Atala turns the tables on the great laugh factory by trying its hand at different forms of stage and small-screen entertainment, from stand-up to sitcom.
By Carole Bailly published on March 2, 2017
You presented Talk Show, then Stand-up comedy and Stand-up comedy 2, and finally you directed the sitcom Situation comédie. Why are you interested in these different forms of typically American entertainment?
At one point I was so interested in these forms of popular culture that I had to say I watched Friends and Seinfeld over and over again because I was documenting for my work, otherwise it wasn’t justifiable!
You’ve already made a film about the making of a film, and now you’re making a sitcom about sitcoms.
What appeals to you about this new format?
The sitcom format is one of the ways we’ve found to make theater in the age of television. What I like about the formula of a TV series, whether it’s a comedy or a drama, is that it’s a beautiful poem about life. You have goals, you encounter obstacles and you vaguely try to come up with plans to overcome them. It usually doesn’t work, and then you discover something else by chance that takes you somewhere else. I also like to explore the rules of a format in order to understand its codes and not be in a state of manipulation but an active spectator.
Why is it so hard to make quality sitcoms in France?
One of the reasons we’re not as good at audiovisuals is that we spend less time on them, and we also consider that as soon as we make popular stuff it’s not as good, we discredit the public who watch these things. I talk about this in Stand-up 2: the quality of what we show is really proportional to the time we spend working on it. I was once at the set of The Big Bang Theory and it’s really beautiful the way the audience is responsible for the outcome of the play. The writers use the audience’s laughter to tell whether a joke is successful or not. If the joke flops, they stop the whole thing and rewrite the scene until it gets a laugh. Just like in live performance.
You’d think that comedy would be easier to write than drama.
Yes, but comedy is a very difficult exercise. In fact, it’s a very serious art form. In France, we tend to think that doing sad things is a guarantee of depth. On the contrary, I think you can go deep into thought, philosophize and reach deep truths by making people laugh. It’s not sub-art, it’s no less profound, no less poetic, and it has the same artistic power.
How do you make people laugh?
There are techniques and formulas we learn in the United States. For example, you have to put the funniest word at the end of the sentence. The problem with this system is that laughter also comes from an element of surprise, of novelty for the spectator, and if you use a technique too much, it no longer works. Sometimes, in a show, people say things in English or in a foreign language, and there’s a word or a turn of phrase that everyone knows. People laugh, not because it’s really funny, but because it’s a way for them to say “I’ve understood what you’ve just said. And that’s a real function of laughter.
What sitcoms inspire you?
One of my secret sources is Seinfeld, which I’ve watched so many times that I can’t admit it anymore – it’s downright shameful! If I were an exhibition curator one day, I’d make a room where I’d show all the Seinfeld seasons on a loop! I drew a lot of my inspiration for Situation Comedy. I think there’s a certain beauty in the fact that this series has become mainstream, even though some episodes are completely experimental.
In Stand-up 2, you shed even more light on the difficulties behind making a show. You even explain to the audience that you’ve reached a “creative impasse”.
There’s still this sort of myth about art: inspiration would magically arrive one evening, when in reality we have techniques to make it work.The video-game prototype I show in Stand-up 1 about an artist who wants to produce his show is simply a story about my personal trials and tribulations. The only benefit for me is that it gives me something to say in my stand-ups. And rejection, which is one of the central themes of Stand-up 2, is part of an artist’s daily life. Even when it works …. A producer to whom I’d sent excerpts from my sitcom called me back three days later in a rather deep voice to tell me that she’d hated the tone, the way I pretended to act badly and the actors’ shabby clothes. So it was pretty violent. But anyway, without knowing it, she gave me a great slogan for my sitcom!
The United States has been a great inspiration for you. But your very first voyage of initiation was your three months in Japan.
Yes, Japan shaped a lot of my thinking. What do we look at and what don’t we look at? What does convention tell me about where I should look? Travel highlights how we’re conditioned to look at certain things and not others. In Japan, there’s this notion of borrowed landscape: the tree in the distance is as important as the garden you’re in. Since it’s visible, it’s part of this borrowed landscape. My latest work at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers will be called Paysage emprunté.I’m going to show people my favorite lamp, or my favorite walk, which I’ve borrowed from the sets at Les Amandiers.Anything I see can become part of the landscape and therefore part of the show.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)