Michel Houellebecq

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Paul is a 50-something call centre employee who has had enough of hismiserable non-existence.  Married, with children, he lives acrumby life which consists of just one crass, life-sapping mundanityafter another.  One Friday the 13th he watches a televisionprogramme which gives him just the spur he needs to get him out of thegroove he has been trapped in all these years.  He mounts hisracing bike and hastens away from the suburbs, heading for themountains where he will kill himself.  Unfortunately, suicide isnot nearly as straightforward as it seems…Read More »

Provocative French writer Michel Houellebecq meets Gérard Depardieu at a sea water therapy center. Together, they try to survive the health regime to which they are subjected by the establishment. But events quickly derail their routine.Read More »

The Possibility of an Island, based on a novel by Houllebecq himself in 2005, certainly has an intriguing enough concept: it reads like a disjointed surrealist take on science fiction — a post-apocalyptic mash-up of A Boy and His Dog, Solaris and The Holy Mountain, with cloning and bikini contests thrown in for good measure. Whether or not it will actually succeed is another matter; thus far, critics have not been kind. The Guardian’s Geoffrey MacNab sat down with Houllebecq to discuss the process of moviemaking, how it differs from writing, and whether or not he intends to contune on as a filmmaker. “Maybe it is a superficial motivation,” he says of filming many of the movie’s scenes in Andalucian Spain, “but I always go to the locations when I write a novel. In this case, some of the locations were so impressive that the idea for the film came from that…I enjoyed the preparation of the movie. I mean, the period immediately before the shooting when you choose everything, all the details. When you create the world.”Read More »