In The main, by Chad Chenouga, his hundredth screen appearance, Roschdy Zem, 57, plays a father, deputy principal of a college, concerned about his son’s success to the point of breaking the law. On his shoulders weighs the responsibility of getting his family out of a past which, along with his drug-addicted brother, keeps catching up with him.
What made you choose this scenario?
When Chad called me, there was no script yet, just about twenty pages written in the first person. From the start, this character full of contradictions, complex, I liked. I liked that we didn’t have a natural and spontaneous empathy towards him. It’s a real challenge to play a role that is not immediately a character that we will appreciate.
With Chad Chenouga, have you known each other forever?
When we were much younger, we lived in the same neighborhood, Place Clichy, in Paris. We were in a friendly rivalry. We ran the castings together, with Sami Bouajila. Except that Sami struggled much less than us. He was immediately dubbed by the professionals. He had studied at the Comédie de Saint-Etienne. So there was Sami and there was us picking up the crumbs. Afterwards, Chad turned to directing, he became a teacher at Cours Florent.
What drove you to go to castings?
I was a flea seller in Saint-Ouen. Fleas are only on weekends. Castings were a way of making ends meet quite honourably, by landing an extra, a silhouette and why not a role… Finally, with extras, I don’t know why, they never held my photo. On the other hand, I had less difficulty when I applied for roles.
Do you know why ?
If we resituate ourselves in the cinema of the 1980s, the films were not very representative of society. People from the first generation of immigrants, we rarely saw them on screen or in stereotyped roles.
But at the beginning of the 1990s, directors like André Téchiné, Xavier Beauvois, Philippe Garrel, Pierre Jolivet or Rachid Bouchareb began to show us differently, with characters anchored in society in the narration of the film.
“The Principal” emphasizes the importance of language and culture in social success…
I had the will to make up for my shortcomings. My relationship with the institution and its obligations had put me in school failure, but the will to learn was always present.
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