Prophet warning
Un prophète (A Prophet) writers Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit, producer Marco Cherqui and director Enrico Maria Artale speak to DQ about reimagining the 2009 prison film of the same name as a TV series, its themes of identity and offering a new perspective behind bars.
In 2009, Jacques Audiard’s French prison drama Un prophète (A Prophet) told the story of a young criminal who must learn to survive behind bars.
Nominated for the Best Foreign-language Film Oscar the following year, it stars Tahar Rahim as Malik, a French teenager of Algerian origin who finds himself trapped between two factions – the Corsican mafia and Maghrebi crime syndicate – as he charts his own rise to power.
A new series, also called A Prophet, now comes to the small screen after making its world premiere recently at the Venice Film Festival. But neither a sequel nor a remake as such, the eight-part drama aims to tackle similar questions of identity to the original but through a contemporary lens and a modern setting.
In his screen debut, Mamadou Sidibé stars as Malik, a young African immigrant who must try to survive in the confines of a brutal jail after being sentenced for drug smuggling. Inside, he meets Massoud (Sami Bouajila), a powerful businessman who offers him protection in return for his obedience. But when he realises he is just a pawn in Massoud’s game, he finds the only way to survive is to take power for himself.
Produced by CPB Films and Media Musketeers Studio, the show is coproduced by UGC Images, Entourage Series, Savon Noir, Staging, MMBV and Camera Lucida, with Bottega Films and Indigo Films. It comes from creators and writers Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit as well as producer Marco Cherqui, who all collaborated on the original film. That started with Dafri’s story about “an Arab in jail with Corsican gangsters,” based on ideas around his own identity as a French Arab of Algerian heritage.
“When he told me his idea about this guy with an origin that he doesn’t know clearly, that he’s going to be in prison and that the prison is going to be his education, which is the only way for him to survive, I thought we had a very French story in the middle of a movie that could become a classic genre movie, and this is what happened,” Cherqui tells DQ.
“From Abdel’s original idea, we built this story about a man who doesn’t know really where he comes from. His body is full of scars and he knows his relationship with Arab culture is only linked by his name.”
“First of all, I’m French. After that, I have an origin because my mum is an Algerian woman,” Abdel says. “I love the spirit of Algeria. But first of all I’m French because I was born here. My culture is here. I was not born in Algeria. I respect my origin. What I love about Malik is he’s a character who accepts the slavery [in prison], but he thinks, ‘How can I get out of slavery to become a new boss?’”
Peufaillit, who partnered with Dafri to support the movie’s writing process, adds: “What I found really interesting – and it’s still the same with the new Malik – is that he’s a learner, which is the most important [thing] about him. He’s not ‘muscle,’ so he would never become a middleman. Either he’s on the top or he’s at the bottom, so we always played with that, with the way he accepts being undermined because he has a goal [to reach the top].
“To have a young Arab who is far cleverer than the other people around him is really interesting because we were not used to seeing that, and also the other characters can’t accept that. They can’t even figure out that he’s learning behind their backs.”
Collecting numerous awards following its release, including the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language and Best Film at France’s César Awards, the decision to develop A Prophet as a TV series emerged following the small-screen revolution that inspired series such as The Sopranos and Twin Peaks.
“At this time, TV shows are amazing – and they are amazing because of the time that so many episodes gives you to work on characters and to get deep inside [the story],” Cherqui says. When he first called Dafri about the prospect of partnering on a series, he remembers the writer being surprised – but not immediately of the opinion that it was a great idea.
But after referencing several other films that have made the leap to television – Fargo and Gomorrah among them – the trio agreed to discuss the idea further. Then it became a question of what a series might look like.
“We tried a few things, and it didn’t work because it was almost always not as good as the movie,” Cherqui remembers. “At a certain time, we asked ourselves, ‘But why was the movie so strong at the time and still very strong today?’ [It was] because of the questions the movie was asking, so maybe these questions deserve to be asked again.
“So it was the matter of a reboot, not a remake, not a sequel, not a prequel. It was to do A Prophet for today.”
They then decided to focus the story on a character of African origin, with the story set in Marseille, where there is a community from Mayotte, one of the Comoro Islands found off the coast of Mozambique and a department of France.
“Malik [in the film] was an Algerian,” Dafri says, noting that Algeria is a former French colony. “You can easily understand the link of the colonised and coloniser, and with Comoro, we have the same link.”
The other key member of the show’s creative team is Italian director Enrico Maria Artale, who came to the project following TV work including El Paraiso, Django and Romulus.
