Upclose with Olivier Assayas

HK Magazine: What gave you the idea of making a film about Carlos the Jackal?
Olivier Assayas: It started a while ago, in 2008. A producer named Daniel Leconte came to me with this idea of making a TV movie about Carlos. He only had a four-page story of how Carlos was arrested in Sudan, seen from the perspective of a French diplomat involved in this incident. I liked the idea, but then thought it’d be more interesting to tell the whole story of Carlos.

HK: Were you aware of how big a project it would be to tell the whole story?
OA: No, god no. If I were I probably wouldn’t have started it. (Laughs.) But once I started looking into the materials, I realized the story of Carlos wouldn’t make sense if we only dealt with one element or just a short period of his life—it’d only work with the whole arc of this complicated character. So I decided to turn this TV project into a real movie, but then began to worry about the scale and time the movie would require, and you don’t get films that long financed in cinema. We had to cast 120 actors, shoot in nine countries. The complexity was beyond my initial imagination. Actually, I wasn’t sure if it was going to happen. I mean, I had fun writing it, but I thought at some point somebody was going to realize how crazy the idea was and drop the project. Luckily, that didn’t happen. At the end we had to use TV money and made it for TV, but we shot it just as a film.

HK: You were a teenager when the series of terrorist attacks happened in the 70s. Were you interested in Carlos back then?
OA: Those events were obviously very striking. The 1975 murder where he killed two French policemen happened in the Latin Quarter in Paris. It’s an area I knew well as all the universities and school were located there. And all of a sudden, there’s a Latin American, who’s involved with Palestinians, killing French cops happening—it made headlines but we didn’t have any idea what was going on. Same case with the Vienna operation [a raid on the city’s OPEC headquarters that killed three people]. People only managed to connect the dots and get to know about Carlos long after all those events took place. So the image of Carlos was blurry in my head at the time.

HK: Did you shoot this movie for those who know about Carlos, or those who don’t?
OA: Somehow I think this film can be seen as fiction. I didn’t know much about him before, so what’s interesting about making this film is to discover and understand more—both his adventurous personal life and a whole generation of people. So in a sense, I think it’s a film made for people who know little about him or the end of the story. You can know zero about Carlos and still kind of know what’s going on. (Laughs.)

HK: Compared to your previous works, “Carlos” is a rare case, where you worked with a massive and masculine cast.
OA: That’s very true. It’s the first movie I made that has a very well-rounded masculine central character. And Édgar Ramírez [who plays Carlos] is such a unique person. He’s interesting and charismatic in a way that very few leading actors are. It’s extraordinary to have met and worked with him. How many Latin American actors can play Carlos? There’s one, that’s him! It’s almost meant to happen. It had been a big question mark for me: who’s going to play Carlos? If I hadn’t found Édgar, I’m not sure if I would have made the film—if you don’t have Carlos, you don’t make “Carlos.”

HK: And just like Carlos, he’s Venezuelan and speaks five languages!
OA: Haha, yes. That’s why he knows things about Carlos that I had no idea about. Unlike me, Édgar actually speaks Spanish and lives the culture, so he understands the reality of Carlos and how that man functions. His father is a diplomat, so he’s also lived in many European countries and leant the languages. In addition, he studied history and political science in university. As a director, I didn’t really have to explain to him what to do on the set—he embodied the Carlos that I only had a notion of, and transcended my notion of Carlos.