It’s the biggest project in French cinema this year: with a budget of more than 70 million euros, the diptych The Battle of Gaulledirected by Antonin Baudry, is a real blockbuster. In these two feature films – the first part of which is released this Wednesday, June 3 – the filmmaker looks at Charles de Gaulle’s fight, between 1940 and 1944, to organize Free France, unify the resistance, and fight the occupier. Simon Abkarian – who plays the general on screen – is RFI’s cultural guest.
RFI : Simon Abkarian, you play Charles de Gaulle in the diptychThe Battle of Gaulle –what was it like to slip into the skin of such a character ?Â
Simon AbkarianÂ: (laughs) You can’t slip in like that! This goes through the text first: the screenplay, the writing. Then there is work on makeup and silhouette. And above all, try to find the place of madness Charles de GaulleHAS ; of his humanity, his eloquence, his erudition, his courage, his probity, etc. These are beautiful foods, for an actor.Â
When you play such a well-known, documented and historically charged figure, how much freedom of play do you really have? ?
We must, precisely, free ourselves from the icon, get rid of it. I had started looking at archives and, very quickly, I decided to stop – I had soaked it in quite a bit. I then had to give free rein to the imagination, in my work as an actor. That is to say, reinvention, reincarnation. We can’t play De Gaulle in an anthropological way, it’s not possible – and it’s not interesting to play an icon. An icon hangs on a wall, and that’s it. The important thing is to give it back its breath and its life, and to embody it through acting work.
You were talking about the madness of Charles de Gaulle : to embody this character, knowing what he represents today in France, perhaps a little grain of madness was also needed ?
Whatever you try to embody, if you don’t have a grain of madness in you, you shouldn’t do this job. There is, at a given moment, a place of madness, which means that, suddenly, we project ourselves into the body of another, into the story of another. But, it’s true, with Charles de Gaulle, it’s a bit power 10. The guy is irrational, unreal; and he is himself an actor who plays himself and represents himself on the world stage. It is very important, for an actor, to have a grain of madness to go towards these roles.
This year, many films presented at Cannes, in addition to The Battle of Gaulleaddressed the period of the Second World War and the notion of resistance. How do you interpret this collective movement ?
I believe that we need to return to our fundamentals, that is to say, those who fought for France to be a prosperous country. The trap of prosperity is that we tend to forget those who died for all of this. Today, I think the time has come to remember who built all of this, and at what cost. To remember what we fought against, who we fought against, and who is raising his head from the swamps. In my opinion, it is necessary, and vital, to carry out this type of project. We almost need spirituality to take us out of the prosaic and appeal to what is noble in us.
Did the political context about which you speak half-heartedly play a role in your decision to accept this role of General de Gaulle? ?
The context was not the same when I accepted the role. But I think that artists, whoever they are, have something within them, a kind of antenna that allows them to see a little further. There is something that they hear and see coming that perhaps ordinary mortals do not want to see, or do not know how to see. In any case, these are alarms that we sound saying “there, there was that, this resistance there, this invasion there, this deadly ideology there, which risks returning having changed a little its costume and its verbiage .”
