Gaspard Noé: You have been to Africa severals times, even before going there to film, right?

Hubert Sauper: Yes, Kisangany Diary was made at the end of a long stay, actually my first. Aside from that I lived briefly in Tanzania in ‘97 working with a friend that had opened a production company. This was the first such business in Tanzania’s history. I helped out in making TV commercials for the national Tanzanian soap, know as the Findi or Winner, a sort of long yellow baguette that you cut pieces off of. This soap was used to wash yourself, for laundry, cars, boats, airplanes ... It was during the shooting of an airplane washing scene that I met these Russian pilots that later played a role in Darwin’s Nightmare.

GN: But that wasn’t actually the town where you filmed Darwin’s Nightmare? Why did you go there initially?

HS: The first trip was for the soap.

GN: Why this town and not another?

HS: It just worked out that way, I don’t quite remember. My friend had landed a bunch of contracts and had asked me to help out in making these ads as he was overwhelmed. We spent a whole month crossing Tanzania. I already had a project in mind dealing with the refugies in the The Congo, as the air lifts had been removed from Tanzania. I had already been in touch with the UN. Then after meeting the Russians, I went back to see the UN, “so there, I know a few pilots, can you take me along in the planes?” and I was off to the east of the The Congo with my partner Suzanna.

GN: And what the heck was she doing there?

 

HS: Suzanna? She played the accordian. No, she actaully did a bunch of things. She took care of the children. We were discovering Africa. We were meeting a lot of people, and I was preparing this documentary. And the only way to get into the Congo, was via the UN transport

GN: Did you use a professional film camera?

HS: No, it was this crappy Hi 8.

GN: The thing is that the sound is surprisingly clear.

HS: It’s clear, since the people I am filming are relatively close, and there are no highways near by.

 

GN: Because I remember, you have this shot with a bunch of kids and this guy getting up, and the image is rough looking with really big grain, but the sound is super clear.

HS: It’s just the mike from the camera, because there’s no noise. That’s the advantage of filming in the jungle, everything is very present.

GN: When making documentary films these days, it no longer crosses your mind to do it in 16mm? The whole process of putting the reel in the camera, changing it, knowing that you need to stop in 10 min, develop the negative ... a lot more complicated than using a camera like the Panasonic DVX100 ...

HS: I guess it all depends on your level of concentration. Sometimes when you need to film a lot, it is hard to keep up.

GN: Getting back to Africa, in comparison to the west, death is delt with on a daily basis. Everyone is telling you that they have lost half their children, that their brother is dead ... You say it is a sort of general hecatombe, but suprisingly, I don’t have the impression that they themselves feel they are punished, I mean for them, the hardships they endure, having lost a child, or the wife that has lost an eye ... they’ve taken so many blows for such a long time.

HS: Yes, I think this is so much more than just a part of their lives, but the mourning

GN: Have you seen the film Children Underground (Edet Belzberg, 2000)? It’s about these kids that live in the subway in Roumania. These kids that have been abandonned by their families. This little girl gets raped, yet when you see her hideous step-father threatening her, who’s a meter taller than her, you can understand why she would prefer to live in the subway surrounded by all these other kids that hit her. When it comes to human cruelty, documentaries can go so much further than films.

HS: Documentary can play a better role of representation if it is used as cinema. Documentary is too often thought of as a news report, a sort of illustrated text in our minds. I just try to see the firemen when they arrive, and to hear their voices when they arrive. When one does that, who does he think I am? Does he think that I can’t see the firemen arrive? Am I considered an idiot? If considered an idiot, the mind will go to sleep after three times. We don’t just loose our attention span, but also all sense of responsibility, because this voice is explaining everything we see. If you want to fly an airplane, you need a licence, or even a car, you need a licence. If you spread idiotic images throughout the world, you don’t need anything, anyone is free to do so. It’s quite strange, as there ought to be responibility associated with the making of images and sound without the know-how required.

GN: I’m in the process of looking for special effects for my next film, which has lead me to watch all the Armaggedon, Apollo 13, ... science fiction films ... I’ve watched about 60 films. In conclusion, you realise that it’s all propaganda film making. It’s all the self confident Americans,

sympathetically sending their people to go fight martians or the destruction of the world. It’s always the Americans going off and saving everything. This doesn’t exist in Italian cinema or French cinema.

HS: Well, it’s all part of a much longer

conversation related to the second world war, because you have the British and the Americans that let Hitler go a long way before reacting, till things had gone much too far. So in a sense, just as they saved the world, they also let it sink.

GN: And then they took part in sectioning Europe which lead to many more problems, and the same with the Middle East. Actually, they came to share the cake. There’s a fabulous 3 hour documentary on Saudi Arabia, The Saoud’s House, and how the Americans infiltrated. In the past, wars were over politics or religion, now it’s nothing but economic wars for markets.

HS: I think that if you were to make a film about the state of our times, it would be about nothing more than economics. Before it was more about ideas, Marxism, etc. Now the bottom line is always the dollar. All human relations have been reduced to this sort of game “I give to you, you give to me”.

JWD: There are people that seem to believe there is a conflict when creating a documentary or news report, if you already have a premeditated outcome to your work.

HS: For Darwin, the film existed in my head well before I even began filming.

JWD: I think this is probably the first time I have seen something that has been put together in such a way, a documentary film where there isn’t any sort of narration guiding you throughout, like a new form in cinema.

