Moral Tales, Filmic Issues (2006) - full transcript
Now we will speak French.
The first question I would like to ask is:
Why shoot a story instead of writing it?
I have written my stories.
I started by writing a book.
It is now being reprinted, and has come out in Germany and Italy.
Its title was "Elisabeth", which was not very apt,
because it was about more than a character named Elisabeth.
Today I would call it "Elisabeth's House."
It comes out at the end of the year.
It was written in a very filmic style.
Maybe that's why it was impossible to film.
But after writing "Elisabeth",
my inspiration ran out, at least in that style,
for it had been largely inspired by American literature,
especially Faulkner.
I stopped admiring that kind of literature and was drawn to writers from the past.
Moving on to America, I read Melville's book "Bartleby".
"Bartleby the Scrivener".
It fired my imagination and gave me a new direction
a very literary style, if you like.
All of this came together in something called the "Moral Tales".
The first volume was written in a style
which would later be called "nouveau roman",
and although it was received with enthusiasm
by Jean Paulhan and Marcel Arland in the literary magazine "NRF",
publishers rejected it, calling it "old-fashioned."
Paradoxically, those were the stories that inspired my films,
because they were much less filmic.
It is a paradox of the cinema.
Were the six "Moral Tales" written then, or only some of them?
All had not been written yet. I added a few.
I added the first one, "The Bakery Girl of Monceau",
and the last, "Love in the Afternoon".
The others were written, although under different titles.
A title that did not change was "Claire's Knee".
Claire's character seems to follow me
because it appears in the novel,
which ends with a description of Elisabeth sitting reading,
and at one point scratches his knee.
Coincidentally, there is also "Claire's Knee".
The adventure begins when we decide to make the film, as it were,
using black and white in 16mm without sound.
It was "The Bakery Girl of Monceau".
But wait. That was not my first film.
My first film was actually much closer
in the style of my first novel.
"The Sign of Leo".
It had a lot of description and not much dialogue,
while my later films had loads of dialogue and even voice-overs.
But unlike other films of the New Wave
Like "Le beau Serge" and "Los Primos" by Chabrol
"Breathless" by Godard and "The 400 Blows" by Truffaut
my film was not successful.
That meant that no producer wanted me, but luckily you and I met.
and we formed a production company, Les Films du Losange,
and we started shooting at 16mm.
What can we say about "The Bakery Girl of Monceau"?
It is the first story to establish
the theme of all the "Moral Tales":
a man choosing between two women.
Yes it is.
But I did not use "The Bakery Girl of Monceau" to establish the theme,
because the stories were already written.
But when I wrote them, I had no idea there was a theme.
I did not notice the similarities.
That came later, by rereading them and modifying them for the screen.
So the idea behind "The Bakery Girl of Monceau"
Was it to use the theme of stories to make a short film?
Yes, that helped me.
He had a vague idea for "The Bakery Girl of Monceau",
but as I became aware of this issue, I put it first.
The theme helped me structure the story in "Love in Afternoon" as well.
So what can we say about "The Bakery Girl of Monceau"?
We could say a lot.
I have very fond memories of that film.
He was just an amateur then.
Era editor of "Cahiers du cinéma",
and at 6:00 pm, you and I would meet in that bakery that we had chosen
because it was near the office of "Cahier",
and we shot parts of scenes.
We had found a bakery.
I don't even think we paid them, but they let us film there.
We made that film with practically no money.
They were all amateurs
except a woman who had been in a Buñuel film, Michèle Girardon,
but she was not the first actress in my film.
The lead actress, the girl from the bakery, had no experience.
We shot it with a Bolex, the camera Jean Rouch was using then.
It was filmed with a Bolex.
Some of our cameras then went on to have interesting careers.
They were photographers, not cinematographers.
Jean-Michel Meurice was also a painter
and then went on to make many television documentaries.
and he was even the director of the French TV station FR3.
Another had a last name similar to your first name:
Bruno Barbey.
He was an international reporter and a great photographer.
I wonder why you chose Tavernier to do my voice in "The Bakery Girl of Monceau".
Was it because his voice was more aristocratic?
It was not a question of aristocracy.
His style -
My type of comment does not fit your speaking style.
His voice is more "literary".
He is truly his father's son. I met his father during WWII.
His speaking style was highly original, and his son's even more so.
Since my comment was very literary,
I thought his voice would work better than yours.
Yours fits the dialogue, but I had to use the same voice for both.
I find it a bit violent. I hope you are not angry.
Of course not.
I never saw myself as an actor. I was just curious.
And it helps us understand the way you work.
I'm not sure
that you would have felt comfortable making the comment.
No, it didn't come easy to my lips.
And back then, it seemed very complicated.
I remember, in the first version of "The Collector",
there was even more comment off.
I remember thinking it seemed very convoluted.
Yes, that is the effect I was looking for, because in "The Collector"
the character is, frankly, a snob,
even a dandy.
But in the other "Moral Tales", there is almost no comment in off.
Two sentences in "My Night with Maud".
In "Claire's Knee", there are none.
In "Love in the Afternoon", there are some at the beginning and in the middle.
I stopped using the off comment.
Tell us what the voiceover added, in your opinion.
Several things.
First, it was fashionable then.
He was in many movies, even American detective.
I remember a Billy Wilder film that used the voice-over.
That is one thing.
It also allowed me to communicate ideas that are difficult to express on film.
In a way, talking cinema is less flexible than silent cinema,
because silent movies had what they then called "subtitles".
Now we call them inter-titles.
They were used for both dialogue and comment.
They added another dimension to the film.
The way the protagonist looked could be "written" on the screen.
This meant that his actions and words
they did not always agree with the comment.
I found that interesting.
That's something you continued afterwards, but without the off comment:
show that what people think, say and do is not always -
Yes, it added dimension.
I managed to express this mixture of objectivity and subjectivity
without resorting to the off comment
in "My Night with Maud"
and "Claire's Knee",
where the role of comment is assigned to the novelist.
The novelist wants to try out a character for a novel she is writing
and she makes comments about his actions. It is also in "Love in the Afternoon."
I completely abandoned commentary on my other films.
In a way, he internalized himself.
After that, we did "Suzanne's Career."
Where did it come from? Was it one of your stories?
Yes. I don't even remember what it was called.
One of the characters reminds me of Gégauff.
Yes, I had just met the novelist Paul Gégauff.
He was also a screenwriter, working with Chabrol in particular.
I was fascinated by his personality.
To many others too, like Chabrol,
and we see some of them in Godard films,
like "Breathhless" and others.
The story was very "Gégauff-like."
This was basically how Gégauff dealt with the women he knew.
You used it as your basic theme.
I find the film very touching
because, in the end, it is the female character who wins.
Yes, she wins in the end.
Could you explain the meaning of "moral" in "Moral Tales"?
There has always been a certain ambiguity about it.
It derives, of course, from the "moralists" of the 18th century.
It has to be understood in that context.
Right.
Actually, "Moral Tales" was the title
from my collection of short stories, written before the movies.
"Moral" there meant that the characters acted according to a certain moral code,
that may be very yours.
In "The Collector", for example, it is the moral code of a dandy.
