theartsdesk Q&A: director François Ozon on 'When Autumn Falls'

François Ozon is France’s master of sly secrets, burying hard truths in often dazzling surfaces, from Swimming Pool’s erotic mystery of writing and murder in 2003 to the teenage boy cuckooing his way into his middle-aged mentor’s life in In the House (2012).

Sexuality, gender and love itself prove variously slippery in The New Girlfriend (2014) and the violently different twins of L’Amant double (2017), while feminist equality powers Potiche (2010), the provincial Seventies comedy of umbrella factory strikes and elections with a sparring Depardieu and Deneuve. Ozon’s comfort with French cinema’s grand dames earlier brought Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emanuelle Bèart and Fanny Ardant together in the Sirkian high-gloss Fifties murder-melodrama 8 Women (2002).

The director is equally capable of a sometimes farcical family drama about euthanasia, Everything Went Fine (2021), a delicate study of post-World War One love and guilt, Frantz (2016), and the sober, socially important account of sexual abuse in the French Catholic church By the Grace of God (2019). His stature as a major, remarkably prolific French director is matched by frequent, substantial box-office success at home, suggesting sympathy with his country’s modern essence.

Ozon’s 24th feature, When Autumn Falls, swiftly follows his radically different Thirties theatrical confection The Crime is Mine (2024). We meet its octogenarian heroine Michelle (Hélène Vincent) tending to her garden, picking mushrooms with her old friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko) and basking in Burgundy’s gentle rhythms. But then there’s the local prison where Marie-Claude’s impulsive bad boy son Vincent (Pierre Lottin) languishes, and the old women’s harsh shared past, explaining the hatred of Michelle’s daughter (Ludivine Sagnier, once Swimming Pool’s sultry star), who threatens to withhold her beloved grandson. Ambiguous motives and suspicious corpses are unhurriedly revealed, as autumn leaves indifferently blanket the ground.

I meet Ozon in the library of the Institut Français in London’s most French neighbourhood, South Kensington, with a row of Proust books by his elbow. Wearing a raffish scarf, at 57 he remains youthfully ebullient, even as he reflects on death, beautiful wrinkles and passing time.

NICK HASTED: When Autumn Falls is a slow-burning film, with so many trapdoors and hooks along the way. You cut before the moment of a possible murder, and I can picture the scene almost more than if you’d shown it. How do those ambiguities and elisions, those scenes that you don’t shoot, work?

FRANCOIS OZON: For me it was important to have some holes in the film. Those scenes exist in my head – not in the script. I didn’t shoot the scene of a character’s death because I wanted to be in Michelle’s point of view. Michelle doesn’t know what happened, and actually she doesn’t want to know – she doesn’t care. She has to protect her grandson. So I wanted to put the audience in her head. What do you do with guilt? What do you do with truth? Do you want to know the truth? All this ambiguity, all these moral problems, were important, and to share that with the audience. What would you do in that place?

That sense of complicity isn't just with the audience. By the end, the characters have had to accept so much to survive that there is complicity and forgiveness between them.

Yes, I agree. It’s a story of survival. It’s people who try to survive with their past, and with reality.

Michelle says, “The important thing is that [Vincent, played by Pierre Lottin, above] tries to do good.” Is that good enough for you too?

Yes! Michelle is the opposite of her friend Marie-Claude. She decides to be pragmatic with life. To survive you have to deal with things you can’t change, and sometimes there are some truths it’s better to ignore. Marie-Claude is destroyed by guilt that she didn’t raise her son Vincent well, causing all these problems. Michelle is stronger. She’s maybe colder. But to be like that is maybe helpful, to survive!

Is Michelle’s pragmatism and comfort with moral ambiguity something you sympathise with?

Yes, of course. Do you think it’s me? [laughs]

Does When Autumn Falls relate to Everything Went Fine, in the interest in children and parents, and old age and the end of life?

I didn’t have that in mind, but yes, there are very often toxic relationships between parents and children. It’s a subject of study which is very interesting for a director, because it’s a lot of neurotic things, and it’s full of love and hate. It’s a complex situation that I like to describe and try to understand.

For all the youth and élan in so many of your films, the element of mortality also goes at least as far back as Time To Leave (2005). Has that always been an interest?