HS: It’s hard to say. In a sense it is classic narration, where you give certain elements. Well, I knew one thing: the mind does not like to receive orders, but rather elements from which it can draw its own conclusions. If you get the impression that you start to be aware of something that I already know, you get this sort of intellectual satisfaction. This way you will really learn something. This is what makes the art of it, it’s been this way since the beginning of time: giving clues from which you create your own

GN: Have you seen the film Mémoire d’un saccage (Fernando Solanas, 2004)? It’s a lesson in economics about the stock market crash in Argentina. It’s really complex and really educational. I think that the lesson learnt in Darwin is pretty simple. Documentaries contain many more useful elements for the human mind than do fiction films.

HS: You also have educational fiction films. I prefer to speak of cinema or non-cinema. Cinema is typically a sort of poetic product, intelligent and artistic, in contast to fast-food images void of meaning. I will be making a fiction film in The Congo. A fiction film with so-called actors, a script, yet it will still be pretty heavy as well. It will be a film that will emotionally and intellectually strike the same cords.

GN: In Africa, in particular, you have so many existential plots. I had interviewed this guy that had quite recently discovered that he had AIDS, and he still hadn’t told his wife or kids. He didn’t know if he should tell them. He’d think to himself: “If I tell my wife, she will leave running, and I’ll find myself alone with my three kids.” He had no money, no electricity, nothing. It had been four months that he would no longer make love to his wife. When we filmed in his house, the kids were so excited to see an electric light bulb for the first time, yet his wife would just keep asking him why he was being filmed. A very strange situation. You very rarely run into such existential

HS: In a way this is a good point. Could you imagine making a film on global capitalism in New York? You just can’t find things on the surface like that. You have computer screens, people on the phones, everything is very indirect. In Africa things are much closer to their true nature.

GN: Will you be using documentary elements in your next film?

HS: I may use certain images.

GN: You can also make fiction with people that are actually close to the subject. A lot of films are made this way. I notice this in this film Lilja 4-ever (Lukas Moodysson, 2002), which was shot in part in Russia and in Sweden. It’s the story of this Russian girl whose mother disappears, abandonning her. This guy offers her work, and she ends up at age 16 hooking in the streets of Sweden.

HS: This film had a political impact in Sweden.

GN: Actually a little eveywhere. It was used trying to stop sex traffic. There is a poetic sequence that I found quite poignant in the film, when you see this young prostitute’s subjective view of all the guys she’s had. It is a 2-3 minute sequence where you see about 50 faces that come and go. Some guys that are not too unpleasant, 45 year olds or young athletic 20 year olds. You see all these faces run by one after another. It becomes really suffocating. You think to yourself — this is what work is for a prostitute. Prostitues must have between 30-40 guys a day. And when you ask them if they take pleasure, they answer: “ya, twice a week, there are some guys that I like”. But when you do the maths, two guys out of 200, what’s that? Films that present prostitution as assembly line work are quite rare.

Did you have moments during the making of your film where you felt the urge to cry?

During my filming in Africa, I had moments of deep sadness.

HS: I cried at the editing table. Alone with 200 hours of footage, I was faced with seeing it all and hearing the voices. Seeing Elizabeth, that had been killed. I watched her speak knowing that she was dead. When I was there I was with my friend who was assisting me. We would often find ourselves in our small room at night and we would ask ourselves, what this day had been all about. Sometimes, you just don’t find what you are looking for anymore. And then all of a sudden, there is like an explosion of new

elements that start working together.

GN: And don’t you feel that when you are faced up close to people’s true sadness that it strengthens you, not from sadism, but that your life by comparision seems magnificent, your little narcissistic problems are stunted by comparission to their true sadness, linked to genocide and sickness.

HS: Yes, but then it’s the big question as to the definition of sadness, and I think that sadness is pretty equally dispersed throught out the world. Having nothing to eat, that is sadness, but being alone in an apartment at 90 years old, not being loved, or for a child to see his father go off to work, that is another form of sadness. Here, our sort of glaciation of society is as collective a sadness as hunger in the Sudan.

GN: In Kisangany Diary, you have lots of moments that are really disturbing. Like when you see that child born dead. But one of the worst is the little child that is all alone, that is put on the ground, that is picked up, then put down again, he is dead, he is not dead, and you see this photographer pass him by with his huge lens. The man is well fed, he has clean pants. He looks and asks himself:” What do we do with this baby?” and then all of a sudden, it is as if he himself no longer perceives this as a human life. It’s useful, or not useful: it’s something quite simple when you see the baby, you just want to take him in your arms and take him away, yet you know you can’t, because when you are sitting there, watching the scene, there is nothing can be done, that baby has already died.

HS: In film, the scene is unbearable, but in real life it is quite banal. It’s strange how film isolates this view. It is just part of rows of children all in the same state, and when you live within this, you can’t be at the battle of Stalingrad and cry when you see someone die, no, in reality everyone around is dying. Here it was the same, and I don’t recall this particular moment as being particularly unbearable, just another moment among others. Sometimes the camera can see better than our own eye. It’s almost a miracle.

GN: The goal is to try to create more

HS: Hard to say. My reflex is not to make a film for the good of the world. I think I do have the desire, as do many other authors, to reveal myself, to bring my perspective and to say clearly, here, this is what I think, this is what I see and I have personally experienced this story and I would like to tell it to you.

GN: In your film, you don’t have the bad guys on one side and the good guys on the other. That’s talent.

HS: I know that not everything I film is new. I am not the missionary that tells you that Africa is in deep shit and that children are dying. Yet, I do feel that we are missing different image treatments, put together in a different kind of way. I think it spefically works on the form, the rhythm, and the editing, that can make a difference in bringing more complexity to this reality: the polarity of the white man, with his large lens camera, and at the same time not trying to denounce him, or make him out to be some kind of living asshole. I wanted to show this because it was important, but without saying: Here, this is the ass, because he was there, just like I was. I was there too.    continue