It’s clear you’ve done all the research but you arrived there as a non-South African playing someone who is supposed to have all this background already. Was there any opposition you had to overcome to prove you could understand Anna well enough?
I feel responsible because it’s a huge subject. But it was more for me about the TRC more than having the right accent, and I was going to – there was no other way. So for me that was part of the work and I had to go through it. But my mission was bigger than that.
The film had been postponed a year so it was good for me because also I could investigate myself as a French white person in front of Algeria. How I could relate and feel the authenticity of what my character was going through, you know? The shame of being French in front of the Algerian War and the way that French generals behaved and tortured, exactly the same way as in South Africa, as they did the same kind of tortures, you know, in Iraq. I mean, the tortures in Vietnam were the same. It seems that in any way, you put men together it becomes [crazy]. When you have some rules you have to defend yourself, or impose some kind of political ideas. It seems that with the alcohol and the women or the native women and the game of males together playing ‘who’s going to do the worse thing’, there’s a moment it resembles any kind of situation of horror.
Do you think it’s gender specific? You said men specifically.
I think in that particular case it was men but the women, in a way, [they were] passive-aggressive. As if they knew, but they didn’t want to know. Because some said they didn’t know but how could you not know? But some knew and were part of it. Or even cooking for a man who does that is being active. Do you see what I’m saying? But in that particular case it was male and it was, as it says in the movie, perpetrators were men. I have nothing against men, it’s just a fact.
It’s true – I don’t know why I want to say that now – but sometimes when people say don’t make war, make love. It’s that suddenly you replace love with war. For me it’s a very bizarre way of saying… Because for me it’s so different. What the energy is, how you transform the energy.
Do you understand the relationship that she has with Langston (played by Samuel L Jackson)? Why did she cheat on her husband?
I never thought that she was cheating on her husband. I think it’s beyond that. It might be weird to hear that but that’s how I understand it, is that she’s going through trauma of discovering the atrocity of her own people. That her blood is – I can’t even say the words for it. That her history is suddenly so dirty. She knew, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know as far as it happened. So suddenly when you’re going through this, she’s going through so many stages of denying, of conflict, of depression, of anger, and there’s a moment when you go outside, you go back to the real life or family life or supermarket or whatever, it seems that nobody understands anything. Nobody is aware of what happened. So that you feel an outsider and you can’t share the pain and you can’t share the horror of it. I think her need to suddenly share who she is and what’s going on can only be done with somebody who’s going through the same experience. That’s how I understand it. And it’s true that it’s cheating as you say, but at the same time it’s beyond that. It’s somebody who needs oxygen (gasping) and can’t get oxygen outside.
But do you think because of the hearing she has to come clean with her husband?
I love the scene when the mother says… (Getting choked up) When she says, “No more lies.” She understands it.
