Life, suffering and art. Iggy Pop, 'Godfather of Punk', has just the right weathered head to get us into To Stay Alive - A Method by Michel Houellebecq's acclaimed essay Rester vivant (1991) to lead. Houellebecq holds up life's poets that being a writer can be a way to drag yourself by the hair out of madness. Go on bravely, is the message now filmed by Erik Lieshout, with Arno Hagers and Reinier van Brummelen as co-directors. With important roles for experience experts Anne-Claire, Jérôme and Robert, three people with mental health problems who have found new footing in writing and painting. Thursday 2 February in cinemas.
The subtitle is A Feelgood Movie About Suffering. Do we detect any irony there, we ask director Lieshout.
'Certainly. On the one hand, it's all deadly serious, but there are also plenty of grounds for relativity, as Houellebecq does in his texts. It seems like wisdom chiselled into stone tablets, but that also makes it funny.'
'He can play two registers, being serious and playing the dragon with himself. Both can be true. It is definitely not all irony, but he sometimes packages it that way. He doesn't think of himself as great. I like that about him too, it makes him come close. He writes about life. It doesn't have to be for eternity. He writes for today.'
Poets, attack!
Michel's encounter with Iggy Pop at the end of the film looks very serious and endearingly direct on the one hand, but you also sense that it is a game.
'It is something that is also in his books and that I fell for. In the end, that whole scene was written out by me in advance, based on Michel's work and what Iggy gave me. You can laugh at it, but it's about something.'
'Of course, we could have made Anne-Claire, Jérôme and Robert into leaden stories, but it's not a film about problem cases. In consultation with Michel, we did choose characters who are quite marginal, so it's a nice process as they slowly emerge from that by making poems and paintings. But it could appeal to anyone who feels trapped in a life that is not their own choice. As you do see in big offices, what I would call intensive human husbandry. Perhaps then, after watching the film, you might feel a kind of liberation and come up with the idea of tossing your hair loose and making something of it. Hence at the end the battle cry "Poets, attack!". That doesn't just apply to poets. Especially in this day and age.'
Was this the first time Iggy Pop and Michel Houellebecq met in the flesh?
'My documentary Last words was already a preliminary study in 2009 for To Stay Alive. I knew Michel was a huge fan of Iggy. He bought his first Iggy Pop record when he was 16 and living with his grandparents. His father and mother were no longer interested in raising him. These wanted to work on their own development. You can imagine how terrible that was. "When I heard that record, I knew I was no longer alone," he has said.
Wind force 6
'That's why I then asked Iggy Pop if he would make music for Last words. I had the great good fortune that Iggy was just in a hotel in Normandy reading Houellebecq's The possibility of an Island had read. He turned out to be very interested. When he called me back, I was sailing on the IJsselmeer, which was a unique experience. An hour on the phone with Iggy in wind force six.'
'Iggy then wrote some songs for my film, and at the concert where he played them live for the first time, I introduced Michel to Iggy. Then we went into Paris and I watched them shyly circle each other. They learned from each other's art. I thought then: we should do more with that. And that became this new film.'
Police cordon
'Michel and Iggy both collaborated creatively on it. For example, Iggy came up with an old recording of the song Open Up and Bleed, which is about a difficult period he went through. He lived in a trailer park and was mentally ill. He pulled himself up by his own hair. From inner necessity, he started making the music with which he laid the foundation for punk. Michel worked his way out of the quagmire through writing in a similar way.'
'When we looked up people before casting, it was quite a spectacle. Michel wrote Sousmission, and he was on the cover of Charlie Hebdo at the time of the attack, so he has had protection ever since. That had the colossal consequence that when we wanted to speak to people we were there with a complete police cordon at the door.'
It is Iggy who acts as narrator in the film, not Michel himself.
'Iggy is a very good storyteller with a steady voice and Michel is not. Quite apart from the fact that Michel just didn't want to do it. He doesn't want to get too close to his own biography, which is a kind of self-protection. This is also why he does not play himself in the film, but a character very close to him. What we see is actually a feature film scene referring to Michel's real reality. Perhaps we are even closer to that reality in this way. By the way, the real conversations between Iggy and Michel are also much more difficult than what we see in the film, because of the respect they have for each other.'
Much attention has been paid to the photography, staging and camerawork. It is almost feature film-like. It rises above an average documentary. Was that a conscious choice?
'Yes, I had even written an actual feature film version. We hesitated for a very long time whether it should be a feature film or a documentary. Now it's an intermediate form. We are filming an existing text that is already set, using elements from real life. From the stories of Anne-Claire, Jérôme and Robert, we used those parts that were useful to us. I think it's an interesting and vivid form. When Jérôme cries, it is real, but there is also a lot of stylisation. So you can get a kind of freshness that in feature films you only achieve with very good actors.'
The beauty of Anne-Claire, Jerome and Robert's contributions is that they show that Houellebecq's text applies to more people.
'Yes, I think that's the fantastic thing about good art. Especially when you write about what is very deep inside yourself, it turns out to be true for more people. I have noticed that people are really touched by it. 'A purifying experience,' I have already heard.'
Reinventing yourself
At Rester vivant Houellebecq argues that only working directly from an emotion leads to something true. Did something like that play a role in the making of the film?
'Yes indeed. Why I was so drawn to that book I don't know exactly, but I felt I had to do something with it. We were pretty intuitive when shooting. When editing, we didn't stick to the script's schedule but always asked ourselves: which scene would be beautiful now.'
'It also has to do with my own experiences with mental illness and drugs. It had almost brought me to my knees, but along the way, including through filmmaking, I managed to reinvent myself. The psychiatrist briefly in the film told me that when people go through a severe crisis it prevents their self from being erased. They are like a baby again. Who realises he exists when he hears his first cry. Adults can create a new identity by making their own stories, films or books. You can reinvent yourself.'
'My problems were not as intense as Michel's, who almost died from them, but it did something to me, the way he describes the horror of life with yet light at the end of the tunnel. Go on! Have no fear, the worst is behind you. Hence, 'Poets, attack!' It's not really a happy ending, because you don't know how things will go on, but it has something pamphlet-like about it. Don't give up, keep going. In today's times, I think that's a call I fully support.'
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