I belong to a generation who discovered sexuality at the same time as death, because I’m from the Aids generation. When I started my sexuality, people told me, ‘Be careful, if you have sex, you can die.’ And I saw many people dying around me. So this theme of death has always been there. It’s all in my films. The French philosopher Montaigne said to accept death, you have to think of death every day. And maybe the fact of filming death and killing people in my films is a way to deal with death, and to accept this injustice.

Like you I was born in 1967, and for me death still feels far off, but closer all the time. Is there an extra awareness, a sharpening in how you work and live at this stage of your life?

Death was there from the beginning with my short films. But actually you’re right, I’m close to Michelle. I think we have to take benefit of the time we have, and maybe we have to be less violent with ourselves, and to accept things. To compromise a little bit!

You’ve said one of the things you most wanted to do in When Autumn Falls is to film actors such as Hélène Vincent. Is there a certain way of lighting or shooting or intent that brings out the beauty of an actor of that age?

It’s not difficult, actually. We are not used to close-ups of an older woman, because we are so used to seeing society’s obsession with the beauty of young people, but if you spend time with old people and you take close-ups, I think the audience can see the beauty of the wrinkles. It takes time, maybe, but if you are able to watch with your eyes you will see this beauty, and that’s why I cast old actresses who are showing their age, who didn’t have plastic surgery, and for me they are beautiful as they are. And they felt comfortable. Of course there is some work on the hair and make-up, but the expressions are real. And for me it was important, especially for this film. For other films, like The Crime Is Mine, which is a comedy about artifice, it’s different.

Was it moving to have Ludivine Sagnier, pictured above, appearing in a film of yours so long ago, and now doing so again?

Yes. Swimming Pool was 20 years ago. So I left here there in a bikini by the swimming pool, and now she comes back! Yes, it’s very moving to work with an actress you have worked with before. Now she’s a mother, she had three children, she’s a different woman, and it was a pleasure to work together again. We both had our own lives and different experiences, each one. And she said, ‘Thank you for a new part where I don’t play a very nice person [again]!’ But she was happy to have a new collaboration. And I hope we work together again.

When Autumn Falls is a crime film, in a way, set in a rustic idyll. There’s that famous Conan Doyle line that “the smiling and beautiful countryside” is as sinful as the worst London slum. Is there some truth in that?

Hitchcock could have said something like that! Yes, I wanted to show the contrast with the beauty of the nature and the darkness of the situation. It’s something which is always very powerful in movies. When I made a short film, See the Sea [1997], it was set on a beautiful place on an island in the west of France in the summer, and the story was totally dark. But the contrast was very important. And for this film I wanted to show the beauty of nature in autumn, because it’s the autumn of life, and autumn is a period of loss, and of beauty too. So it was like a metaphor for all this story.

You’ve said Georges Simenon was an influence on this film. What is Simenon’s appeal to you?

It’s about the atmosphere. These provincial cities where everything seems perfect, everything is beautiful and behind the curtains, terrible things happen. And actually I love Burgundy, which is a place I used to go on holiday as a child, so I wanted to film these places, the forest and the small villages. My memories are of the forest, and the canal. All the wood that heated Paris used to come from Burgundy on the canals.

Can you relate Simenon to another favourite of yours, Fassbinder?

It’s difficult. It’s more Simenon to Chabrol. He made many adaptations of Simenon, and Simenon is not political, he’s more in the tradition of Balzac. He’s mise en trope [dealing in meaningful stereotypes], and Fassbinder is more revolutionary and political.

Your own aunt accidentally poisoned your family when you were a child, and you fantasised that it might be deliberate. Anyone can think about doing anything, of course, and in this film on some level Michelle wishes a character dead. And once you accept that, it doesn’t seem much of a step - just a little push - to actually do it.

Exactly! When Isabelle Huppert saw the film, she said to me something very clever. She said it’s a film about the strength of the unconscious. And it’s funny when I started to work on the script, I said, ‘It’s a film for Isabelle Huppert.’ And I asked her, ‘Would you like…?’ She said, ‘I don’t want to play a grandmother, yet. Wait a little bit!’ The unconscious is in the way Michelle cooks the mushrooms, and what she says to the police later. Is it the truth? It’s her truth. Does she lie or not? I don’t know. But she makes a choice, and she decides to have her own truth. It’s about surviving. And it’s immoral, but she’s old! [laughs] She’s an old woman, she only has a few years left anyway!

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• 'When Autumn Falls' is in UK and Irish cinemas from March 21