Laurent Cantet is one of the most daring and stimulating filmmakers to come out of Europe in the past decade, and he keeps challenging himself. Cantet's movies (Human Resources, Time Out, Heading South), contemporary social dramas that he casts with a mix of trained actors and nonprofessionals, explore issues and anxieties--about work, class, gender, aging--that most films shy away from, and they do it without seeming dry or messagey. His newest film, which will be released in America this weekend under the English language title The Class, is his most ambitious project to date. Based on the book Entre les murs ("Between the Walls") by François Bégaudeau, a 37-year-old former teacher turned novelist and essayist (and film critic), it's a high school movie like no other. Working from a script credited to himself, Bégaudeau, and his own regular screenwriting collaborator, Robin Campillo, Cantet gathered together a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds to represent the multicultural classroom presided over by their teacher, played by Bégaudeau. He made some real finds, including the mouthy sparkplug Esméralda Ouertani and Franck Keita, who plays Souleymane, the angriest and most defiantly unreachable of the kids. Once everything was in place, they worked together for a year, with their scenes monitored by three high-definition cameras. (One cameraman focused on the teacher, the second on the kids, and the third was hired to keep an eye out for the happy accidents.) The result is a movie that's bristlingly alive and full of surprises--not the least of which are provided by Bégaudeau's instructor, a hotshot charmer who badly wants the kids to see him as a cool older dude rather than a stuffy instructional figure, and who isn't always able to maintain perspective when faced with a choice between meeting a troubled, needy kid halfway and preserving his own self-image and ego. The Class, which won the Palme d'or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, is arriving in theaters just in time to confirm its status as one of the best pictures of the year.

SCREENGRAB: So, directing your leading man in this movie, you got to tell a film critic what to do. That must have been fun.

LAURENT CANTET: When he was in front of the camera, he was not a critic anymore. He was very busy, not just because he was acting himself, but also guiding the scene from within the scene, guiding the children to go where we wanted them to go. He had to think of all that while we were filming.

SCREENGRAB: I think this is the first movie you've made that started with someone else's material. How did you get involved with Bégaudeau and his book?

CANTET: I wrote the first script two years before reading the book. It was the story of Souleymane. The book is more documentary than the film itself. The book is sort of a diary. Every day he wrote about what he was doing while he was teaching, and then he rewrote that to make it into a chronicle of the life of the class. There was no real dramatic structure in the book. That's why I was able to bring the story about Souleymane that I had written and connect it to the documentary material that Francois had proposed. Then I began to put the script together with Robin Capillo, and Francois would read it every day and tell us, "I can believe this" or "I don't believe that" or "I wouldn't say this in that way, here's how I would say it." He was really more of an advisor than a co-writer.

SCREENGRAB: One thing that I find exciting about your movies is that you seem to be really interested in exploring the ways that institutions let people down.

CANTET: I wanted to show all the complexities of this institution, the school. On the one side, it helps a lot of children to integrate into society. On the other hand, it excludes a lot of children, children like Souleymane, who can't find his place in the system. Or girls like Henriette, the one who says at the end that she feels she hasn't learned anything.

SCREENGRAB: I was a little surprised at the degree to which the teacher is presented as this flawed character. In some ways, his character really doesn't come off very well. Is that something that Bégaudeau was totally on board with?

CANTET: I didn't--we didn't--want to make an ideal teacher, a heroic teacher. Human beings just aren't like that. And of course, it was no problem for Francois to show that side. Because he was acting, you see. It was the same with the children. The boy who plays Souleymane is nothing like Souleymane, he's very kind. But he was able to show this image that's unlike himself.

SCREENGRAB: So the kids were able to step up as actors? Because I was curious about how much you had to shape the roles to fit who the kids already were.

CANTET: There was a kind of alchemy involved. We worked together for a year, you know, in our workshop that we built inside the school, and at times I couldn't tell what was coming from me, from Francois, from the children themselves. We worked together for three hours each week from October till May, and then we shot during the summer, for seven weeks. I wasn't paid [for the preparation period], nobody was paid. It's just my way of working.

SCREENGRAB: How did you find these kids?

CANTET: It was quite easy. We just found the school that was interested in the project, which happened to be in a very mixed neighborhood, and we organized this weekend, and told the volunteers that they would all be welcome, and we had fifty volunteers at the beginning, twenty-five of whom stayed to the end. I didn't choose them. They simply decided to be part of the film.

SCREENGRAB: Some of the kids who really stick out, like Esmeralda--did you know early on that you were going to be using them a lot?



CANTET: Yes, Esmeralda was at the first meeting, and after two minutes -- [laughs and shakes his head]--it was obvious that she was going to be playing a central role. And we were expecting to find such a character, we had a place for her in the conception. And some kids created their own character. Take, for instance, Wei Huang, the young Chinese boy. In the script, we had a young Chinese boy who doesn't speak French very well, and he's afraid of making mistakes, so he just doesn't speak. That might have made for an interesting character. Except then we met Wei, and Wei is very talkative. He likes to express himself, even though his French isn't perfect, he only arrived in the country two years ago. We weren't going to tell him, "Wei, shut up, be more like the character we've written," because Wei was more interesting than that character. So we rewrote the character to better fit Wei.

There's also a character who's a Goth. The boy himself is not a Goth in real life. But when we talked about costuming, someone asked, "Are we obliged to dress exactly as we do in real life?" I said no, if someone wants to be, say, a Goth... I didn't even get to finish my sentence. He was like, "Yes! Yes, I want to be a Goth!" So I said, let's try it. It gave him a chance to be, during the shooting, what he doesn't dare to be in real life. But he really embodied that character, he really lived with that character. He was able to improvise as that character.

SCREENGRAB: You like working with non-actors.

CANTET: Yes, it's something that is, first, very interesting, because you learn a lot of things, and the film becomes based on what they can bring from their own experience. I really like working with that, and I'm always surprised by what can happen. Accidents can happen, you really have to listen to what's happening and use it to rebuild the scene. It's something that I really like.

SCREENGRAB: How different is it working with non-professionals, compared to working with someone like Aurélien Recoing, whose performance in Time Out, which is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, must have taken an awful lot of skill to bring off?

CANTET: In fact, with Aurélien Recoing, we worked a little bit the same way. Aurélien rehearsed with the non-professional actors in the cast, learning to work with them, to help them be at ease in the scene. I like to mix professional and non-professional actors in a scene because I think it helps both. The non-actors may be driven a bit by the professionals, who can give them the confidence they need to get through it. And the professionals don't act the same way as they do when they're working with another actor. They have to really listen.

SCREENGRAB: Have you gotten any feedback from the educational community about The Class?

CANTET: [Pause.] Yes.

SCREENGRAB: {Laughter] Oh-kay.

CANTET: In fact, the film divided the teachers in France, between those who liked it, because they could recognize the problems and issues that they have to deal with every day. And then there are others--and I should say, I think they're in the minority-- who rejected the film because they watched it as if it were a documentary film, and they were judging the teacher, and they didn't want to see a feature film like that. They didn't want to recognize themselves in that. But of course, the teacher is what I wanted him to be, and we never set out to make a film that would present this model to the world where we were going, "Oh, that's a good teacher," or pointing a finger and going, "That's a bad teacher!" We just wanted to show, that's a teacher.