The temperature in Locarno, Switzerland is touching 30 degrees Celsius but French novelist-turned-filmmaker Michel Houellebecq is dressed as if embarking on an Arctic trip.
He declines to remove his heavy anorak as he orders an espresso and lights a cigarette, but at least the furry, rimmed hood is pulled down, and his face is visible.
A slight figure, he answers questions in a very faint voice, and turns out to be more adept at small talk than his reputation as France’s most provocative nihilist would suggest.
Last weekend, he cancelled a press conference after critics laughed during a screening of his first film, an adaptation of his novel The Possibility of an Island, and definitely not intended as a comedy. But when we met a couple of days later, he was in a relaxed, almost expansive mood.
It is fair to say that The Possibility of an Island is a curious film — a sci-fi movie about cloning, weird religious sects and human life after the apocalypse. There is an unevenness of tone: certain sequences, such as a bikini contest set in a Lanzarote beach resort, wouldn’t look out of place on The Benny Hill Show.
Elsewhere, the film is more in the spirit of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, notably the shots of Benoît Magimel (as a character called Daniel25, the last man alive), roaming through a barren landscape with his dog in tow.
The soundtrack features Mozart and Beethoven, and at times the film has an austere beauty; at others, it is reminiscent of an old episode of Star Trek.
The critics were not kind. This week Le Figaro‘s Brigitte Baudin described The Possibility of an Island as ”ridiculous” and ”catastrophic”, while Corriere della Serra‘s Maurizio Pollo wrote that it was ”of a quite exemplary tedium”. Others were less damning: the critic at El PaÃÂs reported that Houellebecq had directed his first film ”with more enthusiasm than results”.
The most surprising thing about Houellebecq’s debut is that it is unlikely to offend anyone very much. Surprising for his critics, at any rate: Houellebecq says his reputation as the bad boy of French literature was never deserved. ”I can do nothing. It doesn’t depend on what I do any more. I don’t think critics read my books.”
It’s true that, in person, you start to wonder how this rather fey, diffident man has managed to cause so much outrage. He tells me how he wanted to cast his Jack Russell dog in the film, but couldn’t because it was too disobedient — not exactly the anecdote of an angry enfant terrible.
But why did he want to make this film? Why throw himself into the chaotic and stressful business of translating his work into a very different medium? Houellebecq says he was inspired by certain locations, particularly the landscape of southern Spain. He lives in Ireland, but has a holiday apartment on the Costa Almeria in Andalucia; it was there that he first dreamed up The Possibility of an Island.
”Maybe it is a superficial motivation,” he says, ”but I always go to the locations when I write a novel. In this case, some of the locations were so impressive that the idea for the film came from that.” He adds that The Possibility of an Island shares some locations with David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.
Making the film was a mainly pleasurable experience. ”I enjoyed the preparation of the movie. I mean, the period immediately before the shooting when you choose everything, all the details. When you create the world. I enjoyed a lot of the shooting, too.” Editing was a different matter. ”I don’t like conflict,” he says. Like most first-time film directors, he didn’t enjoy having to argue his case with producers and financiers.
Houellebecq’s film is disarmingly cast. Cult leader The Prophet is played with such gravitas and sympathy by Patrick Bauchau that it’s a while before you realise what a crackpot he is.
”Bauchau has something in him that is to do with sincere spirituality,” Houellebecq agrees. ”He gives the impression of someone who believes in something that is honest.” At one stage, Houellebecq considered Michel Piccoli (Belle de Jour) for the same role. Had he gone with Piccoli, the tone of the film would have been very different: ”Piccoli is very ambiguous,” he says. ”Patrick Bauchau has something pure and naive.”
The film was made for about €4,5-million, not a large sum when you are trying to portray the end of the world. Houellebecq couldn’t afford to feature quite as many gadgets as he might have liked; instead, he gets by with showing us a serious-looking man in spectacles, pulling wires and punching a computer keyboard, in an attempt to show us that Bauchau really is being cloned.
An enthusiastic sci-fi and horror fan, Houellebecq published a non-fiction book, Against the World, Against Life, in 1991, about the horror writer HP Lovecraft. ”Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration,” he wrote at the time, implying that in Lovecraft he had found a kindred spirit. Before writing The Possibility of an Island, he did extensive research into cults, even attempting to read the collected works of L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. ”I tried, but they are extremely boring. I don’t understand their success,” he shrugs.
He has mixed feelings about other film versions of his work. He liked French director Philippe Harel’s Whatever (1999), a bleak comedy about a misanthropic systems engineer on which Houellebecq collaborated closely. But he is withering when it comes to German director Oskar Roehler’s 2006 film The Elementary Particles, based on his novel Atomised. ”It was a big disappointment,” he says. ”The actors are good but that, in my opinion, was the only good thing. Technically, it is not very good, the script is not good.”
Houellebecq does in the end remove his gigantic anorak, but the conversation takes a chilly turn when I ask him about his mother, Lucie Ceccaldi. As has been exhaustively chronicled, Ceccaldi abandoned the young Houellebecq to be brought up by his grandmother, and he wrote about her in vicious fashion in Atomised. Earlier this year, she hit back, publishing a memoir in which she called him a liar, an impostor and a parasite.
The very mention of his mother makes him groan. When I tell him that Ceccaldi gave an incendiary interview to Britain’s Guardian in May, describing her son as a ”stupid little bastard” and his work as ”pornography”, he says he did not know; if he had, our interview would never have taken place.
”I don’t like that,” he says. ”It is disgusting. I don’t like people talking about my private life.” He adds that, while he may not read what the newspapers say about him, his friends or family do. ”They’ll say, ‘Did you read that? It is awful.”’
For the time being, Houellebecq is heading home to Ireland. He used to live in Cork, then Dublin, and is now in the process of moving to County Clare.
”I am always looking for a compromise between a nice place and somewhere not too far from an airport,” he explains. But even at home, he finds it hard to close himself off entirely from the rest of the world.
”It needs personal discipline not to look at the internet,” he admits. ”It is human temptation [to read] what is said about you, but you have to resist.” (Did he really not read what his mother said about him?) There are no further film projects in the pipeline, and he is looking forward to getting back to the privacy of his study. ”I think I will come back to writing for a while.” Garbo-like, he adds: ”It is good to be alone.” — guardian.co.uk