Riz Ahmed channels Yann Mounir Demange in DAMMI

Oscar-winning actor/producer Riz Ahmed (SOUND OF METAL) and acclaimed UK director Yann Mounir Demange (’71, TOP BOY) tell host Rico Gagliano about treading the line between truth and fiction in DAMMI—Demange’s semi-autobiographical short about an angry young man trying to come to terms with his identity, his dad, and his birthplace: Paris.

DAMMI is now streaming exclusively on MUBI worldwide.

More films from Riz Ahmed are also available to stream in many countries.

God is A DJ - you can listen to the song Rico mentions in the episode. 

To stream more of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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[Rico] <i>Heads up audio listeners,</i><i>you're about to hear a videotaped conversation.</i><i>For the full experience you'll find the video version of this episode</i><i>on Spotify or YouTube.</i> I just wanted to tell you, so I'm going through your bio prepping for this, I'm looking at my page here because I wrote it down and I'm looking at your bio and it's like, like on Wikipedia and it's like 2006 was in a Michael Winterbottom movie, nominated for best actor of the 2008 British Indie film awards. Stars in the great satire <i>Four Lions</i>, by the way, which I love 2010 gets another BIFA nomination, blah, blah, blah, decade of major credits. Then in 2016

appears in <i>Star Wars: 0:39

Rogue One</i> gets a Best Newcomer nomination at the Empire Film Awards. You've been working for like a decade at that point, getting major nominations. Tell me about when you learn, you've been nominated for Best Newcomer.[Riz] Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, man. You know what I mean? If I... listen, I'm hoping to get another Best Newcomer nomination at some point soon, man. I'm hoping to get a debut nomination at some point. If you can trick people into thinking you're not damaged goods,- staying on the shelf- [Yann laughs] then lets take it mate! I'm hoping I get discovered at some point.[MUBI Podcast theme][Rico] <i>That is actor Riz Ahmed and director Yann Mounir Demange.</i><i>And honestly,</i><i>they're in no danger of being considered damaged goods.</i><i>Riz got an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in the drama</i> Sound Of Metal,<i>he rode shotgun with Jake Gyllenhaal in the sleeper hit</i> Night Crawler<i>and he'll be in Wes Anderson's next flick.</i><i>Yann directed</i> '71 <i>a war film about the Troubles in Northern Ireland</i><i>that landed him Best Director at the British Indie Film Awards.</i><i>He was an exec producer and director of the celebrated UK crime series</i> Top Boy<i>and the zombie satire</i> Dead Set.<i>But these guys latest collaboration seems way more personal and harder to pin down.</i><i>Half truth, half fiction</i><i>and just nineteen minutes long.</i><i>I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome back to the MUBI podcast.</i><i>The show that tells you the stories behind great cinema.</i><i>Season six is coming soon, but today a special episode,</i><i>my chat with Yann Mounir Demange and Riz Ahmed about their new short Dammi.</i><i>It's a psycho-drama about a half Algerian guy</i><i>played by Riz, raised in London by his mom</i><i>who visits his birth city of Paris to come to terms with his estranged dad,</i><i>his identity,</i><i>and the city itself.</i><i>All of which sounds a lot like Yann's own life.</i><i>In fact, he gave Riz's character his own Algerian name.</i><i>So I started by asking if he'd ever thought</i><i>about just making it a documentary?</i> At the beginning, it was going to be a documentary.- Oh, it was?- It was. But it wasn't-- the subject wasn't gonna be me. And I approached a very dear friend of mine, Rosa Attab she's French Algerian woman, and she's like a real, a true artist. And we started to ask like"Would you like to collaborate with me on this documentary,"hybrid documentary that I'm doing?" And she's like, "Yeah." And then when I arrived to Paris to start, like, prepping it and building out the idea with her, she said, "Look, I hope you don't mind,"but I took the liberty of writing a voiceover"just as... just to see if it sparked something." And she cheekily wrote a voiceover... about me. Wow. So she, she wanted you to make it about yourself. Yeah, she did. And I was a little bit like, wow. OK, let me take a beat with this, see how I feel. And then I started to write a voiceover back and it became a dialogue between this man and this woman. It became a dialogue between Rosa and me and then it became something else, because there's an element of fiction as well there, it's not completely just autobiographical piece of work. But my father is actually the guy who plays my dad in the film. We're gonna get to that! Don't you worry. It's unavoidably a very personal... element. All of that being said, that there are surreal elements, there are fictional elements. There is, I mean, there's a character named you who's in there that is to some extent based on you. When do you decide that Riz Ahmed is gonna be your perfect avatar? Once I started to lean in to... making it very more personal, I felt vulnerable and I was like, the only person... that I feel comfortable doing this with, if I'm gonna do it, is Riz. You know, we've been very close friends for a very, I mean, it's gotta be 20 years, now. Yeah, the BBC was putting together a kind of like cohort of up and coming writers, directors and actors in London. And they had an idea of launching almost kind of like a YouTube, a series of YouTube characters and make like following these characters lives and it, the project never really happened, but they just kind of gathered a room of people together who were kind of coming up at the same time. And we met there briefly and then two years later we did <i>Dead Set</i> together in like, 2007. And yeah, we just became fast friends at that point. So you get the call and it's like, basically"Riz I got this part for you, it's me."