Interview met François Ozon

5x2 is a story told backwards. Was that notion your initial starting-point?
No, the catalyst was wanting to make another film about a couple, a subject I'd already visited in Gouttes d`eau sur Pierres Brulantes, a somewhat subjective adaptation of a Fassbinder play that he wrote at the age of 19, displaying an adolescent vision of what being a couple is about, cruel yet somehow disillusioned. So 5x2 is a return to a similar theme, definitely written with greater experience, but not going into a heavy explanatory thing. Basically I feel it is easy to say that the daily grind can make things worse, but it's often only the visible part of the iceberg, with the real divergences hidden from view. The real reasons a couple comes apart are more profound, and I find that interesting. I wanted to film only the most significant moments in a relationship, without having to include the everyday as a plot.

How did you come to decide to write the story backwards?
I was struck by what Jane Campion did with "Two Friends", a TV drama which tells the story of a friendship backwards. The two girls separate at the start and the film takes us back to their first meeting. Stories told backwards often generate a kind of suspense: you hang on in for the final revelation. And in that case the only revelation was that the two women did not come from the same social background. There was something touching to me about that vision of friendship. Seeing the story backwards meant that you almost ended up forgetting that the two characters were destined to part. You were given a space within which to hope that the break-up might not happen after all, which seemed a perfect way of telling a love story.

Why?
When a love affair comes to an end and you try to remember the salient moments, the bits that come to mind are the most recent, those that culminate in the break-up. So starting at the end and working one way's backwards to the first encounter seemed a good way of attaining a more judicious and lucid account of how a couple came to be in the first place. The more you go back in time, the lighter, the more idealized the form is. I wanted the audience to experience the range of different emotions a couple experiences in the course of it's life, including indifference, disgust, dread, jealousy, competitiveness, togetherness, attraction… Also, I needed to try and make each episode of the film belong to a different genre of cinema. The first episode is a psychological drama, a "chamber film". The second part is more socially aware, a more classic French film. For the wedding section, I turned to certain American films and for the section in which they first meet, I looked to Rohmer's summer films. I wanted the movie to alter during its 90` minutes of screen-time so that the tone and issues would shift from chapter to chapter. It was fun to try to start the film with all the strongest scenes and see whether the dramatic still functioned as we worked our way backwards. On the set, my joke was that the beginning was like Ingmar Bergman, the end was like Claude Lelouch.

As in "Irreversible", your starting-point is a break-up and make your way to original happiness. But in Gaspard Noe's film, that sense of universal happiness is destroyed by an outside event, whereas in your film it seems an intrinsic part of existence.
Yes, that's why I did not place much emphasis on decision points in life. When there is a significant event, in terms of plot, such as when Marion sleeps with the American or Gilles fails to attend the birth of his child, I tried to treat these events in as inconspicuous a way as possible, so that the audience should not have to feel, "Now, this is the reason they split up". The film has to remain open, to not let it's structure turn into a form of explanation. The audience have to fill in the gaps between episodes by drawing on their own experience.

You mean you needed to give enough detail to draw the audience in, but not too much, so that the story remained in some way universally relevant. When did you decide what to put in and what to leave out?
During writing, during shooting and during editing. The main thing was to go easy on dialogue and explanation. In the dinner scene, for instance, originally, Gilles was seen to be unemployed while his wife was in work, so he stayed home to look after his child. But that was all a little too harsh on the character, it made him seem depressed compared to the energetic, feisty quality of his wife. It seemed to explain their break-up and was a little too specific to the characters. The challenge was to use this backwards story telling technique without falling into the obvious psychological patterns. The trick is to make the audience feel it is always learning a little bit more about the characters, when in fact they are growing steadily less familiar, almost abstract. What I most wanted to avoid was the notion that, "it was bound to end badly". Of course the relationship does come to an end, but I am not sure that this matters very much. The important thing is to have experienced it. I even wanted the last shot of the movie to make the audience want to relive it, to believe it could start over. That particular paradox is especially compelling: if you tell a story backwards, it acquires a somber, final quality and yet at the same time it progresses towards a luminous and optimistic ending. Or so it seems.

