Xavier Beauvois

Has supported Lionel Jospin's 2002 presidential campaign.

[press conference for Von Menschen und Göttern (2010) at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival] Everything began with a phone call from Etienne Comar who said, "Look, I've got a screenplay here and I need the opinion of a director. Can you come and tell me what you think about it?" I said yes, of course, so I saw a first draft of the screenplay and he said, "What do you think of it?" And I said, "Well, it's fine, it's wonderful, it goes beyond religion." And then he confessed that it was in fact he who'd written it! He asked me if I would like to work on it, so we got to work, to adapt it to my taste. And after that I began to take an interest in the life of these brothers and I was immediately interested, attracted, astonished even - you begin to take an interest, not only me but the whole of the crew. Everybody was attracted, was fascinated by the life of these brothers. It's very rare in our highly egotistical society today to see people who take an interest in other people, in the religions of other people. These were intelligent people, people who had a passion for their faith, for their existence, people who are very much involved in the question of being; we are all doing things - they are simply being. And of course today in France we have a lot of very stupid problems - we try to create oppositions between people through these questions of the burqa and others and we ignore what is beautiful in other people and the beauty of other religions and that's what I found fascinating here, the idea of building a church along with Muslims to work together - I thought it was great. That was the origin then of the project. After that, I made my own retreat in a monastery, the Abbey of Tamié, and there a certain number of things became evident to me, things which affected my direction of the film. You have to actually stage your direction; you can't have panoramic shots within a monastery, you need to keep a fixed camera position. I fixed what were really moral positions in that way.