- Well--- Tell me about that. As you can tell, I mean, Yann even now, I think you're... you're hesitant to frame it as though it's you, and I think that that's because in a way it isn't, you know, this is the nature of fiction and of like, you know, narrative storytelling particularly that takes on this kind of magical realist element that you have. Like the DNA and the soul of this character is from Yann's experiences. Of course, there's an element of like, you know, catharsis and personal exploration in this. But as is true of any film, of any story, it takes on a life of its own as well. And... it was almost about, you know, knowing Yann, knowing some of his experiences, but also having some of my own experiences around you know, diasporic identity and a love letter to a city that you feel is home, but also feel like you don't belong in, you know, this is the kind of this is the water we swim in. You know, this is what we know about this experience.[Muffled plunging][Riz's character, muffled]<i>Yes, I'm a Londoner.</i><i>I like being a Londoner. But it's complicated.</i><i>Something is always gonna be missing there.</i><i>It's like pieces of me are scattered.</i><i>It's just in London, I can get caught in the noise of it all.</i> I can pretend everything's fine. Over here, it's rubbed in my face. That... something's missing. I feel like I read this somewhere that you didn't realize until recently that all of your movies are about outsiders basically, or something like that. Yeah, I think... yeah, I mean... yeah! It's like, you know, you do, you don't know what it's about. And then you, you gotta do press for a movie and you start to get your titbits together and what's your chat? And you kinda go, and I went, oh right, there was the whole decade of work for me that was about young men trying to find their place, trying to find their tribe. But ultimately having to come to terms with being a perpetual outsider and being... and having comfort in that and actually walking, being your own man at the end, that is literally what <i>'71</i> is about, you know, he decides, he leaves the army. He's not going to try and find the tribe. He was deeply-- all these boys have been seeking the paternal at this point, in my films, I can't deny it. So maybe this was like a sort of full stop on it and I just went straight... at the whole paternal issue. Finally, what I wanna ask you, 'cause one of the reasons you were picked for this was because that you could relate to that. And you do, like a lot of your work too is about identity and people trying to find identity in a society that maybe you don't somehow fit in. When did that start being a passion for you? Because it really, it feels like pointed choices at a certain point in your career. Yeah, it's interesting you say that because... I feel like a lot of creative choices aren't choices that they choose you. I never really sat down and said I want to make a project about identity or I want my career to be kind of exploring these themes in a similar way that, you know, you're talking to Yann right now. He's saying I didn't set out to make a film about myself. I think often the most honest pieces of art are ones that, kind of, find a way of manifesting themselves through you even while you're kicking and screaming to like, keep them down. So if you ask me, honestly, would I love to have a career that didn't deal with all these kind of issues of identity and kind of what it is to be Muslim in the West and all this kind of stuff? I mean... I mean, yeah, that sounds like fun too. I mean, I grew up watching, you know, Bollywood and Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, those weren't political films. It's just that in a way I just feel like I don't have, I don't have a say in it. And you know, sometimes yes, you, you swim with that tide and you think, yeah, this is what I wanna do. Sometimes you swim against it. At a certain point you just kind of surrender and say like this is just the thing that's just happening. And I guess on some level, you know, my creative spirit needs to...- explore this stuff.