Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
America might finally be ready for filmmaker Raoul Peck.
In European period costumes and traditional biopic formula,The Young Karl Marxis Pecks most conventional feature so far.
And yet, its the one he never thought he could make happen.
Who was this movie for?
The idea was to make a film for todays young people.
WhenI was your age, I remember, thank God, I had people giving me books.
There were groups I could engage with, groups at the university, with friends.
And this is mostly missing today.
Itseemslike you have access to everything, itseemslike youre being informed.
You know the newest Kelly Clarkson song, and you know it immediately.
Butthat doesnt leave space for anything else.
How did that happen?
I remember quite well when the Berlin Wall went down, I was in Berlin at the time.
All of those countries became totally capitalist, even China in the way its economy functions.
Profit now determines every decision.
Capitalism has become a planetary system, just as Marx predicted in theManifesto.
How useful do you think Marxs work, and the ideas you depict in the film, are today?
The work he left us is exactly the instrument we need to analyze what happens in this society today.
He tells you how your place in the system influences your consciousness, your political consciousness, your subconsciousness.
Maybe Trump says something about draining the swamp, butobjectivelyhe is part of it.
All the bases for that analysis are in Marx.
Pages and pages of it!
How did you go about representing that on film in an engaging way?
Marx had to go all the way to the ground on everything.
He didnt just pretend.
Marx was exactly the contrary.
In those letters there are political discussions, theres theory.
But they speak about their friends, their lives, their work.
They are funny, theyre ironic, theyre passionate.
That was the fuel for the film.
We wrote 80 percent of the screenplay based on the correspondence, thats why theyre so human.
They were in the street doing nonsense.
She was an incredible woman.
It was important for us to have this strong woman character.
We tend to see this big man in front and forget about the teamwork.
Thats the most crazy criticism.
Thats an excuse for not engaging with the content of the movie.
Film critics sometimes, you know, can be very lazy.
Come on, formal criticism is valuable too.
But Im amazed when this is the thing they put in front of the discourse.
Yes, this is the first film ever in the Western world about Marx.
And I managed to make an almost mainstream film out of it.
No, its complicated enough!
The artistic challenge and it took me ten years with Pascal to write this story was the writing.
That was the most difficult part.
We were making a film about the evolution of an idea, which is impossible.
This is the accomplishment.
So when someone criticizes the formal aspects without seeing that first, for me, its laziness or ignorance.
Theres an incapacity to deal with whats on the table.
I make political films about today, Im not making a biopic to make a biopic.
I dont believe in being an artist just to be an artist.
And by the way, this film cost $9 million.
I dare anyone in the United States to make this film for $9 million.
Thats the same thing.
The acceleration weve had over the past 30 to 40 years is a machine, you cant stop it.
No, you lose your job.
So Marx, Baldwin, John Brown…
I had Baldwin on my list 30 years ago.
But we found a connection and we went for it.
And I just finished a screenplay with Pascal on [revolutionary psychiatrist and writer] Frantz Fanon.
Youre going to do John BrownandFanon?
Of course, of course.
Im not in the movie business to make films.
For those who want to see it, they can see it.
And I see the result.
In Germany, in France, young people were the people who got the film right.
And it gives them the idea:We can fight, we can organize, we can study.
Its about learning, and working, and trying to come up with something.