Those with a more bourgeois moral code might consider him a real jerk.
So is.
But that deliberately anti-conformist aspect of his moral code
for me it is a cliché of that specific period.
But it could also be said that "moral" refers to ...
an inner world, and not -
So I explained later.
In other words, it is not based merely on your own actions.
In those days, however, I explained it a little differently.
I think my films introduced the world of cinema
a certain content expressed or by ...
the monologue of a character, as in the comment in off,
or for an argument.
In many movies, people never discuss ideas,
be it moral or political ideas.
And if those kinds of discussions are indeed presented,
You always sound fake
But I think I have managed -
and this is what gives me the most joy about my films as a whole -
I have managed to show people arguing about morality,
no matter what morality it is,
in a completely natural way,
be it the moral code of a dandy in "The Collector",
or religious issues in "My Night with Maud",
or matters of eroticism in "Claire's Knee".
They are all covered by the word "moral" in the general sense.
I've even managed to discuss political issues, which can be tricky,
also naturally
in "The Tree, The Mayor, and The Mediatheque".
It was easier for me to discuss politics,
because the story was set in the past,
in "The Lady and the Duke".
And your film after that.
Yes, there is also a moral aspect to "Triple Agent".
And political too.
The next film we had planned to do was "My Night with Maud".
But the television programming director said it was "filmed theater," not cinema,
and was not interested.
That's right, because they talked a lot in the film.
That would continue to be an obstacle in my later films.
In a way, it's my fault.
Instead of describing the scenarios
and action from time to time,
my scripts are pure dialogue.
Sure, this scares the reader.
So I didn't have the money to do "My Night with Maud",
and television refused to produce it.
Fortunately, I ran into Truffaut.
I had fought with him
because he had instigated my departure from "Cahiers du cinéma".
But in the end, he wasn't really angry, because he had done me a huge favor.
I was wasting my time in the magazine
engrossed in boring administrative duties.
For a living, since I no longer worked at "Cahiers du cinéma..."
I got into educational television.
Since he had been a teacher, he was not just a principal,
but also a "TV producer," which means "screenwriter."
He wrote comments.
Some of those TV shows were from the movies,
and one was about Jean Vigo.
As Truffaut was a great admirer of Vigo,
we brought him in for that show.
It was a way for me to get in touch with him again.
He said, "I read your script I thought it was cool."
I told him that I had been denied funding.
He said, "That doesn't matter. I'll find a way to produce it."
I had read the script
because we had sent it to Trintignant.
I had seen him in films and I liked his way of acting,
but he was already a star and he was very busy.
I didn't know if you would like the script
or if it would have enough weight to convince the producers.
Trintignant's agent,
who also represented Truffaut,
his name was Lebovici, and he had the script in his office,
where Truffaut saw it and read it
and it really touched him.
Truffaut sent for me and said, "We have to make this movie.
We will gather people."
His was the impetus that brought together ten co-producers,
each making a small investment.
It didn't really cost them anything,
because that money came from public funds to support the cinema.
There is a law, which still exists,
which gives French film producers a percentage of box office taxes.
American producers are infuriated that it is not applied to foreign films.
Some important producers of the time financed the film.
This is how we were able to do it.
I think one reason why Truffaut read "My Night with Maud"
it was because you had written it,
but also because "The Collector" had impressed him.
We were forced to do that film first, although we had planned it for later.
In the chronological order of the "Moral Tales",
"My Night with Maud", which was then called "La fille à bicyclette",
It came before "The Collector".
The order was not very important,
but I wanted to make the first three films in black and white
and the rest in color. That's it.
It doesn't matter if we go from color to black and white.
Certain producers very eager to make the film
they were against shooting it in black and white.
Pierre Braunberger, who started in the 1920s,
who had produced Renoir films and also supported young filmmakers,
He begged me to shoot it in color.
I refused. Why?
One thing I liked about Clermont-Ferrand -
the city where Pascal lived, which is so important to the film -
was that the houses are built from volcanic rock,
so the whole city is black.
It is a city without color.
I thought that fit the atmosphere of the film.
Although we did not shoot in color, I had chosen a colorless wardrobe.
They all wore gray or black to match the atmosphere of the film.
If it had been filmed in color, it would only have been shades of black.
There was another reason. We could have done that
but black and white is prettier.
But there was another reason: The film takes place mainly at night,
and black and white film was much faster than color film.
Those are some of the reasons,
but often, in my films, the practical and financial choices
they fit very well with artistic choices.
Did you make "Interview on Pascal" in preparation for this film,
Or did that show give you the idea to make a film about Pascal?
I can't say.
It often overlapped, because when you've been researching -
I know it was when I was preparing
or at least I was thinking about the film.
But I do not remember.
It was around the same time, but I don't know which came first.
Often the shows you made for teaching television
they served as a test for films you prepared.
Yes, it encouraged me to shoot discussions.
I found that filming a discussion was both easy and interesting.
My first movie, "The Sign of Leo", had none.
"The Collector" has a few discussions,
but they are extremely - how to put it?
The characters are not that dense. Their lines of dialogue are shorter.
But in "My Night with Maud", you could say that they talk a lot.
That was also your first experience with direct sound, which was important.
"The Sign of Leo" had some recording with direct sound, but not all the time,
because then, the sound recording equipment was very heavy and bulky.
There were no Nagra recorders.
We had a sound truck where they recorded directly on film.
There was no magnetic tape.
But all the sound in "My Night with Maud" was recorded in locations,
and from that moment on, all my films used direct sound.
I never use post-sync.
Many other directors use it for exteriors.
Even when I'm filming on a noisy street, I use direct sound recording.
You often try to do just one take.
Direct sound recording should complicate it.
What are your thoughts on the first few takes? Why try to do just one take?
I will have to mention "The Collector",
because it came first.
Not in series order, but it was done first.
We had no money to make "The Collector",
So you barely gathered something up
A photographer friend of yours
he advanced us some money,
and he took good advantage of it, because the film was a success.
But we had to be very thrifty,
so my principle was to do just one take,
and keep it short.
It is usually said "Camera," then "Action." We did the opposite.
He would say to the actor, "Go ahead, walk. Action!"
and then "Camera" to save movie.
Of course, in "My Night with Maud",
we did more takes because it is necessary when using direct sound,
for many reasons, like when an actor misses her in her lines.
That didn't happen because the actors were extraordinary,
Trintignant further of Françoise Fabian.
But outside noise can ruin a shot.
But in any case, everything went well.
I had a sound engineer who revolutionized sound recording ...
but here we use traditional techniques. His name was Jean-Pierre Ruh.
Then he was one of the first to film -
although it was common on television -
in using the lavalier microphone.
With a transmitter. A wireless lavalier microphone.
He used it in "Claire's Knee", but not in "My Night with Maud."
Going back to the idea of the first few takes,
Do you find that a first take has a special quality?
I had a whole theory about the first takes that I still subscribe to.
I realized that by doing multiple takes, actors could become demanding.
It's hard to stop an actor from wanting another take
And generally, the second take is not that good.
He was shooting a film in Germany, "The Marquise of O...",
and the actors were perfectionists and kept insisting on more takes.
