Night Moves
By Adam Nayman
New York Film Festival 2025:
An Interview with Claire Denis (The Fence)
“I hope you will enjoy, more or less, the movie,” said Claire Denis in September at the world premiere of The Fence at the Toronto International Film Festival. More or less, I did. Freely adapted by Denis and Andrew Litvack from a 1979 play by the late Bernard-Marie Koltès—a frequent collaborator of Patrice Chéreau and a major voice in French theatre before his death of complications from AIDS in 1989 at the age of 41—the film takes place in and around the grounds of a construction site somewhere in West Africa. The outfit employs mostly men from the surrounding villages; its globalized ownership (with British stewards giving way to a Chinese consortium) belies a symbolic lineage as an outpost of white colonialism, a re-entrenchment of hierarchies no less abject for existing at the lower end of trickle-down economics.
The ruling authority on the ground is Horn (Matt Dillon), a weathered, ugly-American type tasked with overseeing the crew and liaising with the locals; he’s a heavy drinker nursing wounds real and imagined. The action unfolds over the course of a single day and night, during which time Horn is approachedby Alboury (Isaach de Bankolé), a Nigerian man resplendent in a pinstriped suit, planted firmly on the edges of the property. His request to collect the body of his dead brother, apparently killed on the job in an unspecified accident, carries a bristling sense of implication; ditto Horn’s reluctance to give him what he wants and send him on his way. Alboury won’t come inside, and he won’t go home, either; the more the two men try to feel each other out, the less likely it becomes that one or the other is going to budge.
This is a compelling setup, sociologically and emotionally loaded; Horn and Alboury are as much free-standing symbols of interracial suspicion and animosity as the compound itself, with the massive, barbed-wire fence (and attached guard towers) serving as a locus of mobile, shifting perspectives. (The low-light cinematography by Éric Gautier is attentive to the shadows and patterning of the metal, which visibly imprisons the actors in close-ups and two-shots alike). The mostly mixed—verging on skeptical—reception of The Fence at TIFF hinged on the paradoxical consensus that Denis had chosen source material that was somehow both wrong and a little too right; wrong, because Koltès’s Black Battles with Dogs seemingly isn’t a particularly great play, plunging as it does into dramatic convolution and increasingly declamatory dialogue; too-right because the basic scenario—which involves the characters of Horn and his new young wife, Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce, best in show), who has arrived from overseas to consummate what would seem to be a marriage of convenience—hews so closely to the narratives and themes of the autobiographically inflected Chocolat and White Material, for some perhaps to the point of redundancy.
I don’t know if Black Battles with Dogs is a great play (trawling through reviews of different productions suggests a generally respectful reputation), but its mix of broad political commentary and hothouse perversity—with Horn and Leonie both parrying the spiteful, desirous thrusts of his younger, sexually frustrated second-in command Cal (Tom Blyth)—clearly meshes with Denis’s sensibilities. Koltès was compared during his life to Samuel Beckett, and there is some of the latter’s absurdist goldbricking in Horn’s exchanges with Alboury, who intuits that he’s probably more likely to encounter Godot than his brother’s corpse and doubles down on his wraithlike patience anyway.
The Fence isn’t funny, exactly, but it is rueful, a quality that, when duly pressurized, can lead to uncomfortable (and not quite cathartic) laughter. The diegetic use of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” to connote the multi-directional erotic obsession festering amongst the three white characters prompted giggles from the people around me; I was less keen on the one-to-one-ratio of erotomaniac Cal’s theme song being “Beds Are Burning” but if any director has earned the right to their pop needle drops, it’s this one. Meanwhile, the production’s intimate scale—and visibly modest budget, including multiple images captured on an iPhone—has brought out something ornery and resourceful in Denis’s filmmaking—more ornery, maybe, than usual. The common denominator between the scenes and performances that work and the ones that don’t—I can’t tell if Dillon is miscast or inhabiting Horn’s gnawing recognition of his own inadequacies—is the sense of an artist who’s backed herself into a corner and is trying to claw her way out, or through, the material itself. Despite its tarnished reputation, there were parts of Stars at Noon that clearly felt masterful; the rhythm here is ragged, chancier. Denis’s collaboration with Saint Laurent as a financier seems instructive, somehow, with each character defined by—if not reduced to—their increasingly rumpled designer duds, pragmatism and elegance threaded together. An early, CGI-assisted sequence of a snarling canine—a stylized depiction of one character’s subtext-heavy nightmare of white aggression, staged against an abstract black void—becomes similarly emblematic of the project’s pent-up energies.
