as though he shot the film blind, walking through a dark tunnel with no end in sight. Even now, he's not entirely sure what it is he came up with.

So how does that work with the actors? Did they not require some proper guidance? Were they not forever wondering what their motivation was? Carax is horrified. "Well, I would never work with people who would say that. I don't work with people who ask me questions. That's the problem with speaking to you."

Let's try another tack. Some critics have speculated that Holy Motors is Carax's exuberant salute to the cinema he loves. They point to Kylie Minogue's crop-haired "Jean" as a reference to Breathless star Jean Seberg and the presence of a masked Edith Scob as a nod to the actor's early role in Georges Franju's brilliant Eyes Without a Face. Before setting forth as a filmmaker, the teenaged Carax steeped himself in the classics and then wrote reviews for Cahiers du Cinema. Here, surely, is where those age-old influences have all washed up.

The director isn't biting. If anything he regards Holy Motors as a science-fiction movie; a parable of human relationships in the internet age. It all started with those white limousines, which he saw as a neat symbol of the virtual world, in that they are rented by the hour; in that they want to be seen but won't let you see in; in that they are like living in a bubble. "I suppose I was trying to describe the experience of being alive in the internet world. The different lives we are able to live. The fatigue of being oneself. We all get a little tired of being ourselves sometimes. The answer is to reinvent yourself, but how do you do that and what is the cost?" He twirls his cigarette. "I know that's true for me. I feel as though I've exhausted a few lives already."

He was born Alex Christophe Dupont to a French father and an American mother in a hippie commune outside of Paris. He says that he was lost and lonely and in need of a home. "I changed my name when I was 13. I don't know why but it made sense at the time. I wanted another identity. I wanted to reinvent myself. And then when I was 16 I discovered this island called cinema and I thought: 'Oh how wonderful, I'm ready. I can live there with this new name of mine.' There was a beautiful symmetry to it all."

He insists that he had never seen a camera or worked with a crew by the time he came to make his first movie. But that was fine because he had an impish alter-ego in Denis Lavant, a masterly cinematographer in Jean-Yves Escoffier and a radiant muse in Juliette Binoche, his girlfriend of the time. Boy Meets Girl was a hard-scrabble love story and Mauvais Sang a dystopian tale about a runaway sexual virus. Carax, according to the New York Times, was "French cinema's reigning mad romantic".

So what went wrong? The evidence suggests that the director ventured too far upriver – fighting with his backers and ballooning his budget on Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, his swooning tale of an alcoholic street performer (Lavant) and a blind painter (Binoche) adrift in hyper-real Paris. The film made money but it left him ruined. "I was very lucky when I started to meet people I would work with for 10 years," he explains. "Lavant, Escoffier, and then I made films with my girlfriend. But Les Amants du Pont-Neuf ended all that. We spent three years working on it and everyone either died or separated or fought. After that I was left alone."

Some of the scars have yet to heal. I've heard a rumour that the Minogue role in Holy Motors was initially conceived with Binoche in mind. "Yeah, we tried to do something together. But we didn't get along, so I changed the scene completely and rewrote it for Kylie."

You didn't get along? "No. We didn't get along. And it was maybe a bad idea to begin with. Already people are saying Holy Motors is a film about my films. If Juliette had been in it, it would have been even worse."

In the wake of Les Amants, Carax went to America in search of funding, but the excursion came to nothing; he couldn't find a kindred spirit. In 1999 he bounced back with Pola X, another wanton love story, loosely adapted from a Herman Melville novel. But the film was a critical and commercial disaster and left its director feeling still more isolated. Making films drives him crazy, he says with a smirk. But not making films drives him crazier still.

What does he do when he's not making films? "Well," he shrugs. "I spend a lot of time falling sick. Falling in love. Reading. Trying to make films. Travelling. And now I have a daughter. She's seven. So that takes up time too." He studies his cigarette. "After each film there's such exhaustion and disappointment. And then if people don't like you and don't like the film, it's even harder to come back."

Maybe he needs to get over himself. Carax laments that he has trouble finding the right actors, the right producers, and that there is no point shooting if the pieces aren't in place. But how can he know unless he holds his nose and takes the plunge? Just jump in, I tell him. What's the worst that can happen?

"No," he says. "No. How do I know? I just know. I need at least two or three people. I need a good producer. Film has a budget but the relationship with money is very personal. It's not how to spend the money, it's how to spend Leos's money. I need help. I need money. I need two or three people."

Ordeal over, I escort Carax back outside and let him smoke his cigarette. He stands by the railings, his collar back up, his eyes still darting. I find myself torn between wanting to soothe him and wanting to shake him: this fragile, elfin little man has just produced an explosive, flamboyant tour-de-force and now worries that the world will never let him make another.

I tell Carax that I loved Holy Motors and he nods at the ground, endearingly unconsoled. "It's hard to say who you make a film for," he says. "But if you make them for anybody, I would say that you make them for dead people and then show them to living people. Every time I finish a film I expect a phone call from someone who's seen it: 'I saw your film, Leos, and you were right to make it.' I don't even know who that person would be. Just someone who would make it all OK. The dead people in my life? God?" He sucks on his cigarette. "It never comes. They never call."

Contributor

Xan Brooks

The GuardianTramp

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