Barbet Schroeder: "This was the most dangerous movie for me to make."

They say that you can judge a man by the company he keeps. If that's the case, you could conclude that, with friends and clients like Algerian terrorists, Palestinian assassins, dicatatorial mass murderers and the Nazi Klaus Barbie, the lawyer Jacques Verges is, as the jurors judging Max Bialystock in The Producers would say, incredibly guilty.

Not that Verges would dispute that conclusion. He would just say that it didn't matter.

The orotund Verges says that, and much more, in Terror's Advocate, the documentary by Barbet Schroeder that traces Verges's career as a lawyer defending Algerian anti-French bombers to his support of German terrorists in the late 1970s, to his undisputed position as the advocate for the practioners of genocide in the 1980s and beyond.

Schroeder knows monsters when he sees them. He has made films about Idi Amin and Klaus von Bulow, and the director admits that Verges's clients are even more monstrous. His film is an interview with Verges, who can talk his way into and around any subject, in a French that seems to have been refined in the best schools. Verges is a product of the best education that France could provide, and he has used it against France ever since.

In this case he couldn't be more different than the earnest Robert McNamara, the subject of Errol Morris's feature-length interview in The Fog of War. McNamara has given himself a mission - to warn anyone who will listen about the dangers of nuclear weapons. In the course of that impassioned warning, Morris gets him to detail atrocities in Japan and Vietnam in which he played a role that, McNamra assures us, were far less horrific than any version of nuclear war would be. McNamara admits with confessional ardor that if the Allies had not won World War II, he and his commander, General Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay, could have been tried for war crimes for the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in the bombings of Japan. Verges would have agreed on McNamara's guilt. He just might have kept him from hanging if that trial had ever taken place.

Terror's Advocate

Intercut into Terror's Advocate is footage of the conflicts that have defined terror since the 1950s - Algeria, the Middle East, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the Red Army Faction in Europe - and reminiscences from comrades and peers, from admirers and former friends. What we don't get is commentary from omniscient experts who tell you what it all means. How could they? Verges is certainly not giving us the whole story. Verges is a mysterious man who cultivates an air of mystery in a dark office decorated as such a lair might have been one hundred years ago, with African sculpture and a serene Chinese Buddhist head, clearly an object that he cherishes, that moves in and out of the frame as the camera scrutinizes the lawyer. The fastidiously groomed Verges (son of a Vietnamese mother and a French diplomat from the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion) says he doesn't know how old he is, which seems to be a tactic to avoid telling us the truth, but he must be in his 80s, every inch the icon of inscrutability, an impression that he has been refining for six decades.

Terror's Advocate is a forum for Verges to proclaim, as he has always done, that the governments who express respect for human rights are the greatest violators. Schroeder begins the film with rare footage of the massacre of Algerians at Setif by the French in 1945, just as the Nazis were surrendering to the Allies. The reason: demonstrators were flying the Algerian flag. Estimates of the number of Algerians killed run as high as 45,000 - historians say about 6000. Verges's point (and the point made by Algerian witnesses) is clear - the governments who tried Nazis in Nuremberg have no monopoly on morality. More troubling than the fact that he's making this argument is that people believe it.

His famed trial strategy - the rupture defense (defense de rupture) - has involved denying the authority of the court to judge his client. It couldn't be more different than the approach taken by his obvious counterparts in the US like William Kunstler or Johnnie Cochran, who relied on technicalities and reasonable doubt to free their clients (remember OJ's glove), even though the broader picture tended to be framed by politics and race. Verges, in effect, pleads guilty for his clients. But he also reverses the tables and accuses the court and the government that it represents comparable crimes. And it tends to work. He claims to Schroeder that not a single one of his clients who is condemned to death has ever been executed. Given the people whom he has represented, that's quite an achievement.

Reviews out of Cannes, where the film premiered, described Verges as charismatic. I don't share that view, nor do I find him persuasive when he's arguing to minimize the horror of the Holocaust, the genocide of Pol Pot, or the massacres and mass rapes that took place in the former Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milosevic (another criminal whom Vergews advised.)

