François Ozon: ‘I was a very perverse child – I loved the idea of my aunt trying to kill us all’

The reformed ‘enfant terrible’ of French cinema – and director of ‘Swimming Pool’ and ‘8 Women’ – is back with a twisty tale of mushroom poisonings and sex work called ‘When Autumn Falls’. He speaks to Adam White about catfights, plastic surgery, and why some filmmakers might actually miss censorship

‘You can see so many sex scenes on your telephone today, so sex naturally felt more transgressive 20 years ago’ (Shutterstock)

When he was still in his teens, sometime in the late Eighties, the filmmaker François Ozon asked his little brother to kill their family for him. Before anyone panics, this was play-acting, and for a movie. Photo de Famille was a scrappy, seven-minute blueprint for the kinds of films that would, a decade later, transform Ozon into the mischievous French prince of lust, provocation and psychosexual chaos. His brother agreed to it. As did his family. In the film, “my brother gave some poison to my mother and smothered my father”, Ozon remembers. “And he cut the throat of my sister with a pair of scissors.” Did they mind participating in such a thing? Ozon grins. “My mother said, ‘yes, we will do that in your film because we know you wouldn’t do that in reality’.”

Even with that origin story in mind, Ozon’s creative penchant for sex and death tends to be overstated. Yes, the 57-year-old’s most internationally successful movies – the candy-coloured whodunnit 8 Women (2002), or the Charlotte Rampling murder mystery Swimming Pool (2003) – are awash in the stuff, but his output bends more diverse. There’s the bittersweet coming-of-age tale (2020’s Summer of 85), the Hitchcockian psycho-thriller (2017’s Double Lover), the other one involving Rampling and a body of water (the tender, mesmeric Under the Sand from 2000). He’s made more or less a film a year since 1997, and likes to sew a degree of tonal unease into most of them. Just when you’re getting comfortable in a particular genre, out comes another one.

Take When Autumn Falls, his 24th feature, which is in cinemas this week. It begins as a bucolic slice-of-life drama, with Hélène Vincent – playing Michelle, a retiree and devoted grandmother – tending to her garden and meeting with friends in a village in Burgundy. Then her stressed daughter Valérie (Swimming Pool’s Ludivine Sagnier) arrives, then a poisonous mushroom lands her grandson in hospital, then her very dysfunctional past comes to light. There are apparitions and police interrogations. Cryptic ex-cons fresh from jail. By the time a character mysteriously plummets to their death at the midpoint of When Autumn Falls, all you can do is let the film’s pure, unadulterated Ozoniness wash over you.

The film was loosely inspired by an incident in Ozon’s own childhood, in which his aunt accidentally poisoned several members of the family with wild mushrooms. “I loved the idea of my aunt trying to kill us all,” he laughs. “I was a very perverse child, as you can see. Or just a future director.”

Sitting in the corner of the cavernous library of London’s French Institute, Ozon is dressed in a crimson jacket and black trousers, a scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. His sunglasses are on, and mostly stay on. Looking at Ozon is akin to looking at an illustration of a Frenchman drawn from memory, and he speaks in a boyish, lightly dishy register. He tells me he loved working with the 81-year-old Vincent on the film because she really looks like an 81-year-old.

I need to work with a coordinator of intimacy on my next film – it didn’t exist before

“Some French actresses have so much plastic surgery that they don’t have age anymore,” he says. “I won’t give you names, but you know who I’m thinking of, don’t you?” He giggles. “And I’ve worked with them!” In all seriousness, though, he says he understands social and industry pressure to maintain a youthful appearance, but also loves lines and loose skin – he’d sometimes shoot Vincent in extreme close-up just to show it off. “That’s not possible for some actresses. Sometimes you prefer not to go too close with the camera because it’s not real anymore. You don’t see the expression.”

Whether their faces move or not, female actors of a certain age have lined up to work with Ozon for more than 20 years, ever since he revitalised Rampling’s career with Under the Sand. He was in his early thirties at that point, but had enough resolve to insist upon her casting despite worry from the film’s backers. “She was considered, at that time, totally forgotten,” he says. “Her career was stopped. All the French financiers said to me, ‘don’t work with her – she’s finished’. Helpfully, I didn’t follow them, and the film was successful.”

That led to 8 Women, in which he pulled together a murderer’s row of divas – including Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Béart – to play the suspects in a country house crime. “When the cast was announced, everybody wanted to come to the set to see the catfights,” he laughs. “All the media was convinced it would be a disaster, and impossible with so many egos on the same film. But they were wrong.” He thinks it would have been different if it were called 8 Men. “Actresses are clever. They are cinephiles. They are not afraid to work with young directors. Men?” He shrugs. “The egos of male actors can be huge. For women, there is a kind of sisterhood and solidarity.”

Ludivine Sagnier and Hélène Vincent in ‘When Autumn Falls’ (Parkland)

8 Women arrived at a time in Ozon’s career that saw him shift away from the barbed, button-pushing sensibility that had defined his early work – 1998’s Sitcom, which shot him to fame, was an overheated satire of the modern family, boasting orgies, sadomasochism and full-frontal nudity. It saw him dubbed the enfant terrible of Nineties French filmmaking, with more shades of his American contemporary Todd Solondz than an Éric Rohmer or a Michel Audiard. “I was looking for me,” he says. “It was instinctive. Maybe I was more provocative in the form?” He shrugs again, admitting that he struggles to look back at his older films. “They are like children I’ve abandoned,” he laughs, “and I don’t analyse them.” He points at me. “That is your job.”

He’s evolved, at least. Much like Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar – who, god forbid, panned away from a sex scene in one of his recent films – Ozon’s modern eroticism tends to be a little more tasteful than it used to be. It’s not by design, he insists. It’s cultural. “You can see so many sex scenes on your telephone today, so sex naturally felt more transgressive 20 years ago. Sometimes I think directors would actually welcome back the Hays Code [the puritanical guidelines for American filmmakers in force between the years of 1934 and 1968] just so you can rebel against something.”

‘Everybody wanted to come to the set to see the catfights’: Ozon’s ‘8 Women’ (Shutterstock)

The filming of sex scenes is also changing, as he’s learnt while planning his next movie, an adaptation of Albert Camus’ The Outsider. “I need to work with a coordinator of intimacy,” he says. “It didn’t exist before.” He says he’s not had an issue with shooting them himself. “I always share information with my actors – what position I want them in, which part of the body I want to show, and I ask for their point of view. It’s never been a problem. But it’s better now – there are some directors, especially in French cinema, who push the limits when it comes to making sex scenes.”

That’s partly because filmmakers in France, he says, hold enormous cultural and social sway. People don’t tend to say no. “The director is king. We have the power.” And it’s also one of the reasons he’s never been tempted by America, despite fielding offers to direct Hollywood films in the aftermath of Swimming Pool. “All they proposed to me were remakes, or erotic thrillers that would mean I was repeating myself.” And, he says while finally slipping off his sunglasses, “I wouldn’t have final cut.” It’s a power thing, he adds. “As a filmmaker, you have none in America. There, the director worships the producer. It is the director who helps the producer to win an Oscar.” He hoots, dismissively. This is a man who convinced his family to die on camera in the living room for him – fat chance anyone’s going to be able to boss him around.

‘When Autumn Falls’ is in cinemas from 21 March