They said, "It hasn't been good. We can do better."
I would tell them, "It's okay that it wasn't good. Not all takes have to be perfect.
There must be ups and downs. If not, it becomes static."
And I have stayed true to that principle.
I can also correct things in the cutting room.
My later films had higher budgets,
And in terms of the total cost of a film, a second shot doesn't cost much.
I shoot several takes, but very often I find that the first take,
although perhaps not the most perfect -
I can say the following:
It may not have the least flaw, but it has the highest quality.
That's what matters to me: quality, not flaws.
However, you are not afraid to rehearse extensively in advance
so everyone knows exactly how the shot will be done.
You are not afraid of losing a certain natural quality
by having the actors rehearse a lot.
I'm not afraid to lose that due to over-rehearsal
but because of the excess of filming, which is not the same.
For the first take, the actor prepares.
There is a kind of risk factor,
and that gives it a certain advantage.
You may have rehearsed it very well before.
You have to rehearse
because I am very demanding with the positions and frames.
I also think -
This is what I think:
If you rehearse a lot, then you can be natural.
What can cause problems is giving an actor his lines too late,
and as a result, he is still learning them.
There is a moment when the naturalness is lost,
but he gets it back later.
That is why, in almost all my films,
the actors receive the script several months in advance,
and they have so much time to absorb it that it becomes natural.
When I ask them to say their lines, it's like a first take.
You have already heard the dialogue, and sometimes you even incorporate
expressions that the actors used in the final dialogue.
I have made two kinds of movies.
In some I wrote the dialogue well in advance,
and in others, it was all improvised.
What is curious is that the improvised dialogue is not so different
of the more "literary" dialogue written in advance.
"The Green Ray" is one example, but there are many others.
Many of the films that I shot in 16mm,
like "The Green Ray", "Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle",
"The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque", "Rendezvous in Paris"
all of them used improvisation.
There was even it in "Claire's Knee."
Everything melts. I think so. I don't know.
I don't think I could always tell what was improvised from what was not.
I think it works well with written potions.
Also, with a few exceptions,
I think professional actors mix well with non-professionals,
although non-professionals often require more effort on my part.
I think it's because of all the rehearsal you do with actors beforehand
that when they improvise,
it doesn't have that annoying makeshift feeling.
I see it in so many films today that it has become a mania.
When you use improvisation,
you have argued about it and worked on it so much
that doesn't seem like improvisation.
It is.
I don't like that impromptu feeling you mention.
I have some ideas about it.
I think if we ask people to say things that they say in their everyday lives -
For example, a girl who works in a bakery.
There is one in "The Bakery Girl of Monceau" and also in "The Sign of Leo".
If I ask a girl who works in a bakery
give someone bread or tell them how much it costs,
It will be very natural, but anything else would seem forced.
In the field, if I ask a farmer
Say something you say every day, that's okay.
So you have to know what to ask him.
You can't give him a line and have him say it. You have to use your own words.
Since we are talking about the filmmaking process,
you often have the finished film in your head.
You have broken it down into shots in advance, correct?
If that is.
I am not saying that montage is unnecessary.
In fact, I always take part in the editing.
It surprises me that some directors don't.
I participate in the montage almost frame by frame.
But that does not mean that it does not do a "decoupage",
breaking down the film into separate shots and sequences before shooting.
My films, to use Bazin's words,
they take shape in the "decoupage", not in the montage.
For me it is completely unthinkable
deliver a film to an editor,
as many directors do, and ask them to mount it
and then say, "Okay," or correct it,
but without taking the initiative.
No, I know in advance precisely how the film will be edited.
You could say that it is part of the staging.
Dividing it into scenes and takes is part of the staging.
Recently, for fun, I produced some shorts
in which i asked the actors to come up with a script.
I didn't exactly follow the script.
I corrected things, rewrote the dialogue, etc.
and I directed the staging, but I did not appear in the credits as director.
Figured by "Cutting".
For me, the "decoupage" is extremely important.
In the history of cinema, there was a director who had two credits in all his films:
"Directed by" and "Filming Script of."
That was Marcel Carné.
I did not know that.
In those shorts, I was featured as "Shooting Script, Eric Rohmer."
One director who took this to the extreme was John Ford.
He only filmed what was absolutely necessary,
shots that would be in the final cut.
"The Collector" approached that.
For example, reverse shots in conversation scenes
They weren't filmed like we're filming this, every angle captured without interruption.
We only filmed the actor who was speaking.
Any shot of an actor listening was done separately.
But that was an extreme case. We did it to save money.
Yes, the final cut of "The Collector" was 8,200 or 8,800 feet,
and we only rolled a little over 16,000 feet total.
You told me the lab thought it was short.
In addition, the assembly took only a week
precisely because you had planned each shot in advance.
And since there were so few,
it was easy to put them together.
It was actually more complicated than that.
My editor, Jacquie Raynal,
who later worked on films in the US -
He left because he had gotten a paid editor job,
and we didn't pay him.
So they left me to fend for myself.
It was very hard, because there was no sound.
All he had was a lead track.
So I had to lip-read the actor's lines. I had to learn a lot to ride it.
So I made a preliminary cut.
I essentially edited the film,
but then Jacquie came back and made corrections.
This is how we got more funding.
We screened the 90-minute film without sound, in black and white.
We didn't even have the money to make a color copy.
So we screened a 90 minute silent film,
in which an infinity of incredible things happened,
but we didn't quite know what.
The producer, from Beauregard, then said
that he would advance the money to finish the film.
I hope he was not disappointed later.
No, the film was a success.
Yes, it was a critical, and even public, success.
The cinema was packed for months.
I remember how Nestor Almendros started.
We were filming a short near the Arc de Triomphe,
and a cameraman left.
I was tired
of our way of working and not getting paid,
so he put the camera on the sidewalk.
Nestor was there, because he always nagged me to be on set,
to take photos or lend a hand in whatever.
We didn't know he was a cameraman, and he said,
"I know how to use it. I can do it."
We did not know that he had already shot several films in Cuba.
He picked up the camera, and so it began.
In your collaboration with him,
the next great film was "The Collector".
I remember a story about that.
The previous cameraman had been offered a paid job,
So he left, and I don't blame him.
Then Nestor said, "I know how to film," so we started shooting.
So I was also interested in cinematography,
although I had never done it professionally.
We used reversible color film,
so the lighting had to be perfect.
You couldn't correct the color, as there was no negative.
I knew we had been shooting up to that point with an aperture of 2.8.
So Nestor took the camera
and I asked, "What opening are you going to use?"
He said, "I'll use 3.2." He checked with the photometer.
The light can change, of course.
I said, "The light is the same as before, and he used 2.8."
He replied, "Good. I can use 2.8."
Well, I panicked.
I thought, "If you don't know what to use..."
In the end, he was right. It went right.
It was between the two values.
He was very clueless.
It wasn't technical at all. It gave the impression -
But it was a false impression. He never spoiled everything.
In "The Collector", a mistake would have been fatal,
very difficult to correct.
His distraction gave him an artistic air,
but he always complied.
He also had an excellent eye for framing,
even though he was extremely myopic.
