by James Mottram
The French courtroom saga has enjoyed something of a renaissance over the past few years. Think of the sublime Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall, Alice Diop’s Saint Omer or real-life saga The Goldman Case. Now comes The Thread, co-written/directed/produced by and starring the imperious French actor, Daniel Auteuil. He plays Maître Jean Monier, a lawyer called to defend a father and husband, Nicholas Milik (Grégory Gadebois) accused of murdering his alcoholic wife.
No stranger to confronting and complicated works (see Michael Haneke’s Hidden), Auteuil knows exactly what drew him to this legal battleground. “The courtroom is the place where you meet the worst examples of humanity,” he says, when we interview him at the Cannes Film Festival. “It’s also the place where you meet men and women who have such reservoirs of illusion that they try to see the humanity in the monsters they’re called on to defend.”
Indeed, as Monier becomes more entrenched in the case, he becomes fully convinced of his client’s innocence. “He has a problem with empathy. That’s his weakness. He doesn’t know where to stop, to create a line, a border between himself and his clients, and he’s like a young child in that respect. The other people warn him. They tell him that he’s making a mistake. He refuses to listen, and this is going to be the struggle of his life.”
Titled ‘An Ordinary Case’ in some territories (although in Australia, the distributor has returned to the English translation of the French title, Le Fils), the script is based on a real-life case, written by criminal defence lawyer Jean-Yves Moyart, who blogged under the name ‘Maître Mô’ and became a best-selling author before he passed away in 2021.
“The mission that I saw,” says Auteuil, “was that I was going to remain faithful for his family, for his young children, for his wife. I was going to remain faithful to his passion, to what he saw through his story. I was going to allow myself a certain freedom. I had to do certain things to better express the story, to bring it to the screen, but I was going to remain faithful to his passion that he had for his job.”
For Auteuil, The Thread marks the fifth film that he has directed, following remakes of Marcel Pagnol’s 1940s Marseille trilogy, The Well-Digger’s Daughter (2011), Fanny (2013) and Marius (2013), and The Other Woman (2018), adapted from a play by Florian Zeller. Taking on a true story was always going to be different, with Auteuil structuring it around courtroom proceedings, as Milik is accused of the crime in collusion with a local bar owner.
Auteuil also plays with the chronology, with flashbacks interwoven throughout. “The other thing that I did was that for two hours in my film, I lied to you,” he says, with a smirk. “I gave you false clues. There were clues that I set from the film, but the fact that I played with the chronology allowed me to deceive you and to again take you into the nightmare that the character himself, my protagonist, is experiencing.”
Co-starring with Auteuil in the film is Danish actress Sidse Babett Knudsen, who plays Monier’s fellow lawyer and partner Maître Annie Debret. She immediately understood the appeal of the French courtroom saga the moment she put on the long black cloak, or gown, traditionally worn by lawyers. “I thought, ‘This is why they do French drama, because it’s so cool.’ It’s like the best costume in the world.”
It’s also an ideal arena to study human behaviour, she adds. “You have a microcosm of the world, of the social, of the political subject. It’s interesting. It’s not a genre I would go looking for myself. But when I saw Anatomy of a Fall, I could almost not bear it. It’s so horrible, that whole ambience in that room. Whereas this…it’s a completely different world. It feels like what they’re searching for, these lawyers and judges, is something different.”
Auteuil compares the courtroom drama to other classic genres, like the Western or the love story. “These genres date back to antiquity, the tragedies. We have never done better than those genres, and that’s why we keep returning to them. The closed universe of the courtroom allows us to focus better. It allows us to get directly into the story. And in my case, what interested me was getting into the minds of my characters, sensing a nightmare that they were involved in.”
Babett Knudsen had never met Auteuil before arriving for the shoot a couple of days before proceedings began. But the Borgen star went for dinner with him, and they immediately got to work. “We’d spoken on the phone. I said what I thought about the character and how I would justify the fact that I’m Danish in this. I think there’s something in the cliché of a Dane – we’re very direct.”
One of the more subtle aspects of the film is Jean and Annie’s relationship, a coupling that’s endured its strife. “We had an earlier draft where they talked more about it,” explains Babett Knudsen, “the fact they have been married, they’ve got kids, they’re divorced, they’ve worked together for years, and now they’ve picked up the relationship again, which just makes it believable to me, because that’s how paths are, aren’t they?”
Intriguingly, Jean was going to be played by a younger actor, something one of the film’s producers suggested to Auteuil. She thought that it would be interesting to depict the young lawyer and how his illusions are destroyed by the story. But I felt that it was also interesting to have an old lawyer who’d lost his illusions previously [after defending a murderer who was guilty fifteen years earlier] and then who meets this accused and the story rekindles his taste, his love for justice, for his work, and wants to begin again.”
As for casting Jean’s client, Auteuil was drawn to Grégory Gadebois. “He has these child’s eyes and the body of an ogre. He’s a fantastic actor, and I thought it would be really interesting to see the confrontation between him and myself. The world belongs to young people, and it’s no different in the courtroom. So, I peopled the courtroom. In reality, the courtrooms are filled with young people. So, the judge and the district attorney are young people. The district attorney is someone who has a great deal of respect for her antagonist, but nonetheless she wants to crush him.”
Certainly, playing Jean Monier has given Auteuil a rare insight into the psychology of being a lawyer. “You have to be able to be able to defend your clients. You have to be able to go on to tell yourself stories, a little bit like a surgeon. If a surgeon opens up someone to remove a tumour, and finds that it’s inoperable, he has to have the strength to be able to close it up again and go on living. You have to have the strength to defend people like World War II war criminals, like Klaus Barbie in France: the worst criminals you’re confronted with.”
The Thread opens in cinemas on 28 August 2025
