One of the film’s remarkable qualities is the intimacy you share with François-Marie Banier, that allows you to film him with a degree of trust and spontaneity that is extremely rare in cinema. When and how did you first meet?
It was in the 1970s, at the Drugstore Saint-Germain, which no longer exists today. One evening, I was having dinner with Marguerite Duras when François-Marie came over to greet her at our table. I immediately felt an irresistible desire to film him. He had just published Le Passé composé, which he signed for me… After that, we saw each other for a while, then lost touch, and eventually found each other again.
The film was shot in two periods, ten years apart. Yet rather than emphasizing the passage of time, it seems to do the opposite: these two moments almost become one, as if what the film is really about - the value of aesthetic sensitivity, the central place of art in life - had the power to transcend time and current events.
We wanted to make a film, but we had no script and absolutely no idea what we were going to shoot. At the time, I had a Sony HD camera, and I began filming François-Marie in his studio, surrounded by his collages and photographs. Little by little, the film became a portrait. He kept talking about his photographs and the people who appeared in them. Later, in Madrid, I edited the footage we had shot in Paris into a first cut of about 1hr 40 min. The only real difference between 2015 and 2025 is his house near Nîmes, his monumental paintings and our train journey.
The film has gone through several versions. This is not unusual in your work: like a visual artist, you often return to your films, revising them or sometimes transforming them radically. Could you tell us about the different versions of the film and the ten years during which you worked on it?
In 2015, we hadn’t seen each other for quite some time, even though our relationship is, as you say, timeless… Then, one day in 2025, someone knocked at the door of my studio in Madrid. I went downstairs to see who it was, and there was François-Marie. We went out to dinner and decided to continue the film we had begun ten years earlier, this time with a different camera, a Sony 4K. We carried on filming in Paris and then at François-Marie’s house near Nîmes.
I hesitated for a long time over the title. I considered several possibilities: In Ten Days, In Ten Years, which echoed Françoise Sagan’s In a Month, In a Year, or Ten Years Later, which recalled Alexandre Dumas’s Twenty Years After. In the end, we decided to call it F. M. Banier Filmed by A. Arrieta.
We could go on filming in different houses, in different countries. We could even make another film in which François-Marie would play a different character. His Robespierre in Éric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke (2001) is extraordinary. There has never been another Robespierre in the history of cinema quite like his.
Something that will probably surprise many viewers (though not those familiar with your work) is your constant presence on the soundtrack. We hear you humming or quietly mumbling while you film. It was an excellent decision to keep these sounds. What do they bring to the film?
Those sounds are unavoidable. They come from the unconscious…They are too mysterious; they are part of the film’s discourse. I cannot remove them.
Interviewed by Manuel Asín
