My first glimpse of Claire Denis is of a slight, elegant figure dressed in white slipping out of a black limousine that fills the narrow street outside the hotel where our rendezvous is scheduled. For an instant, I feel as if I have been sucked into the menacing world of her latest film. I have just travelled to Paris to interview her, and have arrived early because I am anxious not to waste a minute of the 45 I have been granted to investigate the extraordinary career of a French director idolised by peers such as Barry Jenkins, Charlotte Wells, Andrea Arnold and Pedro Almodóvar and whose work is a fixture of critics’ lists of the best movies ever made.
At 77, Denis is a formidable presence. She speaks a handful of languages and made two films during the Covid pandemic, both of which won European film festival awards last year. Both Sides of the Blade took the Silver Bear at Berlin, while Stars at Noon – the film we are here to discuss – tied for the Grand Prix at Cannes. Based on an early, semi-autobiographical novel by the poet and novelist Denis Johnson, it’s the story of a reckless young American woman trapped in Nicaragua who tries to flee the country in a stolen car with her English lover (Joe Alwyn), a mysterious character she has randomly picked up. He claims to be a businessman but keeps a gun in his sponge bag and appears to be wanted by the CIA.
Trish, bewitchingly played by Margaret Qualley, is a hard-drinking wannabe journalist who has been reduced to hustling in a country in the grip of armed struggle, after her passport was confiscated and all her ideas were rejected by the upmarket travel magazine for which she used to freelance. Everything in her world is slippery, not least the truth, and it’s impossible for her to earn a living other than by submitting to the favours of police and politicians. But Denis is not happy when I say so. “It’s so bourgeois to say that,” she snaps. “I would say she can earn a living. But it’s hard to start out as a young woman. It’s the same way I started as a film-maker. I think, in life, unless you are brought up in a rich family and everything is easy, you always go through dire straits. It wasn’t easy to make films as a woman in the 80s, you know.”
When I clumsily suggest that she seemed to have made a pretty respectable start, as the protege of some of the world’s finest directors, including Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders and Jacques Rivette, the interview very nearly becomes a whole lot shorter. “Protege!” she explodes. “It’s insulting. What a vision of women you have. It’s so disgusting to say things like that. Would you use that word for a man? I was working as an assistant director. I made my own way and was paying my own rent. They chose me because I was good at my job.” She won’t accept that perhaps the word has a different meaning in English. But then this was the woman who dismissed Zadie Smith from writing her 2018 sci-fi drama High Life, saying; “We were so opposed on every idea. There was not a word we could share.”
In the mid-1980s of Johnson’s novel, Nicaragua was a centre of political idealism, as the Sandinistas, who had recently freed the country from dictatorship, took on the US-backed Contras. Trish – like Johnson himself – was one of the idealists who found her illusions dashed, and her life very nearly derailed, by living realities. Denis has updated the story to the era of Covid face masks. “To do a period film would have been very negative because so many people died in the revolution,” she says. “But I could feel in Nicaragua the immense pride of the revolution and also the equivalent of the fear that the president might become a dictator. I don’t feel the story has dated, to be honest. Central America has always had to hold a very difficult balance because of its closeness to the US.”
As if to illustrate her point, just as she was about to start filming in the country itself, an election was called by President Daniel Ortega, who had led the post-revolutionary Sandinista government and who now ruthlessly cracked down on opponents, creating a new culture of violence that would have made her film set uninsurable even if she could have guaranteed the safety of her cast and crew. Undaunted, she shifted the shoot to Panama, which, she says, had always been plan B. There is a smoky, jazz energy to the film that is partly the result of needing to improvise to get it made. But it raises an issue: how does a director with such strong political principles justify using a revolution as background colour for the story of an affair between two expatriates?
“That’s intentional, of course,” she says. “The novel and the film are really putting in the foreground the fact that two people fell in love and they can’t help each other because they can’t tell the truth to each other. That’s really what I wanted. And I think it’s exactly like in life. Desire for someone puts a lot of things in the background. But I think that there’s a problem with many films – and maybe they are the sort you like – that always put everything together, like spices. That’s typically the sort of film I don’t understand.”
