French director Jacques Audiard will already be very familiar to fans of international cinema and crime genre aficionados alike thanks to such excellent fare as the Vincent Cassel-starring thriller ‘Read My Lips’ and the excellent 2006 crossover hit ‘The Beat That My

Heart Skipped’, in which a young man vacillates between a life of crime and a career as a pianist. Working from a screenplay by Abdel Raouf Dari, the French Arab writer of the recent ‘Mesrine’ biopics, Audiard delivers his most epic film to date with ‘A Prophet’. Newcomer Tahar Rahim is the titular character, a young French Muslim called Malik, who is jailed for a petty crime, but whose rise though the prison ranks, sees him leave an accomplished criminal. Attending the London Film Festival last year, where ‘A Prophet’ won best film award, Audiard and Dafri discussed the film.

Can you describe the genesis of the film?

Abdel Raouf Dari: One thing that I can’t stand in France is you never see people you see on the street on the screen in the cinema. Blacks and Arabs virtually don’t exist in our film mythology. I grew up in an area where three quarters of the people around me had spent time in prison and when they came out they came out more clever than when they went in. So the idea that if someone is clever from the outset, then through the school of crime they will be able to learn and exploit the little weaknesses of their co-prisoners and become stronger and be able to rip them off, was fascinating to me. It was Jacques’ brilliant idea that our lead character Malik El Djebena would be able to get out of prison for weekends, that wasn’t in the original script. I love ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and inspired by it my co-writer Nicolas [Peufaillit] and I had this idea that in the first part Malik is in prison and he’s learning; the second part he is there on the terrain and he is applying what he’s learned. Something for which I am eternally grateful to Jacques for is that he managed to keep the essence of what it is to be an Arab in that situation in prison in a way that I recognized, and that’s something that I value. And something that we’d never seen before: in the prison the Arabs speak Arabic!

How did the relatively unknown Tahar Rahim come to be cast in the lead role?

Jacques Audiard: This could be open to misinterpretation but I tell people that I met Tahar in the back of a car. I went to see a friend on a shoot, and when we went back into town there was this actor in the car and when I saw him it was love at fist sight. When casting ‘A Prophet’ I felt myself obliged to see the forty odd actors before I was convinced Tahar was the right man. He was a very young actor, at the beginning of his career, and had only done a documentary, a small part in a TV show, and a bit of theatre. Now I think about it I really don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t existed. I wake up adorned in sweat thinking about it.

Were the remainder of the cast professionals?

JA: The rest of the cast went from people who had a little bit of experience, like Tahar, to people who had no acting experience. Many of the extras had actually spent some time in prison. That was a huge advantage for me, just so I could witness how a prisoner crossed a corridor, or how they looked at each other; all this interaction was very important.

There are moments of beauty and moments of violence. How do you balance that?

ARD: Jacques hates the violence; me, I have no problem with it, I grew up with it.

JA: I have a problem as a film maker with violence as I know that on film, in cinema, it’s false. When a character dies I know the actor doesn’t die. For me there are two things, violence and the act of lovemaking that are false, and it always puts me in an embarrassing situation when I know the actor has to go beyond playacting. What we were really interested in with ‘A Prophet’ was for the character to exist interiorly which is rare in pure genre films. Then when we were writing and thinking about how to present Malik’s interior life, one of us said ‘What if he dreamt?’ What if the guy who had killed him came back as a ghost?’

Did you do any research into prison life and its hierarchies when writing the film?

JA: A lot of the prison politics stuff was in Abdel’s script when I received it. But one thing you have to know is that this film is a fiction. When you think about it such visible corruption like that would never be allowed in a real prison. It’s a pure fiction but documented fiction. I’ve often been told that this film is so realistic and I have to reply ‘How long have you spent in prison?’ It’s a pure genre film: everything is false, the set is false; we made it in an empty factory in the Paris suburbs – the magic of cinema! The set designer did look at a lot of prisons and the design is a mixture of all that.

Abdel, was it important for you to represent French Arabs accurately on screen?

ARD: To me the situation in France now is like what happened in the thirties in America; the way there would be a white man with a hand on the shoulder of the black man, telling him how he can do something to redeem himself. Now the Americans have got to the situation where you can have someone like Denzel Washington who doesn’t have to be accompanied by a white to cross the road. But in France an Arab is an Arab; he’s always got an accent, he’s working on a building site, or he’s a terrorist.  With Jacques’ film for the first time we see Arabs on the screen dealing with their own story and being fully responsible for doing their own thing. I’m very grateful to Jacques as he treats the character with a lot of respect. And hopefully this film would be a good starting point for these fantastic actors. A lot or our cast loved to fantasise that it will be like ‘The Godfather’, when Pacino was still an unknown and what a risk that was to take.

Name some films that have been an inspiration.

JA: For me Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Pusher’ films. I don’t know if they inspire me but they gave me the desire to continue with film

ARD: For me ‘The Godfathers’ 1 and 2, although I have a problem with the third one. In recent years it’s more TV series, as for me as a scriptwriter, I love to see work with good character studies and the psychology well worked out. ‘Breaking Bad’ was an extraordinary series, and The Wire’ really impressed me, and of course ‘The Sopranos’.

Abdel, you also scripted ‘Mesrine’, another crime genre film.

ARD: I don’t have a fascination for criminals. I just talk about what I know. I’ve never been someone who is violent - I’ve found myself in little quarrels - but I’ve met lots of people who are very violent. I’ve seen them look after their children and do things for their wives but they go to prison for some very serious things and I ask myself, how can you put all that together in one head, in the same person? With ‘Mesrine’, the attraction was the possibility of doing something like a grand American spectacle whilst speaking purely about French society; to be able to say disagreeable things about France, as normally we French like to write our own story in very pleasant terms.

Are you planning to work together again?

ARD: We haven’t actually really worked together yet as Jacques and his co-writer Thomas Bidegain took over this screenplay before the film commenced, so I was able to do ‘Mesrine’. But I hope we can work together again. Jacques is water and I am the fire and water always wins over.

‘A Prophet’ is released 22nd January

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