DepressedBergman@DannyDrinksWine
Mathieu Kassovitz on why 'La Haine' (1995) would have been horrible had it been in colour instead of Black & White:
"Interviewer: Was it essential that it was three kids?
Kassovitz: I needed a trio because when you’re with a friend, you have a discussion, and it ends fast because either you agree, or you don’t, but you cannot argue all the time. Three people can disagree all the time because it bounces from one to the other. I wanted one guy that’s the funny one in the middle; the political one that wants to get even with the society; and then the other one who’s trying to hold it in because he knows what real violence is. It was a trick, like the black and white is a trick too – to make it universal, a story that happens everywhere, so you don’t know if it’s Paris or Mexico or Brooklyn: it could be anywhere.
Interviewer: How does black and white make it more universal?
Kassovitz: When you look at black-and-white footage from the war, it changes when you see that footage put in colour. I did the voiceover for 'Apocalypse', a fantastic documentary series covering wars, for which they colourised all these black-and-white images and rendered them in HD. In colour, all of a sudden the footage becomes very personal – you see your grandfathers there, it’s not just ghosts or an artistic image, it could be today. What black and white does is bring poetry into reality. That’s why when you do a movie about poverty where you don’t have control over the environment and things are supposed to be ugly, it’s very difficult. It costs a lot of money to make it look good. But it doesn’t cost anything to make it look good in black and white. If I showed you 'La Haine' in colour, it’s horrible."
(Mathieu Kassovitz's interview with Kaleem Aftab, BFI, 2020)
