I was initiated into the cinema world by filmmakers as well as by critics. Someone like Serge Daney had just as much of a formative influence on my love for film than the discovery of Sirk or Truffaut. Daney enabled me to put feelings and impressions into words. In fact, I think I would have really loved to be a critic! Still, that’s too much of an intellectual responsibility for me. Cinema is a popular art. Each spectator knows and understands the object at hand, i.e. a film. So he or she can apply his/her own scale of values to it.Robin Harsch is above all a talented filmmaker. I met him when I was put in charge of the movie section at ECAL. He was a student then. We immediately realised that we belonged to the same “movie family”. Robin acts in his rather comedy-like short films. I really wanted to make the best of his body on screen. I find his centre of gravity very much down in his legs. He is very close to the ground, with a crisp and nervous physique. Just like a fox!

This is the third time I’ve worked with Natacha Koutchoumov. We had great fun creating the character of a bird of prey, perched up high. I wanted her to be a phallic, vertical woman. She dug deep into her treasure trove of inventiveness and imbued Rosa with an engaging complexity. In “Another Man”, she shows us something completely new. This is very rare in cinema.

I cast Elodie Weber for the role of Christine because I wanted François Robin's companion to be similar to him: almost as tall as he, but dominating the couple at the same time. I immediately fell for Elodie’s way of slightly drawling her words. Her acting is not in line with the spirit of the times, because it’s anti-naturalist. I love it.

At the end of the film, I wanted François Robin to meet cinema “in the flesh”: passing from the screen to words, and then to the real thing. Bulle Ogier, with her outstanding career, is so much more than an actress. She has lent her talent to some of the greatest film directors of the 20th century. To me, she incarnates the best of European cinema. She gave me the extraordinary gift of standing in front of my camera for a few hours.

It sort of resembled the capture of Fort Alamo by a bunch of Indians! It can be termed “surreptitious shooting": sort of wherever our fancy took us. In the snow, in hotel rooms hired for the day or at the home of one or the other actor. Those were very happy and energizing moments. It felt as if we had run away from a ski camp to conquer a mountain. I did the filming myself. The actors did without the help of costume and prop assistants. Some jobs were done by ECAL students, who kept asking questions and challenging everything. We tried out stacks of things. It was wonderful to see cinema in the making and in the un-making in real time. The Swiss film authorities (Federal Office of Culture) didn’t understand my “method” at all. They felt my screenplay was not polished enough. In my mind, this job was going to be done during the shooting. The Swiss film authorities being dogmatic, they thought that not shooting with a “real” crew wasn’t a good idea for a film director. Or with “real” actors, for that matter...

Finally, I think that their incompetence and their misunderstanding of any form of cinema that goes beyond the norms, however slightly, has “built me up”, in Daniel Schmid’s words.

It’s my most personal film, although I don’t appear in it and although it isn’t based on personal experience. Still, it develops topics I feel strongly about, such as imposture, sexuality, and mixing up the genres. I tried to film the men just like women were filmed in film noir movies in the Fifties and Sixties: with a kind of erotic violence.

Their femininity was exposed to exacerbate its assets. I tried to do the same with the male body.

Just like in my two previous movies, I tried to let the film take control over reality to make the same reality disappear for the sake of cinema. It appeals to me that the audience is occasionally misled by the various levels of narration: i.e. something highly symbolic is transformed into a real fact for the characters.

I’m working on three film projects at the moment. Some of them will be expensive, others won’t. It’s not the bucks injected into a feature film that determines its importance for its author. I hope to be able to enhance my filmography in the coming years with films that are as important and as light production-wise as “Another Man”.