120 BPM director Robin Campillo: 'We were too young to die but young enough to survive'

Over 25 years ago, the French filmmaker was a member of ACT UP, the Aids activist group. With his latest prize-winning film, Campillo finally tells that story

Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Sean in Aids drama '120 BPM'

There are few films as beautiful and heart-breaking as 120 BPM, the French-language production about the Aids/HIV activist group ACT UP. The story sees newcomer Nathan (Arnaud Valois) join the Paris chapter during the early 1990s, having had enough of the government’s indifference towards the gay community’s suffering. While a tough introduction – the group argue among themselves and struggle to come up with ideas they agree on – Nathan eventually falls into place and finds love with Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), who has Aids.

Throughout the film, there are clubbing scenes of pure euphoria, contrasted by harrowing hospital scenes. ACT UP are not portrayed as saints, while the general public are not all villains (though the French government are). It’s a story of resistance, hope, and love, of failure, death, and moving on – and stems from writer/director Robin Campillo’s own experiences.

Born in 1962, Campillo was an active member of ACT UP during the late 80s and early 90s, taking part in protests and forming friendships that should have lasted a lifetime. Revisiting that period while writing 120BPM – which is an amalgamation of fictional and non-fictional events – was, unsurprisingly, difficult.

“Writing the script was mostly hard,” Campillo says. “We all ran through those years disconnected from our emotions. I remember clearly that I was very used to going to hospital. When I opened the door to a hospital room I knew how to behave for the person on the bed. For them not to see my emotions was conditional. I went in with a stern face, speaking very simply. It meant we were all very disconnected.”

Partying and being among like-minded 20-somethings helped the activists survive – but everything was bittersweet. “We were young,” he says. “I remember the guy who inspired Jeremy – the guy who dies very quickly in the film. That was a shock. I remember him so well. He was there one moment, 21 years old, and came into the room with his best friend, a girl. The guy just had some blood on his nose and three weeks after he was dead. It was kind of okay at the time because we were too young to die, but young enough to survive all that. We had life in front of us.”

Those views have now changed, and looking back on those tragic events has made Campillo think deeply about his experience. “You realise the sum of all the things you have gone through,” he says. “It’s the first time I wrote a script sometimes crying.”

A hugely personal scene takes place near the beginning of the film, when Nathan talks about his first boyfriend who died of Aids in hospital. “That’s my life, and I put the image of a boyfriend there. It’s his name and his photo. To be able to do that 25, 30 years after is incredible. Because I lived this storm. Of course, it’s so far away from me that sometimes I feel like it never happened. Sometimes it makes it concrete and real.”

One of the things 120 BPM does so wonderfully is present the contradictions within both ACT UP and the public. Members of the group certainly do not agree on everything, arguing amongst themselves, with certain members wanting to push their agenda more aggressively than others. A scene located at a school shows one teacher refusing to let ACT UP members speak to a class, while another teacher allows them to continue talking. Showing both sides within and outside the group was something very important to the filmmaker – to showcase how things really were.

“The worst thing was not homophobia, but indifference,” he explains. “Indifference is everywhere, in every society. It’s a much bigger political power. In the 80s, when the first articles about the gay cancer – eventually called Aids – it was not that people were saying ‘Oh my God the gays are going to die, great’. No one was saying that. They were just saying ‘All the gays are going to die’ as if it was something to accept.”

With the film, Campillo was particularly interested in showing how ACT UP combated that indifference. Their strategy was to be as theatrical as possible, whether that meant invading a pharmaceutical company and throwing fake bags of blood everywhere or putting on huge demonstrations. The fact these demonstrations were theatrical, though, did not take away from the group being sincere about their actions.

“The character of Shaun is very into that, because he’s very sincere,” he says. “That’s the way militants are. It’s not bad – it’s OK. But we are at to some level drama queens, very legitimate drama queens. All these details are part of the history. You cannot invent those emotions. Especially the sensation and sensuality of those moments. If you were not there, it’s impossible.”

Some of the most breathtaking scenes in 120 BPM take place in clubs. They make for a heavy contrast with the bland, white theatre that houses the ACT UP meetings. The clubs are dark, with strobe lights bouncing off the dancers’ faces, the scenes free of dialogue. The characters stand alone, experiencing euphoria.

“I have done interviews where people say ‘Are you nostalgic for this period?’” Campillo says. “And I say ‘I cannot be nostalgic for this period because people were dying.’ But I am nostalgic for this period. I’m nostalgic because my friends were alive and we had fun together. I’m not nostalgic at all that they were dying. I’m nostalgic for my youth. Why not? To have had the chance to have been part of this group, I am so happy for that. So, when you talk about the clubbing scene – they were in the script, but I realised I had built something with those clubbing scenes that was not in the script.”

The director goes into huge detail about the scenes, explaining how they originally had dialogue, something that was removed because the actors looked like “they should shut up and dance, because that’s what you do when you go to a club.” He continues: “It’s all about bodies. It’s like in cinema theatres, where we are all alone together. You’re alone in the dark, looking at the light.”

There are five of these scenes, the first of which features the ACT UP group dancing together, “warriors having fun” as Campillo says. There are more girls in the second, which ends with the characters falling from the club directly into bed: “A dream for everyone, where you don’t have to grab a taxi.” During the last one, though, each character is lonely, the director instructing the actors not to look at each other. All the time, the particles above the dancers are interweaving, the camera eventually focussing on them. The idea was to invoke the thoughts of cells and, of course, the presence of Aids.

“You are so happy when you discover this sort of thing,” he says, “because it’s not something that was in the script. When we shot the last scene – and we had the music for six months because I’m very paranoid because composers are so lazy most of the time – they danced on that music. For the first time the actors hear the music of the film. That put everyone in another dimension. It was an amazing to shoot. Because of the strobes, it was like watching the first images of cinema. It’s like watching the shutter of the camera.”

Campillo has previously said of 120 BPM that it brings together his love of film with the story he was born to tell. In France, the film is a box-office smash, and it has wowed critics too, winning the Grand Prix at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

“I’m really not a mystical person, but I’m a little mystical about what I was born to do,” he says. ”This film… It’s resolved something of my life, from my 20s to today. That’s amazing. Of course, I’m very happy that the film was a success, but the fact that I liked the film was enough for me.”

With all this newfound – and deserved – attention, it begs the question: why did Campillo wait so long to tell his story? The director, after all, has proven to be a capable filmmaker over the years, writing the César Award winning The Class, directing the Venice Film Festival best picture winner Easter Boys, and helming Les Revenants (which was adapted into the US TV series The Returned).

“I wanted to be ready as a director,” he says. “The idea was working away in the back of my head and I was waiting for it to work as it should. Because the film was not clear enough in my head, my way of directing was not confident enough, I waited. You need to be very far away from this story to tell it. You have to miss that moment to make a film about it.”

‘120 BPM’ is in UK cinemas from 6 April