He wore contact lenses.
And nothing happened.
While I had had cameramen that weren't myopic ...
And I really wish they didn't see so well
I remember many cameraman that, if you filmed on the street
and you asked them to film a poster,
they said, "It's very visible. You don't have to do a close-up."
Well that's not true.
He is too small to read, especially on TV.
Another feature of your job
it's your use of music,
or rather, its extremely limited use in the "Moral Tales".
"The Sign of Leo" had a lot of music, because it was about a musician.
I assigned the music
to a talented musician named Louis Saguer.
It was a sonata for cello similar to Bartók's sonata,
which at that time impressed me deeply.
I preferred having composed music to using pre-existing music.
I thought I had music for the whole movie
but it was the musician himself, and I thank him, who said -
In a scene where the hero goes down a very noisy street,
He said, "Don't use music here. The noise from the street is very beautiful."
I followed his advice,
and as a result, the music is very discreet.
Later, in the "Moral Tales",
The truth is that I wanted -
Especially for "The Collector",
The truth is that I wanted to create an interesting audio environment.
It had a very rich palette:
the harsh noise of cicadas ...
the song of birds, etc.
But in reality, there were also engine noises,
especially light aircraft
that were flying over the filming location.
This is what happened:
For financial reasons, but also for the reasons stated,
because the planes were truly unbearable ...
we replaced the background sound with the sound of cicadas,
that were present at the location, and birdsong.
I did extensive research on the birds in that region in July,
and I got pretty good at it.
I could name them all, although I've already forgotten.
I remember you were in contact with ornithologists and bird song specialists,
and every bird song in "The Collector" is accurate.
Exactly. We do not use any bird song. We had woodpeckers
or whatever was native to the region.
Native birds present during the season
who sang at that specific time.
However, I found the aircraft noise, used sparingly, to be interesting.
So I put the airplane noise back in during the erotic scenes,
and it worked quite well.
Recreated the problems of direct sound recording
on a film without direct sound.
For example, when the main character looks at Haydée and wants to kiss her,
that's when a plane passes.
There is also another moment like this.
This effort to build such a rich and varied sound environment
It must have diverted you from the music.
I have a funny story about that.
I needed music for the credit sequence.
You had some kind of African or Polynesian drum in your house.
I said, "I want very simple music, maybe just percussion.
We don't have to hire a composer. "
I think Haydée was friends with a musician,
and I had written something, but I didn't like it. It was too complicated.
I said, "I want something else like that," and started hitting the little drum,
And you started tapping a pot
And we record it.
I gave it to my editor and said, "I want something like that,"
but I don't have a musician. "She said," This is great. We will use it. "
So we keep it.
This idea of being contrary to music
it was more opposition
the use of music to manipulate emotions.
Yes, I have talked about this often.
Music is an easy way out.
Music gives meaning to an image,
but an image and its sound should provide that meaning on their own.
I have always paid careful attention to the sound environment of a film.
I had to do it in "The Collector", because there was no direct sound,
but in the other films too -
In the sound mix.
Certain sound engineers I worked with
they weren't interested in background sound, and some were.
In any case, the first ones I hired
They weren't very keen on background sound so I recorded it myself.
We bought a small tape recorder, an Uther,
but it was fine for recording background sound in locations.
It shouldn't be too light or stand out too much.
Often when the sound engineer did it, he stuck out too much,
and a more "distant" sound was better in the sound mix.
There was a whole segment in the world of film criticism
that lasted a long time, although perhaps things have changed,
that said you were "very French," "very literary,"
that you did not show any interest
in the visual aspect, framing, "decoupage", etc.
or the influence of painting,
all those visual elements so important to your work.
I've always been irritated by how blind people can be with all this.
Paradoxically, I even used to say, "My films are silent films."
When I saw them without sound -
because in the color correction stage, they are projected without sound -
I found it very interesting.
They took on a different meaning
the one they had with sound.
Silent cinema was my introduction to cinema.
I was late to the movies.
But I didn't discover cinema in theaters at that time,
I mean the end of the 30s.
I discovered it at the "cinémathèques", where they showed
the old silent films.
People kept saying, "This is a radio soap opera."
"It's just refined affectation." Things like that.
Just because it has plenty of dialogue doesn't make it "literary" or "theatrical."
The dialogue in a film is completely different from that of a performance.
It is very typical of the cinema.
And I've always said that silent films are the most talkative.
DW Griffith films have enormous amounts of written dialogue.
It is the eternal question:
Is the film closest to the novel or the play?
In the end, it depends on the film.
It would be wrong to say that the novel -
On the surface, the novel seems closer, for example in terms of dialogue.
The dialogue from a novel transfers quite well to the screen,
whereas with a play it is much more difficult.
But I think the textual history of a novel
it is more difficult to adapt to the cinema.
It may be due to the length of a novel.
The logical counterpart of a film is not a novel
but a "nouvelle", or short story.
Like "The Marquise of O...", 60 pages long.
Yes. I kept the whole story intact, all 60 pages.
I have seen many films that are not novels but try to be.
They leave me a little unsatisfied.
It is more interesting for me to find inspiration
in ideas of German Expressionism.
At least the German post-Expressionists of the 1920s
who made films in a genre called "Kammerspiel," or "chamber theater,"
that maintained a unit of space.
In Murnau's films, for example, like "The Last Man",
there is a unity of space and time.
It takes place in one day and in one place, a hotel.
The "Kammerspiel" influenced me a lot,
and I was not the only one in the French film community.
There is a French filmmaker not at all loved by the New Wave,
because he belonged to the previous generation of filmmakers,
but I never disliked it.
I've always had a certain respect for him, and I find beautiful things in his work.
I am referring to Marcel Carné, who loved the work of Murnau and the "Kammerspiel".
He made films that spanned a short period of time
and they often ended as they began.
I have also made use of that resource.
In the "Moral Tales" a moment to think.
No, no so much.
But most of my "Comedies and Proverbs"
they end at the same point where they started.
But the feeling is different from the present in Carné films,
where there is a fatalism and a pessimism.
My films are more optimistic.
Essentially, in the "Moral Tales",
a character is fascinated by a woman who is not for him,
and in the end, he breaks free and leaves her.
So there is a very different feeling.
There is the element of Greek tragedy,
in which, by dramatic necessity, the events unfold in a single location.
On film, you could quote "Rio Bravo".
But you were looking for something more emotional
as in German Expressionism.
If right. I think by trying to -
It can be interesting to try to express the passage of time,
but in the film it always gives the feeling of being a bit contrived.
It's easier in a novel. You can say, "Three years later ..."
In a film you have to express it explicitly or write it in text.
I'm not saying that everyone has to,
but personally I'm more comfortable with a shorter story, with time unit,
and therefore take place -
Get all the ideas you can from a single location.
I say "ideas," in the sense of ideas for staging.
In a certain scenario, I think, "I can use that, and that, and that."
It inspires me.
I have no desire to go find another location.
We now come to "Claire's Knee",
and I have two anecdotes that I like
about nature and the seasons.
The script indicated
that at a certain point we needed roses in bloom,
and in another, we needed cherries ready to pick,
so we had to set the shooting schedule
for the precise moment the cherries were ripe
and the roses were ready to be picked.
