French Director Christian Carion bids Farewell to Russia

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 20 July 2010 15:43

Written by Brad Balfour

Another hot Russian spy fills our news media and infiltrates our movie screens. From Anna Fermanova in the real world to Angelina Jolie in Salt (about a Russian gumshoe who was recruited during the Soviet era to destroy America), stealth plots to topple foreign governments are exploding. But one cloak-and-dagger story actually happened the other way around, something detailed in L'affaire Farewell, the new French political thriller. 

Based on the book Bonjour Farewell by Serguei Kostine, the cinematic Farewell tells the riveting true tale of a disenchanted KGB colonel who gives state secrets to a French businessman working in Russia. Devastated by how the Communist ideal has become corrupted under Leonid Brezhnev's regime, he committed treason, and in so doing hastened the Cold War's end and made way for Gorbachev, glastnost and perestroika. He acted without seeking financial compensation – much too capitalist for his taste – but rather followed his nose to a new dawn for all his fellow Russians, and especially for his son.

As directed by Academy Award®-nominated Christian Carion (Joyeux Noël), the film boasts a remarkable international cast starring two noted film directors who are also respected actors, Guillaume Canet (The Beach, Merry Christmas, Tell No One) and Emir Kusturica (The Good Thief, Underground, Arizona Dream). The ensemble also includes Alexandra Maria Lara, Ingeborda Dapkunaite, Diane Kruger, Willem Dafoe, Fred Ward and David Soul.

Farewell crisscrosses romance, politics and the state while telling a compelling story through terse dialogue and understated action. When Carion came to New York earlier this year to debut Farewell as the Opening Night presentation of Rendez-Vous With French Cinema, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and UniFrance at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater, he gave the following exclusive interview. NeoClassics Films will release Farewell in the US.

Q: In making this film, how much did you want to deviate from the true story; were you inspired by real events, but was more interested in telling your own story?

CC: When I started to work on this project I was coming from Merry Christmas, so I wanted to have everything but the truth. And I started work on it and I discovered that we know many, many things about the Farewell Affair, but there are some elements that are mysterious. I was writing the script at home in Paris, and some people called me at night. How they got the number I don’t know. Five, six called.

Q: That must have been interesting -- and a bit chilling.

CC: Yeah, it was amazing. The first one called to me and said, “Are you working on A Farewell Affair?” I said yes. “Oh you’re right; it’s a good idea. Personally I know two of the elements you should know. Would you like to have a coffee with me in Paris?” I said “Yes.”

So the guy came, gave me a name, I don’t care if it’s true or not. And the first question he said was, “So Farewell is dead?” I said “Yeah.” “Did you see the cops?”

I said “No, and I know that no one saw the cops.”

And I said to him, “You know we just have a paper from the KGB to his wife telling her he’s dead.” He said “Okay, if the KGB told you he’s dead he must be dead.” I said, “Okay, if you’re telling me he’s not dead and he’s living in South America and making some pizzas, everything is possible.”

He said “That’s the problem. Everything in the Secret Service is possible.”

He paid his coffee and went away. So I come back at home writing the script and I said, He’s right; everything is possible.

There are some true elements. For example, the things between Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand, we know really what happened because there are some witnesses -- American witnesses, French witnesses -- what they told about Farewell...we really know...But in Moscow we know many things, but not everything. There are some mysteries around this story and I love it. I love the idea that a Secret Service story keeps some secrets.

Q: When they opened up the KGB files, they didn’t find any further information? I guess your story is really based on the French point of view.

CC: French, but Russian too because there was a journalist doing big research with the KGB archives. We think now that the KGB archives are not honest. Now we feel it. That’s why we don’t know, for example, my opening is at one point the CIA knew much more than the French on Farewell itself. But I can’t prove it.

Q: That’s why you put the implication in there that they knew more, but you really didn’t dwell on it.

CC: You know, it’s a movie about points of view: the French point of view, the American point of view and the Russian point of view. That’s why when [someone] very close to François Mitterrand told me that Ronald Reagan used to watch Westerns, I said, "Why, but why not?"

I imagined him watching The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Why? Because I’m fond of John Ford, but you know the movie at the beginning you are on the James Stewart point of view, and you believe he killed Lee Marvin. And then you are on John Wayne’s point of view and you understand that what you believed before was false. This is Farewell. You are on the French point of view, you believe something, and then when you are on the American point of view it’s another story.

Q: Is he such an idealist? He doesn’t want to take money, but obviously a money trail is much more trackable, first of all. You want us to believe that he genuinely think he will have an ideological impact? In that scene with Gorbachev, you suggest that there are people even in the KGB that have ideals. The issue here about being realistic versus ideal in relationships, politics and philosophy -- that drives your film.

