From Paris: We have interview Jean-Marc Barr in Paris, in the multiethnic area of Belleville where the actor-director-photographer americano-french lives. He welcomed us in his house and, around a cup of coffee, told us about his origins and his vision of life and art. Our conversation was very spontaneous, like a group of friends gathering and talking about diverse subjects that would come to our minds. [from paris our correspondents Maurilio Marngo & Lydie Francart].
Jean-Marc Barr: I have american origin I lived in California in the seventies, eighties, and a bit of nineties and 2000’s and all was extraordinary! It was a bit like the Pompei of the period.
Masha Konstantinova: I am Russian and I never lived in the United States.
Jean-Marc Barr: Three-for years ago, I was in Moscow. It was like New York in the seventies! You could feel a country, a city that was in the midst of its boom! There was money for the first time! There is so much corruption there but you can find an unexpected luxury in the West. Like you can find death very quickly. It’s like New York in the seventies, exactly this. But I also know Moscow in 1988 and at this time it was grey! Really grey, everybody was like this.
M.K.: But I think it is still the case.
Jean-Marc Barr : No, I don’t think so. I think that how can I say what happened between the United-States and Russia, happened on both sides. There is a part of the population in Russia that benefited from it, like there is a part of the american population that benefited from the cold war and all. There, in the United States, we start to go into… it’s not Russia at all, yeah, but the problem is that ignorance is general, like in Russia. For the majority. And there is a empirical nationalism in the american mentality, this is very dangerous.
JMB: In Russia, you still cannot do like in the United States, take a car and just drive, travel, you cannot do this yet.
M.K.: Yes, the streets are still not equipped, there in not infrastructures yet.
JMB: No, and you are scared!
M.K.: Yes of course, it’s like going into the forest!
JMB: Yes indeed! Whereas in the United States, you can still do this. Michaël Gorbachev, he introduced the glasnost and the people from the Soviet Union caught him, leaving the country in gangsters’ hand. Us, in the United States, we ‘slowly’ became gangsters. It’s true, the way they act today, it’s scary! I’d be scared! When you see who gets killed; journalists and so on; it scares you. You will not open your mouth. They asked me to do it for Amnesty International, something about women trafficking, and beaten women. Apparently, in Russia, there is 54 dead women per week, killed by their husband and by women trafficking. They asked me to go to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and I said no. You come in, judging someone, but you are not at home. Americans thinks everybody is american, that everyone has the same values, but it is absolutely not the case.
Maurilio Marengo: What I got from the United States, was that people were very interested about Europe and that they don’t know much about it. They are curious like children!
JMB: Yes. What they know is from the television. A big part of the population is educated but, hum, in the South, for example, a major thing is racism. I was reading something about this the other day. People that first populated the United States were English, arrived in the North, in Connecticut, and created the first colonies. They were escaping religious persecutions and settled there. When the United States were created, there was a huge wave of migration from Scotland and Ireland settling in the South. They are calvinists instead of protestant, methodist and all. And slavery appeared, and social classification started, some of the white population got rich and the other no and of course there were the black people. Then the civil war, with the South loosing and the black population emancipating. Some goes to university, but suddenly a big part of the white population was not educated and found themselves ‘inferior’ to the Black population and this was not acceptable. And it is this, this was the root of racism, because suddenly, thirty years later, we started to lynch them.
M.M.: For how long have you been in Paris?
JMB: I am here since 1993. Before I was in London, during ten years. I was ten years on the East Coast, in Washington D.C.. When my dad went to Vietnam I went to France, in 1967-68, where I started school. Then I went back to the United States, and when Dad retired, we went to California. So I stayed over there for seven, eight years.
M.M.: Why did you choose Paris?
JMB: Well, when I first arrived there, as a kid, I was the son of a soldier, colonel in the Air Force, and I suddenly found myself in Montreuil [city on the east side of Paris], in a french school where I did not speak the language properly. It was a moment of my life where I had my first emotions, sensations, my first doubts.
M.M.: How old where you?
JMB: Seven. As a contrast of what I was living in the United States, it was a… mysterious place! And I come from a very classical education, that was american, military, catholic. So Paris was for me the place where … where I could address any taboos that could exist for a twenty year old, so I had a liberty that I did not had in the United States! It was also the period when Reagan has been elected, where I was feeling a bit dizzy. I did not know what I wanted to do, but I could see that the United States where going in a direction which I could not identify with. Thus, I went to Paris and after a year I decided to be an actor, I got accepted in a school in England; because english is my language; where I did my studies and got my first job… I am European! For me, I am European! Maybe not linked to Euro, but … I am born in Germany, my parents met after the war, an american soldier and a french woman, so I am from everywhere, I have italian blood, irish blood, breton blood…
M.M.: really? Did you know that I am italian, do you have italian origins?
JMB: Yes. My maternal grand-mother’s name was Mino. Her family was coming from the surroundings of Florence, and during Napoleon’s period they settled in the Alps, in Haute-Savoie. My great grandfather was Giuseppe Mino, and apparently, I don’t know if its true, the Mino’s also come from Mino da Fiesole, a place close to Florence where there is a famous carver called Mino da Fiesole. Obviously my dark skin does not come from my irish origins!. But it is exactly this that is great, I am a mix, I was lucky to have a modern education. For example, when I was in the United States, after being in France, I was in Washington DC during the first efforts to eradicate segregation, such as putting white kids in black school and vice versa. All of this was very good for me. I was in the middle of my puberty, I had my first crushes on black girls, and suddenly the racist discussions was disappearing because racism come from ignorance. When you are confronted to spend all your time with people and that you are biologically changing, you stop seeing the colour of the skin when you look at girls’ legs! If I would have bring home an afro-american girl, I would have got into trouble, my father was racist. But not extremely racist, like my uncle, so I had the chance to evolve. You see, in this area, in the 19th arrondissement, it is magnificent because you have all the nationalities, Chinese, Arabic, African, Turkish, and so on! And amazing mix ups, and this is the future, for sure. And the world nurture conflicts. Russia does not have this problem, because they mix much less with others. But the conflict happening in the United States is that there is thirty percent of the population under the corporation umbrella that are white and used to dominate since fifty, sixty years but do not have a democratic power. They are now becoming hysterical, crazily scared. This is happening in France too. This means that the structures holding up the twentieth century do not hold up anymore for the twenty-first century. If we do not accept this cultural mix, we are doomed to be at war.
