How did the script come together from your talks ?

X.D. : The important thing was to give ourselves enough time-- to spend time together. For me it did a lot of good just to live and feed on this world for a while, to destroy all my preconceptions. If I sometimes heard stories that were really difficult, that seemed surreal, I didn't bring judgement on them. It was actually Jeannot who judged, bringing all these stories to bear on his past, trying to understand. For me it was a comprehension without accepting, but I wanted at least to understand how and why we could arrive at this point. The balance was struck between the elements that Jeannot brought to the film and my desire to bring them to the screen in an artistic form, in another reality.

J.M. : I think that, actually, if I had been the one to make the film, I would have gone more toward caricature than Xavier did.

X.D. : I always came back to the emotions, the reality of the characters ; the need to be close to them. This also determined the way I filmed : the camera is always very mobile, and the gaze is neither one of fascination nor voyeurism. You are part of the gang ; you are in communion with them, without judgement, without fascination. At certain moments you feel like you want to join in their game, but you realise very quickly that the price to pay for this false freedom is very steep.

Why the desire to make a film about these people in the first place ?

X.D. : What's interesting in these characters is that their madness begins where ours stops. They press that button really far, living everything to the extreme be it passion or friendship or their relationships with money. They have codes of behaviour too, but they go way beyond how we think.

Yet the film isn't just a story about thugs. At a certain point there's a change in direction toward the theme of redemption. Was that the idea from the start ?

X.D. : In fact, I wanted to retell the story of the life of Saint Francis of Assisi in the present day through the milieu of organised crime. I talked to Jeannot about it so he could bring his narratives to bear on this particular story. Saint Francis was someone who went through wars, who was thrown in prison, dragged through the courts by his father, who squandered his family's money and who, in the end, met Saint Claire. I wanted to talk about all of that-to show the war, the horror, the clan rivalries, and stop at the point where he gains his conscience. Who would Francis be today ? The son of a real estate broker, with fast cars, whose wars would be internal.

J.M. : All the characters in Xavier's plays evolve through tragedy. What is there of tragedy today but the criminals, alone against the world ? It's theatrical but it's also really like that. The rest is incredibly flat and trivialised.