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What gave you the idea for this film?
- I SAW BEN BARKA GET KILLED grew out of a specific situation. Four years ago a cinephile
friend of mine, Frédérique Moreau, told me that, during a dinner she had with Franju shortly
before he died, he told her he had given up drinking following a tragic event that had marked him
very deeply.
This was the abduction of Ben Barka, which had happened - so he said - before his very eyes,
when he was due to meet the Moroccan dissident at the Brasserie Lipp. Franju said he had seen
Ben Barka just about to come into the brasserie when he was stopped by two men and hustled
into a car. He must have imagined part of the scene, since he couldn’t have seen it happen from
where he was sitting, but we do know that he was due to meet Ben Barka on 29 October 1965.
I myself was a teenager at the time and I remember attending the trial, which took place in 1966. The Ben Barka affair was a huge story that shook the Gaullist government and revealed a parallel political system operating under the cover of the official regime. But I had completely forgotten that Franju and Marguerite Duras were involved. So it was the disturbing idea that Ben Barka had been abducted - you could say - because of cinema that gave me the idea to retell this tragic story and make it into a film.
Franju and Duras were unwitting tools in this business...
- There’s no question about that. They both really believed they were involved in the production
of a documentary on decolonialisation, for which Ben Barka was to be historical advisor. Franju
was to direct and Marguerite Duras was to write the voiceover. It was an entirely plausible pro-
ject in the context of the years 1965-1966. The issue was of burning importance at the time,
Franju was a celebrated documentary-maker and Duras, already famous as a writer, was also
known as a political activist. They were totally manipulated.
The Ben Barka affair is one of those things no one talks about, like the Algerian war, which is almost entirely absent from cinema.
- And it’s all the more surprising because these events are also extremely powerful in dramatic
terms. The Ben Barka affair involves politicians, gangsters, secret agents, intellectuals, a writer
and a filmmaker. A scriptwriter couldn’t ask for more! There are almost too many elements and
the problem faced by my co-writers Frédérique Moreau, Saïd Smihi and I when we were writing
it was deciding what to leave in and having to leave out some facets of the story.
The film also gave you an opportunity to look at a period when artists and intel-
lectuals really were politically active…
- Intellectuals were very active, on both right and left, with their action crystallizing around
events like the Algerian war. But we weren’t trying to idealize that period. Their opposition to the
established system sometimes also blinded them; in this case it was Marguerite Duras - and the
whole Saint-Germain-des-Près circle - in relation to Georges Figon, an ex-convict whom they
saw as a model of radicalism, a kind of new Genet.. That failure of judgement made things
easier for Ben Barka’s murderers.
What did Ben Barka represent?
- Ben Barka is a really archetypal political figure of the 1960s. A man of the Third World, secular,
anti-colonialist, fiercely opposed to American hegemony, but who had more in common with
some one like Patrice Lumumba, or later Salvador Allende, than with a revolutionary like Che
Guevara. He had the stature of a true statesman. He was unrivalled as a pragmatist and tact-
ician, able to bring Russians and Chinese together round a table to serve the cause of Third
World emancipation - a real feat in a period of enormous tension! Ben Barka was looking for a
new world balance, working for it as leader of 'Tricontinentale', an organisation involving the
governments of the newly independent countries and representatives of liberation movements
from the three continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The American leadership saw him as a serious threat. At that time Morocco was acting as a
bridgehead through which the USA could monitor Africa and the CIA was overseeing the Moroc-
can secret services. When it became known that Tricontinentale was going to meet in Cuba -
with all its symbolism! - in January 1966, the tension was ratcheted up a notch and the situation
became unacceptable to the Americans.
Ben Barka’s murderers just didn’t understand that, in eliminating a man like him, they were paving
the way for the far more sinister - and dangerous - figures that the world has to deal with today.
I’m convinced that Mehdi Ben Barka is one of the people whose absence has badly affected the
history of the Third World in the forty years since his disappearance. And one of the aims of this
film is to remind us of this - remind us of him.
What kind of research did you carry out?
- We wanted to start with a detailed overview of all that is currently known about the affair.
This was a complex task because new elements have kept on coming to light over the last 40
years - with belated confessions and sensational revelations - and it’s sometimes hard to tell
whether something is true or made up.