Yet Verges's life is an irresistible itinerary. He falls in love with Djamila Bouhired, the beautiful Algerian terrorist who kills dozens of innocent Frenchmen when she bombs a café in downtown Algiers in 1957. She is tortured by the French in prison, but unrepentant, and Verges as her lawyer keeps her from going to the guillotine. She's released in 1962, and becomes the Marianne of Arab anti-colonialism. Verges then marries her, converting to Islam - no small feat for a man who loves wine and women, says the arnarchist cartoonist Sine (from the magazine Charlie Hebdo), an old friend who offers running irreverent commentary on Verges's adventures and self-promotion like Falstaff on a barstool.

In 1970, Verges disappears, and much of the film involves speculation as to where he spent the next eight years. We'll never really know, although he was a friend of Pol Pot from their university days in Paris. When he resurfaces permanently, Verges defends the new generation of German terrorists and their Palestinian allies (with whom he might have been in the 70s), and falls for another woman - Magdalena Kopp, a West German comrade of the notorious Venezuelan killer, Carlos, who goes to prison for possession of explosives. He visits her in jail with ardent resolve, but she deserts him for Carlos as soon as she gets out. So much for the notion of honor among terrorists. Yet Verges does achieve one honor for which he's understandably proud. The French Secret Service orders him to be killed - perhaps even twice, we're told. Like his clients, he somehow escapes death. It's amazing that this walking résumé is still walking.

For all his venom for France, Verges seems to be the prototype of the Frenchman - a man who knows the art de vivre and who can't fight off the coup de foudre when love strikes him. He has another weakness. Verges can't really speak English, which keeps him from cracking the huge market for English-speaking defendants accused of crimes against humanity. I wonder what he would have thought of Scott Peterson or Scooter Libby or Jack Abramoff or Larry Craig.

Schroeder would like to see his film as a portrait of vanity, and it certainly is. And vanity gets the upper hand here. Verges can't stop talking, which is the worst thing for a witness to do, even a virtuoso speaker like Verges. Ultimately, the only person whom he persuades is himself. Or could I be wrong ? Perhaps the public is the jury here, and we all know how juries can be swayed by a man who knows how to say the right things.

Terror's Advocate is not a guide to the terror of our time, even though Barbet Schroeder calls it a history of terror. These are yesterday's terrorists, no less intriguing, but either dead, or in prison, or at gatherings here and there which must be reminiscent of the waxworks in Sunset Boulevard - they are "retired" performers, after all. The terrorists whom we're told are trying to kill us today are a different group, although they do creep into the picture - as Islamist victims of torture by the old terrorists in power in Algeria. How will Verges defend that pratice? We don't know yet, although he'll probably begin by accusing the accusers of something comparable.

Verges was cheated out of a chance to defend Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi leaders. Now he says he'll defend George W. Bush, as long as Bush pleads guilty.

I spoke to Barbet Schroeder when he was in Telluride presenting his film. He won't be in Toronto, since his schedule forces him to return to shoot in Japan.





You had trouble financing this film. Why?

No television wanted to put money into a film that might portray Verges in a positive way. They were all afraid of their viewers being seduced by my subject.

Who finally made a commitment to it?

I got a government grant that was based on quality. It was subsidized.

Did Verges agree immediately to cooperate with the film?

Yes, of course, yes. He was very excited at the idea.

Had anybody tried to make a film of this length about him before?

No. He goes on television all the time, but that's one of the secrets of the movie, why I was able to do it. It's his vanity. He doesn't resist putting himself in the limelight.

Had anybody tried to write a serious systematic biography of him?

No, there are two books that are very much against him, that dig into his past, and are very negative. You couldn't call them serious biographies. They're cheap biographies, very negative. And, frankly, to do a real biography, I imagine that you would have to wait another twenty years, because so much of the stuff is still hidden. The information held by the French Secret Service will be revealed only after his death.

How did you decide on the look of the film?