CC: Yeah, exactly. I was really, really fascinated by the idea that there was one guy in Moscow who said, “I can change the world.” And three months later two presidents, Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand, have to see each other because of this guy who said “I can change the world.”

It’s special. And why he did it, it’s a mix of idealism because he was really Communist, he believed in it. When he said “We Russians, in 1917 we were in the Middle Age, and 40 years later we were the first to send a human being into space. It’s the truth.”

And so at that time, during the ‘60s, they were on the top. So they really believed in their system. But in the ‘70s everything fell down.

Q: Well real mediocre premiers too.

CC: Especially with Brezhnev. The way he ruled the poor during the ‘70s was a real nightmare for the system.

Q: That’s what he addresses in the movie.

CC: Yeah. At the beginning of the ‘70s they started not to believe in the system, especially with people of the KGB. The KGB were the top of the top, no? The best engineers and so on. And in their position they were able to see the difference between the West and the East because there were spying in the West, so they knew everything.

At that time they said, “Okay, we are losing the game. We are deeply losing the game. What can we do?” And this idea to make a big bang in a way, they said something new will happen. They expected a new Communist system, better than before, but at the end nothing anymore.

Q: Do we know what happened to the wife and son?

CC: They are still alive; they are living in Moscow. When I was in Moscow before... I thought he would leave the country and go for example to the USA. Not at all. He is an engineer in Moscow, which is funny.

Q: He followed in his father’s footsteps after all.

CC: Exactly.

Q: And he realized that his father was this idealist in the end, by that scene we see.

CC: Yeah, of course, because they met each other.

Q: When the French guy tells them too.

CC: Yeah.

Q: When you made this movie did you say to yourself, I need to have these certain scenes from the book? You’re mining a vast amount of knowledge, so how do you figure out what to boil down to a two-hour movie? There are lots of decisions you could make.

CC: It takes a long time to find a good balance. The first version was a Tolstoy movie; it was too long. But you need to write everything, to read it to see how it works between this scene, the other scene, and so on. And then at the end reduce, reduce, reduce, but try to keep the good balance, the good details, which is really difficult.

Q: What made you decide to cast Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan?

CC: I proposed to him to play Ronald Reagan, and he said, "Never.: So I take a plane, I went to LA, I spent three days to convince him to do it. And in the beginning he said, “You must be French to propose to me to be Ronald Reagan.” I said “Why?”

He said, “Well, first of all Ronald Reagan is a kind of god here in the USA, because in a certain way we said this is a guy who destroyed the Wall of Berlin in 1989, and now you are coming with a story coming from the French president. Always suspect the French, especially when we are Socialist with Communist ministries. So it’s a nightmare. And I am a Democrat.”

I said “No, you can’t tell me that. I don’t care if you are Democrat or Republican or Communist. I don’t care. You are an actor and I ask you, especially because maybe you are a Democrat, to defend the most Republican president you had since a long time.” And then he said okay and let’s see. And when he accepts, and I was really impressed by what he did.

Q: Americans  make movies as these big, grand things, so we don’t mind putting in living French presidents or American presidents. But French movies don’t usually have big political themes, so it must be strange for you to do that because you don’t usually see that in French movies. They do a movie on Napoleon maybe, but you don’t see modern figures in the films. French political movies, political thrillers, are rather unusual. It’s usually movies of relationships or morals or maybe the police. The French love making crime movies – but they don’t deal with political thrillers.

CC: That’s absolutely true and I think we are wrong because I really respect this tradition here in this country to make political movies. For example, I asked my crew when we were preparing Farewell to watch an American movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, All the President’s Men.

Q: One of the great movies of all time.

CC: Yeah. And I said to them, "You should watch this movie." First of all because it was released in 1976, produced by Robert  Redford, and about Watergate, so it was just three or four years after the real story. We in France we have scandal like every country, but we are not able to do it just three or four years after the real story. We need a distance; we are too shy.

Q: Isn’t that funny?


CC: That’s why when I proposed this movie, Farewell, my producers were really enthusiastic and so on, but when I was trying to find some money they said, “Wow, François Mitterrand himself in the movie?”

I said “Yeah, he’s a character. I want to see him.” “Are you sure? Don’t you want just to see his back?” I said okay forget it. No, it’s him on close-up. But it’s not our French tradition.” Some critics in France said Farewell is not a French movie.

Q: They thought it was a ‘70s American political thriller.

