By James Mottram and Reuben Lazarus
“People want me to do another La Haine. Because they say, ‘it’s twenty years, it’s an anniversary, do a sequel.’ But everybody died in the first one, I don’t know what I could do. A jihadist story? I don’t think I could make it funky. Never forget, La Haine is a comedy, that’s why it worked.”
Back in 1995, Mathieu Kassovitz won Best Director at Cannes for his sophomore feature film La Haine, a bold in your face statement about the clash of cultures and youth in modern France, bolstered by its thumping French hip hop score, grimy black and white cinematography capturing the raw dialogue and performances from the likes of Vincent Cassel and Saïd Taghmaoui.
“We didn’t consider the movie as a piece of filmmaking, we considered it a political statement,” says Kassovitz today. “So, when we came to Cannes and we realised they didn’t care about the subject, they only cared about us, it pissed me off so bad.”
But more than 20 years later, the film is still fondly remembered. “Yeah but that’s not because the movie is good,” is Kassovitz’s surprising reply. “It’s because politicians are fucking idiots. Listen, listen, if politicians were good, nobody would remember La Haine. Nobody would remember La Haine! They would say, ‘ah that movie was good but it’s outdated’. It’s not! These guys have fucked it up, media have fucked it up, politicians fucked it up, CGI fucked it up. You know actually, making a movie is difficult to do on the set, it’s still difficult to do today, but then you didn’t have a second chance. That’s what made this type of cinema; you could see the truss, you could see the track, who gives a fuck? Right? Because the camera is moving, because the actor is doing whatever he wants. This couldn’t exist today; they would erase the booms, they would erase the mics, they would make it perfect, stabilise the picture. It’s not the same thing.”
Happy End is playing at the Melbourne International Film Festival. La Haine is available on DVD, Blu-ray and digital now.
