About "A Prophet" (from The Boston Globe review):
In most prison movies, anticipation is a survival skill. How long until I’m paroled? How long until I’m jumped? How long until I’m dead? In Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet,’’ waiting runs a distant second to watchfulness. Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) puts his little brown eyes everywhere he can. He studies the fraught dynamics between his Corsican protectors and the Africans and Arabs in the prison yard. He observes how the Corsicans interact and learns their endangered species of a language. Malik is a young recidivist thug, serving his first adult stint in a French penitentiary for assaulting the police. This time he elects to give himself a Sorbonne-level education in cunning. Read the full review here.
A Prophet – Lead Actor Tahar Rahim interview
Did you do any other kind of research for the role?
I saw a lot of documentaries, and I saw movies and photos and I talked with ex-prisoners. But this only helped me for the second part of the movie. For the first part I had to forget all this to find another way of working with Jacques and talking and trying to think about the situation, the character and the way he acts at this moment. Malik was a virgin to the prison, so I am too. That’s why I discovered the set the first day of shooting. I knew that this could help me.
Which films inspired you most?
Mainly foreign jail movies. One I remember in particular was a film by Brazilian director Hector Babenco called Pixote. I watched those movies because I thought it could help me, but it wasn’t exactly like that.
Read the full interview here.
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