Were it not for his age (76), one might think that Alexandre Arcady was a young director. Full of enthusiasm in his Parisian office in the heart of the 8th arrondissement of the capital, he talks about his latest film, his life and his projects with relish. Only the anecdotes and the numerous film posters on the walls betray the longevity of the director since his first feature film Le Coup de sirocco, in 1979 until the last, released a few days ago, Le Petit Blond de la Casbah.
What is the secret of its vitality? Certainly not practicing sports! Alexandre Arcady readily admits, he never does it and doesn’t watch it on television either! So much so that on the set of Coup de sirocco, for a scene where he had to play football, Patrick Bruel had to take matters into his own hands to explain to him what a penalty was! In reality, this vitality comes precisely from cinema. “There is nothing more exhilarating. It allows me to stay young,” he admits. In his latest film, he makes his hero, who plays him as a child, say: “I like cinema better than life.” “We have the power of destiny, we make everything,” says the director, who always draws inspiration from life events to tell stories. “I never had a career plan. These are the situations that made my films.”
His first feature film, Le Coup de sirocco, even if it is taken from the book by Daniel Saint-Hamont, combines his own experience of the “exodus” of the pieds noirs from Algeria to the mainland. Filming with Roger Hanin made him want to do the experience again. It will be Le Grand Pardon, a huge success in 1982. The film is released in theaters on the same day as Yves Boisset’s Spy, Get Up, with Lino Ventura. Alexandre Arcady emerges victorious from the competition, from the first day of operation. The same evening, the team meets in a restaurant. At midnight, Lino Ventura comes, like a gentleman, to greet and congratulate Roger Hanin. “Seeing them both, I said to myself that we had to shoot them together. I imagine Le Grand Carnaval with them.” This film was born from this image, even if in the end, Lino Ventura would not shoot it. Alexandre Arcady is attentive to everything that happens around him. He observes everything. Apart from Hold-Up, a commissioned film with Jean-Paul Belmondo (“shooting with Belmondo is something you can’t refuse”), his 17 productions always have a link to a current event or an event in his life.
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Is it because he discovered cinema while watching Forbidden Games, at the age of 7, at the Olympia in Algiers? The parallel between what this film tells, the exodus on the French roads in the face of the advance of the German army in 1940, and the war in Algeria at that time has a profound impact on him. “I felt like the film was entering my veins. Cinema allowed me to get through the war with less anxiety.” It is his refuge when attacks multiply in Algiers, before the “exodus” towards the metropolis. He goes there accompanied by his neighbor, or his mother, when she wants to escape the fits of jealousy of her husband, a former Hungarian legionnaire. Le Petit Blond de la Casbah, chronologically, should have been his first film. Former director of the Jean Vilar Theater in Suresnes, at the age of 25, he tried to become an actor, without really breaking through, and wants to move on to directing and cinema. But in the 1970s, Alexandre Arcady did not feel ready to discuss his personal memories. With Diane Kurys, he created his production company Alexandre Films, in homage to his father Alexandre Egry. He has already understood that to control his work, he must not let outside producers decide.
Today, things have changed a lot. The confinement made him decide to take the plunge. “What impressed me the most during this period was the silence! The sounds of my childhood came back.” And the atmosphere of this building in the lower casbah of Algiers where everyone lived together without problem, Jews, Arabs, Christians. Everyone shared the joys of others during religious festivals. “We were poor, but rich from our shares, from our great tribes.”
Even if childhood memories inevitably idealize the world in which he lived a little to remember only a few good moments, the reception given to his film warms his heart. After a screening in Marseille, a woman came to tell him: “I laughed, I cried, I had a great time.” The greatest compliment for Alexandre Arcady. Especially after the October 7 massacres in Israel and the rise of anti-Semitism in France. After a few days of astonishment, he wanted to speak out to break the silence of those whom he had thought would speak spontaneously. “The silence was terrible, so I spoke out to say that we must not let anything go. Because the majority of people are not anti-Semitic in France.” The director refuses to give in to fear. “All this must not create fear. It has to engender courage. I too can say long live Palestine. But I will never say death to the Arabs! My country is France. My heart is in Israel, but my soul goes to Algeria. I am rich in all that, that’s what I want to pass on.”
Alexandre Arcady is teeming with projects and stories to tell. He already has the idea for his next film, while the last one is still showing. It was the spectators who convinced him. Many of them asked him what happened to the little boy after his crossing of the Mediterranean. Alexandre Arcady therefore decided to shoot the sequel: the story of the little blond in Paris.