CC: The best moments of the history of cinema, ‘70s for me.

Q: It does compare a little bit I think to Sidney Lumet.

CC: Yeah.

Q: Robert Redford didn’t direct All the President’s Men.

CC: He was producing. Producing; his money on the table for the move.

Q: In the casting how did you decide on the rest of the cast? You don’t always see French playing Russians, for example.

CC: At the very beginning I said to my producer, I want some Russian actors, French actors and American actors because of the story, speaking their own language, like Merry Christmas. And because of the success of Merry Christmas, I was allowed to make another movie with three languages and so on and so on.

Q: And with a political war there were broader issues than just relationships.

CC: Exactly. I had a kind of freedom because of the success of Merry Christmas in France and abroad. So I did it. I said okay; you give me the permission, I will do it, respecting different languages. And I started first for the Russian cast. Emir Kusturica was not my first choice. You know that story?

Q: Just to have Kusturica was an amazing thing.

CC: So I went to Moscow and I met [Nikita] and he said, “Okay, it’s a great story, let’s do it together. I’m going to co-produce the movie.” And he helped me to meet some Russian actors, and I found one of them, an amazing actor. We went to Paris to make some [rehearsal] and so on. But the Russian ambassador living in Paris called the guy on his cell phone and he said, “You are a great actor. The Russian people they love you, and they are right. But the Russian people will never understand why you decided to play a traitor, an asshole.”

Q: So they would really react that way?

CC: So the actor called me and said, “Forget my name, forget my number, I don’t do the movie.” So I called back [that Nikita guy] and I said, “Nikita, an ambassador is calling an actor not to do the movie. Maybe in North Korea, maybe in China, but the new Russia; it’s not a new one.

Q: And it’s putting it in front of an international audience.

CC: He said, “No, I don’t believe it. It’s impossible. I know this guy; I’m going to call him.” Then he called me back and he said, “Yes, that’s true. You will never have any Russian actor who will accept to play in Farewell.” Because the guy, the Russian ambassador, now he’s the Minister of Culture in Russia. So he said, “Forget Russian actors and forget shooting in Moscow because you will never have any authorization.” That’s why we shot in Ukraine and in Finland for the winter. And I proposed Emir Kusturica because I thought he was able to speak Russian, but I was wrong.

Q: Well he’s Serbian, right?

CC: He’s Serbian.

Q: So didn’t he learn Russian?

CC: When he was young, like when he was a kid in Yugoslavia, they used to learn Russian of course, but he forgot everything.

Q: How old is he, in his late 50s, right?

CC: 55. And I think he’s really amazing in the movie. So that’s why everywhere I was I used to thank the Russian Minister of Culture because of him.

Q: Well he’s a great hook, too. But he doesn’t like to travel; that’s why he’s not here, right? He doesn’t like to take planes or something.

CC: No, it’s not true. It’s because he spends a lot of time with his band [Emir Kusturica & the No Smoking Band], which is a kind of rock and roll Serbian music. It’s amazing.

Q: It's like Serbian dance music.

CC: It’s pure energy. So he’s always flying because of the band because he earns a lot of money with the band, and all of the money is going to his village in Serbia. I went over there in the middle of January. I met Johnny Depp because he invited Johnny Depp. We spent three days eating pizzas and drinking beers. But I said, “What are you doing here, Johnny?” He said, “Well I am invited. They want to make an homage to me and we would make a movie together.” Emir directing Johnny Depp; a Pancho Villa movie.

Q: I thought that was an uncanny stroke to get Kusturica to play. I had assumed that you cast him because he was an actor, and the fact is he looks the part perfectly -- and I assumed he spoke Russian, but also French and English. I know he knows English. I didn’t know how much he knew French.

CC: Not so well.

Q: You can actually hear; it sounds French with a Russian accent. So he had to go back in and learn Russian to be able to do this? Serbian’s not that far removed from Russian.

CC: No, but they are very close but with some differences. He spent a lot of time with a Russian professor to remember the Russian language. But it was very difficult.

Q: Well you have two issues here with this film. You have the more internal issue of the impact it has within the French audience in the community -- the very idea of making a film with political implications. You’ve made two films that have this underlying humanizing of politics. They’re trying to show the humanity in people within that world. Then there’s that larger picture of perspective, and how do we get from one viewpoint to another? What do you feel you were trying to accomplish within the French sphere and the international sphere?