Could you tell us how you arranged this stroke of luck?
It was not a stroke of luck.
Almost all my films were easy to make,
with the exception of films based on pre-existing works.
As I wrote the story, it was based on things I had come across.
I wrote my story around roses and cherries.
I asked when the cherries ripened,
and they told me that at the end of June, beginning of July.
In the mountains they mature later than in the lowlands.
So in the filming schedule, I scheduled the scene for early July.
This is how it worked.
But you planted a rose bush.
No, I think Brialy said that.
The rose bush was already planted. I only asked when it would be in bloom.
Because legend has it that you planted the bush at that exact spot
and you calculated exactly when it would bloom.
It could have been true, but the result is the same.
The rosebush was already there,
and I thought it was an interesting point for the film,
so I asked him when it would bloom.
The landscape was perfect with the 1.33 aspect ratio,
because the mountain and the lake filled the entire screen.
I'd like you to talk about the 1.33 aspect ratio
and why was it important to you,
because we always had to fight for your films to be shown
in that aspect ratio.
When I made "Moral Tales", there was only one format.
The new formats, which we call "panoramic,"
like 1.66 or 1.85, they didn't exist yet.
These formats did not exist -
Wait, that's not true, because I shot "The Sign of Leo" at 1.66.
That format did exist.
It was your choice from the beginning -
I thought it would be more interesting to do it at 1.33.
That was the silent film format that you admired.
The format was the same,
but the surface area was different.
In the projection copy of a film with sound,
there is a black band that restores the 1.33 relationship.
The relationship is the same.
In France, films were screened at 1.66, so I had to take that into account.
I found that most filmmakers preferred the 1.66 to 1.33 format.
I don't like it, and I'll tell you why.
First, for the simple reason that this format clips objects.
It does not offer more space. Offers a narrower space.
For example, I like to film people's hands.
If the format is not high enough,
you can stick your face and hands out if the character talks like this,
but if so, which is also interesting,
they don't come out in the shot.
Also, as you said before,
I like to be able to see what is above people's heads,
and in particular, since it is in the mountains, see the mountains.
Everything that has height -
not just mountains, but many things like trees, houses -
disappear in a format that is too much -
I could say too wide, but no -
It is flat, without enough height.
I see it as a negative, not a positive.
It is very important to me that the films are shown in their original aspect ratio.
That means 1.33, and not 1.66, although it is no longer used.
Now it's 1.85, which is terrible for me.
If it is projected at 1.85, the characters are cut off.
I don't know if this keeps happening
but on television they showed Chaplin's films with Charlot's head cut off!
It is a scandal.
For me, it is essential
that these films are shown in their original format.
Although it is true that in the films beginning with the "Moral Tales -"
no, the "Comedies and Proverbs" -
I took precautions to ensure that my films could be shown in 1.66 without problems.
But in the period of the "Moral Tales", they could not be projected in 1.66.
Yes, they could. It's been a mistake before
when I said they couldn't be projected at 1.66.
"Claire's Knee" was often shown at 1.66, and it was fine.
But it was better at 1.33, because you could see the mountains.
I remember we always fought with the projectionists
to display it at 1.33.
Your films are usually made in a specific location,
and that location plays a role in the film.
I attach great importance to the scenarios, and I think they should vary.
I think that is what changes the most.
You can find similarities between the characters and the stories,
but the scenarios change.
In this, he resembles Balzac.
Balzac's stories are always the same, or almost always.
They are stories of intrigue.
But the people who plot the intrigues are not the same,
and the scenarios are always different.
I think the public likes the setting to vary.
When doing cycles or series of films like me,
you must vary the scenarios.
The locations inspire me.
Before writing the script, I visit the location.
If we use "Claire's Knee" as an example,
It was already written, but not for that scenario.
It was set in the suburbs of Paris, but I was tired of Paris.
I wanted a landscape that was cool, or at least familiar,
something brighter, less ordinary.
I thought about filming it in a region known for its natural beauty,
but that he also had an interest in cinema and film festivals.
There was an animation festival there, and those people helped me.
The son of one of the directors of a resort
that belonged to a company ...
based in Annecy
He offered to let me film in the center, and I decorated it as a private home.
If you look carefully, you don't see any bedroom.
It doesn't really look like a private house.
In any case, I managed to transform it.
I added a few things.
A fence and things like that.
In general, you didn't like filming in the studio for "Moral Tales",
but you made two notable exceptions:
"Love in the Afternoon" and "My Night with Maud".
Why was it shot in studio? For very practical reasons.
When you can't find a location in France, or at least in Paris -
I mentioned that I visit the location before writing the story.
Some settings are such an essential part of the story
that you can't use just any location.
The location I needed was very specific, and I couldn't find it in Paris.
I went looking for locations and saw many apartments, but nothing was working.
Their layout was bad, and they were also too loud.
That's when Pierre Cottrell,
which was part of our production company, Les Films du Losange,
suggested shooting in a studio.
I hesitated, thinking it would be too expensive,
but we finally found a studio in an old section of Paris.
I knew him from my educational TV programming days.
We don't film in the studio
but in an apartment that had to be transformed into a studio.
I said, "It's fine as it is."
So that's where "My Night with Maud" was filmed.
That was "My Night with Maud".
In "Love in the Afternoon", the room in the attic
was created in a study because we couldn't find -
There was the office of "Love in the Afternoon."
It was modeled on the Les Films du Losange office.
You even copied the buildings across the street.
It was not this room but the next. Plus the view from the windows.
"My Night with Maud" was also filmed at your house.
Françoise, the second main female character,
he lived in a little house "in the mountains," but it was shot in Paris.
It was done for the reasons you have stated: We had no choice.
Still, I felt more comfortable -
We couldn't find an apartment that worked
so we had to shoot it in a studio.
Since then,
I have always avoided studies
Except for period films, which have to be shot in the studio.
There are usually no dreams in your films.
You're a bit allergic to the use of dreams in movies
but you made an exception in "Love in the Afternoon."
Yes, because it is in the prologue.
I believe that cinema is an art based on reality, in the present,
and that it is artificial to show dreams or dreams.
But in that case
it's like it's out of the movie.
It is not in the middle of the plot. He's introducing the character.
And I resolutely made it a little childish
based on a book I read as a child.
Wasn't it when you were doing "Love in the Afternoon"
that you did any work on Ingres?
Yes, there was an exhibition by Ingres
when he was doing "Love in the Afternoon."
Actually, the film was already finished.
But Ingres did not inspire "Love in the Afternoon."
Maybe the socket we used looked like an Ingres, but that only became apparent later.
But you usually do intensive research on painters.
Each of your films has pictorial references.
Painters always inspire me, but I never try to copy them.
Maybe no one will notice
but it can be a basis for discussion with a cameraman like Nestor Almendros,
who loves to paint.
I'll give you an example of "My Night with Maud."
The pictures on the walls I chose myself.
They are enlargements of lunar craters.
They are very photogenic.
Why lunar craters? Because there was a lot of talk about the moon then.
Maybe it was after the first moon landing -
No, it may have been the first rocket to fly over the moon,
But everyone was talking about a moon landing.