M.M: Today, what is the importance of the art and Internet?
Jean-Marc Barr: what comes after entertainment? Art is becoming entertainment, even contemporary art, since it plays with the same values. With Picasso’s work selling for 43 millions of euros. Thirty, Forty years ago, in Russia especially, the respect of art was natural, there was something spiritual to it. At least for me, the spiritually coming from art is the reason why I wanted to become an artist. I was impressed with what Tarkovski was proposing. If you try to explain what he was proposing to nowadays kids, they would not understand. It is not logic anymore for them. Or maybe one out of ten or twenty could watch him. But we are in a world, today, where the human being is generally confused, if he is not religious, he does not know where to gets his values. We are forced today to be the slaves of a life where we have to make money, a value that is becoming very important, that does not let us be open minded about spiritual aspiration. This is my opinion. I believe in the art that I appreciate in my own way. I do not go to the movie a this time, I read. I am full of information, and I do not know what to like anymore, because there is too much. I put my music in an iPod on shuffle mode, and this is entertainment. For me there is great art, but I rarely see it. I think our civilisation, and especially the western one, is leaving the end of a cycle, that lasted five hundred years. Suddenly we are thinking again of how we will live in the future… well, I think.
M.M.: In this vision, how could the cinema guide us? If it can.
JMB: I don’t really know. At this time, really, I am in a metaphysical dilemma, because I obviously do the entertainment, I can play with special effects. But the great moments of cinema for me were the small part I had in Breaking the Waves. For me, this movie had all the quality that cinema could offer. An other movie, maybe, was Too Much Flesh, that I did myself. I participated in its writing and many other things. There was a black young man in South Africa, and while I was doing my laundry he came up to me and asked: “are you an actor?”, I was expecting him to talk to me about The Big Blue, but he said: “listen, I have seen Too Much Flesh and it changed my life”. For me, it means something. What I wanted from this movie, a guy totally got it, it helped him, so for me, it is a real achievement! And I am doing it for this. I really do not take this profession seriously, I try to survive, and sometimes I bother people. Cinematographically, Breaking The Waves, it is the strongest.
M.K.: this conflict between the society, God and the individual. Your movie Lovers was a real success in Russia. You are one of my favourite directors.
JMB: Thank You! The problem is that with movies like this, the french movie industry took us as a threat, because we had a small budget, and we shoot in english… and we did not shoot six years after! No one wanted to produce us. For people that usually make four million dollars per movie, we suddenly did one for one million, and we did it in english!
M.K.: But this is not art anymore, this is business.
JMB: No, we did the business! Because the french cinema is subsidized. For a four million budget movie, there is often only three hundred people that have seen it! It does not sell abroad, and with nineteen movies released per week in France, no one sees it! It is not good business! Us, we wanted to propose a real business! But the crazy thing is that we suffer from it. At the time, in Russia, when there were artists trying to have an individual point of view in the soviet system, they were ignored. Well, we start to see the same thing here! If we do not propose the perfect ‘TV standard’ product, that can be adapted for the television with a lot of stupidities, deaths and so on… if it goes to the cinema, your movie will never be produced. So it is the same, we are in a system similar to the soviet one. It is the same for the United States. For us, it is corporations that control the media, politics and profits. It is important for artists to try to fight for at least the illusion liberty. This is why I did this trilogy on liberty.
M.M.: and in your opinion, for you, what is liberty?
JMB: It will be death. Death is the ultimate liberty. Everybody has the same liberty (laugh).
M.M.: In that case, is there something after death?
JMB: Who cares? No one can be sure of the truth, there is no way of knowing what is happening after life. We have no way of knowing so “who the fuck cares”? If someone have its own interpretation, we have no way of proving it, and it could triggers wars, so who cares?
M.M.: there are medium that say they are able to talk to dead people… we could wonder…
JMB: I came with nothing, I was nothing, and I will leave with nothing. So, if I understand that “I” equals ‘nothing’, my life is beautiful, really! All of this is nothing! My life, it’s nothing! So even if I adore it, I would be able to sell it tomorrow and be happy starting all over again, not being in fear of telling myself that I will not have both of my credit cards at the end of the year. And this is our problem today, meaning that our existence is fixed by corporation values. We are conditioned by advertisement, publicity and movies to live a dream, and our policy today is becoming a reality show.
So it is really an exiting moment, I do not know how I will survive, but I prefer to be in the situation I am today than than being forced to talk to three of four directors that are able to pay my salary, which is the case for a lot of actors today that has to be paid 3, 4, 5, 10 million per movies. Suddenly they become unaffordable, and I becomes the same thing. Me, I am not worth much, but it’s okay!
[translation pauline marmin]
Jean-Marc Barr (born on 27 September 1960 in Bitburg, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany) is a French-American film actor and director. His mother is French. His American father was in the US Air Force and served in the Second World War. Jean-Marc Barr is primarily known as an actor, but is also a film director, screenwriter and producer. Barr is bilingual in French and English: he speaks French with a nasal, hybrid accent, reminiscent of his American upbringing – with a slight American accent and occasional anglicisms in interviews – and English with a Mid-Atlantic accent