Laurent Cantet’s The Class is starting an impressive collection of awards.
Less than two weeks from now, it will be competing at the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film as France’s official entry. Last year, it was the first French film in 21 years to win the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. But more importantly around these halls, it’s the #1 movie of 2008 on JustPressPlay’s top ten list.
Sony Classics released the film in New York and LA in December. It has since trickled into a dozen or so more cities. We spoke with the film’s director, Laurent Cantet, a few months ago, just on the heels of it being selected as France’s pick for the Oscar race. During our talk, the French director touched on the film’s democratic process of shooting, what public schools should do and the difficulty of assimilating multicultural people in a modern nation.
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JPP: This could have been mistaken for a documentary, I think, if you didn't know about it.
Laurent Cantet: The beginning, you can think it is a documentary film, but very soon we decided to start the film like a chronicle of a school year. Some characters go out—emerge out of the group—and finally you really follow their story. And that story is obviously fiction, I think.
It's not exactly improv, right? What you do with the actors?
We worked with the actors all year in workshops. Improvising, trying to find the characters with them, trying to listen to their own experiences with school. And we—even during the shooting that took place during the several early days after the workshop—we leave a lot of space for improvisation, but very directed improvisation.
So they knew what they should say...
I was telling each of them a few lines I really wanted to hear—the kind of reaction I was expecting from them—and then Francois was starting the lesson, the scene, like a teacher would do in real life.
What about the questions, like when they were asking questions about a certain subject? Were they real questions?
Some were already written and I told them to ask them. And others come from their own expectations.
The subject of the class is very interesting to me. It’s Language—and that might just be Francois' profession when he was still a teacher... Was it?
Yes.
Because it really fits into... The film is a teacher trying to communicate with students and they’re talking about language.
This is the particular moments of the year of the work. Francois is not always discussing this way with the children but sometimes he accepted this kind of discussion because he thinks it is important to give sense to what they are doing there. They always negotiated what they were doing there. And after awhile, I think they can understand why they are learning and sitting here. If you don't understand why you are doing something, you don't do it really well. You don't learn anything if you don't know why you are learning. We decided to show these moments when the teacher accepts to discuss and the class becomes a school of democracy.
There are a lot of moments where they start to veer into almost a sociology class, when they start to talk about how they should behave in society.
I think school has two missions. One is to teach knowledge—and this is easy to do—and one is to help students grow up and become citizens, and find their place in the world, and understand what role they have in society.
I also think the classroom is where they shape their personalities.
Yes. We really decided to focus on those moments.
When they're talking about their roles in society, even the teachers have discussions about what to do with certain students. It almost feels like, it’s not just about a classroom, but society in general. When they discuss how to appropriately punish Suleiman, it’s like... "What do you do in a penal system?"
I think that’s also why the film can be shared by an international audience. We're not just talking about a French school system, but also all of society's issues that society doesn't want to look at usually—and are concentrated in school. For example, one of the main questions is what does it mean to be part of a community? What is it to share cultures? I think France has a real problem with that. To integrate children, France asks them to look like French people. They don't want to take into account the culture of each of them. I think that's one of the bigger differences between the French way of integration and the American one.
You say that, but it’s interesting to me that in the classroom itself, you see the tribalism. How people stick with each other, it’s like they're friends with their own kind and you see where they sit in class.
I think that if they do so, it's just... For example, the scene where they discuss soccer and a lot of them have a nationalist point of view. They don't feel designed by French community so they claim for their own culture—”I'm not French, I'm Malian”—even though they were born in France and their history is there.
I also like how you show the teacher side. It's not all about the one classroom. You show the teachers getting frustrated with having to teach these kids and there's this one teacher who gives this monologue about how he can't take it anymore.
Yeah, but the next time you see him in the film, he's defending the students more than the others. I think school is a succession of very happy moments and very depressing ones. And when you are a teacher, you are going up and down like that, knowing the crisis won't mean that everything is finished; and sometimes when you manage a good relationship with someone, doesn't mean tomorrow it will be the same. It's always changing and when you're a teacher you have to get used to that. Which is why I wanted this scene with the other teachers who don't have anything to say just looking at him, knowing that they might be in this situation the day after.
And they were all real teachers, right?
Yes.
They had input in this? They contributed their real feelings?
We had the same kind of work with the teachers as with the children. It was less often but we met together and improvised and discussed the situation. It was important for me to take into account the reality of this little world we were describing, because no one knows what's happening in the school besides the students and teachers.
Even them, they’re kind of separate.
Yes, because there is no good or bad way to be a teacher. I didn't want to judge their way of working.
Something you talk about in the film is that there's bound to be miscommunication. Francois says, “Academically limited,” when it gets to the students, it’s “What do you mean, limited?” You have to keep them separated at some level.
I think Francois is kind of an idealist. He would like to have this equality between him and his children, but he's confronted by this school system and must change his point of view. Because reality isn't as ideal as the way he imagines his job.
There are a lot of movies—American movies especially—about teaching inner city children. They always portray the teacher coming in and saving the children with their methods. But it didn't feel that way here because Francois is equally at fault.
I didn't want to create an ideal teacher, a kind of heroic character, because I think what the film is trying to do is show the complexity of the system, all the contradictions of the school system, all the implication of what is happening here can have on society, and how society can reflect itself here as a microcosm. All these questions can't be solved by one guy who arrives and says, "I have all these answers to the questions!" Francois is taking a lot of risks in making his job this way, accepting this kind of discussion. When you are in front of 25 children asking you a question, you have to answer in a second, like that [snaps fingers], because they don't want to give you the opportunity to answer it later. So when you have to answer very fast... Okay, you make mistakes. You are improvising and you make mistakes. You can’t avoid that.
Is that your role during the shoot, too? You listen to the actors and have to interject.
That's one of my pride about the film. It has been done in symbiosis with its subject. The class that I wanted to show was a space of democracy and the film has been made in a democratic process. I was listening to everyone. Everyone could impose his/her way of thinking the scene, [and say if a scene] was strong enough to convince [the audience or not]. We really worked in the same spirit as what the film is trying to show. I think you can feel that in watching the film.