- [Rico] Yeah, sure. You know, and my conscious kind of mind doesn't really have a say in the matter. That's just the way it is. It's a weird thing, you know? That's really well put. I love genre... And I, you know, a lot of, sort of... big films and influential films in my life actually, have been genre films. But what, I love genre when it's layered with a specificity. Where the characters and the human beings at the heart of these stories, there's an undeniable specificity and culture that they're from things that they are wrestling with within the thriller if you like. And that's, that is actually whenever I come to a genre piece, I get sent stuff, usually that's the thing I inject into it. I like the shape of, I like the shape of the movie or the shape of the story. And then it's like, ok, what's the specificity, what's the thing, the point of view or the human being that I want to portray in the heart of this story? And then I inevitably, not by choice there's these things that I project onto 'em that you know, that are about identity and things. So it's not-- I wouldn't, I would never set out to make a film about identity. Like I said, I think it's better served in a podcast or an essay and there's fantastic literature around that now, thank God. But it's, when I tackle a story that sort of genre or a horror, whatever it may be and I can't help myself. Let's talk about something very personally you brought to this, you mentioned it earlier. Your dad, who you cast as your dad. First of all, tell me about the conversation with him about doing that. I mean, look, it's wild. I never speak-- yeah, but, yeah, my old man's in it. Me and my old man were pretty estranged, you know. It's, it was a strange one, I never really met until I was in my teens and then found out I had another brother from a different mother who's only about six months apart. And I started developing this story with Rosa and then, and it was about a Paris that I saw growing up fragments of, that I could see slightly disappearing. And after the pandemic, there was a massive drop off, these old bars, they call them <i>chibani</i> that this old Algerian owned bars that were just frequented by a certain generation of Algerian men who are now like in their seventies who came to Paris and they, they created their own sense, these communities and they were quite, they were like, like a particular type of bar, you know, they, they drink, they gamble, they do deals. And I grew up, my dad always had bars and whenever I'd go to Paris, I'd go to these bars. So when I was starting to engage with this, making it more personal, and I was writing these characters, there's a type of older Algerian man that you don't see anymore. And when I was trying to cast it. You know, you have... these types of men will never come to a street casting session. Not with a gun to their head would they'll come? Would they do it. You know, you can't street cast this type of man. And in the end, Rosa was like,"You gotta ask your father." I was like, "You're out of your mind." Like I don't, I didn't, I was like... So seriously, because you couldn't get anyone else. I couldn't, honestly, I couldn't find anyone. We were like, no, this is not real, this is not real. So I ended up casting him and his best friend. They got, he's got this friend that a sidekick that he's, they've been best friends for 50 years. I think they've never gone more than two days without seeing each other. You know, live close to each other in Paris. When they go back to Algeria every summer, they're like, they're walking distance from each other in Algeria. And I was like, you know what, you know, I approached him and he loved it. He was, he was... he was very moved. And then this crazy thing happened and it wasn't planned, you know, I started to have a dialogue on screen with my dad through Riz. Like, Riz... you know, I'd set up a scene and I'd say to Riz go in there and tell him what an arsehole he is. He'd go in and shout at him and I'd see him and I'd see my dad taking it and then I'd go maybe, like, soften it, maybe comfort. And then so like there was this, they have a... they have a hug and they scream at each other... and... it's, and it's all through Riz and it feels like my... my father and I finally had a conversation but you know, I was watching it take place on the monitor. I had heard about this. What is, tell me about that experience from your point of view. How aware were you that, that... dynamic was going on? That you were the cipher kind of between? Yeah I mean, I knew that Yann and his father kind of spent long periods of time where they were estranged. I knew that it was a kind of like budding and relatively kind of new relationship and that this film was kind of helping to catalyze that. I guess in a way, you know, all that was in the air, I didn't intellectualize too much. And in a way, you know, what's... amazing about the, the best directors is how little they actually need to communicate. You know, because of the environment they're creating on the set, you know, just because of the design of the space itself, there's something just very kind of, like ethereal and haunting about being in that studio space where we were shooting full of smoke with the kind of the kind of classic sh... you know, benches and lamp lights and maps, maps that you have of Paris that you find on Parisian streets and the, the pinball machine and the bar of those, exactly, those kind of old Algerian bars you have. And yet there's a certain kind of music that Yann's playing on set and it's lit in a certain way. And with that, in that kind of set up, in that kind of, with the right kind of casting, the right kind of set, the right kind of atmosphere. I remember, like, Willem Dafoe