Lads and Jockeys, which screens at 9:15 tonight and 4:15 tomorrow at the Clay Theatre, is Benjamin Marquet’s first feature film. In this excellent documentary, he takes on an unusual subject: a 40-year-old boarding school in Chantilly, France, 30 miles north of Paris, whose sole purpose is to train young people to run stables and ride horses. It is the largest such school in France, possibly in Europe, and only a talented few will become the jockeys who ride in professional races. Just as most music students enter conservatories with aspirations to become soloists, most of the students who enter this equestrian school aspire to become jockeys, the most glamorous profession in horse racing. But those who don’t have the talent for it — that is, most of the students — will remain “lads,” short for “stable lads.” In his film, Marquet charts the progress of three students during their first year in the school. It’s not an easy path. They are apprenticed out to current or former professional jockeys, and those men have little patience with unprofessional behavior, even when it comes from a 15-year-old boy. The jockeys, by their example and often harsh instruction, seek to instill a respect for the horses and a love for their craft. And these three boys, at least, rise to the awesome challenge. We see them develop, almost despite themselves, a truly professional attitude towards both success and failure. And we do see a measure of each. It’s a very engaging documentary, and I highly recommend it. Yesterday I had a chance to sit down with Mr. Marquet and chat with him for half an hour about his film.

How did you end up doing a whole film on this subject? How did you find the school?
After I studied anthropology in Paris, I lived in Senegal for a year, and shot my first documentary over there. It was a 35-minute short, and I came back to Paris with the movie, and people seemed interested in it. Well, my father works in the movie business also, and he loves horses — for 40 years he has ridden horses in Chantilly, where this film takes place. And he saw my first film and suggested that I do something about the whole world of horse racing. At first I was like, maybe not, because horses are not really my stuff, and working with my father — same thing, maybe a little bit risky! But finally, I said, “okay, I studied anthropology and I love Africa, but there’s no reason I couldn’t do something in France.” So I said, “okay, let’s try it.” I had no idea what Chantilly really looked like, what the industry was all about. So I said, “first, I’ll just go see what is there, and second, if I do something, it won’t be about horses but about people. So I spent a couple of days, and really quickly I understood that there are tons of characters there, all involved in horse racing in some way, and I would just have my choice. I mean, they’re all really original people, with extraordinary backgrounds.

I actually learned to ride first, in that school. The teacher you see at the beginning, he taught me how to ride. But I knew about the school from the beginning. It’s right next to all the stables in Chantilly. At first, I didn’t know we were going to focus on the school. We knew we were going to do something in the school, but at the beginning I thought we were just going to follow a kid, briefly, at the beginning, then a guy at the end of his career: a lad and a jockey. Finally it ended up that the relationships with the kids were really great, and I understood that it had a big potential, movie wise. And so, little by little, I really started focusing on the kids.

How did you make the decision to focus on these three kids in particular?
The first decision was to choose a class, so I chose the youngest class. It’s a school you enter when you’re 14 or 15 years old, and those in the youngest class were all brand-new to the industry. So that was the first choice. And then I spent lots of time with them. Then in October, like a month after they started school, I selected ten, fifteen kids who seemed interesting, and I interviewed them. And very soon I knew those three were going to be the characters, for different reasons:

Flavien, the one who rides the race at the end, he had this really tiny kid voice, and I don’t know why, but he suddenly started talking about death, about God, about — nothing to do with horses! — about his parents, about, “does death hurt?” Stuff like that. so I said, ok — he’s going to be interesting.

Steve, the redhead, he is in a complete different world. Lots of poetry, he doesn’t know it, but I loved it. I don’t know how they did it, I didn’t read the translations, but his French is really completely mixed up, and he has that very strong northern accent also, as in Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis [which is playing Sunday at 1:15]. He’s from that same northern part of France.

And Florian, the last one, he’s like a bullet. He knows where he wants to go, and he goes straight towards it.

So that’s how I ended up choosing them. Each one is very different, and they all correspond to what I could be, used to be, wanted to be — like Flavien, I was this really romantic kid, still loving mom a lot, that was me at one time. Like Steve, I could also be completely in a world of my own, and I could also be like Florian and just do things without asking why, and just go straight ahead knowing what I want and what road to take.

I have to say that even though Flavien was the one who rode in the race at the end, Florian really impressed me with how he internalized a highly professional attitude. When criticized, he would curse under his breath, and then he would do the job again.
Exactly. I had a talk with him one day, I asked him, “how do you feel you learn? I have the feeling you just observe a lot.” I have 220 hours of footage, and in that footage I could see him doing exactly the same movements, especially with the broom, as his trainer. He moves his body in exactly the same way. He just observes a lot and does the exact same thing. And he really feels that he’s a professional already. Even though he didn’t ride in the race at the end, he is the one who really has a chance to become a jockey. And he had his first race just two months ago. Because his trainer is a really professional high-society guy, step by step.

It really impressed me how all the jockeys, especially Florian’s jockey, instilled discipline and respect in the boys: not as an end in itself, but because the horses deserve respect. Everything is about the horses. One of them says, “talk to your horse, it’s not a tractor.” Well, we know that these boys rose to the challenge, but how did others do? Were there kids who dropped out?
The year I was there, everybody told me that in winter, half the class is going to stop. And it ended up that the winter was quite warm, or at least not really, really cold like it could be, and finally only one stopped at the end of the year, not even in the winter. But statistically, about half of the kids who enter the school stop, because it is really exhausting. They’re up at 5 in the morning, and in the winter it could be raining, snowing, doesn’t matter. They’re outside at 6 in the morning in winter, and 5:30 in summer.

You mentioned that you studied anthropology in school; would you say you took an anthropologist’s approach in making this film?
Yes, and I think that’s how documentary should be done. Two things in documentary films make me a bit angry: first, the voice-over, which tells you what to think. A dog passes by, the voice-over will say “a dog passes by.” And second, there’s the fact that documentary filmmakers often “steal” their images. I don’t believe you can spend only three weeks with one person, or an industry, or in a society, in any group, anything, and understand what’s going on. I think you have to spend a lot of time, and either be able to do what they’re doing, or at least try and show that you’re trying to understand. And that’s what works. This industry, this culture, it’s a very closed culture. Besides horses nothing else matters. It was very tiring for me because you couldn’t talk about anything but horses. I mean, nobody even cared about soccer. So first of all it’s very difficult to be accepted, but by the time they understood that I was going to be here for a year, that I’m doing a feature movie and not something for television, and then a lot of showing that I’m involved — I learned to ride a horse, I was in the stables at 5 in the morning when it’s still night, helping to sweep and rake when I have nothing to do, instead of putting my hands in my pockets. And so little by little, I got integrated, they came to trust me. and from there on, they gave me everything. Here what I’m talking about is being accepted by the adults’ world. With the kids, it was easy for me to be 14 years old.

As I watched the film, I was squirming almost the whole time because I was remembering my own adolescence.
Of course. And that was really important to me, to show them as real adolescents, becoming adults without seeing it. Pretending to be adults, but back in the room you still get into fights and stuff, and talk about girls and wrestling.

That reminds me. This seems to be a very masculine world, and I didn’t see very many girls in the film. Were there any girls involved in the training?
Here’s the thing. Sixty percent of the school is girls, but it still a world dominated by this very masculine ideology, this macho thing. Girls have to be really tough to be there. As to why I didn’t shoot with the girls is that the intimacy I could get with the boys, I couldn’t get with the girls. Because they were, you know, 15, 16, I couldn’t live with them as much as I could with the boys, and they weren’t as open with me. If I had to redo the film, I would probably take a female director with me. That was access I couldn’t get.