His latest film, about sex and war, cements Bruno Dumont's reputation as an uncompromising director for the boho set - but he would cast Tom Cruise to get a bigger audience, he tells Xan Brooks.
Bruno Dumont is not a popular film-maker and it is all my fault. Or, to put it more accurately, it is the fault of a UK media that is conspiring to block his route to the general public. Journalists don't trumpet his films as loudly as they might. Distributors won't release them as widely as they could. As for the TV schedulers, they'd prefer to stuff the prime-time slots with all manner of cookery and property shows.
"The people follow what the media say," Dumont says. "So if you said that Bruno Dumont is fantastic, it follows that more people would go to see my films." He sucks gloomily on his cigarette. "I have no wish to remain on the sidelines. I have no wish to make films that are only seen by bohemians in London and Paris." From the outside it doesn't seem like such a bad life. Dumont's stark, metaphysical pictures have earned him a lofty reputation. He is seen as the successor to Pasolini and Bresson, a spiritual cousin to the likes of Michael Haneke or the Dardennes brothers.
The 49-year-old even looks the part: a sternly handsome intellectual, with an ashtray at his elbow and a head full of abstracts. Yet it is Dumont's fate to be embraced as a darling of the French art house at a time when the domestic industry is struggling to hang on to its audience. The ghetto is shrinking and Dumont is looking further afield.
We discuss his latest film, Flanders, which charts the experience of a group of farmers sent to fight in an unnamed desert war. This is a film of two halves, both physically and thematically. The first section is dominated by brutish, perfunctory sex, and the second by brutish, perfunctory violence. The bulk of the first half plays out in the dank expanses of Dumont's native northern France. The majority of the second half takes place in the arid mountains of Tunisia. The director points out that the first terrain is vegetative and the second is mineral, and that both are of paramount importance. "The starting point of this film was landscape," he says solemnly. "It is the main character. Everything else is secondary. The other characters come out of the landscape and are defined by it. That is why I use non-professional actors, because they can only be themselves."
Dumont acknowledges that many viewers will naturally see the film as a veiled comment on the war in Iraq. Yet this was really only the starting point. "I'm using the war as an object for meditation. The film is really a love story and love stories are always wars. There is no difference between two countries fighting over a piece of land and two men fighting over a woman." He nods thoughtfully and reaches for his cigarette.
DUMONT WAS BORN in Bailleul, a small town near Lille where he still lives today. As a child he recalls accompanying his doctor father on his rounds of the outlying farms, staring out through the glass at the impoverished rural communities that he would later put on screen. In his 20s and 30s he led a strange, split existence, shooting corporate videos by day and teaching philosophy by night.
"I liked doing both of those jobs," he says. "Philosophy can be too much about navel-gazing, so the videos were a good balance. Of course they were publicity films, so I had orders from above. I had to assign these products with a value they frequently did not have. I had to lie and I was paid to lie. And yet all this time the philosophy was teaching me the need for truth. So there was a tension there - this process at arriving at the truth through lies." The videos also taught him to love machinery: "Every day I was filming machinery, trying to make it look beautiful." Working with actors, he adds, is really no different from working with machines.
Naturally Dumont's harsh, unblinking brand of cinema has a tendency to split an audience. When his breakthrough picture, L'Humanité, won the jury prize at the 1999 Cannes film festival it was booed lustily in certain quarters of the gallery. His follow-up - the American-set art movie Twentynine Palms (2003) - was savaged by most reviewers as a portentous and self-indulgent mess. Until now, I had assumed that he must secretly enjoy stirring up such violently differing responses, perhaps regarding it as some artistic badge of honour. "No, no," he says. "It is an enigma that really disturbs me. Obviously, I want my films to do well. I really want people to like them." He now admits he got it wrong on Twentynine Palms. He should have edited it more tightly and cut out the epilogue. But the experience has not scared him away from making American films. On the contrary, he would dearly like to give it another shot.
"You see," he says, tapping another cigarette from the packet. "I feel I have a political duty to reach out to the general public. I want to make films that the people want to see. So if the people want to see Johnny Depp or Tom Cruise, then it is really my job to incorporate them into my films." At this point I feel I could use a cigarette myself. I'm trying to picture Tom Cruise in a Bruno Dumont film - perhaps being informed that he is just a machine and that the real star of the movie is a mineral landscape. I just don't see him going for it. Maybe Dumont is joking.
"No," he says. "I'm serious." Does he not think that Cruise - and all the movie-star baggage he inevitably brings with him - might not be antithetical to the type of films Dumont is intent on making? "No, because what I'm looking for in Tom Cruise is his skill as an actor, not the fact of him being Tom Cruise. The problem is not Tom Cruise. The problem is the system that won't let me speak to him." He's actually been trying to speak to Tom Cruise? Dumont nods earnestly. "Yes. I've been trying to get a meeting with Tom Cruise for five years, and they won't let me see him. They're really putting a spanner in the works."
I can't quite make him out. His films are so gloriously uncompromising, driven by such clear-eyed intensity. And yet the man himself seems to be at a creative crossroads, unsure which way to turn. He wants to stay put in Bailleul but he is sick of sitting on the sidelines. He prefers to work with non-professional actors but is prepared to make a concession and cast Johnny Depp.
He talks about his artistic influences and admits he has actually always been more inspired by painting than cinema: impressionism, abstract expressionism, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Still, there are some contemporary directors that he admires, and he namechecks Lars von Trier, Ken Loach and Jacques Rivette. Any American film-makers? "Um," he says. "Ummm . . . David Lynch?" I suspect Dumont's own films might not be as portable and populist as he would like them to be. They would almost certainly be less interesting if they were.
Dumont stubs out his last cigarette of the hour and gets up to shake hands. "Maybe you have a telephone number for Tom Cruise," he says. "Maybe you can get me Tom Cruise's number." Again, I think he's joking, but then again, he may well be serious. The man is not an obvious comic.
- Guardian service
Flandersis on limited release