I'm enamoured of the high-definition image, so I wanted it to be lit as much as possible as a fiction movie. I selected the locations very carefully, and the framing, because I was trying to have frames that would say something about the character. So, for example, when you have Bachir Boumaza, the former Algerian minister in the frame, there are bars on the windows behind him. It shows that, although he's a man who was in the government of Algeria, they're ready to jump on him at the first occasion if he says something they don't like. I put Verges in the darkness of his office, like an animal waiting to jump from the dark, like the beast in the dark.

Can you tell me where in Paris Verges's office is?

It's near the Place Clichy, in the 9th Arrondissement, which is really part of the character. He would really not have an office on the Left Bank.

Why not?

Because he hates those humanists, people who believe in the droits de l'homme (human rights). He calls them the droits-de-l'homme-istes. He hates all that, and all that traditionally is on the Left Bank.

Most of the film is an interview with Verges. You have contemporaries filling out the pictures, but there are no "expert" professors, historians or commentators making sure that the viewer understands everything.

I did try to include interviews in which people would give some perspective on what he was saying. But I never wanted to argue directly with him; that's a losing proposition. He's much too brilliant to be defeated in an argument.

This really is a man of extreme vanity. He knows how to make his vanity work. He doesn't lose anything, except Magdalena Kopp when she comes out of prison and leaves him for Carlos.

Also, I approached the movie as I would have approached a work of fiction. The human material, the characters are so rich, that I had a tendency to approach it like that and not as a documentary piece. It ended up being a movie about the origin of modern terrorism, the history of it. Because it all started in Algeria, that is, the blind terrorism, which is the bombs in cafés killing innocent people - or, maybe they weren't innocent, they were Europeans. And it's still going on now, of course.

Remember, the US government is sending its officials and officers to see The Battle of Algiers to better understand they way terrorists see a war from their perspective, or at least to see how filmmakers working with Algerian terrorists saw it at the time.

Absolutely. And in Iraq they are using some manuals that were written by the French, and they are still using them as we speak. The French people were the experts, and they were such experts that they were called into South America by dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina and Chile. It's documented now that all the people who were part of the Battle of Algiers - the French - were called to South America as specialists to control the population, and to apply all those techniques of torture, murder and interrogation. It's what they call connecting the dots. And they were sometimes working with Americans in South America, all those French experts in torture.

You hired an American private investigator, David Fechheimer, for this film, and he was on camera. Had you hired private investigators before to help with your research in a documentary?

No. But everyone was saying that Verges was in Cambodia, so I wanted to get the proof. It was so much work to actually find out, and the investigator was a friend of mine, so I asked him if he would give me a hand.

Djamila Bouhired

Who would not talk to you? There's one obvious person.

The woman who was a shadow over the whole movie, our Greta Garbo, the woman who was the inspiration for the whole movie, Djamila Bouhired, this extraordinary woman. I'm deeply impressed with her. In a way, I'm actually happy that she didn't agree to cooperate, because it would have been so much great material, that it might have kept me from pushing my movie further. I could have decided that I had enough with her.

Were you able to contact her? Did she actually say no?

I spent an evening at her house. She wouldn't let anybody film her - not Al Jazeera, who would sometimes spend a week in town, hoping to film her. She's the Greta Garbo of terrorism.

Is she still seen as the La Pasionaria of terror in the Arab world?

Absolutely.

Sometimes Verges is called a monster. People call him a villain. They call him all sorts of names, as they did with Idi Amin and Klaus von Bulow. What is there in common among Idi Amin, Klaus von Bulow and Verges, if anything?

I wouldn't put Amin in that league. He was just a man in power, a caricature of a man in power. But there is one common link. It's the humor. All those guys have a lot of humor and are making jokes in the middle of the horror.

Did you see The Last King of Scotland, the dramatization of an encounter with Amin?

Yes, of course.

What did you think?

It was very interesting, the premise of a young boy who believes that this guy is for real and slowly realizes that he's a bloody dictator. Fantastically acted.

What about the comparison between Verges and Alan Dershowitz? Didn't Dershowtiz say, "I would defend Adolf Hitler"?