actually said this in an interview once, where it was basically like you create the world, everything will flow from it. If you make it feel to the actor, like this is a world that you're inhabiting then, like, it just happens. Is that what you're going for? Like, are you, do you think of yourself as a world builder? I guess in a way? I... no, but, but yes, I guess now like hearing it articulated. That's, I don't like to intellectualize it when I'm on the set. To a certain extent, yes, I like to create an atmosphere, a sense of the world, A feel. It's a feeling, it's a vibe. And then I have a strong sense of what I would like it to be, but I don't try and dictate because frankly I want everyone's good ideas. I want to create an environment where, you know, there's a specificity that's undeniable. There is a world that they, they have to inhabit. And once they're inhabiting it, you know, it's about their instincts. Both of you, interestingly, as I was looking into it, I knew that you have this kind of separate musical career, almost, parallel musical career. You actually were, it sounds like pretty heavily involved in garage and kind of electronic music, and that whole scene. Is that maybe something that you guys share in terms of, you know, a communication through music, like, is that why you can play together, in a way? Well, yeah, first we call it garage. No, it's alright. I said 'garage' once and my niece was like, "You <i>what</i>?" I think that the kind of music you're talking about there is just kind of in the... it's just in our bloodstreams from growing up as Londoners. You know, we grew up in the era of jungle music which transforms to drum and bass and then it gives birth to garage. And then from there it goes into dubstep and grime and... and now we're in a kind of drill era and UK rap is kind of rising and it's a beautiful thing to see. And I think that's just kind of like part of what we've grown up around. How that... affects our kind of cinematic tastes or choices. I don't know, it's maybe, a... whereas kind of UK, kinda whereas kind of American kind of hip hop culture is kind of derived from like jazz and soul there's a kind of smoothness and a swing to it. I feel like that UK you know, Black music culture, you know, that I'll call it, it is kind of like about syncopation. And it has a kind of like...'off' kind of kilter, two-step to it. I would say it kind of has edges to it. In a different way. If you listen to UK rap music and the flows in that, it has a kind of edge to it. If you listen to the British accent the way we don't, you know, it's not 'water' it's water. You know, the kind, of the... the cozy edges of things have been kind of shaved off in the music that we've grown up around. It's kind of trying to catch you off balance? Yeah. And so I guess maybe on some level,[Yann] It's fascinating to hear him say this.- Sorry?- [Yann] It's fascinating. Yeah, so I guess on some level the maybe, the films that we like, it's about... yeah, there's an element of kind of syncopation, surprise, has a kind of bite to it. I think there's a kind of bite to the music that we've grown up around and maybe we enjoy that in our films.- I like it!- Yeah. I mean, I don't know, yeah, I don't know how... it works in relation to the stuff I've done apart from <i>Top Boy</i> because there was a hot specificity around that.- [Rico] Yeah, right.- And the sound and the feel of it. But, yeah, music, I mean, it's the highest art form, isn't it? Like it is... it's the one, isn't it? Like my mother has dementia. She's in and out of moments of lucidity. But if you put a certain track on it pierces through everything. And there's something about... you know, music without a doubt has influenced me the most in my life. It's also given me, in that, on that theme of being an outsider seeking tribe, the rave scene of the nineties and early 2000s in London, a very specific thing that I feel very privileged to have been a part of. You know, the jungle and the garage scene. It gave us, it was our church, you know, and actually there was a feeling of community and togetherness and connection- [Strings rising]- "God as a DJ"....that came from it. God's a bad boy DJ,[All laugh] The remix artist.[MUBI Podcast theme]<i>Yann Mounir Demange and Riz Ahmed.</i><i>Their short Dammi is playing exclusively on MUBI worldwide.</i><i>and in some countries, we've got other great films from these guys too.</i><i>Check the show notes of this episode for details.</i><i>Also in the notes you'll find a link to the song I refer to at the end there,</i> God is a DJ <i>by Faithless</i>.<i>Get Ready to dance like it's 1998.</i><i>Meanwhile, let's roll credits.</i><i>This episode was written and hosted by me Rico Gagliano.</i><i>Ciara McEniff produced it</i><i>along with Ibti Omer, Ilyass Malki, along with Stu Pot Productions.</i><i>It was edited by Sean Holdsworth and Amos Levin.</i><i>Our theme music is by Yuri Suzuki.</i><i>The show is executive produced by me along with Jon Barrenechea</i><i>Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Tacca.</i><i>We're signing off for the summer but stay tuned this fall</i><i>for season six that dives into horror.</i><i>Till then safe travels and may all your cinemas be air conditioned.</i>[Theme reaches conclusion]