There are also photographs, male nudes
By Leonardo da Vinci.
They are very beautiful, and they seemed like a natural choice for a female doctor.
After that, for "Claire's Knee", I thought of Gauguin,
because his Tahitian paintings have mountains,
lush greenery, blue water and all that.
I did not try to reproduce a Gauguin painting.
I just gave the characters beach towels
that they looked like sarongs from Tahiti, that they were so then.
But your films are pictorial on their own, often because of how you frame them.
Shots often look like pictures because of how they are framed.
That comes naturally to me. I don't try to do it.
But in particular
I don't use a set designer, except in period films.
For contemporary films, I decorate the sets myself
and I choose the pictures on the walls.
Sometimes I keep what was there. Sometimes I find others.
I choose paintings for many of my films.
In the "Comedies and Proverbs" series, for "Pauline At The Beach", I used Matisse.
Later, in "Boyfriends and Girlfriends", there were works by Nicolas de Staël.
So you are right. I do use a lot of paintings.
There is a relationship between the painting on the wall and the film,
even when the frame is not visible.
Another pictorial aspect
is that you choose the colors of everything that appears on the screen.
I remember that for the rugs of a film,
It took forever to find the right shade of gray
because you insisted on gray rugs.
It was in "Full Moon in Paris."
I remember the gray rugs being a problem.
So you always control the choice of colors.
In "Moral Tales", I decided to assign a color to each film.
Each one was a color of the rainbow,
and they followed the same order.
"The Bakery Girl of Monceau" is yellow.
"Suzanne's Career" the green one.
"My Night with Maud" the bluish black.
"The Collector" the violet. The credits are in purple.
"Claire's Knee" is pink, and "Love in the Afternoon" is orange.
They follow the order of the spectrum, although they do not start at the beginning.
When I did the "Comedies and Proverbs",
I assigned a few colors to each film.
For example, "The Aviator's Wife"
it has green, blue and a little yellow.
"Pauline At The Beach" has blue, white and red.
"Full Moon in Paris" uses gray,
contrasted with strong colors like red, green, etc.
"Boyfriends and Girlfriends" uses the official colors
from Cergy-Pontoise, where it was filmed, which are blue and green.
Also, my scripts are bound with covers of the corresponding colors.
Yes, looking back, we would like to compare your film cycles,
What main difference is there between the "Moral Tales" and those that followed?
It could be said that the "Moral Tales" are more moral, more ambitious.
They ask questions of a moral order.
The "Comedies and Proverbs" lack that kind of ambition.
There are no or very few theoretical discussions.
Instead they deal with jealousy
and the conflicts between the characters.
In the "Four Seasons", it could be said that I revisit
questions of morality and philosophy in a more discreet way,
as in "Tale of Spring".
In all of them, there are more discussions of a general nature.
Will you shoot your next movie digitally?
Do you plan to use aspects of digital media in your future films?
I could stop after my next film
but yes.
At one time, I played the role of prophet,
and I got pretty close.
It wasn't just me, but the entire New Wave.
Like all revolutionaries, we think ahead.
I didn't say that "After me, the deluge",
because I don't think cinema is going to disappear.
It may take another form
but I cannot say what form it can be.
I have no idea what the future of cinema will be.
But yes, I continue to use -
For example, for my next film,
I am going to use a rather complicated procedure.
I will shoot in 16mm, then it will be transferred to video,
and then it will be printed in 35mm.
I don't know why, but it's supposed to -
It gives great control over the image.
One thing is certain:
More and more people will watch classic DVD movies at home,
and DVDs have a level of quality that is more satisfactory to directors.
That is something that is certain in the future of cinema.
I'll admit that -
some people may be outraged - but I don't go to the movies anymore.
I can appreciate one more film, and judge it better,
if I see it on video instead of in the cinema.
This is due to my age.
I've become a little claustrophobic, and my sight -
I have lost the gift of choosing a seat
at the proper distance from the screen,
because often I can't get to that seat, and I can't sit anywhere.
That is why I much prefer to see a film on video,
despite what certain purists think.
Also, if you have a good sound system,
the sound of the film can finally be heard
like it was supposed to when we mixed it,
Checking every roll in the soundstage
and the sound is absolutely perfect.
This is a luxury.
We always had to fight
for the quality of sound in theaters.
Yes, that is true.
I feel very comfortable watching a film on video or DVD at home.
I am very proud of the quality of our sound.
I think, "In the future, with DVDs, people will be able to turn up the volume
and appreciate how well the sound blended."
In theaters, you often don't appreciate the quality of the sound mix.
In terms of aspect ratio, the DVDs respect the choice of 1.33.
My next film will be at 1.33.
But in theaters -
It has always been a struggle.
It won't screen at 1.33.
Actually, yes, it will be, but using a few tricks.
The film will be in 1.85,
but there will be a black strip on each side of the frame,
so on screen it will be 1.33.
The black strips are just as dark as movie black, so they are invisible.
I would like to thank you.
I should thank you for coming here to ask me questions ...
and for contributing your memories as well.
We share the same memories
although sometimes we do not remember things in the same way.
I forget some things, and you forget others.
The first question I would like to ask is:
Why shoot a story instead of writing it?
I have written my stories.
I started by writing a book.
It is now being reprinted, and has come out in Germany and Italy.
Its title was "Elisabeth", which was not very apt,
because it was about more than a character named Elisabeth.
Today I would call it "Elisabeth's House."
It comes out at the end of the year.
It was written in a very filmic style.
Maybe that's why it was impossible to film.
But after writing "Elisabeth",
my inspiration ran out, at least in that style,
for it had been largely inspired by American literature,
especially Faulkner.
I stopped admiring that kind of literature and was drawn to writers from the past.
Moving on to America, I read Melville's book "Bartleby".
"Bartleby the Scrivener".
It fired my imagination and gave me a new direction
a very literary style, if you like.
All of this came together in something called the "Moral Tales".
The first volume was written in a style
which would later be called "nouveau roman",
and although it was received with enthusiasm
by Jean Paulhan and Marcel Arland in the literary magazine "NRF",
publishers rejected it, calling it "old-fashioned."
Paradoxically, those were the stories that inspired my films,
because they were much less filmic.
It is a paradox of the cinema.
Were the six "Moral Tales" written then, or only some of them?
All had not been written yet. I added a few.
I added the first one, "The Bakery Girl of Monceau",
and the last, "Love in the Afternoon".
The others were written, although under different titles.
A title that did not change was "Claire's Knee".
Claire's character seems to follow me
because it appears in the novel,
which ends with a description of Elisabeth sitting reading,
and at one point scratches his knee.
Coincidentally, there is also "Claire's Knee".
The adventure begins when we decide to make the film, as it were,
using black and white in 16mm without sound.
It was "The Bakery Girl of Monceau".
But wait. That was not my first film.
My first film was actually much closer
in the style of my first novel.
"The Sign of Leo".
It had a lot of description and not much dialogue,
while my later films had loads of dialogue and even voice-overs.
But unlike other films of the New Wave
Like "Le beau Serge" and "Los Primos" by Chabrol
"Breathless" by Godard and "The 400 Blows" by Truffaut
my film was not successful.