It was the middle of the rainy season when the film crew finally set to work. In one powerful scene, which upends every cliche about car chases and weather, the couple make a slow-motion getaway in a taxi with the rain sluicing down so hard that the driver can’t see where he is taking them. There was no need for a rain machine, says Denis. They just filmed the rain scenes when it rained. In that particular scene, the camera boom and its operator were in the car with the actors, with Denis herself directing from the boot.
Does she ever feel scared? “All the time. Everything about film-making is frightening,” she replies. “I’m scared before about making a bad movie, about not being true to the actors, to the story, to the image of the world. But on a set it’s too late. There is no time for fear.”
Fear has never stopped her. Born into a civil service family, Denis spent her childhood moving around west Africa. She knew she wanted to throw her lot in with film but avoided the difficulty of explaining such a wayward vocation to her parents by getting married young to a photographer she had known since her mid teens in the knowledge that, as a married woman, she had the right to make her own choices. Among the first was to divorce him and go her own way.
Her first feature film, Chocolat (1988), was set in Cameroon, where she spent part of her childhood. “I needed to make it clear that Africa was not finished for me,” she says. “I was raised by my parents to realise I had to take into consideration I was white. But we were trying to live in the most normal way possible. I was always sent to the school of the city or the village where we were.” It was only when she worked with the South African musician Abdullah Ibrahim, and was invited to screen her film in the homeland from which he was exiled under apartheid, that she realised just how deadly race politics could be, she says. Her second film, Man No Run, was a documentary about a group of Cameroonian musicians touring France. Possibly her most celebrated work, Beau Travail (1999), was about French Foreign Legionnaires in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, and she will be returning to Cameroon later this month to scout for locations for her next project, which she finished writing last week.
For all her pugnaciousness, Denis remains open to having her mind changed by people she respects. A case in point is the Harvey Weinstein moment, which she dismissed in a 2018 interview as “a debate of spoiled children”. She has no recollection of saying that. “Maybe I was tired,” she says vaguely, then concedes that, only ever having seen him on the red carpet at Cannes, initially she had no reason to take a view. “Then I asked Juliette Binoche [whose films with her include Let the Sunshine In, which she was publicising at the time]. And she explained it to me, and I understood that for those young actresses it has been a problem in their life. One person was brave enough to raise it, then a second one, and suddenly the door was open.”
Does she think it has made a difference? “They learn a little bit more to protect themselves. But when you’re young, you’re less afraid. I remember when I was young, I couldn’t believe someone could force me against my will. Of course, I was wrong. But at that point, I’d been very lucky, because I was born in that brief moment where younger women knew a little bit about feminism and that it’s necessary to protect your own body. Nobody will do it for you. I was hitchhiking all the way through the south of Spain with my English pen friend, and we were not afraid.”
This brings us back to the damaging behaviour of Trish in the film – and particularly her relationship with alcohol. “I’ve been drinking myself when I was insecure, sometimes,” says Denis. “I know that feeling of needing a drink. Not getting drunk all the time. But drinking, when you have not much money, helps a lot. I know that feeling of being in despair and hoping a glass of rum will help me to get through. And then two, and then three. Of course, I knew that. And it’s still there today, you know? Sometimes rum is a good thing.”
Our 45 minutes is up and her people are hovering, but she’s in full flow and waves them away. Over the next 45, she sweeps from rum, to the violation of body modification for young women, the importance of showing menstruation on film as a normal part of sexual intimacy, and how no roosters were injured in her controversial 1990 film about cock-fighting. Her own politics are still strong. Has she been part of the current protests in France about the age of retirement? “Of course,” she says. “It’s not written on my face, but I don’t think you can live in a country without being interested by politics. I pay tax and I live in France. Being a French person, I consider the minimum I can do is to be interested in my own country.”
Then she circles back to the #MeToo moment. “In film,” she says, “there might be more respect now for this and that, but it’s not a reality. I hope, maybe little by little, it will become one. But when you see that some state in the US has stopped abortion, it’s weird. It’s frightening.” As she finally stands to leave, she dismisses me with a wave and just the hint of a smile. “Protege! I will not forget that. You have not redeemed yourself.”
In both the French and the English sense, Claire Denis is formidable.
• Stars at Noon is available digitally on 19 June.
