Prolific French director François Ozon touched down in Venice on Tuesday with his adaptation of Albert Camus’s absurdist classic The Stranger about a French expat living in colonial 1930s French Algeria who indifferently kills a local man.
It is the third fiction adaption of the novella after the 1967 version by Luchino Visconti, starring Marcello Mastroianni, and 2001 Turkish film Fate, which played in Cannes Un Certain Regard.
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Anticipation is riding high on the Lido as to whether Ozon has pulled it off with his black-and-white adaptation, starring Benjamin Voisin as protagonist Meursault and Rebecca Varder as his lover.
At the press conference for the Golden Lion contender, Ozon revealed he had hit on the idea of adapting The Stranger after failing to secure financing for a project following a young man in the wake of a failed suicide attempt.
The director said that like most people in France, he had read the novella when he was a high school student, but had found fresh meaning when he came back to it later in later life.
“Maybe I understood it a little better than when I read it as a teenager and at the same time there were a lot of things that I didn’t understand in the book that fascinated me,” said Ozon.
“I started in a somewhat carefree way and at the same time a little anxious because everyone around me was saying to me, ‘It’s my favorite book. I’m curious to see what you’re going to do’. That put pressure on.”
Ozon said he decided very quickly that he would revisit the story with a modern perspective rather than – as Visconti had done – with gaze of the time of its writing in 1939 and publication in 1942 when France still occupied Algeria.
“The most important thing right away is the first sentence of the book, which is extremely well-known and everyone remembers, ‘Mother is dead, maybe it was yesterday’,” said Ozon.
“But in fact, it wasn’t this sentence that shocked me today, that surprised me. It was rather a sentence that appears in the second part of the book, when Meursault returns to prison and says, ‘I killed an Arab’.”
“I said to myself, there you go, this is the key to my adaptation. Contextualize this story about French colonization and try to understand Meursault’s character by following Camus’s book as faithfully as possible.”
Ozon said his decision to making the film in black and white was both artistic and financial.
“Since it’s a philosophical book, it seemed to me that black and white was ideal for telling this story, being free of color, it’s a form of purity… it was also a financial choice. It’s not an American blockbuster and I didn’t have the means to recreate the 1930s in Algiers, so it allowed me to simplify a lot of the sets,” he explained.
The film was shot in color and then converted into black and white. Ozon said the end result was a pleasant surprise.
“It makes everything absolutely magnificent and awakens the cinephile in us because all of a sudden, when I saw Rebecca in a white swimsuit on the beach, I said to myself, it’s Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer, or Benjamin walking in the streets, I had the impression of seeing James Stewart or Cary Grant.”
Ozon, who has delivered a film every year for the past decade, was asked where his drive came from at a time when it was increasingly hard to get feature films financed and over the line.
“There’s a quote from Camus: ‘To create is to live twice’. Well, to make a film is to live twice. Journalists often say to me, ‘You can’t have time to live because you’re always making films,” said Ozon.
“On the contrary, I believe that I live twice as much because I make films… to create, to tell a story, to work with a team, because it’s truly a collective effort, is the most powerful thing.”
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