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When we meet in a Brussels café where she came to present her second film, Deniz Gamze Ergüven emerges a rare alliance of strength and fragility, able to seize a violent episode of African American story and make it his own. At almost "three years without sleeping", the closing of two episodes of The First (a series of one of the creators of House of cards for the Hulu platform) and soon two babies, the director of just 40 years decided to blow a little before resuming the writing of a new feature film this summer. Daughter of a Turkish diplomat who grew up in France since the age of six months, graduated from the Fémis, she began working on Kings in 2006, a year after the riots in the French suburbs to crystallize in her "a certain malaise", while she was denied French nationality for the second time – finally obtained since the success of Mustang feminist bomb addressed to Turkey by Erdogan. Ergüven then returned with Kings in immersion in these six days of riots (and 53 deaths) after the acquittal of police officers responsible for the beating of the black taxi driver Rodney King. As in Mustang Ergüven attaches to free and teenage figures (the film opens with the murder of the young Latasha Harlin, which occurred in a grocery store a year before the riots) and follows the escape of a group of afro teenagers (one girl and two boys, one pacifist, the other more radical – like two disciples of the currents initiated by Martin Luther King and Malcom X), under the empathetic gaze of Millie (Halle Berry) , a social worker who will make alliance with the only white neighborhood (Daniel Craig – delivering in pbading an erotic dream scene of unprecedented tenderness under the jackets of James Bond). To dare such a scenario, which comes back with a romantic look at the rioters, we had to be able to rely on the real. Deniz Gamze Ergüven did it. The result is a fiery and painful work, interspersed with archival images, broken hearts and unexpected smiles, like signals of distress, the hope of which escapes, however, by puffs, to us.
What touched you particularly in the Los Angeles riots, you who did not grow up in the United States?
I was very touched by the riots in the 2005 French suburbs. riots became a mirror of a malaise that I was not the only one to live. I started reading a lot about riots, it became obsessive. Riots always have the same pattern, in the way they rave about police violence during a power vacuum, and then burst. The riots in Angeles have the distinction of having been extremely mbadive and touching an entire community across all generations, as if the volume of waste had been pushed to the maximum. I organized myself quickly to spend a month in South Central in the neighborhood where it happened in 1992 in Los Angeles. The film was confirmed when I realized that during these five unlicensed days the most absurd situations happened, and that some could smile too. All the details of the film are true. The police really let people climb the lampposts, McDonald's managers were negotiating with the rioters with burgers to protect their stores, people were settling their bills, stitching toilets and it was this dissonance that attracted me , this pbadage from dark to light. That's how the intuition of the film came in.
This is also the tone of Mustang ?
Yes. What interests me is the break in tone. That's how someone who has listened to Chopin all his life starts to hear Thelonius Monk, there are some chords that can seem dissonant. That's what exactly affects me.
We remember Kathryn Bigelow's recent Detroit about the riots of 1967, which dealt with racial violence in a very frontal way: how did you approach the treatment of violence?
From film to film, Kathryn Bigelow masterfully deals with the violence of American society, it is her subject. Detroit tells how an entire city is imbued with this collective unconscious. She manages to move from one character to another, seamlessly, his artistic direction seems beautiful. The scenes of violence in Mustang and in Kings are also pillars of the films. I could not avoid them, but I was confused about how to tell all this. The scenes of Rodney King's lynching archives are terrible. They correspond to the fact that America often asks the wrong questions. It's so striking today, to see how much the country has built on segregation. I spent the winter in New Orleans, the schools are always whites on one side blacks on the other. This is the heart of American history, it's their central tragedy.
What partners were Halle Berry and Daniel Craig on this film about these issues?
Halle Berry thought it was really time to talk about all this. We began our preparation at the time of the Charlottesville violence (when a white supremacist rolled on the crowd, killing an anti-racist protester in August 2017 Editor's note). Trump came to power on the eve of the shoot, the crowd scene was being shot the day before his inauguration, the police had to move the shoot. Everything was resonating. But then when the film was released in the United States in late April it was muted. As for Daniel Craig, it seems to me that we had a rather similar view of outsiders on America, even if he is very New York today.
Adolescents Are at the Heart of Mustang and Kings : Why?
Adolescence acts as a revelator. There is something very pure and very innocent in the adolescent point of view, which reacts very strongly. The title of the movie "Kings" (kings) greets the memory of Rodney King and Martin Luther King – but also reverses the negative perception of the black men of the time. In the TV archives of the riots, I was very shocked to see how much black youth was stigmatized, demonized as "African wasps". Rodney King was treated as an outcast. The point of view of the film is that of Millie (Halle Berry) who has a different perspective on these children. We can also consider that the clash between the two teenagers, Jesse and William, has something of a clash of kings between two streams of ideas, two schools – pacifism against action. As an heir to Martin Luther Ling and a heir to Malcom X who are fighting against each other
Are you optimistic about the evolution of the representation of African-Americans in Hollywood?
In general, the American society s is built around the cinema. Many of their perceptions depend on the cinema that maintains something. One of the greatest films in American history is Griffith's Birth of a Nation which is also one of the most racist films of all time. Then there was a permanent demonization of African-Americans. I struggled to raise financially Kings because it made me understand that nobody wanted to see that, or while the film was necessarily badigned to the genre of "Urban movies" as Menace To Society. Clearly the success of Black Panther has changed the game this year. But the stigma changes target. Today being Middle Eastern in the United States remains a plague, it is really "bougnoulistan". The writers do not go there, they fantasize from their offices through a telephoto lens that crushes all the subtleties of the world and generates products that are Fox Tv, clumsiness and ignorance. I register the opposite of this vision.
Drama
Kings
Directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven. With Halle Berry and Daniel Craig -87 '
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