Xavier Giannoli on Of Blood and Money

Universal Film & Television Journal’s Amir Ganjavie interviewed Writer/Director Xavier Giannoli about his new series Of Blood and Money (D’argent et de sang).

Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): So, you began working on this series with material from newspapers and Fabrice Arfi’s novel.

Xavier Giannoli (XG): Yes. And from it, I was thinking about the idea of the mafia. The cathedral of mafia literature on film is The Godfather, the novel by Mario Puzo. Do you know what is on the first page of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather?

(UM): No.

(XG): A recitation of some words of Balzac. That was his model to write The Godfather. For me, the continuity was perfect. It’s a way after Lost Illusion to continue to talk about greed.

(UM): This is your first time writing a TV series, how was it different from film?

(XG): When I like a series, I like to have six hours. It’s a very particular experience. You can’t stop the credits at the very beginning and it’s like diving into the world of the series. I like it when films are very long. The Godfather is almost four hours, films like Magnolia seemed like they were three hours and a half. It’s a deep experience to be inside the world of fiction and to stay there. I love this sensation. I was not thinking, “I’m going to make a series.” There was this book, huge material, with beautiful ideas. I started to work and immediately understood that it was going to be very long. In the beginning, we did not know 8 or 10 episodes. I was completely free with them and they told me, “Okay. You can send us one episode after the other.” Sometimes the episodes were too long so we were talking together and moving the frames. In the end, there were 12 episodes and I’m very happy with that because my obsession was the retention and the writing. They were aligned with a guy from the Ministry of Economy I interviewed because I wanted to understand how two small-time crooks could steal 5 billion. He told me everything was too fast because it’s only six months and this idea of too fast became something important for me in writing and filming. I want everything to be very fast.

(UM): What I like about your work is the quality of the writing, the dialogue especially.

(XG): I’m coming from literature. I wanted to be a teacher of literature and literature changed my life. A lot of the filmmakers I know never thought about this side of the camera. The human situation is complex. That’s why I like literature because it can help you to understand that all human and social-political situations are complex and there are a lot of shades. That’s why I spend time writing.

(UM): Do you have any golden rules that you apply to writing dialogue? For example, what is good or bad?

(XG): It depends on the situation. There are people from a lot of different social circles. There are people from the street, there are traders, and the music of each of these social circles is very important when I’m writing dialogue. I don’t like dialogue when you can see that it is a dialogue. I want something natural. In Woody Allen’s film the people, most of the time, know what they are living in. They know the issue of what’s happening because they are intellectual. They analyze all the time. In the series, there are not these kinds of people. They are gangsters and are very distinctive. In writing the dialogue, I was always thinking that they were going to say a lot of things with their eyes. They’re going to say a lot of things with the way they move. That’s where cinema was important. They don’t have the word but they have the gesture, the movement.

The first season of Succession was really great. If you watch it one more time, watch the way all the characters, the three brothers and the sister, when they sit, they never sit like us. They sit like children on the floor. I remember it was very interesting to see that. That was a very good idea, to see people with a lot of money moving like children.

(UM): Coming to the question of acting and performance, how do you try to get an actor prepared for conveying the character?

(XG): I always say to the actors, “The most important thing is not what you have to say but what you have to hide.” That’s why it’s very important for me when I’m building the shooting list, the beginning is always the look. A lot of the stories in all my films are about someone who is lying. They’re gangsters and they are not telling the truth so it’s very important for me to always be in the eyes of the actors. I’m always talking with them, to be very careful of the dialogue with your eyes.

It’s very important, the quality of silence there. After that, I’m acting the dialogue myself to try to find good music; It’s like music to have a natural dialogue. There is not a lot of improvisation. But on the set, it’s like a game. I ask the actors to feel free. Most of the time, I say, “It’s boring. Let’s find something. It’s too classical. These people are crazy at this moment. I want to see something crazy and rhythmic.” Body language is also very important in cinema. With the camera, it’s very important that the way the character moves can say something about his history and where he’s coming from.

(UM): I imagine that you spend quite a bit of time getting yourself familiar with the character. For example, now that you are making movies about gangsters, do you spend time watching documentaries?

(XG): Yes, but that’s what is interesting. They are not really gangsters. It’s very specific. The Tunisian Mafia, I don’t know if “mafia” is right, they hate violence. It’s not the Sicilian or Algerian Mafia. They have no guns and they are not fighting. They are always joking and talking. They are very funny. They are gangsters of small things. They are not gangsters like in the Scorsese film. They are not like this. What was interesting for me was that nobody was a real gangster at the beginning. They just had a good idea, but it’s too good of an idea. None of them could imagine that they were going to steal 5 billion in six months. This money, it’s like blood in the Pacific Ocean. Suddenly, there are real gangsters. It’s really dangerous because it’s too dangerous to have a lot of money like this when the real mob knows that. One of the characters, Jerome Matias, the young trader, wants to play with that. He’s a poker player, he likes danger, and suddenly, because of this money, he’s going to meet very dangerous people. He thinks that everything is a game. Of course, it’s a tragedy. In the end, it becomes a tragedy.

(UM): I know that, unfortunately, one of the main actors, Gaspard Ulliel, died during the project. I’m just curious, what was the impact of that? Did you replace all of his scenes in the series?

(XG): I had to rewrite. In some of the scenes, I just stopped with that. In the other scenes, I had to rewrite it for Niels Schneider’s Jérôme Attias. The character is different. It’s another idea of the character so it was a shock. It was after 1 month and a half. It was very strange that suddenly, there were these dark shadows on the series. Because in the real story, there were a lot of dead people. Suddenly, I’d read something tragic and violent, and my first move was to think, “Okay, let’s stop.”

After, I thought, “No, maybe there is something in the unconscious. Of course, death is everywhere.”

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