As for whether or not The Fence fits—neatly, jaggedly, or otherwise—with its director’s other films about interlopers trying to gain a foothold on the physical and psychic terrain of the Dark Continent, that’s a question for everybody except Denis herself. Her long-standing reluctance to conceptualize retrospectively about such resonances doesn’t register as evasiveness. It seems more like a matter of her trying to take—and make—each new movie on its own terms. That it’s hard for those of us who consider ourselves admirers to do likewise speaks to the double bind of seeing certain filmmakers as setting a standard—for themselves, for their peers, and for critics. A month after seeing The Fence, the various hitches and hiccups in its dramaturgy have faded from my (selective?) memory while certain images—a forlorn cot made up as a wedding bed; Leonie’s red dress clinging to her shoulders; a closing shot that rhymes, fleetingly, with the coda of Chocolat—have stayed; one camera movement that comes to rest on a pair of fists clenching takes pride of place in the great Denis encyclopedia of body language.
I talked to Claire Denis in Toronto; as ever, I enjoyed it, more than less.
Reverse Shot: Can you talk about the location in the film? Did you use a real construction site?
Claire Denis: The location is a jail. And we had to build it. I looked at some real construction sites, which are very well guarded. Barbed wire and fences, and walls, people with guns. In Senegal, I found a spot which was going to be used as an industrial site. We didn’t have a big budget. We decided we would do things as small as possible but with a sort of perspective in mind. The whole thing—the house—is built out of containers. Everything is a metallic box. I saw places where containers get used like this: they become rooms, or offices, for workers.
RS: In Chocolat and White Material, the white characters are living very comfortably; they feel like they’re at home. Here, Horn seems resigned to his quarters; he’s been there forever, but he doesn’t necessarily want to be.
CD: He dreams that he will be leaving soon, that he and his wife will go somewhere else. He wants it to be the end of his career.
RS: The image of the little bed he makes up for her is very striking; he’s trying to make this inhospitable place feel cozy, and it’s not exactly convincing.
CD: It’s their wedding night!
RS: Yes, although it’s not going to be much of a wedding night for a few reasons; their dinner never gets started, and we find out that he’s been injured in a very particular way.
CD: They talk about his wound, yes. He says that if she wants to sleep alone, he has a cot in his office. But she also says they have great sex. She knows what to do. She’s a nurse. She knows about his wound, and it doesn’t affect their sex life.
RS: There’s a lot of repressed sexual energy in the film; Cal gives Leonie a hard time when he picks her up at the airport, but there’s desire there, and of course there’s unspoken tension between Cal and Horn as well.
CD: Tom’s character is very jealous! Cal wants Horn all to himself, not to share.
RS: At the Q&A last night at TIFF, Tom Blyth said that Cal sees Horn as sort of a father figure and a brother, which you laughed at. I guess incest isn’t off the table in your movies, so…
CD: It’s not incestuous, I don’t think. It’s just love.
RS: But there is an ambiguity to the relationship between those two men, yeah?
CD: It’s all in the play, yes. The ambiguity of two men together, and the woman who arrives and breaks the balance. She’s maybe as disturbing to them as the black man outside asking for the body of the brother.
RS: Can you talk about your memories of seeing the play in 1979?
CD: When I met Bernard, he was working with Patrice Chéreau. It was Bernard who first introduced me to Isaach. Bernard had wanted him to be in the play; the part was written for him. I remember that on stage, Alboury is in the shadows, and Horn is on the veranda; it’s staged so that the audience is on the veranda with him. Here, Alboury’s point of view exists, which isn’t possible on stage. In the play, though, the two men inside are drinking more heavily, they’re drunk, drunk, drunk. And they’re both older, much older than Tom is in the film.
RS: Did you make a lot of changes to the characters or the dialogue?
CD: Yes, because translating from French to English…it’s so different, especially when it comes to white and Black characters. Of course I prefer to work in French…Alboury and the guards are speaking in Yoruba, the language of Nigeria…if you watch a lot of Nigerian films, you hear it all the time.
RS: Beyond the language, though, do you think you fundamentally altered the material?
CD: I don’t think the play could stand today. I had to make some parts more modern. The character of Leonie, for instance…In the play, she’s like a woman of the 19th century, discovering Africa for the first time. The moment she sees Alboury, she falls in love with him. That’s something that I changed completely. I didn’t do this to betray Bernard; I think he would have been happy with it.
RS: Was there ever a thought of doing it as a period piece?
CD: No interest in doing it as a period piece. I visited so many of these sites and they’re basically functioning the same way today.
