Thomas Elsaesser: You made ONE MAN's WAR in France at a time when there had already been an extensive public discussion about the French and their collective memory of the Second World War and German occupation, THE SORROW AND THE PITY, LACOMBE LUCIEN and THE LAST MÉTRO AMONG others had very much fixed the critical debate around the question of collaboration and resistance. Your film deliberately displaces these terms, and one could imagine an equally important debate around the use you make of documentary material – in your case, newsreels of the period – and the choice of a German writer, Ernst Jünger, as intimate witness. Does the question of Jünger's complicity, his attitude to the historical events he observed, engage you more than “the truth” about the French?

Edgardo Cozarinsky: Whether the majority of the French collaborated or resisted is a question of statistics and a neuralgic point in the national conscience. What mattered to me was the question of Jünger the writer, and the quality of his look at history. He approaches current history with a precise surgical hand, almost as if the events he is describing are part of natural history. He works hard at having a perspective. He puts himself at a distance from what he is experiencing as if he were a visitor from another planet.

No doubt, for you, ONE MAN's WAR is also part of a different history, if only that of your other films.

The question of perspective relates to something I tried to do in my previous film. The Sorcerer's Apprentices, where it is present in the use of “inserts” from a future point in time. It was introduced by the use of titles: “let's try and remember what it was like in the last third of the 20th century,” an introduction which proposed a point of view to the spectator, the vision of an unknown, unforeseeable future which was established only in those written inserts. The action itself was superficially realistic, according to the conventions of the film noir, but it occasionally opened up to include excerpts of Büchner's Danton's Death, excerpts which are themselves fragments from the myth of the Revolution. This kind of formal relationship did not actually come to mind when I was working on ONE MAN's WAR; only afterwards when I was trying to work out the fascination of Jünger's perspective.