Pilgrims' progress

The award-winning Le Grand Voyage got the first official all-clear to film in Mecca. Writer-director Ismaël Ferroukhi talks to Michael Dwyer

The first feature film from writer-director Ismaël Ferroukhi, Le Grand Voyage, is a classically shaped road movie in that the journey becomes one of discovery for its two main characters - a domineering Moroccan man (Mohamed Majd) and his son (Nicolas Cazalé), whom he orders to drive him on the 3,000-mile journey from France to Mecca. The father is a strict traditionalist who resents his son's relationship with a non-Muslim woman, and the tension crackles between the two men in their deep-rooted generational and cultural conflict during this unsentimental and ultimately touching drama.

"When people are travelling they can lose their reference points," Ferroukhi observed when we talked in Dublin recently. "This is a very important journey for the two characters. The father comes from a very different culture, and the son grew up in France, so they are like strangers to each other at the beginning of this journey."

Coincidentally, the two leading actors had some scenes together in another picture of cultural displacement, Gaël Morel's Les Chemins de l'Oued. That film featured Cazalé as a young man who, to escape being jailed in France, is despatched to his grandparents' hometown in Algeria, where the values prove as alien to him as the language. "I didn't watch that film until I had finished my own," Ferroukhi says. "I wanted to be as free as I could in developing the characters. But it is very good. Although the two actors had a few scenes together in that, they are together for almost all of my film.

"They had a similar rapport to the relationship between their characters. Mohamed is a very experienced actor whereas Nicolas is much younger and hasn't made as many films, and at the beginning there was a tension between them. I watched them as they observed each other and as they got to know each other. Both of them cried when we finished shooting. It was a very close experience for the two of them."

Now 43, Ferroukhi was born in the Moroccan city of Kenitra and moved with his family to the south of France when he was three. Although his film is not autobiographical, it was inspired by memories of the time when his own father travelled alone by car to Mecca. "It was the cheapest way to go, and like the father in the film, he wanted to live the journey . . . while he is travelling he is able to prepare himself mentally."

The movie was shot in seven countries, and as in the movie, the journey was eventful. "In Serbia we had to respect the curfew imposed after the prime minister's assassination," he says. "In the Middle East, the Iraq war had just started. And in Turkey we had a hard time trying to get authorisation to shoot inside the Blue Mosque or at the Bulgarian border. I didn't have a lot of money and it costs a lot to move a cast and crew from one country to another. However, I had a small cast and crew - just 15 people in all, so that made moving around easier."

Le Grand Voyage, which won the award for best first feature at the Venice Film Festival last year, has the distinction of being the first film allowed to be shot in Mecca. "It was very exciting to be filming there during the pilgrimage," says Ferroukhi. "But it proved to be extremely tricky as the authorisation we obtained from the Saudi Arabian embassy was not worth a thing once we got there. The authorities are used to TV crews that shoot standard pictures in a very short time, and not to a cinema crew that will shoot the same scene two or three times.

"I shot the scenes in Mecca first, because I knew that would be the most difficult part. I wouldn't have made the movie if I couldn't shoot there. That was essential for the end of the film, but I also could not have shot it anywhere else and been able to get thousands of extras to appear in it. I wanted the viewer to feel a sense of the occasion in Mecca while the pilgrimage is taking place. That is what the film is leading to all the time."

As the film proceeds, sympathy subtly shifts from the son to his overbearing father. "The father doesn't understand his son at the beginning, so he responds in his extreme ways. Instead of telling the son to stop using his mobile phone, he throws it away when the son is out of the car. The father's behaviour is hard and clumsy, but it's based in love for his son."

When Ferroukhi was a schoolboy, one of his best friends was Cédric Kahn, who went on to become one of France's most interesting directors and is best known here for L'ennui and Roberto Succo. Before making those movies, Kahn directed three feature films based on screenplays written in collaboration with Ferroukhi.

"As long as I knew him, he always wanted to make films, whereas I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was a boy. I liked to write stories at the time and later I wrote a short story that everyone said seemed very visual. When I made my first short film I showed it to him. I think we will work together again."

Ferroukhi followed his first short, the award-winning L'exposé, with L'inconnu, for which he managed to secure the services of Catherine Deneuve for the leading role. "That was crazy," he laughs. "I had no professional actors in my first short film, and then Catherine Deneuve acted in my next one. It was a very good experience. I learned so much from making that film. Canal + and Arte wanted to make three short films with new directors and well-known stars. I wrote a script and said it was for Catherine Deneuve if she wanted to be in it. She saw my first film, read the new script and she agreed to do it."

Le Grand Voyage was one of the last films produced by Humbert Balsan, one of France's most prolific and adventurous producers, who committed suicide in February. "He saw the film before he died, which was very important to me. I waited five years to get the money to make the film, and I don't know if I would ever have been able to make it without the help of Humbert Balsan.

"I was shocked when he died. I am very proud to have known him and worked with him. Any time I told him I had a problem making the film, he said there are no problems and he sorted them out. He loved a challenge. He produced so many movies of a very high standard, most of them difficult films no other producer would get involved with or would be able to raise the money to get them made. I think that's why he is dead. He had run up very large debts, but he never spoke about that."

Le Grand Voyage opens Friday at the IFI