11/03/08
Text: Scott Indrisek
French star Mathieu Amalric—who we personally think is the most tragically hip character actor to grace the screen since Terence Stamp in the late 60s—plays the villain Dominic Greene in Quantum of Solace, out now in the U.K. and on November 14 in the U.S. He also stars in The Heartbeat Detector, currently available on DVD. Anthem spoke to him a few months back while he was filming down in Panama; see what he has to say about suicide in France, burlesque dancers, and the violence that language often hides.
I don’t know if you’ve had a corporate office job in France, but would you say that SC Farb is typical of a French corporation?
Nicolas [Klotz, the director] didn’t ask me to go spend six months in a real company to know exactly how it really worked. I wanted to do that but he said ‘No, this is not what I’m looking for’. And as you can notice in the film it’s really fiction because sometimes you don’t know really [know] in what time you are. Some location[s] look like the 60s, sometimes you feel that you are [in modern times]. It’s not naturalistic, it’s not a documentary. Even the way we speak is very, very ‘written’ and all that.
[In a company] it’s always dangerous to say what you really think. You have to disguise, and you have to smile or shut up. That’s the best way to be powerful in France sometimes. We’re not asking people to be human sometimes. There’s a big company in France [where] there has been six suicides in two years and they are asking themselves ‘Why? What’s happening?’ There’s a lot of suicides in companies in France.
It’s funny because coming from the States we tend to look at France as a much more ideal place for workers. You have all this vacation, the state provides for you…so it’s interesting to hear you say this.
With the right wing now even stronger, unions don’t have that much power and solidarity. It’s very difficult. They just fired 20,000 teachers for next year. I don’t know what the thing is about France. We feel things really are tough, very tough.
You might be becoming more like us Americans, maybe.
Yes, but we don’t have the same story. We don’t have your energy. We don’t have your belief. We don’t have this thing about hope. We don’t have any hope, I think.
France doesn’t have any hope?
In France people hope that things won’t change! The story of America is completely different; it’s something completely different. The racism in France, it’s so different. I think the thing is really how people use words. In France we use a lot of American [business] words that seem modern—like managing. In fact, under those words there are violent acts.