Certainly, they do have a lot of points in common. I discussed Verges with Dershowitz. Dershowitz had discussed the technique of Verges, which was la defense de rupture, which means you don't address the judge and the prevailing notion of justice. This was when I was doing Reversal of Fortune. He didn't know all the details about Verges, but in the history of legal defense, la defense de rupture was a new way of going about it.

In the film, Verges says that he has had many clients condemned to death, and that none has been executed. Is that true?

He's said it so often, that I cannot believe that it's not true. He claims that he made such a big show in defending them, that the state couldn't execute them, because he'd make an even bigger noise.

That doesn't seem to keep the government from executing people in the United States. In a way, he was prophetic in his understanding of media. He understands that exposure is everything, or can be everything in the right hands - his, of course. And this was his most effective weapon, long before notions of media culture, what the French call la mediatisation, became current.

He's a genius at manipulating and controlling the media. Actually, the way he handled the movie itself - the movie is very damaging to him, very dangerous for him - and he managed to say that this was a great movie, and this was because of him. And he claims now that it's his movie. This was fantastic, this was masterful. If you look at the movie, it's pretty devastating.

It's like Jean Genet; he took on and affirmed every stereotype that was ascribed to him. He said, "I'm guilty of everything, and here's my story." Genet would have been fascinated by Verges. Is the weakness of Verges his proclivity toward romance - his marriage to Djamila and his pursuit of the imprisoned terrorist Magdalena Kopp, who leaves him for Carlos once she gets out of prison, even though Verges has visited her the entire time that she's been inside? Is that the one thing that he can't control?

No. I think that his weakness is vanity.

If that's his weakness, he still seems able to control it. He can make it work. Yet love seems to weaken him. Stendhal defined vanity as le desir de paraitre, the desire to appear, literally. In many cases, that's just what vanity is, the effort to be something else, or just to be seen. But in the case of Verges, he really is what he is.

Yes.

He's an auto-aesthete. Did he arrange his office with the Asian bust and everything in place, as if he's stage-managing the way he's being seen?

Of course. Yes.



Terror's Advocate



I guess you could call that le desire de paraitre.

He's an aesthete and a gourmet even before being a politician.

Proust would have loved him.

Many novelists would have. He's really a character out of a novel.

Verges is associated with yesterday's terrorists. You have Palestinians killing each other, and Algerians persecuting Islamic fundamentalists. A government that came to power, like it or not, through the effective implementation of terrorism is now torturing its opponents. What does this say about the historical evolution here?

I went to the prison where Algerian women who fought the French were imprisoned, and I saw where Muslim women were being abused and tortured. It was a very scary detention. The prison was full of Islamists, and they were being butchered. It was the same means that was being employed against them.

Verges must have made a lot of enemies over the decades. Can he walk the streets without security?

Yes, he can. He's quite brave physically. When he walks around the streets, people come up to praise him for the defending people who were unjustly accused, especially Omar Raddad, who was wrongly convicted and pardoned by Jacques Chirac in 1998, thanks to Verges.

Did he represent any of the young Arab men who were rioting in Paris recently?

No. Most of his clients are in Africa.

You had final cut on the documentary. Verges could not have stopped this if he decided that he did not like the way the light looked on his face.

That's right. I would not have made the movie otherwise. This was the most dangerous movie for me to make. The danger was to make him look sympathetic, to make him look as if he was right.

How well-known was Verges before the Klaus Barbie trial?

Quite well-known in France, because the French Secret Service decided to kill him, on orders from the Prime Minister, Michel Debre. It was not so long ago. They decided to try to kill this lawyer because he was doing more damage to the Fench army than a whole regiment of independent fighters.

You said that you even had final cut on your Hollywood movies. If you insist on final cut in the US, producers are reluctant to agree to that.

In the end it always ends up being a negotiation.

In the past, you and I have talked about how difficult it is to invent fictional characters who are compelling and more surprising than characters in real life. Do you still feel that way?

Absolutely. That's the big attraction of the documentary for me. The characters who are the stuff of novels. And the novels are taken from those real characters, too, the good ones.