In what may or may not be a testament to the state of the French film industry today, some of the most interesting movies out of France in recent years have been directed not by veteran filmmakers, but by movie neophytes taking their first shot at standing behind the camera after experiencing great success in other artistic media. Last year's highly praised The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was helmed by Julian Schnabel, generally known as a visual artist, and if The Possibility of an Island, the directorial debut of controversial novelist Michel Houllebecq turns out not to be one of the best movies of the year, it will at least be one of the most talked about.
The Possibility of an Island, based on a novel by Houllebecq himself in 2005, certainly has an intriguing enough concept: it reads like a disjointed surrealist take on science fiction -- a post-apocalyptic mash-up of A Boy and His Dog, Solaris and The Holy Mountain, with cloning and bikini contests thrown in for good measure. Whether or not it will actually succeed is another matter; thus far, critics have not been kind. The Guardian's Geoffrey MacNab sat down with Houllebecq to discuss the process of moviemaking, how it differs from writing, and whether or not he intends to contune on as a filmmaker. "Maybe it is a superficial motivation," he says of filming many of the movie's scenes in Andalucian Spain, "but I always go to the locations when I write a novel. In this case, some of the locations were so impressive that the idea for the film came frm that...I enjoyed the preparation of the movie. I mean, the period immediately before the shooting when you choose everything, all the details. When you create the world."
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