Barbet Schroeder: interview

Actor and director Barbet Schroeder talks to Time Out about his experience of making 'Terror's Advocate', a profile of infamous criminal lawyer Jacques Vergès

When, exactly, did the subject of Jacques Vergès begin to interest you?
‘When I was 16, I was very close to the Algerian cause and Jacques Vergès was one of my heroes. Then, of course, in time I became more and more interested in movies, and I drifted away from him when he began to follow Klaus Barbie and Carlos the Jackal. He was the number one mysterious and complex character. I wanted to find out more about it, so the minute I had an opportunity to do that I jumped on it. I was ready all my life to do the story.’

The impression you get from the introduction of the film, particularly the segment on Algeria, is that he became something of a celebrity in Europe. Is that the case?
‘In Europe I don’t know, but in France he became a celebrity because he was the public enemy number one. He was on the hit list from the French Government and there were assassination attempts on him because he was fighting for the Algerians. He was so close to them that he was more dangerous than a group of 1,000 people in the mountains of Algeria, and so he was considered a military target.’

Was it always your intention to make a documentary of his life? Do you think that his life would have lent itself to a fiction film with someone actually playing him?
‘Oh yes, of course. There is a ton of fictional material and love stories. You can take the love story with Vergès, the triangle with Carlos, Magdalena Kopp and him, or the rivalry and the split between Carlos and him – take all that and you could make a great fictional film. It would be hard to find an actor as good as him, but there’s definitely enough room to adopt an interesting fictional angle. What interested me was to do a documentary where I don’t leave any fictional stone unturned. That was my idea, but at the same time, it was to also present the last 50 years of terrorism.'

You said before that you couldn’t get a better actor than Jacques Vergès. Do you think that the Vergès we see on the film is partly an act?
'Of course he’s performing, of course. As a lawyer, you are a performer in a play. He considers that, and is definitely performing. He’s a very clever performer, too.'

How did the opportunity come about to actually get the interview with him? Was he willing to talk?
'Yes, yes it was very simple. It was just that I requested to have the final cut and final choice of whoever was interviewed, and that was all, and we were off and running. What was more complicated was getting all those other people (laughs), but to get him was very easy.'

Your documentary on Idi Amin was entitled ‘Self Portrait’. Do you think that the same can be said of 'Terror’s Advocate'?
'Yes, it’s exactly the same idea. It’s the idea that I’m not going to try to judge, I’m not going to try to explain what you have to think about, I’m going to let the man speak for himself. I accept that it’s much more difficult to deal with Vergès, but it’s exactly the same approach, where it’s through the actual work of moviemaking and editing that things are said.'

Were you actually interviewing him on the film?
'Yes, my closest collaborator was a young woman who was doing the interviews with me, so she, from time to time, would ask a question, but she was mostly doing the little interviews with the small high-definition camera. She was going to people’s houses and doing interviews and I used some of those to complete the puzzle of the movie.'

What is your relationship with Vergès like now?
'I’ve just come back from Japan, and I had been in Japan since the movie came out in Paris, but just before leaving we had lunch together, and we were trying to comprehend everything that had happened. Obviously, when he saw the movie he said, ‘it’s a pity that so much intelligence was devoted to such a work’, and didn’t like it. And then, when he saw it again, he decided to take another approach, which is to say ‘This movie was a masterpiece, and it was all because of me.’ Then when I saw him the last time, he tried to indicate to me that, in the end, he was the one who was manipulating me, not the reverse. He said that this was an example of Stockholm syndrome, that when people are locked up in a room with somebody, they end up liking them. He said that’s what happened to the audience of the movie, and he may be right – he may be the one who was manipulating me all the way, we’ll never know!'