A separation, a dinner with friends, childbirth, a wedding, a first encounter…Were the number and nature of the different section set from the start?
At one point, I wondered if we needed a sixth part, between the wedding and childbirth, a moment of happiness before the children disrupt the couple. But I realized that the moment of perfect happiness had occurred before the wedding. It was in the dance scene. And the truth is that happiness as a couple is not really something I find inspiring. It's hard for me to write such a scene without giving it a darker edge.

And the notion of having an Italian song as an interlude between each scene?
At first the film was going to be called "the two of us", an ironic title which is also the name of a magazine in France. I was going to use the covers of the magazine as an opening credit sequence. I didn't in the end, but I needed something to offset the darkness of some scenes and I thought of Italians songs, which are almost a cliché of sentimentalism. In the film, it is the man who suffers most, so I chose songs by men. The most beautiful and moving Italian love songs are often sung by men, unlike French love songs.

You shot the beginning of the film and you stopped to shoot for five months before returning to shoot the other sections. Why?
It is a luxury, something I could treat myself to. You start working, stop, write a little bit more on the basis of what you have started to shoot, you start to cut, then you go off and shoot some more. It is a very fertile method and with this film it seemed all the more appropriate as I wrote the first three parts very quickly, then found I was blocked, especially about the encounter. When I shot the first part, I had a vague notion that when they met, Marion might be in mourning for her boyfriend. But to place something that strong at the end would change the way one saw the whole film. By taking a long break during shooting, I was able to avoid such easy screenwriting solutions, as well as give the actors time to change physically, to find a way of looking younger.

You had already tried breaking a shoot into two parts with Sous Le Sable...
In the second part of Sous Le Sable, I felt I needed to explain Bruno Kremer's disappearance. But when I shot the first part, I realized that Charlotte Rampling bore such strong fictional presence that I could afford not to explain the disappearance at all. All I had to do was explore certain avenues of explanation, without going into them fully, and so let the audience find its own explanation - in the mystery of Charlotte's face. 5x2 functions somewhat along similar lines: from the moment Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Stephane Freiss are credible as a couple, they are shown only in fairly ordinary circumstances. This procedure was vital. They had to carry the film, or I would not have been able to tend towards something slighter and underwritten in the second part.

How did you cast the film?
My first instinct was to go for stars, but I realized that I needed actors who were less familiar or the audience would not identify with them. What I wanted to, was to find the right couple. It had to be obvious familiarity and togetherness. It's fairly simple really: you put two actors side-by-side and you think, 'That Works'. I screen tested using a scene from Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes of Married Life", when Liv Ullmann's character calls on her husband to get him to sign the divorce procedure. Each of them is involved in a love affair. He is sick. She is about to go away. But they make love again, the togetherness returns, they are still very attached. It is a fascinating scene because it calls on the actors to show a succession of very varied and profound emotions.

Did any particular films they played in help you choose Stephane Freiss and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi?
I'd seen Stephane in a play by Yasmina Reza, at the theatre. He was very charming, yet slightly unsettling. Screen testing him, I immediately sensed that he has a big, introspective quality on screen. He seems very masculine and yet he is not quite there, he seems fragile, there is something almost childlike in his eyes. And regarding Valeria, I feel that despite an appearance of vulnerability, which is overused in her films, she can project a sense of power too. It was interesting to try and show both sides of her nature. She has performed in many films that require her to hold herself in slightly neurotic postures, to walk all huddled up, with her hair falling over her eyes. In this film, I wanted her to open up physically, to feel beautiful.

In the last shot, time seems suspended as it does at the end of Sous Le Sable…
There is specific action ("Let's have a swim"), but the shot acquires a symbolic charge. I wanted a shot that recalled those French teenage magazines about boyfriends and girl friends, like "Nous Deux", in which you always see lovers staring out at a sunset. The rest of the film avoids such imagery. This ending seems like a cliché, like something from a photo-novella, yet all that the audience has just been seen rubs off and they view the shot differently. Also, it seemed important that the lost should linger long enough, that the audience might have time to run the film back through their mind and put the story back together.

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