That meant that no producer wanted me, but luckily you and I met.
and we formed a production company, Les Films du Losange,
and we started shooting at 16mm.
What can we say about "The Bakery Girl of Monceau"?
It is the first story to establish
the theme of all the "Moral Tales":
a man choosing between two women.
Yes it is.
But I did not use "The Bakery Girl of Monceau" to establish the theme,
because the stories were already written.
But when I wrote them, I had no idea there was a theme.
I did not notice the similarities.
That came later, by rereading them and modifying them for the screen.
So the idea behind "The Bakery Girl of Monceau"
Was it to use the theme of stories to make a short film?
Yes, that helped me.
He had a vague idea for "The Bakery Girl of Monceau",
but as I became aware of this issue, I put it first.
The theme helped me structure the story in "Love in Afternoon" as well.
So what can we say about "The Bakery Girl of Monceau"?
We could say a lot.
I have very fond memories of that film.
He was just an amateur then.
Era editor of "Cahiers du cinéma",
and at 6:00 pm, you and I would meet in that bakery that we had chosen
because it was near the office of "Cahier",
and we shot parts of scenes.
We had found a bakery.
I don't even think we paid them, but they let us film there.
We made that film with practically no money.
They were all amateurs
except a woman who had been in a Buñuel film, Michèle Girardon,
but she was not the first actress in my film.
The lead actress, the girl from the bakery, had no experience.
We shot it with a Bolex, the camera Jean Rouch was using then.
It was filmed with a Bolex.
Some of our cameras then went on to have interesting careers.
They were photographers, not cinematographers.
Jean-Michel Meurice was also a painter
and then went on to make many television documentaries.
and he was even the director of the French TV station FR3.
Another had a last name similar to your first name:
Bruno Barbey.
He was an international reporter and a great photographer.
I wonder why you chose Tavernier to do my voice in "The Bakery Girl of Monceau".
Was it because his voice was more aristocratic?
It was not a question of aristocracy.
His style -
My type of comment does not fit your speaking style.
His voice is more "literary".
He is truly his father's son. I met his father during WWII.
His speaking style was highly original, and his son's even more so.
Since my comment was very literary,
I thought his voice would work better than yours.
Yours fits the dialogue, but I had to use the same voice for both.
I find it a bit violent. I hope you are not angry.
Of course not.
I never saw myself as an actor. I was just curious.
And it helps us understand the way you work.
I'm not sure
that you would have felt comfortable making the comment.
No, it didn't come easy to my lips.
And back then, it seemed very complicated.
I remember, in the first version of "The Collector",
there was even more comment off.
I remember thinking it seemed very convoluted.
Yes, that is the effect I was looking for, because in "The Collector"
the character is, frankly, a snob,
even a dandy.
But in the other "Moral Tales", there is almost no comment in off.
Two sentences in "My Night with Maud".
In "Claire's Knee", there are none.
In "Love in the Afternoon", there are some at the beginning and in the middle.
I stopped using the off comment.
Tell us what the voiceover added, in your opinion.
Several things.
First, it was fashionable then.
He was in many movies, even American detective.
I remember a Billy Wilder film that used the voice-over.
That is one thing.
It also allowed me to communicate ideas that are difficult to express on film.
In a way, talking cinema is less flexible than silent cinema,
because silent movies had what they then called "subtitles".
Now we call them inter-titles.
They were used for both dialogue and comment.
They added another dimension to the film.
The way the protagonist looked could be "written" on the screen.
This meant that his actions and words
they did not always agree with the comment.
I found that interesting.
That's something you continued afterwards, but without the off comment:
show that what people think, say and do is not always -
Yes, it added dimension.
I managed to express this mixture of objectivity and subjectivity
without resorting to the off comment
in "My Night with Maud"
and "Claire's Knee",
where the role of comment is assigned to the novelist.
The novelist wants to try out a character for a novel she is writing
and she makes comments about his actions. It is also in "Love in the Afternoon."
I completely abandoned commentary on my other films.
In a way, he internalized himself.
After that, we did "Suzanne's Career."
Where did it come from? Was it one of your stories?
Yes. I don't even remember what it was called.
One of the characters reminds me of Gégauff.
Yes, I had just met the novelist Paul Gégauff.
He was also a screenwriter, working with Chabrol in particular.
I was fascinated by his personality.
To many others too, like Chabrol,
and we see some of them in Godard films,
like "Breathhless" and others.
The story was very "Gégauff-like."
This was basically how Gégauff dealt with the women he knew.
You used it as your basic theme.
I find the film very touching
because, in the end, it is the female character who wins.
Yes, she wins in the end.
Could you explain the meaning of "moral" in "Moral Tales"?
There has always been a certain ambiguity about it.
It derives, of course, from the "moralists" of the 18th century.
It has to be understood in that context.
Right.
Actually, "Moral Tales" was the title
from my collection of short stories, written before the movies.
"Moral" there meant that the characters acted according to a certain moral code,
that may be very yours.
In "The Collector", for example, it is the moral code of a dandy.
Those with a more bourgeois moral code might consider him a real jerk.
So is.
But that deliberately anti-conformist aspect of his moral code
for me it is a cliché of that specific period.
But it could also be said that "moral" refers to ...
an inner world, and not -
So I explained later.
In other words, it is not based merely on your own actions.
In those days, however, I explained it a little differently.
I think my films introduced the world of cinema
a certain content expressed or by ...
the monologue of a character, as in the comment in off,
or for an argument.
In many movies, people never discuss ideas,
be it moral or political ideas.
And if those kinds of discussions are indeed presented,
You always sound fake
But I think I have managed -
and this is what gives me the most joy about my films as a whole -
I have managed to show people arguing about morality,
no matter what morality it is,
in a completely natural way,
be it the moral code of a dandy in "The Collector",
or religious issues in "My Night with Maud",
or matters of eroticism in "Claire's Knee".
They are all covered by the word "moral" in the general sense.
I've even managed to discuss political issues, which can be tricky,
also naturally
in "The Tree, The Mayor, and The Mediatheque".
It was easier for me to discuss politics,
because the story was set in the past,
in "The Lady and the Duke".
And your film after that.
Yes, there is also a moral aspect to "Triple Agent".
And political too.
The next film we had planned to do was "My Night with Maud".
But the television programming director said it was "filmed theater," not cinema,
and was not interested.
That's right, because they talked a lot in the film.
That would continue to be an obstacle in my later films.
In a way, it's my fault.
Instead of describing the scenarios
and action from time to time,
my scripts are pure dialogue.
Sure, this scares the reader.
So I didn't have the money to do "My Night with Maud",
and television refused to produce it.
Fortunately, I ran into Truffaut.
I had fought with him
because he had instigated my departure from "Cahiers du cinéma".
But in the end, he wasn't really angry, because he had done me a huge favor.
I was wasting my time in the magazine
engrossed in boring administrative duties.
For a living, since I no longer worked at "Cahiers du cinéma..."
I got into educational television.
Since he had been a teacher, he was not just a principal,
but also a "TV producer," which means "screenwriter."
