Michel Hazanavicius may not be that well known outside of his native France, where he’s spent most of his career directing television. But his sly spy spoof OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies has been one of the surprise hits of the summer across the Channel, and even as it lands in the UK, the director is already starting work on a sequel. We went to see what’s what.
LWLies: A lot of the humour in OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies is very French. How well do you think it translates outside France?
Hazanavicius: We showed the movie in different countries and it’s not the same reaction in all the countries. In the United States, the people liked the movie very much and they laughed more than in France. I think it’s not so French to mock the French – the French don’t mock the French so much, this is very English or Belgian. This is very specific humour. In France we like the French, so we don’t laugh at the French. In Japan the people didn’t laugh so much but do the Japanese laugh? I don’t know. In the States actually they laughed earlier in the movie because they catch the joke quicker than in France. In France people wait to see exactly what the movie is before they allow themselves to laugh.
LWLies: It got really excellent reviews in quite serious press, like in Cahiers du Cinéma. Were you surprised by that, because they can be quite snobby can’t they?
Hazanavicius: Yes but I’m a snob too! Yeah I was surprised because it’s a comedy and when you do a comedy you don’t have such good press in general. We have been very lucky for this one. Maybe it’s because of the movie and maybe it’s because the French comedies, I think, are not so good. I mean, they can be very fun but in terms of cinematography, the care to make the movies… We had the chance to make a stylish movie.
LWLies: What were you particularly inspired by to get the look?
Hazanavicius: The first Bond movies, the Hitchcock movies from the late ’50s and the French B-movies of this period, I mixed in to make this one.
LWLies: Why did you decide to work on the project in the first place? Did you like the books?
Hazanavicius: No. Actually the impulse to make the movies, the producers had it. They wanted to make an adventure comedy and the scripters wrote a first draft of the script and then I put some things myself in the movies. I like comedies and I like to do comedies and it was the occasion to make a stylish comedy.
The books are very bad books. The character is really racist and misogynistic and homophobic and so on. The writer and scenarist read the book, tried to read one and he told me some sentences in the book which are terrible, very horrible, so we forget it and we make our character and we just take everything that is bad in the character and we try to put it in a way to be funny.
LWLies: James Bond is quite similar to that isn’t it? The early films are often quite racist and misogynistic.
Hazanavicius: James Bond is a little bit but the original OSS I think is more stupid. Because I think Sean Connery has an irony, the way he plays the character is very ironic, when you look at him it’s funny. The French one is not, so it was, for us, a way to speak about today. By borrowing the mood of the past they can say things that they wouldn’t be able to say.
LWLies: There were other films as well in the ’60s. Did you watch them at all? Were they equally appalling?
Hazanavicius: Yes, they were really B-movies. I think there’s seven or eight movies and they are not so good. When they try to be funny I think they are not so funny. They are very funny when they try to be serious and so we mocked these movies but at the same time we like it because they are very stuck in this period, late ’50s, early ’60s, so it’s funny because they are really stupid and the way people were thinking is so funny. In one example they are in a lift with a lady, he just has to look at the lady and the lady’s in love with him, so naïve.
LWLies: You do sometimes push the comedy quite close to the edge, it’s quite a gentle film but there were a couple of ‘Oh my God!’ moments. How far did you feel you could go with that?
Hazanavicius: I want to go as far as possible but I don’t want to hurt people. I don’t want people to laugh at something and feel bad – feel that they’re laughing at something which is not clean, you know when you go out of the theatre you don’t feel ashamed to have laughed at this joke. It is very important, so there’s a lot of work actually to make these kinds of jokes digestible.
LWLies: Were there any moments where you felt like you had to cut it off or was it quite instinctive the whole time?
Hazanavicius: There were some narrative points. For example, when he opens a door it’s always closed by someone. When he says bad things someone will look at him. The audience have got these sort of witnesses so you can position yourself as an audience member with that person who’s showing that it’s a bit off what we’re seeing. You have to know who’s talking, where’s the film’s point of view. So for the first 20 minutes it’s spending time to say we are gentle, we think like this, we are not like this. There’s 20 minutes of presentation of the movie itself and when the audience starts to say, ‘Okay, I know you’re politically correct, stop with that…’ then we can go on.
We also try not to have one single target, because this guy is so stupid he doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t hate anybody, he just doesn’t know, so he says what he thinks it’s good to say because of the period and the fact he’s French, he’s white, he’s Catholic so everyone who’s not like him is under him. You know that’s the way he thinks. And the other point is to put the action in the ’60s to make the audience feel comfortable because you can enjoy the distance and you can judge it and say, ‘Okay, this is the period’. If you do exactly the same jokes today, I’m not sure it will be digestible. But the second one is worse. Because the jokes are with the Jews.
LWLies: Did you make up a plot completely, it wasn’t from anywhere in particular?
Hazanavicius: Yes. It’s a very stupid story and I am not sure anyone can understand the story. But there’s something very special because the children, they really like the movie, the eight-year-olds, and I try to think why, because I didn’t make it for the children and I think it’s sometimes a little bit sophisticated but they liked it and I think it’s because nobody can really understand the story I think, but the main character doesn’t understand more than we do so there’s no problem. But it’s stupid story.
LWLies: Does it bother you that, outside France, the audience for World Cinema and that for spy comedies don’t overlap so much, so a lot of people who would watch it if it were English language will miss out?
Hazanavicius: We had this problem, it’s not a problem, I can’t do anything about it but that’s what happened in Japan specifically and a little bit in United States as well. Exported French cinema is very introspective cinema, small economy movies, and in other countries, that’s what people want to see when they go to see a French movie. This is a problem and this is not because when people see it and they like it they are very pleased. But it’s difficult to make them come in the theatres for sure.