CC: It’s really difficult for me making the movie to have a distance like you have and to understand. It’s very instinctive, an emotional decision you have to make to make that kind of movie or not.  What I know is I wanted to shoot the two presidents like normal people, like human characters. I was really excited by this idea and the fact that this guy, Farewell, his private life was very, very important. It’s because the relationship with the son, the women and so on make him make the decision to do something. It’s not just idealism. It’s idealism for sure. Remember, there’s a scene where he sits on the chair of his boss and he says to his mistress, “I’m better than him.”

Q: Right. That’s why we see the scene where the boss is trying to learn French. Was he just trying to learn French because he felt a rivalry with him?

CC: No, he tried to learn French because he’s the boss of a French, so he tried to be a little French fluent.

Q: And there he is, he’s the boss and doesn’t speak any French.

CC: Never.

Q: So he looks down on the boss.

CC: So there is idealism; there is jealousy with his boss. Many, many human elements, but the main for me was the relationship with the son. Very important for me because I have a son -- he’s 16 -- and it’s complicated. That’s why I was very touched to imagine the moment when he screened the Super 8 when he was a kid, because at that time they were very close.

Q: Was it hard to create a Super 8 impression? That wasn’t shot with a Super 8?

CC: No, no, we imagined the Super 8.

BB: Yeah but how did you actually make that footage?

CC: We just shot in Paris.

BB: But not with a Super 8?

CC: Yeah. It was fun. We spent one day with a small camera, I was shooting myself with a kid and trying to play, to be like you do now with a digital camera.

Q: The character Pierre Froment, what is he doing now? Is he still alive? And what’s happened to him?

CC: Yes, he's still alive. He’s retired and he’s living in the South of France with his wife. He’s very wise, he’s old now, he’s 80.

Q: You didn’t think about maybe putting at the end, “Pierre is now living in…”?

CC: Everybody asks me this and I think it means something. First of all, I said to myself people seem to be intrigued because they want to know after, and as a joke I said okay in Farewell Two we’ll come back, you will know everything.

Q: So you really did fool the Russians and drove out instead of taking the plane.

CC: Taking a plane was impossible.

BB: And what clued him to the idea that they were onto him?

CC: The true story or in the movie?

BB: Let’s say both.

CC: In the movie there are some letters in the bathroom.

BB: And that was left by the maid? And that was the thing that tipped him off and so he actually acted on it. But what made him go to the family? I thought once he got the communication he wasn’t going to here from the Colonel again. How would he know the Colonel got picked up?

CC: In the true story what we know…but you know, the guy is still alive, and I met him. But he doesn’t speak very much. It’s amazing. For example, I asked him to come and watch the movie. He came, he watched the movie. So I said, “What do you think about the movie?” He said, “Well, Guillaume Canet played me very well. I’m very proud to be played by Guillaume Canet, my wife is proud.”

“No, that’s not the question. The question is about the story.” “I have to go because my sons are waiting for me outside. I can’t stay with you.” And he went. This is Secret Service people.

BB: But he really wasn’t Secret Service initially, right?

CC: No, he became because after the story, when he came back to Paris and so on, they proposed to him some other…

Q: So his wife finally accepted?

CC: Yeah. They went to Lebanon because in 1982, ’83, it was very important to know what happened over there.

Q: You showed the Russian being the idealist and the French guy is just worried that he gets caught into a spiral and has no idealism; he doesn’t give a shit. He’s just doing it because he’s caught in a trap by his job and his wife would give a shit.

CC: He’s selfish, that’s it.

BB: You had Leo Ferre, why Leo Ferre? I’m a huge Leo Ferre fan.

CC: Good question, I am too. In the ‘80s I was 20 and I used to listen so much to Simple Minds, especially Queen too. That’s why I put Queen in the movie. But I said to myself, "Okay but my parents used to listen to Leo Ferre, and I hated that kind of fucking... it’s so French.?

But after I was 35, 40, I used to listen to the songs of Leo Ferre, and I said, "Oh wow, not bad." The soundtrack is very important to me and I would love to have seen Queen, of course. I wanted to see on a big screen Freddy Mercury almost naked singing in concert, “We Will Rock You." It was a real concert in November 1981.

Q: You didn’t have problems getting the rights?

CC: Well when you pay everything is okay. So it was possible and I said okay, we will have it. But Leo Ferre, especially the way they danced together, I mean Emir and Ingeborga, his wife, wow. What I really remember when we shot the scene on the set, it was magic. Magic because of the music first; Emir didn’t know Leo Ferre. I gave to him a lot of CDs of Leo Ferre, and he loved the song. She didn’t know Leo Ferre too, but the mood of the song, they said okay let’s dance, and they way he danced with her, I was so…

Q: That was improvised by him.

CC: Yeah.

