YOUSSEF NABIL

In conversation with Fanny Ardant

Fanny Ardant: In your work I see cinema, life, death & love. Are these always your concerns?

Youssef Nabil: I grew up in Egypt where cinema is very essential for us, I discovered death through cinema. When I left Egypt, the idea of leaving your country, your family, people you knew and loved, and then going to a new place made me think a lot of life and existence, and not only of my own. But I'd like to know, what do you think of cinema, life, death & love?

F.A: For me, cinema is a distillation of life, it's all what we have without knowing it, all what we've got. In cinema, I have the impression of living intensely because I know that it won't last forever, life too won't last forever. Life is like moments in a movie, it's like having a beginning, a middle and an ending, it's a privileged moments, almost painful, almost happy, but it won't last. The roles I've play in cinema are ones whose character I loved. I loved these women that I've interpreted, and suddenly they're no longer characters, but they are me.

When I hear “action”, there is this silent moment where I feel that I am entering into a dark tunnel. I dive into it, like into water, without knowing. The cinema has this magic. When I go to see a movie - as a spectator - I like to be told a story, to enter the universe of someone, it's unlike reading a novel, or listening to an Opera, or going to the theatre. In cinema, images tell you the story, tell you where to look. When I am asked “which movie you will take with you in a deserted island,” I cannot answer it because they're so many. It is like having a mix of so many different things in one glass, then you see them all falling in the bottom of the glass. I think we are made of this. We are all that is in the bottom without knowing it…

Life. We live life, with its happiness and sadness, and after so much living, when you talk about life, you talk about what you believed in, it's not exactly what you have lived and gone through, but it is what you believed in. I don't think you could use words to described what you lived, it's never clear, it's very foggy from this distance. I think what you believed in when you were 14 yrs old, you will believe in for the rest of your life, not just in an innocent way. You can't change life, but you could look at it differently. I think we have to see life like embarking on a big vacation, like when we were children. On holiday I never used to waste a day, but also we should learn to let go. When someone says, “this is not reality”, I say “but what is reality?” Your reality is your way of looking at things. Life is like a bow and arrow , we always look and aim for the perfect target, but at the end, maybe all the story behind life is to be the bow, it was never the target that was interesting, but to try to find it.

Death. I always remember the line from a poem ”Whatever the reason we succumb for, death is not death” of Mayakovsky. And I always believed in that, that death is not death. I faced death with people I knew who died, but I always said to myself, that the people I've loved will never really die, because I keep them within me, I will talk to them every day, I will let them exist every day, for me they are present and as important as the living ones, maybe more. In the Catholicism, there is this idea that we must believe in the visible and invisible worlds. Since I was a young girl, for me both exist. For example, in the world of dreams, when I wake up after a dream I feel like there was no difference; what was the difference between a dream and reality? Nothing! I have lived at night, in my dreams, that what is important for me.

Like you, I also think and talk a lot about death, never in a morbid way. When my brother died, I was desperate, then at the funeral, I saw earth, I saw his coffin going inside earth, and that was a consolation, as if earth has received him, welcomed him, letting him sleep. For my own death, I wonder if I will be afraid? Maybe, at the very last moment of my life. I was always afraid about the death of others, but not of mine. Death is the big story of life in the same way it is in cinema and being on a shoot: we know about it from the beginning, we know that it will end. I think when death comes, someone will look back at life and say “was it only this?” When people speak about ghosts, I always dream that my parents will come back, and I will be able to see them next to my bed, talk to them again and be able to see things that other people can't see. You know the famous poem by Racine - “my nights are more beautiful than your days?” I agree with that, we have the possibility to say “no, this doesn't interest me, I have another parallel life.”

Love makes you go crazy, love is what we wait for all the time, and at the same time waiting for love is already love. We think that we always want to build, and that love destroys. This is how I see love and that we must accept, accept to be destroyed, and accept that we don't have to try to re-build ourselves again. Love is a malediction and a benediction. When it destroys you, it makes you see other new things. It makes you feel life in a different way, you become like an animal. But when I think of the kind of Love that changes you completely, to the point that you no longer are the same person you were before, I think this love lasts for a moment, like thunder. But still, we must live for that, we mustn't look for serenity. It's like taking a train that will never pass by again, it's like receiving a gift from life, even if this might destroy you. You must take it, accept it.

Paris, 27th July 2009

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