RS: The title of the play is Black Battles with Dogs, and the movie opens with a monologue describing a very violent dog; the imagery you added to illustrate the words is surreal and terrifying, close to the style of a horror movie.
CD: The nightmare of the dog was only in the notes for the play. It was never actually described onstage. But it was always this terrible little white dog. In the movie, it’s a special effect. We filmed a real dog, and then the special effects made it into a monster. They can do everything with special effects now.
RS: How did you decide on Matt Dillon for the role of Horn? Obviously the character being American required a very different sort of actor from Michel Piccoli, who played the part on stage.
CD: Matt Dillon for me is a legend! We had known each other for years, so maybe there was a little shyness about working together. He came to Paris to organize a painting exhibition, and we ran into each other in the street. He asked me why we hadn’t done anything together. I told him I would send him the script for The Fence as soon as it was done.
RS: The other major collaborator I wanted to ask about was Saint Laurent, which has gotten into the business of helping to finance films; they had money last year in The Shrouds.
CD: I knew Saint Laurent wanted to be part of certain films. They choose a certain kind of film or director that they like, and they make an offer. So all the clothes in the film are Saint Laurent. I thought that the best thing was to take everything. I don’t think I’ve made a movie where costumes are unimportant. Elegance in wardrobe is something that can give strength to a character. When I did White Material, we worked a lot on the details for Isabelle Huppert’s dresses.
RS: All of the clothes in the movie are very beautiful, but they also get very distressed as the story goes on. It’s a rumpled sort of elegance, no?
CD: The shirt looks great on Matt. That’s its purpose.
RS: You mentioned White Material; do you think this movie has a particularly strong connection to that one, or to Chocolat? Do they go together for you as movies about white characters grappling with a sense of belonging or difference in West Africa?
CD: Geographically, yes. In my thoughts, I’m not sure. It’s been almost 40 years since Chocolat, but working with Isaach, the link is still very strong. We were the ones who had met and known and loved Bernard.
RS: Alboury is a powerful character; he can’t penetrate the fence, but he pressurizes the entire story. I love the stillness in Isaach’s performance.
CD: That stillness is in the script. I wanted Alboury’s presence to feel like its own sort of danger.
RS: There’s a duel-like quality to the exchanges between Horn and Alboury, with all of these repeated questions and deflections. It’s an element of the movie that feels rooted in something theatrical—something that reminded me of a play.
CD: I want to disagree with that! That kind of fake politeness between a Black man and a white man, who are about to fight for something…politeness can be like a little war. Those repetitions are part of that.
RS: You mentioned that this is the first movie that you’ve ever shot in sequence. How did you and Éric Gautier approach the production and the lighting design?
CD: I had no continuity person with me. I did have a first AD and a great crew, but we were working very fast, in the night and in the wind. Working in sequence made it easier, from one to another. I didn’t have to think as much about the angles. It made it a bit more open in my mind. Éric and I only had a few days to prepare; it was because of the location that we shot in that way [in sequence]. We tried to be very clear between the white light of the road and the warmer light inside the house. And we did all of the day scenes—the driving scenes out on the road—with a cell phone before we started the night shoot.
RS: Given the small budget it’s pretty impressive that you got music from Midnight Oil and Kylie Minogue…
CD: The artists were very helpful.
RS: They’re both Australian, which is probably a coincidence.
CD: I did that on purpose. I love both of them. “Beds Are Burning” was great for Cal. In Australia, Midnight Oil is a very political band. And Kylie is a friend.
RS: There’s less score in this movie than usual.
CD: The score wasn’t working. We tried to use more. Stuart was there from the beginning, as usual; during the editing, we talked about it and we agreed that music was going to be hard.
RS: Do you think that directing has gotten easier for you over time? Or harder?
CD: I don’t know if it gets easier or harder. Maybe getting older makes things harder? Directing has always been hard. Producing movies now, though, is harder.
RS: You’ve talked before about having doubts whenever you make movies. I wonder if that doubt is also where your confidence comes from?
CD: My confidence is a confidence in the script. Or, maybe more deeply, it’s the confidence I have in the performances of the actors.
RS: I wanted to ask you about one shot in the film. Cal says something to Leonie about being a kind of trophy wife, and the camera pulls down to capture her reaction and it’s not in her face—it’s in her clenched fists. That image has stayed with me.
CD: He says she’s like a piece of money that falls on the ground and falls for nobody. I knew that line mattered a lot. It’s so offensive. The line is in the play. I wrote the reaction for her body.