Do you consider yourself to be a documentary maker and only a documentary maker?

To my mind, the words documentary maker and fiction are arbitrary designations. There are no clear borders between the two. Real life is full of what we in cinema call fiction, that's to say characters are often staged, they play roles, with well-rehearsed dialogues, there is a decor, an action, a ritual. This is true of everything that happens in a courtroom, a hospital, a police station, a convent, an office, a shop. This sort of fiction has been shown admirably well by the great documentary makers such as Fred Wiseman or Raymond Depardon.

But documentary has its limits. I once pointed out that documentary, which by its very nature is destined to read all that is real, is banned from filming the most powerful realities of human life: violence, murder, sadism, love, death, madness. Those are all secret acts.
It is probably because of this basic obstacle in the cinema of the real that the same prohibited subject matters are shown profusely in fiction films. For in fiction the roles are reversed: reality is the film being made; the real thing is the scene being filmed; the master is the camera. So it becomes possible to represent everything. The death of the main character is not the death of a man, passionate love is not experienced but acted, and violence is mimed. But that doesn't mean these representations are any the less disturbing.

Nevertheless, in documentary films, the feeling of reality is so powerful that this image from real life, from a real situation experienced by the beings who really endure or carry out an action instead of just acting it out, holds great fascination for the spectator. It is no less powerful than that of the fiction film, which pulls off the miracle of the true.

This sort of cinema has many facets. It can be the privileged witness of an exceptional event that it captures as it happens and which gives birth to a document of unquestionable, sometimes unbearable power; or after having studied, observed and understood reality, it can organise the way to possess it with the consent of the characters of this real action, by holding them faithful to their truth, by encouraging their spontaneity, by avoiding any form of manipulation. That's what Luc de Heusch called the participating camera.

The camera that lacks respect for human beings distorts the truth. If these principles are respected, there is no objection to the meticulous reconstitution or staging of scenes. That was the method used by Flaherty. Sometimes the reconstitution, through its quality of truth, constitutes a new reality, an action that the protagonists will experience as real and not acted.

Nevertheless, documentary narration obeys the same laws as fictional narration. Most procedures of cinematographic language were perfected by the early documentary makers and, notably, by Dziga Vertov. They developed such techniques as slow-motion, accelerated motion, superimpositions, deformations of images, the effects of rhythm, the use of ellipses, reverse motion, etc.

All of which leads one to believe that documentaries and fiction films are complementary, each taking strength from the other. There are poets, visionaries and prophets in both camps.

So, what is the border between documentary and fiction? I find it impossible to give a clear answer to the question. In films of pure imagination, such as horror films or fantastic films, films of anticipation or science fiction, there are always a certain number of elements borrowed from reality, which usually belong to the realm of documentary. Sometimes these elements stand the test of time better than fiction.