FILM

After the wonderful ‘Tell No One’, it took a proper-job mid-life crisis complete with depression and therapy before French director Guillaume Canet felt ready to return to film-making with the autobiographical ‘Little White Lies’.

Remember 'Tell No One'? French writer/director Guillaume Canet's brilliant Hitchcockian 'wrong man' thriller was one of the best foreign-language films of 2006. But whatever happened to Canet? Rather than building on the commercial and critical success of that film, he seemed to drop off the radar, taking only the occasional acting role for the next few years. Turns out he'd had some kind of mid-life crisis.

"It all started when I was finishing 'Tell No One'," he explains. "I got sick. Shooting and editing the movie had taken so much out of me that I picked up the first virus going. It developed into septicaemia and I spent a month in the hospital. When I got out, I went straight into a good old depression. It finally occurred to me that my whole existence couldn't begin and end with my work and that I was allowed to take the time to enjoy life. That made me realise how much I'd deceived myself over the years about what I really wanted, and how much energy I'd devoted to my work to avoid having to think about things."

So began the journey that would lead to his belated follow-up, 'Little White Lies'. "At 35, you don't look at things the same way as when you're 20. You've already taken a few knocks. I decided to enter a process of analysis - a fairly time-consuming process that was more productive than I could ever have imagined because it resulted in me writing this script in under five months. That's what makes the movie so special for me. I cannot make a more personal movie than 'Little White Lies'."

The film follows a group of old friends who leave Paris each year to spend a month at a beautiful beach house. But this year, one of their number suffers a near-fatal motorcycle accident before they're due to depart. The others decide to go anyway, but the shocking incident provokes unexpected emotions and revelations. It is, Canet concedes, partly autobiographical. "There's a little bit of me in each character. A lot of what's said in the movie comes from my life. Afterwards, of course, it's reworked and fictionalised to become part of a story. Even so, writing the script of 'Little White Lies' got quite painful because it dug so deep into personal experiences and made me relive so many emotions. I wanted to make a cross-generational movie. Even the children's characters are based on what I felt when I was 5-10 years old, surrounded by grown-ups. You always have to put something of yourself into a story. What's true and real for you can be true and real for somebody else. At the very least, it's authentic because it's personal."

As the title suggests, lies play an important part in these characters' lives. "The film is about the lies people tell themselves and, collaterally, each other - everything we don't want to see in ourselves, that we try to gloss over. At the beginning, the characters spend a lot of time dodging the real issues, like a lot of people at various points in their lives. Is this truly my dream job? Do I truly love the person I live with? Is my sexuality what I truly wanted? I don't use the word 'truly' by chance. It's the key word. And those questions are relevant at any age."

Canet freely admits that his film draws inspiration from the great movies about groups of people, chiefly 'The Big Chill'. The experience of making 'Little White Lies' was clearly therapeutic too. "We all miss out on so much for the same reasons," he muses. "You let your work and lifestyle get on top of you, you neglect your family, friends and relationships, while giving people the impression you're there. You know it's time to stop and think, to redefine your priorities and decide what you really want, but you don't necessarily take the time to do it, and when you finally get round to it, it may be too late. In a group, there's also the worry that you'll wreck the atmosphere by raising certain issues that may be a bit sensitive, so you don't say anything. You let it slide because you think things will work themselves out. The 'little white lies' are the rug you sweep all the crappy stuff under, until eventually it begins to show. When it all comes out, it can be gruesome, as it is for some of the characters in the movie when they finally have to face the truth."

'LITTLE WHITE LIES' OPENED ON FRI 15 APR.
 

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