<\/p>\n
Prolific French director Fran\u00e7ois Ozon touched down in Venice on Tuesday with his adaptation of Albert\u00a0 Camus\u2019s absurdist classic The Stranger<\/em> about a French expat living in colonial 1930s French Algeria who indifferently kills a local man.<\/p>\n It is the third fiction adaption of the novella after the 1967 version by Luchino Visconti, starring Marcello Mastroianni, and 2001 Turkish film Fate<\/em>, which played in Cannes Un Certain Regard.<\/p>\n More from Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n Anticipation is riding high on the Lido as to whether Ozon has pulled it off with his black-and-white adaptation, starring\u00a0Benjamin Voisin as protagonist Meursault and Rebecca Varder as his lover.<\/p>\n At the press conference for the Golden Lion contender, Ozon revealed he had hit on the idea of adapting The Stranger <\/em>after failing to secure financing for a project following a young man in the wake of a failed suicide attempt.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n \u201cMaybe 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\u2019t understand in the book that fascinated me,\u201d said Ozon.<\/p>\n \u201cI started in a somewhat carefree way and at the same time a little anxious because everyone around me was saying to me, \u2018It\u2019s my favorite book. I\u2019m curious to see what you\u2019re going to do\u2019. That put pressure on.\u201d<\/p>\n Ozon said he decided very quickly that he would revisit the story with a modern perspective rather than \u2013 as Visconti had done \u2013 with gaze of the time of its writing in 1939 and publication in 1942 when France still occupied Algeria. <\/p>\n \u201cThe most important thing right away is the first sentence of the book, which is extremely well-known and everyone remembers, \u2018Mother is dead, maybe it was yesterday\u2019,\u201d said Ozon.<\/p>\n \u201cBut in fact, it wasn\u2019t 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, \u2018I killed an Arab\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI said to myself, there you go, this is the key to my adaptation. Contextualize this story about French colonization and try to understand Meursault\u2019s character by following Camus\u2019s book as faithfully as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Ozon said his decision to making the film in black and white was both artistic and financial.<\/p>\n \u201cSince it\u2019s a philosophical book, it seemed to me that black and white was ideal for telling this story, being free of color, it\u2019s a form of purity\u2026 it was also a financial choice. It\u2019s not an American blockbuster and I didn\u2019t have the means to recreate the 1930s in Algiers, so it allowed me to simplify a lot of the sets,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n The film was shot in color and then converted into black and white. Ozon said the end result was a pleasant surprise.<\/p>\n \u201cIt 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\u2019s Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer<\/em>, or Benjamin walking in the streets, I had the impression of seeing James Stewart or Cary Grant.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a quote from Camus: \u2018To create is to live twice\u2019.\u00a0 Well, to make a film is to live twice. Journalists often say to me, \u2018You can\u2019t have time to live because you\u2019re always making films,\u201d said Ozon.<\/p>\n \u201cOn the contrary, I believe that I live twice as much because I make films\u2026 to create, to tell a story, to work with a team, because it\u2019s truly a collective effort, is the most powerful thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Best of Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Deadline’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Prolific French director Fran\u00e7ois Ozon touched down in Venice on Tuesday with his adaptation of Albert\u00a0 Camus\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1992795,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[359597,360450,360448,360451,360449,360452,360453],"class_list":["post-1992794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-albert-camus","tag-black-and-white","tag-francois-ozon","tag-french-algeria","tag-luchino-visconti","tag-marcello-mastroianni","tag-meursault"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/To-Create-Is-To-Live-Twice-\u2014-Venice.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1992794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1992795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1992794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1992794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1992794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}