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Xavier Beauvois
Born in northern France in 1967, Xavier Beauvois moved to Paris at the first opportunity, determined to become a filmmaker. After encounters with revered critics Jean Douchet and Serge Daney, he found work as an assistant with André Téchiné and Mañoel de Oliveira. Aged 23, Xavier wrote, directed and starred in his acclaimed début picture, North (1990), which was nominated for a César for Best First Film. He followed up with Don’t Forget You’re Going To Die (1995), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes and the prestigious Jean Vigo Award. His third and most recent film, To Matthieu (2000), starred Benoît Magimel and Nathalie Baye and, like Le Petit Lieutenant, premièred at the Venice Festival.
I began thinking about ideas for a crime thriller while I was editing my previous film To Matthieu. I didn’t have any precise framework for a plot in mind but I knew I didn’t want to take a book or a film or any other fictional story as a starting point. I wanted my inspiration to come from real life.
I met a police captain working with the Criminal Investigation Division and spent several months following him out in the field and in the office, even passing myself off as a police lieutenant at times. That’s how I got access to crime scenes and to every stage of an investigation, even the most confidential parts, such as autopsies. The reality often struck me as far more interesting than the clichés of the genre.
To bring the characters to life and add depth to scenes in the script that I deliberately kept as spare and simple as possible, I chose actors I had already worked with: Nathalie Baye (Vaudieu), Roschdy Zem (Solo), Antoine Chappey (Mallet) and a newcomer, Jalil Lespert, to play the petit lieutenant.
(Xavier Beauvois)
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