Director Laurent Cantet Heads The Class

Available on DVD and Blu-ray from Sony, Laurent Cantet’s The Class (street: Aug. 11) is an outstanding documentary-styled drama that was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award this past year. It’s based upon the life of educator Francois Bégaudeau, who called upon his real-life experiences as a teacher of multi-ethnic children in a low-income neighborhood in Paris and then turned them into an acclaimed book and then the screenplay, both of which became the basis of Cantet’s film.

But even though a book and screenplay were firmly in place, Cantet needed more to set out on turning the printed words into an organic, flowing piece of cinema.

“The way children acted in front of the camera—it’s just fascinating,” Cantet told me in a phone interview a few weeks back. “With this kind of material, there’s always a lot of room for improvisation and some ‘happy’

To that end, Cantet arranged a months-long workshop schedule for some fifty kids that he chose to possibly appear in the film. that Cantet arranged for some fifty kids, wherein they would reads pieces from the screenplay, improvise from that and speak about themselves. Of that fifty, twenty-five were chosen to be in the film. It was during these filmed workshop periods that Cantet and Bégaudeau honed in on the storyline and sequences that were shot for the movie.

“One of the important things that happened during the workshop was that I got to know each of them—all twenty-five,” said Cantet. “It usually takes a long time to distribute roles to different actors, but after one year of workshopping, things come more naturally.”

Though Cantet didn’t show the workshop footage to his cast during the actual filming so there would be a freshness on the screen, he was surprised to see that very little changed from the workshop to the production. And though screenwriter Bégaudeau was on the set and was trying to make the kids say what they were expected to say, he didn’t get in the way of the results.

“It’s always so interesting to see what the people say about their own life--I have fun doing that,” said Cantet. “The kids were at that age where they were so passionate about what they had to so that by watching it, you start to understand things about yourself.”

Posted by Laurence Lerman on July 6, 2009 | Comments (0)