Script Q&A: A Prophet

At the end of the movie, did you have an idea of what he is when he gets out?

Bidegain: Yes, he gets into politics (laughs).

Audiard: No, this is possible. What I tell myself is that he is going to try to run away from everything he built, and maybe he will have to go back to what he knows best, which is a criminal, to succeed. And then he would have a third life. When I say politics, that is not ironic, to serve the public good. There are a lot of things we thought about. It was a lot about organization of the human soul, and he’s interested in the public good. At one point, we had this idea that he would become the lover of a woman in politics. He would help her in protection, and at one point, she would present herself to the president, and the film starts the night of the election.

Having a father who is a screenwriter, how much did he influence you, and how did you learn from him?

Audiard: (long pause) I am absolutely the son of my father. Except that … no, not except. When you are a child, and you see someone like my father who was always writing, cinema was really a profession, not an art. It was just a job. It was not an art. Start at 8:00 and finish at 6:00. So it was a very simple vision, a very simple knowledge of cinema, not mystified, not a dream. This was why I didn’t want to go into cinema. At first, I studied literature. My father belonged to a generation in France, who had very little respect for cinema. The fascination went toward literature or theatre. The cinema was just a joke. I was an assistant editor on Polanski films, and who really influenced me was the head editor. She was an extremely smart woman, very bright, I learned a lot from her.

How was it working with real prisoners?

Tahar Rahim: It was a pleasure; they were really nice, very sweet. They are good men. They were ex-convicts, and it’s true that they knew how to behave in a jail environment. As a human being, when you meet someone, you don’t meet that person’s past. Using them forced us to be real. They will set the tone, and they made the movie good. When we were arriving to the jail, all the noise and people were really making it alive.

Audiard: Sometimes I would pick one guy; you bring him the cigarettes, you bring him a baguette. Immediately they were there. They were the smartest backgrounds actors I’ve ever used because they knew how to behave.

Rahim: I tried to put together the work. Typically, when it looks very simple on the screen, it’s very difficult to make.

How difficult was it to help your character grow? There’s this amazing conflict that you have in your mind, that we see on your face, when César is being beaten up–please describe that?

Rahim: At that time, in that scene? I don’t know how to explain it, I didn’t want to be too complicated–I didn’t want to think about the beginning, the middle, the end. That was a mistake I made at the beginning of the shooting. Because doing it that way, I will just close myself and become very secluded. It wasn’t to ask more questions, but ask less questions, the right questions, the ones that will help me between one scene and another. I will ask the right questions and get the right answers. From what I remember of building the character was to go in one direction, but stay in the truth of the scene. I just had to think about the moment in that scene, and in another sequence, I will ask myself how I felt in that moment. I didn’t think ahead. There were things that I did not understand.

Was it filmed chronologically?

Bidegain: No, it wasn’t. There were a lot of questions about hair. His hair was always changing.

What are you thinking about Oscar® time?

Audiard: We go on a plane, we dress well, we drink, then we applaud, and that’s it. That has been our life the last few weeks. Next week we do the same thing in Los Angeles, in better clothes.

* A Prophet (from Sony Pictures Classics) opens February 26, 2010. For more information, visit sonyclassics.com/aprophet

Danielle Alberico has worked in creative development and as a freelance journalist in both New York City and Los Angeles. She is currently working to sell her third screenplay, El Torito: To Hell and Back, based on the life of the super middleweight boxer, Tony Ayala Junior. She has worked for the Style network, Canal Plus, Scriptawish.com, and Howard Stern On Demand.

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