the black ones are the first to die.”
With “High Life,” Denis will inev-
itably receive more international atten-
tion than she ever has, but for years
many filmmakers have spoken of her as
a sort of secret saint. Along with Barry
Jenkins, the director Josh Safdie is an
admirer, and Greta Gerwig has said that
seeing Denis’s “Beau Travail” (1999)
made her want to make movies of her
own. Based impressionistically on Mel-
ville’s “Billy Budd,” “Beau Travail,” shot
in Djibouti, follows a group of French
legionnaires. Stationed near the salt flats
of Lake Assal, without imminent as-
signment, they alternate between ag-
gression and existential futility. We
watch them perform an endless series
of almost absurdist rituals: peeling veg-
etables, ironing creases into trousers that
nobody but themselves will see, per-
forming military exercises that resem-
ble ballet choreography.
“It’s such a macho, minimalist film,”
said Andrew Lauren, one of the pro-
ducers of “High Life” and its financier,
who saw “Beau Travail” years ago, on
the recommendation of his father, the
designer Ralph Lauren. “When this
new project came to us, and I went back
through Denis’s filmography, I was, like,
‘Wait, she did “Beau Travail”?’ I would
have sworn that a man made it. She’s
like the precursor to Kathryn Bigelow.”
Barry Jenkins told me, “There were
sequences of ‘Moonlight’ that just would
not have been filmed the way they were
had I not been familiar with Claire’s
work. Certain things about framing
the men and the pace at which we ed-
ited their interactions share a lot with
‘Beau Travail.’ ” He laughed as he ad-
mitted that, without realizing it, he had
shot a scene in “Moonlight” that al-
most exactly re-created one in “Beau
Travail.” In both, men stand alone, lan-
guorously smoking cigarettes, as plumes
of smoke intermittently float across the
frame. “Her metaphors are so delicately
constructed,” Jenkins said. “Not every
audience member is going to get them,
and that’s O.K. She places a tremen-
dous amount of trust in the audience.”U
nlike Denis’s past movies, which
were shot on location, mostly in
France and Africa, “High Life” was
largely filmed at a studio in Cologne,
during two months last fall. The cast
and Denis stayed at a hotel thirty min-
utes away. The drive, made each morn-
ing and night—often with a P.A. be-
hind the wheel who was described to
me as “the worst driver in the history of
mankind”—took them past oil refiner-
ies, sausage factories, and tractor-trailer
bordellos that were parked, with Ger-
man eiciency, along the highway exits.
By all reports, it was a trying experi-
ence. Denis was unused to filming in astudio. She made scene changes con-
stantly and with little warning, some-
times by text message. Benjamin de-
scribed an atmosphere of inadvertent
method acting. “These convicts are all
supposed to be from diferent places—
they don’t know one another at first, and
they’re just trying to make it,” he said.
“And, on set, it was the same! I’m this
guy from Atlanta, Claire’s French, obvi-
ously, most of the guys on set are Ger-
man, the actors didn’t know each other.
It was a trip.” Robert Pattinson, who,
several people said, spent much of his
time on set asking existential questions—
Wait, who am I in this movie? What are
we making here?—told me, “It’s a very
abstract way of working. It feels like ex-
perimental theatre, frankly.”
Lauren said, “A lot of people were
thinking, This is good for my résumé,
but I wish I weren’t here.” He contin-
ued, “I think, if you make a movie with
Claire, you can make any movie.” He
compared the process to over-prepar-
ing for the SATs, or training at high al-
titudes, so that your performance at sea
level feels easier on game day. At an
early color-test screening, held at an or-
nate theatre in Cologne, Denis’s voice
was the only one in the room, saying,
“Merde! Crap! What are we doing?
Why am I here?” Lauren said he thought
“everyone sort of took it personally.”
At the end of each day, the cast and
crew convened at the hotel bar. “Ev-
eryone would sort of be sitting at difer-
ent parts of the bar, and she’d walk in
and it was, like, Shit! Claire’s here!”
Lauren recalled. “I saw a lot of people
wanting to leave many, many times, but
they stayed. They stay because they love
her—even though they can’t stand her.”
Denis does not deny such behavior.
“I can be the worst person, the mean-
est person on a set,” she said. “Shout-
ing, screaming, complaining. I don’t have
a lot of respect for myself as a director.
People accept me the way I am, because
they know I’m not faking. Probably.”
When I described these accounts to
the filmmaker Olivier Assayas, a close
friend of Denis’s, he laughed. “There’s
a certain form of chaos in the way she
works,” he said. “When you make mov-
ies, it’s always disturbing how confi-
dent everyone involved is that they know
how things should be done. And you
have to constantly remind them, No,“I said drink, damn it, drink!”••