We used the trial transcripts, books written since 1966 and eyewitness accounts from France
and abroad. For example in the last few years Israeli and Moroccan spies have started to tell
their stories. Whatever the case, given this mass of documentation, we now have proof that it
was the Moroccan secret services who carried out the abduction of Mehdi Ben Barka, under
CIA supervision.
And the French secret services?
- Their involvement at the highest level remains unproven, although some supporters of French
Algeria, who in 1965 still occupied high-ranking positions in the French state, were certainly
pleased to see the Moroccan leader eliminated. On the other hand for de Gaulle, who was both
anti-American and, in his own way, a supporter of the Third World, Ben Barka was a crucial
political ally. When he heard about Ben Barka’s abduction during a Cabinet meeting, de Gaulle
apparently flew into a terrible rage and immediately wrote a letter to Mehdi Ben Barka’s mother,
promising her that everything would be undertaken to ensure justice was done. But then de
Gaulle’s duplicity sometimes reached such heights that it is very hard to establish exactly what
he did and didn’t know.
How did you begin writing the script on the basis of all this impressive document-
ation?
- We tried several avenues: basing it around Franju, around Duras, taking the gangsters’ point of
view, looking at it as a high-level state plot, and so on. But none of these attempts got very far.
In reality the only person who is there right through the whole story is Figon, because he turns
up at every link in the chain leading to the abduction. He has friends in the gangster world be-
cause of his time in prison, among the intellectuals of Saint-Germain-des-Prés through Marguerite
Duras and in political circles through his friend the lawyer and Gaullist parliamentarian Pierre
Lemarchand. It was through Figon that the fatal connections could be made. So we used the
crime story - that’s what gives I SAW BEN BARKA GET KILLED its film noir feel.
So who exactly is Georges Figon?
- A man with no scruples, born into a bourgeois family but drawn to the criminal fraternity.
Intellectuals such as Marguerite Duras were attracted by his outrageous cheek, but he was
really rather small fry. When he was presented with the Ben Barka affair, he imagined he would
play a crucial part and make lots of money, but events soon got the better of him. However he
did manage to persuade Franju and Duras to get involved in the so-called documentary on de-
colonialisation because, like any real fabulist, he entirely believed in his own stories. So he’s an
extremely ambivalent character who at once retains a certain innocence while being ir-
remediably drawn to crime. 'How could such an obviously intelligent, gifted and bright young man
have chosen shame and misery?' wondered François Mauriac in Le Figaro after Figon’s 1962
television appearance on the current affairs programme Cinq colonnes à la une.
How did you go about writing the dialogue?
- The speech of the time has its own music, which we rediscovered in both the trial transcripts
and the eyewitness accounts - true or false - of the affair. This music was our guide when
writing dialogue between the characters. Some lines are actually authentic, for example when
Duras says to Figon “what you’ve done is disgusting”. The language of 1960s gangsters had not
yet made its way into the mainstream and in fact became known through this affair. Its witticisms
were popularized in the press and embellished by the humorists. Michel Audiard was turning it
into a cinematic style in the lines he gave to actors such as Gabin, Ventura and Belmondo.
It turns out that Figon’s girlfriend Anne-Marie Coffinet played a few minor roles in some of
Audiard’s films.
This film is obviously an homage to Franju, but also to directors like Melville...
- Melville is THE model for French film noir! He was the only post-war director - along with
Jacques Becker - who was able to film the gangster world in a way that was more than just
anecdotal - as an opaque world with its own behaviour and mysterious rituals. An underworld
which undoubtedly fascinated him, but which he never sought to excuse. I myself used a similar
approach, obviously with Franju very much in mind as well, since he also built up a body of work
in which the hidden side of the characters was secretly at work at the heart of the plot. As it
happened reality caught up with fiction, since Franju was caught in a real trap by underworld
types like the ones he invented.
You have a particular way of filming Paris, making it into a cold, impenetrable place...
- For Ben Barka Paris was a lethal, icy trap. That’s what I wanted to recreate in the filming. It’s a
story whose main action unfolds in Paris in winter: it begins at the end of October with the ab-
duction in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and ends in January with Figon’s death in a street in the 16th
arrondissement. So it’s a film in which the weather is always cold. My DP Christophe Pollock and
I wanted to use the winter light, for both exteriors and interiors.
How did you choose the locations?
