Terror's advocate: Jacques VergèsTelegraph.co.uk
25/04/2008
A documentary about lawyer Jacques Vergès, champion of notorious tyrants and criminals, is one of the year's most chilling films. Sheila Johnston talks to its director Barbet Schroeder and his irrepressible subject
Drawing appreciatively on the fine fat cigar that has become his trademark, Jacques Vergès smiles with the air of a cat that has swallowed the cream. "A message is being put across in the media that I'm a bastard," he says. "But the Frenchman is not as stupid as they think. Yesterday, while I was walking around in the streets, a lot of people came up to me to say, 'Bravo, Maître! Keep it up!' This film will give them even more reasons to love me."
The film is a documentary portrait of this flamboyant, high-flying lawyer and some of the causes he has defended in his long career. You may draw your own conclusions from the title: Terror's Advocate. And you are unlikely see a more chilling movie this year.
Vergès started out on the side of the angels, fighting for de Gaulle's Resistance during the Second World War. His next big cause was also justifiable: the liberation of Algeria from French rule. He defended, fell in love and married Djamila Bouhired, who planted a bomb in an Algiers milk bar. Vergès argued, successfully, that she was not a terrorist but an anti-colonial freedom fighter.
But where is the shadowy line that divides the two? Over the years, Vergès's clients became increasingly unsavoury; he moved in high circles and also the lowest ones. He defended Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal and the Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy.
This week, he flew to Cambodia to represent the Khmer Rouge kingpin Khieu Samphan; he has also been working for the Saudi Arabian Prince Nayef Bin Fawaz al-Shaalan, who is accused of smuggling Colombian cocaine into France under cover of diplomatic immunity.
Vergès now holds court on a quiet, sunny roof terrace in Cannes. Terror's Advocate had its world premiere here the previous night, but that has nothing to do with his presence. He is in town - just by coincidence, of course - purely to promote his latest book, a rambling memoir called Que mes guerres étaient belles! ("How Beautiful My Battles Were!"), a signed copy of which he now presses into my hand. I haven't read it. But he turns out to be quite happy to talk about the film instead, even if one feels he's not taking it terribly seriously.
He oozes charm to the point of flirtatiousness. He will not admit to self-doubt for a nanosecond. But surely even Vergès must admit that the film is hardly flattering: what about the title for starters?
"Personally, I'd have preferred it to be called 'Vergès, Anti-Colonialist'," he says. "But the title is catchy. And, although it was the director's aim to harm me, in my view a tiger can devour you; a pussycat cannot. I used him as you would use a knife and fork at table. I'd even say I used him like a client would use a prostitute for 15 minutes." He laughs delightedly at his own outrageous imagery.
The director, Barbet Schroeder, describes Vergès as a "decadent aesthete" but also as "a man of extraordinary intelligence. His client list includes the Who's Who of international terrorism. I'm attracted to monsters."
Among the "devils" who have populated Schroeder's work are the Skid Row poet Charles Bukowski (in the feature film Barfly) and socialite Claus von Bülow, played in Reversal of Fortune by an Oscar-winning Jeremy Irons. A remarkable early documentary, General Idi Ami Dada: Self-Portrait, gave Amin precisely enough rope with which to hang himself. Like that film, Terror's Advocate was made with the full co-operation of its subject.
Vergès, however, proves himself a much more slippery customer than the blustering Ugandan dictator.
"I asked him all the right questions," Schroeder recalls. "The ones he didn't like, he answered with a smile or some kind of clever remark. He always has an answer. When he starts saying at the beginning of the film that there was no genocide in Cambodia, am I going to start to argue with him? I won't ever win. So I tried to make a movie where he has the chance to say his thing, and it's up to people to decide what they think."
What is the current state of their relations? "He calls me 'my dear enemy', and we are on good terms. But we're not having dinner together."
Today each man remains firmly convinced that he has got the better of his opponent. "When Monsieur Barbet Schroeder asked to have the final cut himself, I agreed," Vergès says. "My friends told me, 'But he'll trap you.' I said, 'He might have trapped Idi Amin Dada. But he won't trap me. First of all, I'll appear just as I am. I won't have horns. I won't have a long tail. And I will explain exactly what I did, and why.'
"And afterwards, I said to him, 'You've unintentionally made a masterpiece, thanks to me.'"
