Three-in-one imitation of life

When you tell a story in two different ways, you're already telling a third story, and there's no end to it after that, writer, director and actor, Lucas Belvaux tells Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent.

In one of cinema's most compelling and stimulating meditations on art's imitation of life, Lucas Belvaux has created a fascinating trilogy of films operating from the premise that we envisage our respective lives as movies.

Each of us is the main character, the leading role in our own story. The people closest to us are our co-stars. Our more casual friends and acquaintances are the supporting players. And the people who pass through our lives peripherally are extras.

Eschewing the traditional mould of shaping a trilogy as a series of consecutively linked stories, Belvaux daringly plays with narrative by concentrating on six principal characters and exploring their experiences from different perspectives and through different genres.

The films will be released here under the umbrella title, The Lucas Belvaux Trilogy, with the individual components known simply as One, Two and Three; they were released elsewhere in Europe under their original titles: Cavale (On the Run), Un Couple Épatant (An Amazing Couple) and Après la Vie (After Life).

They may be viewed in any order, but for optimum resonance should be seen from One to Three (the order they will be released here). But perhaps I believe this simply because that is the order in which I saw them. When we met in London last week, Belvaux expressed his own preference, to see Un Couple Épatant (Two)first, followed by Cavale (One) and Après la Vie (Three), which was the release pattern in France.

"It doesn't really matter what order in which you see the movies," he says, "but whatever order you choose, you are perceiving different things and at different times." One (Cavale) is tautly structured as a thriller in which Belvaux plays a terrorist who escapes from prison after serving 15 years. He returns to a changed world where his former associates have moved on to the responsibilities of adult life, but he remains intent on creating civil unrest.

This character figures peripherally in Two (Un Couple Épatant), which, in marked contrast, is a romantic comedy of errors in which the deceptiveness of appearances causes chaos in the lives of a hypochondriac businessman (François Morel) and his Neapolitan teacher wife (Ornella Muti), and their friends and colleagues.

Three (Après la Vie) is formed as a marital melodrama and features Dominique Blanc in a riveting, raw portrayal of a desperate morphine-addicted teacher whose detective husband (Gilbert Melki) is morally compromised when he relies on a local drug dealer to feed her habit.

In Belvaux's bold, ingenious cinematic exercise, all three films take place over the same time period, sometimes containing overlapping scenes that take on different tones in their alternative contexts - a scene played for laughs in one becomes the stuff of drama in another, for example.

It is a remarkable achievement for Belvaux, its writer, director and leading actor, who will be 42 on Friday, the day One opens in Dublin. Born and raised near Namur in Belgium, he made his acting début when he was 18, in French TV films and then in cinema films, going on to work with directors of such diverse cinematic styles as Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Olivier Assayas.

"Strategically, the best way to learn about directing is to be an actor," Belvaux says, "because on any production you are always in the very centre of what's going on and you get to observe everything that's going on. You don't have the same opportunities if you are an assistant director or even a cameraman, because the actor sees everything on the set." Belvuax made the leap into writing and directing in 1992 with the road movie, Parfois Trop d'Amour, a bittersweet comedy of two men in love with the same woman - and she is in love with a third man who is in the process of leaving her. He is never seen in the film, which takes place over the course of 24 hours.

Continuing to work as an actor, Belvaux wrote and directed his second feature four years later - Pour Rire! (Just For Laughs), a sex comedy dealing with adultery, jealousy and mistaken identity and featuring the marvellous Jean-Pierre Leaud, whom he describes as "completely crazy but very special, one of the greatest actors in the world". Three years ago, Belvaux directed the French TV film, Merde aux Toxicos, the only film he has directed from another writer's screenplay. "It's about the mother of an adolescent boy who is shooting up heroin," he says. "One of the reasons I did it was to prepare me for dealing with the story of the morphine-addicted woman in the trilogy."

