Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco never went to film school. Instead, he steeped himself in the works of Luis Buñuel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Robert Bresson as a teenager, teaching himself to direct by listening to director commentaries on DVDs.
The autodidact has gone on to become one of the most prolific filmmakers working today. “I do a film every year or every other year,” he says from Croatia, where he is a regular industry mentor at Slano Film Days.
He is now putting the finishing touches to the Israel-set historical drama Circles, shot in Hebrew, that is strongly tipped as a potential Venice selection. It is one of two Jewish-themed projects he has been working on, also including a yet-to-be-completed documentary that he has been researching and filming in Poland.
Almost all his features, from Dreams starring Jessica Chastain which premiered at the Berlinale last year, to 2023’s Memory, starring Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, and Chronic, with Tim Roth in 2015, have won prizes at major festivals.H
Franco is prolific because he is pragmatic about getting his films made. Through his Teorama outfit, he is happy to keep budgets low, work with small crews and keep running times to a tight 90 minutes.
He is disciplined when writing, always completing five pages a day, never more, never less, and does not revise a word until he has a completed script. He always knows what his next project is before he has finished the previous one. “I have to keep moving forward,” he explains.
Unlucky
Early in his career, he was unlucky with sales agents. His first film Daniel & Ana was picked up by Fortissimo Film Sales in 2009. Company founder Wouter Barendrecht called him and told him. “Your movie is brilliant, I know you will have a wonderful career. I will take care of you and you will never have to worry about anything’.”
But Barendrecht died suddenly a week later.
His second film was picked up by French outfit Bac Films, but its charismatic founder Jean Labadie had just been ousted. Next, he went briefly to Wild Bunch, as it was known then, but that wasn’t “the right fit”, he says.
He decamped to UK outfit Protagonist Pictures. “I told [then CEO] Mike Goodridge, ‘I am coming to Protagonist because it is with you and I want always to be able to deal with you’,” Franco recalls. “‘Yes, yes,’ he said. We had a toast at Cannes. And then a week later, I got an email from him saying he had left the company.”
That is why he is so relieved he has been able to work so closely with Michael Weber at Match Factory for his last five features.
“I need a face, I need a person,” says Franco. “I met Michael at Toronto. He’s great. Whenever I finish a script, he is one of the first to get it.”
Similarly, he has a long connection with the Sarajevo International Film Festival (SIFF), where Daniel & Ana screened in 2009, and where he first met Slano founder, Mirsad “Miro” Purivatra, then the SIFF festival director.
Since then, he has attended Sarajevo 10 times with every film he has made and once as head of the jury. Since Purivatra set up Slano Film Days in Croatia, he has become a regular attendee there too.
“With Miro, it’s an immediate ‘yes.’ I trust him 100%. He’s a serious person, a film person. He has a talent to know who to put together in a room.”
Thanks to his many trips to Slano, Franco has formed bonds with many of Purivatra’s other international guests, Joel Coen, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, Steve Buscemi and Pawel Pawlikowski among them, as well as with a host of young professionals who also attend. “I haven’t skipped a single year.
Partly thanks to his Slano meetings with Pawlikowski, the Mexican director began researching a potential fictional project to be set in Poland.
“But by doing the research, I realised I wasn’t going to be making a fictional film,” Franco says of why this project has now changed to documentary.
His ancestors were Sephardic Jews from Syria, and he has long held a grim fascination with the fate of the Jews in Poland.
“There were three and a half million Jews in Poland before they got exterminated. I went to the camps when I was 16,” he says by way of background to the film. “But, long story short, I don’t know what the documentary is going to be about. Everything that has to do with Jewishness has shifted so much in the last two or three years.”
The documentary is one of these few projects he has not been able to complete quickly.
“The thing is alive and keeps shifting, which is a nightmare,” he admits. “This goddam documentary, you know when you start but you don’t know where you finish. I am learning a lot from it, but I’ll never do it again.”
Franco is working on the documentary with Piotr Wójcik, a young editor introduced to him by Pawlikowski and who helped cut Fatherland.
Ask his advice for the younger filmmakers attending Slano, and he is typically concise.
“Surround yourself with the right kind of people, be decent and straightforward. And break some rules, because that is the nature of filmmaking everywhere.”
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