“It was very difficult for him because he’s Italian; he doesn’t know the substance of French criminality,” Dafri says. “He needed to learn how French people think – and he made incredible work.”
“We had the script but Enrico pushed it further,” echoes Peufaillit. “It’s full of magical realism, so it’s not at all a naturalistic fiction. It’s full of poetry. Thanks to Enrico, he really did amazing stuff.”
Artale was on holiday in Sicily three years ago when he first got a call about helming A Prophet, having been inspired by the original movie when he was at film school. Though he was coming straight from working on another series and a feature film, he decided he couldn’t turn down the “unique opportunity” to take it on.
Early discussions with the writers and producer revealed his intentions to keep the spirit of the movie but, like them, not to just remake it.
“This was an opportunity to do something different and to try to take what was already an original film relating to prison movies and pushing further in the world of TV series, exploring the mystical, philosophical side of it and the dignity of these characters that was already well planted in the scripts,” he says.
“It was a cult movie. It was one of the few movies that had a huge impact on a generation of filmmakers in the way it’s filmed and the aesthetics. I didn’t want to go back to it precisely. I started asking myself, ‘OK, what would be A Prophet now? Could we be braver somehow, relating to the world of TV series with different rules and different expectations?’”
Such was the challenge of bringing A Prophet to television that “many French directors refused the series,” Artale reveals. “They had too much respect.”
As a result, he believes not being French helped him take on the project, despite his love for the original. He also didn’t speak French, nor know Marseille.
“This was a new role for me to discover, and I really tried to dive into that reality, to spend time in this town, to meet not only the people I was working with but also the people in the neighbourhoods and learning the language,” he says. “So there was a big challenge, but always the pleasure and the excitement was bigger.”
Artale wanted the camera to focus on the relationships between the characters – an approach that often meant he would adapt scenes to the actors’ performances. He also created scenes that would just be used in rehearsals to create a deeper understanding of a character’s perspective or motives.
A big fan of prison movies, one reference point for Artale was the Showtime series Escape at Dannemora. He also went back to French movies of the 1960s from directors such as Robert Bresson, Jacques Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville, who understood prisons could be arenas for meditation and reflection.
Prisoners “have a tendency to talk about very important matters that we don’t talk about so often outside of prison,” the director says. “They’re not animals, as we see sometimes in some fictions, or savages. On the contrary, they might have very noble attitudes. I really wanted to work on that. Some characters really offered that perspective.”
Directing all eight episodes was “thrilling,” and gave him the impression he was directing a long movie instead of a TV series. However, he adds: “It’s an exceptional and very inspiring thing that I’m not gonna do anymore. I’m not sure I won’t be ready to do it again, but I’m sure this won’t happen soon. It was extremely demanding, especially at the beginning of the shoot because we were shooting and I was rewriting sometimes at night.”
Filming also took place in Puglia, Italy, “so there were a lot of things to deal with.” But there was never a moment, even during the 18-month editing process, that he felt tired. “Each time I was jumping into the edit or the mix of a new episode, there was always this feeling of seeing how brave we were. That level engagement and that level of passion from the very start was completely new to me. It is my fifth TV series, so I have some experience in that, but nothing has been so emotional.”
Artale took his role as director further by working as the camera operator too, something he believed was “crucial” for his understanding of the story and to get as close to the actors as possible, “not only to see them but to feel them.” Being able to watch actors in camera as well as those out of shot allowed him to take the temperature of a scene and make adjustments between takes or even shift the camera suddenly to take another perspective.
“The camera becomes a character itself,” he notes. “There is a lot of fixed camera or very slow movements, because I was referring, in terms of style, to a certain classicism. But there is also handled camera in some moments which marks a change in the way that I am close to a character. Even though they’re not necessarily action moments, it changes the temperature.”
Following its debut in Venice, A Prophet is set to launch soon in France on Canal+, with the creatives promising there is enough story for three seasons. StudioCanal is handling international distribution.
“I hope the series might give a lot of satisfaction to the audience, even though it is very complex and it doesn’t show violence in a satisfying way,” Artale adds. “I wanted to be shocking and create repulsion for the violence we are showing, and at the same time, keep the emotional engagement of the audience always very high. This is the balance we wanted.”
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tagged in: A Prophet, Abdel Raouf Dafri, CPB Films, Enrico Maria Artale, Mamadou Sidibé, Marco Cherqui, Media Musketeers Studio, Nicolas Peufaillit, Un Prophète