After writing a critique on his last movie The Last Film Show, we were honored to
interview the director Pan Nalin regarding the creation of this piece of work and its
release in France.
What was the first time that came to mind while creating The Last Film Show ?
Was it rather a particular plan, an esthetic, a theme, a character ?
something completely different ?
For me, it was of course the character, two characters to be accurate: Samai who is the main role and the second who’s my childhood friend who was a projectionist. That’s how the story was born. There was one image that kept popping into my head: it was the image of recycling film. The film is turned into tulle, which becomes bracelets, and the projector becomes spoons or plates. Those were the two or three images that struck me right from the start. I didn’t yet know how the story would unfold, what the beginning, the end, or the middle would be, but thanks to that image, I found the film’s ending, the climax. So the film was built in reverse.
The movie is semi-autobiographical. Where do the memories stop and the
fictionalized construction begins ? Is there a scene that happened exactly like we
see in the movie ?
Oh, several scenes were included exactly as they actually happened. I tried to
recreate exactly what I had experienced, starting from the beginning when the kids
were playing with matchboxes, then with building the projector, and even with our
arrival at a “juvenile home”—which is a prison for children—because we, our gang,
had stolen some film reels and gotten arrested by the cops. All of that is true. The
aspect of this reality that was the real game-changer was that of my friend,
Mohamed, who is the projectionist. It’s kind of his story because he’s the one who
lived through the nightmare of the transition from film to digital. He lost his job
because he couldn’t read or speak English. And in the end, he was the one who
started telling me, “The projector’s going to be recycled, everything’s going to be
recycled—it’s over.” His story provided the climax.
And so you did many documentaries. Would you say those non-fiction works influenced your work on The Last Film Show ?
Oh yes, absolutely. Fiction and non-fiction—I love doing both. Because when I
make documentary nonfiction, as a director, I have no choice. I can just say,
“Camera, cut.” I can’t direct the actors, I can’t say anything, I can’t control the lighting.
In a documentary, you have to follow the subject—that’s all. And when you stop, life
goes on, the film goes on. I love that constraint in documentary filmmaking—that as a
director, I only have the option to choose a slice of someone’s life. Okay, I’ll turn on
the camera for three minutes and then cut. And then maybe I’ll continue. In fiction, it’s
the opposite. I get to act almost as if I were God. We can do anything—we can
scream, we can kill off characters, characters fall in love. I love that extraordinary
freedom, and I think that every time I make fiction, I remember the reality I’ve
experienced through documentaries. And when I make documentaries, I remember
fiction. I said in the documentary that you need stories, otherwise it’ll get too boring.
And when we’re casting for fiction—just like in documentaries—I look for real
characters, characters who are extremely interesting.
For your movie Samsara, you had written a small booklet called “Notes on Zenomatography” imposing a highly storyboarded style. What aesthetic approach did you define for The Last Film Show ?
For The Last Film Show, the idea was light. If we just told a story about light, people would get bored, so we thought about how to celebrate light—how to represent inner light and outer light. It’s light that makes filmmaking possible. It’s thanks to light that we can capture images, whether digitally or on film. I found there to be a very interesting spiritual and physical aspect to it. And we tried to celebrate that light throughout the film—without forgetting the emotional story.
Regarding the casting, you auditioned more than 3000 kids before choosing Bavin Rabari. What made him different from the others ?
When we were casting, we just couldn’t find the right actor for the role. We were forced to halt production on the film twice! For Bavin Rabari, I filmed a close-up of just his eyes—not his nose, lips, or anything else, just his eyes. And we talked with him about how to convey a wide range of emotions. I said, “Now you’re hungry—what are you going to do? Now you remember your mother, who hasn’t seen you in a year. You’re reunited with your father. Now you see your iPhone 17—it’s arrived—and you’re so excited!” So many emotions, but only in his eyes. There’s no dialogue, nothing. We edited all the clips together one after another and ended up with a short 40-second clip that we screened in our screening room. Just that. There are no words, no music, no dialogue. There were six or seven of us on my team, and we were all moved. And that’s how we found our Samay
How did you direct non-professional on a subject that personal without them overacting the emotion ?
With children, we can’t shoot the way we normally do. We can only shoot 5 or 6 hours a day because they get tired very quickly, and we can’t do many takes because they aren’t professional actors. With a professional actor, we can do 50 takes; for me, it was important here that the first two takes were good. I didn’t insist that they memorize the lines because when you memorize, you forget everything, you forget the emotion. I said, “OK, that’s the story.” “You’ll have to deliver the lines in your own way.” So, in every take, the dialogue was different. As soon as we’d accomplished a task, we’d say to ourselves, “Yes, he said everything we wanted to say; we’ve got the emotion, we’ve got the story, it’s good. Let’s do another one and move on to the next scene.”
The Last Film Show arrives after a long career marked by various successes such as Samsara and Valley of the Flower. Do those successes make you more confident when starting a new project or is there an additional pressure to keep up with the quality of the passed pieces of work ?
No, I think that for me, every project starts from scratch. I forget what I’ve already done and try to reinvent myself because I believe that the cinematic approach is born anew with each story. I don’t set out to make auteur cinema, thinking, “Yes, I’m going to do this and that because that’s my signature style.” If you watch Samsara, my first film, and Angry Indian Goddesses, it’s not obvious that the same director made both films, the aesthetics are so different. I think that’s what I really like, once I’m in love with the story or the character, I start searching for the cinematic language.
One last quick question: You live part of the time in France, where the film is now being released after a long international run. What does this release symbolise for you ?
For me, it’s love; it’s coming home. We did all the post-production in Paris, editing, sound editing, mixing, music, color grading, and we were always a little sad that it wasn’t coming out in France yet, but at the same time, the film was being released all over the world. We did it a bit like Michael Jackson did, country by country, so to speak. Because we don’t have big marketing budgets; this isn’t a studio film that can be released on the same date all over the world. It’s not Nolan, it’s Nalin. But releasing this film here feels like coming home.
Translated by Mathilde Rivière