French director Laurent Cantet conducts an interview the way he runs a film set; it’s a collaboration. In discussing his new drama The Class (a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes), which follows a year in a Paris high-school classroom, Cantet rejects the usual interview routine of journalist question and sound-bite answer. He asks questions of the interviewer, and he even draws the translator (on hand “just in case”; Cantet’s English is outstanding) into the conversation. At one point, the three of us discuss at length the subtle distinction between the English word complicity and the French complicité.

Cantet’s method for making films (previous work includes Human Resources and Time Out) always involves a lot of discussion and input from actors. But with The Class, that process was taken to its limits. Starting from a nonfiction book by François Bégaudeau about his experiences as a teacher, Cantet and Bégaudeau set out to create a fictionalized version (Bégaudeau plays the teacher in the film).

The Class raises difficult issues about France’s slow acceptance of an increasingly diverse population. This isn’t easy liberal uplift in the mode of Dangerous Minds or Stand and Deliver. Cantet refuses to make the students misunderstood saints. They can be cruel and manipulative, using the power the French school system gives them (in France, students have a representative at school meetings, including disciplinary hearings) against their teacher. For anyone who has taught, The Class hits familiar moments that rarely make it onto the big screen.

To get that authenticity, Cantet and Bégaudeau went into a school in Paris’s 20th Arrondissement, an ethnically diverse neighborhood, and recruited students for a weeks-long workshop process. The group was winnowed down to the 25 students who are seen in the film. Through improvisation, they found story lines for the student characters.

“What I really like,” explains Cantet, “is that the film has been made in exactly the same way as what it is saying. We are trying to show this class like a space of democracy—a space where you learn democracy—and I think the film was made in a sort of democratic process: trying to listen to what they have to say about their own life, trying to take in account their point of view. And I think the way that it involved them in the process is a big part of the success of what we tried.”

Working with a cast of nonprofessionals can be incredibly demanding, and Cantet had to adapt his filming methods. He shot with multiple cameras in the classroom running simultaneously. That guaranteed Cantet would have a lot of students’ reactions to work with in editing, but it also ensured that the students would always have to be “on,” since they never knew when they would be onscreen.

The shooting days ran differently than they would on a normal film. “The first shot [of each day] was very long. It was 25 minutes,” explains Cantet. “After that we scrapped a lot and I was telling them, ‘This part was interesting. I don’t need that. You will say that later.’ And I was rebuilding the scene from what they proposed in the improvisation. Then we made a second and third and sometimes we went to ten takes. What was really impressive when we edited the film was that they had the same energy they had in the first one as they did in the last one. That was really great. They are real actors.”

Recalling what happened at Cannes, when the cast was brought to the stage for the awarding of the Palme d’Or, Cantet sounds like a proud parent. “These children are used to being stigmatized. And at that moment I think they realized that their work and their talent was recognized by people. And it really made them feel so happy. I was maybe more happy for them than for me.”

The Class opens Friday. See timeoutchicago.com/nowplaying for showtimes.

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