Silent Film for a Talkie Era
Learning How Michel Hazanavicius Made The Artist
In this year’s Oscar race, the film that’s amassing consensus as the one to beat is Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist. A valentine to the silent-movie era and a look at how some stars faded during the transition to sound, it’s an audacious enterprise that succeeds with flying colors — somehow, it’s a silent movie that works for the 21st century. Visually stunning, funny, and heartbreaking, The Artist is definitely one of the best films of 2011, and one that will garner nominations for both Hazanavicius (who was previously better known for the OSS 117 series of French spy parodies) and its leading French actors, Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, who is also the director’s spouse. I recently sat down with Hazanavicius to discuss the film.
This is quite an audacious undertaking to do a silent film for a modern audience. To decide to do it is a thing, to do it is another thing, and to find the money to do it is another other thing. It was a fantasy for me to do a silent movie for a very, very long time, and I’m pretty sure it is a fantasy for a lot of directors to do a silent movie because it is maybe the purest way to tell a story in a movie. I have been lucky to have two successes in France, and I guess it gave me some confidence to try to do it, and I met a wonderful producer who was stupid enough, I say, to say yes and put his money into this movie.
You could have made this movie a parody or a satire. Instead you attack it with so much emotional commitment. What I love about silent movie is the emotional power, and it doesn’t make sense to make a parody today. Mel Brooks did it with Silent Movie, but that is not what I wanted to do. If you want to do a comedy, the problem with a silent format is that you don’t have dialogue, so you just have one way to be funny: Use slapstick. For me, I wanted to do something that was specific to the silent movie and that is emotional power. I show things, and people make their own dialogues, their own voices, their own sound, so you are very close to the story because you do the story with your own personality. I wanted to make an entertaining movie but not a spoof.
