With regard to [your first film] La Nage Indienne, you said that you never work with pure fiction. In Bat Out of Hell the feeling of "reality" is extraordinary. Is this film autobiographical ?

XAVIER DURRINGER : The elements are real. The film retells certain situations that Jeannot [Jean Miez] directly and indirectly lived through.

JEAN MIEZ : I was a delinquent by the time I was 16. When I was young, delinquency was a kind of healthy way to rebel and was based on practical reasons : to get yourself out of the dumps and become a bandit in the old sense. Nowadays its different because everything's overshadowed by drugs. I got out of all that at age 42. In the meantime I had done 18 years of prison.

X.D. : I met Jeannot six years ago, one year after his release from prison, and we've been inseparable ever since. We live two blocks away from each other. And the story of the film is connected to our friendship. We talked for thousands of hours. As I was listening to him, I discovered a world that I thought I knew through television or Italo-American cinema. But it turns out that the idea I had about the whole underworld of gangsters and such was a caricature.

J.M. : Scorcese probably came closest to describing the world I knew, with films like Mean Streets and Goodfellas, but it's still very different. The American Mafiosi say that the French think with their balls, not with their heads.

X.D. : Our job was to escape the caricatures. For example, I was naïve enough to believe that someone robbing a bank says "hands up", when in reality the first thing they do is tell people not to do it because that attracts attention ; that if you fire bullets on a gas tank it will explode, which is not the case ; that a guy hit by a bullet will be thrown back 10 feet, when in reality the bullet goes right through, especially if it's a powerful gun. So you see there's a whole history of scriptwriters observing from the outside and cobbling together clichés in order to create a mythology around organised crime. What interested me with Jeannot was to speak about Man through the story of a gang. This actually goes back to the general themes I've been exploring through theatre and in my other films : friendship, love, power, money, solitude, human misery, the pain of emotions. I wanted to finally show the gangsters, not in all their strength, but in their weakness. When you work ten years with a guy and he gets shot, you don't jump to vengeance like they do in American films- you cry, you mourn for your friend. When you're at war with society you're afraid, you're paranoid, always on guard. You can't have a family and above all you can't have a child. You live like a rat. We wanted to show these people from the inside out.