May 2020 | Sight&Sound | 31on Assassin(s), which became my next movie [in 1997],
and I said, “I’m going to push Assassin(s) back. I’m going
to do something about what I just saw.” And I wrote the
script in three, four months.
KA: Was it difficult to write, or did it flow?
MK: It flowed because I knew my ending. I based every-
thing on the ending, so I knew all I had to do is find a way
to get these kids through 24 hours and just get people to
know them. So that when in the news tomorrow they’re
going to say that a young kid got shot and killed by acci-
dent – after watching La Haine, you can put a name and
a face to the kid.
KA: You wrote the boys to be Jewish, black and Arabic. Their
friendship is the heart of the film. Was that based on people
you knew?
MK: It was not based on the projects themselves. How-
ever, I did it to create a symbol that all minorities are
concerned with the issues in the film. These kids, even
if they’re from different backgrounds, they are in the
same environment, and they’re living together, and they
know how to live together, it’s not just one group suffer-
ing. What you show in a movie is one hundred per cent
of the reality that you impose on the audience. They
cannot imagine anything else, so you have to balance
everything.
KA: The actors Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé and Saïd
Taghmaoui, who have all had successful careers, weren’t
well-known when you cast them. What did you see in them?
MK: Very simple. I did a movie with Hubert called Café au
lait [1993]. He was my partner in that movie. The way he
represents the culture, he is so powerful – I needed that.
Then I needed a white guy who doesn’t know anything
about life to allow the white crowd to go and see that
movie. I could have done that part myself, but I knew I
wanted to take pleasure as a director, so I gave it to Vin-
cent because he knows that environment and his brother
was into hip-hop. It was not bad to have somebody with
a name, even if it’s because he’s the son of a famous actor
[Jean-Pierre Cassel]. Saïd was a friend of Vincent’s – he in-
troduced me to him, and I liked the fucking guy.
KA: Was it essential that it was three kids?
MK: I needed a trio because when you’re with a friend,
you have a discussion, and it ends fast because either
you agree, or you don’t, but you cannot argue all the
time. Three people can disagree all the time because it
bounces from one to the other. I wanted one guy that’s
the funny one in the middle; the political one that wants
to get even with the society; and then the other one who’s
trying to hold it in because he knows what real violence
is. It was a trick, like the black and white is a trick too –
to make it universal, a story that happens everywhere,
so you don’t know if it’s Paris or Mexico or Brooklyn: it
could be anywhere.
KA: How does black and white make it more universal?
MK: When you look at black-and-white footage from the
war, it changes when you see that footage put in colour. I
did the voiceover for Apocalypse, a fantastic documentary
series covering wars, for which they colourised all these
black-and-white images and rendered them in HD. In
colour, all of a sudden the footage becomes very personal- you see your grandfathers there, it’s not just ghosts or
an artistic image, it could be today. What black and white
does is bring poetry into reality. That’s why when you do
a movie about poverty where you don’t have control
over the environment and things are supposed to
be ugly, it’s very difficult. It costs a lot of money to
THE ART OF THE STEAL:
MATHIEU KASSOVITZ ON...... GRAFFITI CULTURE
France has got the best graffiti artists, we had
the best dancers, we have amazing producers
and MCs, and we’ve had them for 30 years.
I was there when we all started at the same
time, 30 years ago. We were one hundred
guys in Paris. When you’re 15 or 16 years
old, we were very lucky to have that culture
to hang out and unite us and to challenge
us, and we were proud of it. It was crazy and
beautiful. America did it, but not to the level
we did, where everybody was mixed – rich
and poor, white and black – everybody
together. Nobody gave a shit, you could just
do what you wanted to, and if you were great
at it, you could be proud of it. So my way to
be part of this culture was through cinema.STEALING FROM SCORSESE...
Using the graffiti for the characters’ names
on screen, I stole that from the way Scorsese
introduces people in Mean Streets [1973].
He stopped the frame and put the name of
the characters under it. That was the first
time I saw that, and I reinvented it. I put thegraffiti with Saïd to introduce him the first
time we see him by the police vans, I put the
name of Vinz on his knuckle-ring, and you
see the poster of Hubert in the boxing gym.... AND FROM SCARFACE
[Talking about the moment in La Haine
when Vinz changes a letter on an advertising
hoarding – pictured – in an oblique reference
to Al Pacino’s character in Scarface who
sees an advertising blimp reading, “The
World Is Yours”] I stole that from Scarface,
which is one of my favourite movies. The
old one [Howard Hawks, 1932] is one ofmy favourite movies, and the later one,
the Al Pacino one [Brian De Palma, 1983],
is the epitome of what kids in the projects
want to become. ‘Live fast, die hard’ – all
that shit. Then you add the ‘n’, which in
French is the same sound as haine. So, it
was just like a trick. You can use things like
that and make it yours. It makes sense.THINKING IN BLACK AND WHITE
We shot the movie in colour, but I knew that
it was going to be in black and white, even
though they didn’t allow me to shoot on a
black-and-white negative. We had to shoot
on colour negative and print on black-and-
white. We worked a lot on the chemistry. We
knew what film we would print on before
we shot it, so we tested everything before so
we could have a look we wanted. Like, the
tracksuit Saïd wears in the movie is actually
golden, because in black and white it gives
a beautiful grey impression. Nobody wore
that colour, especially back in those days.
Everybody was mocking him on the set. This
movie could not be realistic in colour.