25/04/2008
A documentary about lawyer Jacques Vergès, champion of notorious tyrants and criminals, is one of the year's most chilling films. Sheila Johnston talks to its director Barbet Schroeder and his irrepressible subject
Drawing appreciatively on the fine fat cigar that has become his trademark, Jacques Vergès smiles with the air of a cat that has swallowed the cream. "A message is being put across in the media that I'm a bastard," he says. "But the Frenchman is not as stupid as they think. Yesterday, while I was walking around in the streets, a lot of people came up to me to say, 'Bravo, Maître! Keep it up!' This film will give them even more reasons to love me."
The film is a documentary portrait of this flamboyant, high-flying lawyer and some of the causes he has defended in his long career. You may draw your own conclusions from the title: Terror's Advocate. And you are unlikely see a more chilling movie this year.
Vergès started out on the side of the angels, fighting for de Gaulle's Resistance during the Second World War. His next big cause was also justifiable: the liberation of Algeria from French rule. He defended, fell in love and married Djamila Bouhired, who planted a bomb in an Algiers milk bar. Vergès argued, successfully, that she was not a terrorist but an anti-colonial freedom fighter.
But where is the shadowy line that divides the two? Over the years, Vergès's clients became increasingly unsavoury; he moved in high circles and also the lowest ones. He defended Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal and the Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy.
This week, he flew to Cambodia to represent the Khmer Rouge kingpin Khieu Samphan; he has also been working for the Saudi Arabian Prince Nayef Bin Fawaz al-Shaalan, who is accused of smuggling Colombian cocaine into France under cover of diplomatic immunity.
Vergès now holds court on a quiet, sunny roof terrace in Cannes. Terror's Advocate had its world premiere here the previous night, but that has nothing to do with his presence. He is in town - just by coincidence, of course - purely to promote his latest book, a rambling memoir called Que mes guerres étaient belles! ("How Beautiful My Battles Were!"), a signed copy of which he now presses into my hand. I haven't read it. But he turns out to be quite happy to talk about the film instead, even if one feels he's not taking it terribly seriously.
He oozes charm to the point of flirtatiousness. He will not admit to self-doubt for a nanosecond. But surely even Vergès must admit that the film is hardly flattering: what about the title for starters?
"Personally, I'd have preferred it to be called 'Vergès, Anti-Colonialist'," he says. "But the title is catchy. And, although it was the director's aim to harm me, in my view a tiger can devour you; a pussycat cannot. I used him as you would use a knife and fork at table. I'd even say I used him like a client would use a prostitute for 15 minutes." He laughs delightedly at his own outrageous imagery.
The director, Barbet Schroeder, describes Vergès as a "decadent aesthete" but also as "a man of extraordinary intelligence. His client list includes the Who's Who of international terrorism. I'm attracted to monsters."
Among the "devils" who have populated Schroeder's work are the Skid Row poet Charles Bukowski (in the feature film Barfly) and socialite Claus von Bülow, played in Reversal of Fortune by an Oscar-winning Jeremy Irons. A remarkable early documentary, General Idi Ami Dada: Self-Portrait, gave Amin precisely enough rope with which to hang himself. Like that film, Terror's Advocate was made with the full co-operation of its subject.
Vergès, however, proves himself a much more slippery customer than the blustering Ugandan dictator.
"I asked him all the right questions," Schroeder recalls. "The ones he didn't like, he answered with a smile or some kind of clever remark. He always has an answer. When he starts saying at the beginning of the film that there was no genocide in Cambodia, am I going to start to argue with him? I won't ever win. So I tried to make a movie where he has the chance to say his thing, and it's up to people to decide what they think."
What is the current state of their relations? "He calls me 'my dear enemy', and we are on good terms. But we're not having dinner together."
Today each man remains firmly convinced that he has got the better of his opponent. "When Monsieur Barbet Schroeder asked to have the final cut himself, I agreed," Vergès says. "My friends told me, 'But he'll trap you.' I said, 'He might have trapped Idi Amin Dada. But he won't trap me. First of all, I'll appear just as I am. I won't have horns. I won't have a long tail. And I will explain exactly what I did, and why.'
"And afterwards, I said to him, 'You've unintentionally made a masterpiece, thanks to me.'"
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