Mathieu Amalric in Heartbeat Detector Courtesy of Sophie Dulac Distribution

Can you detect a human heartbeat through tons of steel and the clamor of our manmade environment? Successfully employed by immigration, border patrol, and prison agencies over the last several years, a heartbeat detection system can locate a concealed passenger in less than one minute and can permit rapid vehicle or container searches without disturbing the material value of the contents. Can you reconcile the human factor with the company's need to make money? By developing a set of strict criteria for the multinational petrochemical conglomerate SC Farb, Human Resources psychologist Simon Kessler (Mathieu Amalric) has successfully restructured and downsized the corporate workforce by almost half by locating and weeding out employees with weaknesses such as advanced age or diseases such as alcoholism. But it appears that company's health is now threatened at the very highest echelons.

Managing Director Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) has become concerned with the supposed erratic behavior of SC Farb's CEO, Mathias Jüst (Michael Lonsdale) who appears may be falling into a state of mental illness, and so Rose entreats the company psychologist with the task of detecting the vulnerability at the heart of Jüst's meltdown. But when information surfaces that one of the company's executives supports extreme right wing theories and ideology and was associated with unspeakable crimes against humanity with ties to a Nazi past, Kessler is compelled to re-evaluate his own tactics. At underground psycho-chemical raves and in smoky dim nightclubs, Kessler tried to escape the crushing psychological and emotional weight of his job and personal life — but it is the ghosts of history that he must ultimately confront.

From the Panamanian set of Quantum of Solace, in which he plays Dominic Green, the nemesis to Daniel Craig's Bond, Amalric chats exclusively to Premiere about working with Julian Schnabel on The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, why perfection can drive you crazy, the music of Syd Matters and the politics of immigration and sub-prime loans.

Did you spend any time in a huge multi-national corporation or any time with the kind of young executives in the film?
No, I didn't. I asked Nicolas if he wanted that and in fact he didn't because that's not how he imagined his film. As you could have noticed, some locations look like the '60s, almost the '50s, sometimes like today. It's not very naturalistic. I think he was more searching more for the spirit or this gas that is in a corporation — that's his way of trying to find something that for him seems real in fact. It's his way of searching reality [even if] his previous films had more to do with documentary research. No, he wanted me to search in myself for things like that. It was very frightening for me. I [kept] saying: "But I look too young, nobody will believe that I'm in a human resource department to that job." But I understood why.