- For the most part we shot in the places where the events really happened. Miraculously we
found the studio apartment in Rue des Renaudes, near the Etoile, where Figon spent his last
days. It’s still a pretty chilling area, where we were able to film a few interior and exterior
scenes. We also did some shooting in the Brasserie Lipp, who gave us exceptional permission,
and in the house of the gangster Boucheseiche in Fontenay le Vicomte. These places are extra-
ordinarily well matched to the details of the unfolding drama and its narration. Franju’s apartment
was in Quai des Grands Augustins! A stone’s throw from Lipp and opposite the police station in
Quai des Orfèvres, where he was questioned and where the affair had its judicial conclusion in
the court in which Pétain had been tried. Today you feel as though the places had anticipated the
drama. So they provided an ideal setting in which to stage it.
Your way of breaking up the space along geometric lines echoes the inexorability of
the plot, its progress towards tragedy.
- First of all there was the constraint associated with period films. In that genre establishing
shots are obviously much more difficult to do than closer shots, for simple reasons of finance.
We decided to take particular care with the sequence of the abduction around the Saint-Germain
crossroads, which we reconstructed with its cinema, the Publicis-Saint-Germain. At the same
time these constraints provided us with aesthetic guidelines for filming: in practice the very tight
framing, closing down the space, was very well suited to the film’s sense of fate and inexora-
bility. It creates a feeling of claustrophobia, turning Paris into a place you can’t escape from, and
which closes in around all the protagonists like a living trap.
Tell me about your choice of music and the role of jazz.
- 1965 is a year whose sound track is still a mix of jazz and pop music... For the film I chose the particular tones of jazz, because Figon is a character from the 1950s, when jazz was at its
height in Paris (Miles Davis was there!): it was the music you’d go and hear at a club like La
Huchette or the Trois Maillets, where Figon was in fact a regular, and which we see in one of
the scenes where Charles Berling meets Fabienne Babe, who plays his girlfriend. The whole
story is impregnated with the pale sounds of jazz.
Berling is astounding as Figon...
- He put a lot of himself into the role. He didn’t think twice about using make up, degrading him-
self visually, in order to create the appearance of a 'provincial lawyer' behind which Figon mani-
pulated his entourage, while demonstrating an extraordinary ability to talk. The guy had to be
both disturbing and attractive and Charles recreated him with a great deal of subtlety. He met the
actor’s hardest challenge, which is to create a particular kind of empathy with the character,
without in any way excusing what he does, making him into someone who swings between
being unbalanced and clear-sighted.
Did you think of Jean-Pierre Léaud straight away for Franju?
- Yes, I wanted to make another film with him after L’Affaire Marcorelle. It so happens that he’s
about the same age as Franju was in 1965. He’d met him through Truffaut a few years before
(Franju was shooting Thérèse Desqueyroux, and Léaud Boulevard by Julien Duvivier).
Georges Franju was a 'borderline' personality and I asked Jean-Pierre to do that kind of painful
contained craziness he was subject to - in contrast to the exuberantly crazy characters he’s
played in the past.
Josiane Balasko is totally believable as Marguerite Duras: it was a daring choice...
- As soon as I’d thought of her for the role it was kind of obvious to me. In a black turtleneck, the
little panther-skin jacket and the tortoiseshell glasses Duras always used to wear, there wasn’t
the shadow of a doubt. For someone like that who’s very well known there aren’t all that many
solutions. Either you choose an actress who’s not been seen much and will disappear behind
the historical figure, or on the contrary you get someone with a strong personality to do it, who
will bring her own understanding to the character. The second path seemed to me to be the only
one possible. Besides it so happens that as well as being one hell of an actress, Balasko is also
one hell of a writer. We mustn’t forget that!
What made you think of Simon Abkarian for Ben Barka?
- To play Ben Barka we needed an actor who could bring a universal dimension to the
character. In reality the ideals he represents go far beyond the specifics of the Moroccan ex-
perience, and even beyond the 1960s. More and more Simon Abkarian is demonstrating that he
can do anything: Parisian worker, Armenian gangster, Turkish kebab seller, religious Moroccan
Jew... In this film I think he gives Ben Barka the stature of a man who is above the vicissitudes
of his period. He also gives him back all the emotion associated with his name and his tragic des-
tiny, because Simon has that emotional potential within himself.
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