His ideas for the trilogy were triggered while he was directing his first film. "It dealt with three characters, and they met many other characters over 24 hours. When I was directing an actor playing one of the secondary characters in the film, it occurred to me that if I were making a film about this character it would be a completely different film and that the main characters would suddenly become secondary roles in it."

Warming to the subject of art imitating life, he adds: "When I get the green light to make a movie, I know that in two years it will be made, so when I come out of the meeting with that thought in mind, I am feeling really happy as I'm walking down the street, but nobody who passes me by knows how happy I am feeling, or why. I want to share it with them, but I know that's impossible, and I also know that they are in a state of happiness or unhappiness for reasons I don't know. These are thoughts that keep coming back to my mind.

"I decided then that I would act on that principle some day, by making several films dealing with various characters whose paths would cross at different times. I didn't know then that it would be three films. When you tell the same part of a story in two different ways, you're already telling a third story, and so you can go in all sorts of ways. There's no end to it. It's like a bottomless pit, so to speak."

While the same actors, cinematographer and composer worked on all three films in the trilogy, Belvaux hired a different editor for each of the three films. "There were several reasons for that," he says. "It gives a different rhythm for each film, and if I had just one editor, I would be editing one film after another, but with three editors, you could edit all three in parallel. I staggered the start of editing each film, so that one would be in progress for four weeks before we started on the second, and the same with the third."

The three films were shot back-to-back over 23 weeks, which Belvaux admits was particularly exhausting for him, given that he also was one of the principal actors and his role as the agile terrorist was the most physical in the film.

"I had just one week free after shooting before we started editing all three films and when it was all done, I needed about a year to recover," he says. "There was so much jumping and climbing that my legs ached after some of those scenes, but I had no choice. I had to carry on with directing the film. I took the role on at a very late stage, so I had no time to be physically prepared for it."

He originally offered the terrorist role to the French actor, Antoine Chappey, one of his Pour Rire! cast. Then, because of complex co-production financing arrangements on the production, he had to cast a Belgian actor in the role. When the actor he chose could not extricate himself from a contractual commitment to another film, Belvaux could not afford the time or the money to wait for him, so he cast another experienced Belgian actor - himself.

This was the first time he acted in a film that he directed. "I thought the other actors would be ill at ease with the director playing one of the main roles in the film, but as it happened, it turned out to be a great pleasure for all of us and I found it very exciting. Playing a role which you have written and which you are directing is easier in another sense, because you don't have to explain anything to the actor when you yourself are the actor."

He elicits fine performances from his fellow actors, and in particular Dominique Blanc who is powerfully understated and deeply touching as the morphine addict.

"Watching the intensity of her performance on the set was remarkable," he says, "and it was even more so to be acting opposite someone who is giving so much of herself to the film. The scene of her overdose had to be shot twice for different contexts and different points of view in two of the three movies. That was so intense and even more so because we shot it with a hand-held camera.

"When I am directing, it feels for most of the time as if I am talking to the body of the actor than to his or her head. I don't feel the need to offer any psychological explanations to the actor because they are just as capable of understanding the motivation of the character. For the director, I believe, it's much more a question of the choreography - where and how an actor moves somewhere, when and how they do what they do."

Reflecting back on the long, adventurous journey that has been his trilogy, Belvaux notes that the most difficult aspect of the production was raising the finance for something so ambitious and different. "That surprised me at first," he says. "I thought it was going to be make so much sense economically - we were going to make three films for the cost of two, and if the first film did well, people would buy two more tickets to see the other two films in the trilogy. The finance people didn't see it like that. Their fear was that the first film could fail and nobody would want to see the other two. In the end I was forced to make three films for the price of one, which was very tough, but worth it." Well worth it.

Special thanks to Paul Ryan for assisting as translator for this interview.

The Lucas Belvaux Trilogy: One opens at the UGC and IFI cinemas in Dublin on Friday, followed by Two on November 28th and Three on December 5th.