Q: Did he know Queen?

CC: Yeah.

Q: You chose Queen. that was your statement about the West conquering the Russians with “We Will Rock You.”

CC: When there is a scene with the small guy, imagine him playing it at the concerts and all the pictures of Freddy Mercury almost naked. I love the scene because him listening to this music, he’s on the West even if he is in Moscow. But because of the music, because of the culture, he’s compromised. There is no wall in his head. And I was touched by the idea that his guy was almost American in a way by the culture and by the time with his father trying to make something with secret documents to change something in Russia for his son. But the son is not there anymore because of the music.

Q: Audiences, especially younger audiences, don’t really remember a world where there was a Berlin Wall. Twenty years ago you could be picked up by the cops like that; it's good that you show those scenes of being summarily taken away. But how can Farewell have been so stupid as to not think about that book that pointed directly to him? Because what really tipped the Russians off to tracking him down was the book. You make us think in a spy mentality.

CC: By the book you mean the poetry book?

Q: You’ve already shown in the movie the paranoia of what it’s like just to walk down the street, and big deal about being registered in the log because otherwise the authorities would have wondered where the hell he was, and he didn’t want to create any suspicion.

CC: Yeah exactly. So he tried to hypnotize people who tried to survey him and to be very kind with them giving them cognac and so on, which he did.

Q: I don’t understand why neither he nor the Colonel realized that having the book had political implications, since as we find out later it points directly to him as the contact.

CC: Because I believe that the guy who did the research to find Farewell was working for the West. So he gave time not to find too much too quickly because if he did then after for the French people it’s finished. So it gave time and not to be so in a hurry to find the good Farewell, to protect the way of the French, to give to them the time to go away. This is my opinion.

Q: Within the logic of the film, why didn’t the Colonel or Pierre recognize that by giving the book with the name in it they could be found out?

CC: There is no name. I don’t understand.

Q: But they said in the movie that when they looked at the poetry book they found her name in the book that led them to Pierre.

CC: Jessica, the wife. No they asked to Farewell, "Why do you have his book?"

Q: Right and he says, "Oh I stole it."

CC: I stole it.

Q: But they researched it, that’s what helped them know he was the agent or the contact. Or didn’t they research it? They didn’t believe him that he stole it? They still checked up.

CC: Yeah they don’t believe the answer of Farwell, but there are no elements about Secret Service in the book. It’s just poetry in Russian and French.

BB: Right, and then he tried to explain he’s using the poetry to create a code. But even if the Russians didn’t realize that the book tipped them off to whom the contact person was, from our point of view as the viewer, we wonder why these guys didn't realize that having the wife's name in the book, somebody would have had the good sense as a detective to start researching who she was in real life -- that she’s the wife of a French contact.

CC: That’s why at the beginning he said when he proposed he gave the book, and he said, "I can’t accept, it’s a personal book."

Q: But he didn’t talk about it from the point of view of it as a spy issue. He talked about it as an issue of being the wife’s book. You don’t even realize how interesting that is.

CC: No, to be honest with you I didn’t realize.

Q: This is a critical element in your own movie, that he makes the point of, "Well you took your wife’s book and are giving it to me -- she won’t miss it." But the real implications are that they had stopped dealing with each other as spies, and were people. But when you look at it from a spy's perspective, he’s giving away that the most important clue for the Russians, once they investigate it, and you didn’t realize there’s a certain message in your movie. There’s a whole symbolism in that.

CC: The movie is not us, it’s not ours, because the way people watch it, the way they feel it, understand it, became their movie.

Q: You didn’t realize that that is the symbolic exchange. Of course then this book is the ultimate symbol of French culture by its very subversion of the Russians.

CC: One point to you. I didn’t feel it. Amazing.

Q: From my point of view, as someone who romanticized the French symbolists, just as Queen is British and American rock and roll, giving the poetry book is like the ultimate symbol of French subversion.

CC: For sure, I knew that. But what you said about the name of the book and so on, it was an amazing mistake. You’re right; I didn’t see that. I’ll have to reshoot this movie.

Q: It’s a critical turning point in the movie. That just caught my attention so much.

CC: Thank you, you taught something to me about my own movie.

Q: I hope that people will appreciate your movie because they’re so used to American high energy thrillers, and there's yours done in its own unique French style. Do you think audiences will appreciate the film and its context as they did with Merry Christmas?

CC: It’s not a typical Secret Service movie. It’s special because the story’s special, and maybe the way I shot it was special.

Q: Do you think Russians are happy where their society is now?

CC: I think they would be disappointed by how it is now.

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