He wrote comments.
Some of those TV shows were from the movies,
and one was about Jean Vigo.
As Truffaut was a great admirer of Vigo,
we brought him in for that show.
It was a way for me to get in touch with him again.
He said, "I read your script I thought it was cool."
I told him that I had been denied funding.
He said, "That doesn't matter. I'll find a way to produce it."
I had read the script
because we had sent it to Trintignant.
I had seen him in films and I liked his way of acting,
but he was already a star and he was very busy.
I didn't know if you would like the script
or if it would have enough weight to convince the producers.
Trintignant's agent,
who also represented Truffaut,
his name was Lebovici, and he had the script in his office,
where Truffaut saw it and read it
and it really touched him.
Truffaut sent for me and said, "We have to make this movie.
We will gather people."
His was the impetus that brought together ten co-producers,
each making a small investment.
It didn't really cost them anything,
because that money came from public funds to support the cinema.
There is a law, which still exists,
which gives French film producers a percentage of box office taxes.
American producers are infuriated that it is not applied to foreign films.
Some important producers of the time financed the film.
This is how we were able to do it.
I think one reason why Truffaut read "My Night with Maud"
it was because you had written it,
but also because "The Collector" had impressed him.
We were forced to do that film first, although we had planned it for later.
In the chronological order of the "Moral Tales",
"My Night with Maud", which was then called "La fille à bicyclette",
It came before "The Collector".
The order was not very important,
but I wanted to make the first three films in black and white
and the rest in color. That's it.
It doesn't matter if we go from color to black and white.
Certain producers very eager to make the film
they were against shooting it in black and white.
Pierre Braunberger, who started in the 1920s,
who had produced Renoir films and also supported young filmmakers,
He begged me to shoot it in color.
I refused. Why?
One thing I liked about Clermont-Ferrand -
the city where Pascal lived, which is so important to the film -
was that the houses are built from volcanic rock,
so the whole city is black.
It is a city without color.
I thought that fit the atmosphere of the film.
Although we did not shoot in color, I had chosen a colorless wardrobe.
They all wore gray or black to match the atmosphere of the film.
If it had been filmed in color, it would only have been shades of black.
There was another reason. We could have done that
but black and white is prettier.
But there was another reason: The film takes place mainly at night,
and black and white film was much faster than color film.
Those are some of the reasons,
but often, in my films, the practical and financial choices
they fit very well with artistic choices.
Did you make "Interview on Pascal" in preparation for this film,
Or did that show give you the idea to make a film about Pascal?
I can't say.
It often overlapped, because when you've been researching -
I know it was when I was preparing
or at least I was thinking about the film.
But I do not remember.
It was around the same time, but I don't know which came first.
Often the shows you made for teaching television
they served as a test for films you prepared.
Yes, it encouraged me to shoot discussions.
I found that filming a discussion was both easy and interesting.
My first movie, "The Sign of Leo", had none.
"The Collector" has a few discussions,
but they are extremely - how to put it?
The characters are not that dense. Their lines of dialogue are shorter.
But in "My Night with Maud", you could say that they talk a lot.
That was also your first experience with direct sound, which was important.
"The Sign of Leo" had some recording with direct sound, but not all the time,
because then, the sound recording equipment was very heavy and bulky.
There were no Nagra recorders.
We had a sound truck where they recorded directly on film.
There was no magnetic tape.
But all the sound in "My Night with Maud" was recorded in locations,
and from that moment on, all my films used direct sound.
I never use post-sync.
Many other directors use it for exteriors.
Even when I'm filming on a noisy street, I use direct sound recording.
You often try to do just one take.
Direct sound recording should complicate it.
What are your thoughts on the first few takes? Why try to do just one take?
I will have to mention "The Collector",
because it came first.
Not in series order, but it was done first.
We had no money to make "The Collector",
So you barely gathered something up
A photographer friend of yours
he advanced us some money,
and he took good advantage of it, because the film was a success.
But we had to be very thrifty,
so my principle was to do just one take,
and keep it short.
It is usually said "Camera," then "Action." We did the opposite.
He would say to the actor, "Go ahead, walk. Action!"
and then "Camera" to save movie.
Of course, in "My Night with Maud",
we did more takes because it is necessary when using direct sound,
for many reasons, like when an actor misses her in her lines.
That didn't happen because the actors were extraordinary,
Trintignant further of Françoise Fabian.
But outside noise can ruin a shot.
But in any case, everything went well.
I had a sound engineer who revolutionized sound recording ...
but here we use traditional techniques. His name was Jean-Pierre Ruh.
Then he was one of the first to film -
although it was common on television -
in using the lavalier microphone.
With a transmitter. A wireless lavalier microphone.
He used it in "Claire's Knee", but not in "My Night with Maud."
Going back to the idea of the first few takes,
Do you find that a first take has a special quality?
I had a whole theory about the first takes that I still subscribe to.
I realized that by doing multiple takes, actors could become demanding.
It's hard to stop an actor from wanting another take
And generally, the second take is not that good.
He was shooting a film in Germany, "The Marquise of O...",
and the actors were perfectionists and kept insisting on more takes.
They said, "It hasn't been good. We can do better."
I would tell them, "It's okay that it wasn't good. Not all takes have to be perfect.
There must be ups and downs. If not, it becomes static."
And I have stayed true to that principle.
I can also correct things in the cutting room.
My later films had higher budgets,
And in terms of the total cost of a film, a second shot doesn't cost much.
I shoot several takes, but very often I find that the first take,
although perhaps not the most perfect -
I can say the following:
It may not have the least flaw, but it has the highest quality.
That's what matters to me: quality, not flaws.
However, you are not afraid to rehearse extensively in advance
so everyone knows exactly how the shot will be done.
You are not afraid of losing a certain natural quality
by having the actors rehearse a lot.
I'm not afraid to lose that due to over-rehearsal
but because of the excess of filming, which is not the same.
For the first take, the actor prepares.
There is a kind of risk factor,
and that gives it a certain advantage.
You may have rehearsed it very well before.
You have to rehearse
because I am very demanding with the positions and frames.
I also think -
This is what I think:
If you rehearse a lot, then you can be natural.
What can cause problems is giving an actor his lines too late,
and as a result, he is still learning them.
There is a moment when the naturalness is lost,
but he gets it back later.
That is why, in almost all my films,
the actors receive the script several months in advance,
and they have so much time to absorb it that it becomes natural.
When I ask them to say their lines, it's like a first take.
You have already heard the dialogue, and sometimes you even incorporate
expressions that the actors used in the final dialogue.
I have made two kinds of movies.
In some I wrote the dialogue well in advance,
and in others, it was all improvised.
What is curious is that the improvised dialogue is not so different
of the more "literary" dialogue written in advance.
"The Green Ray" is one example, but there are many others.
Many of the films that I shot in 16mm,
like "The Green Ray", "Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle",
"The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque", "Rendezvous in Paris"
all of them used improvisation.
There was even it in "Claire's Knee."
Everything melts. I think so. I don't know.
I don't think I could always tell what was improvised from what was not.
I think it works well with written potions.
Also, with a few exceptions,
I think professional actors mix well with non-professionals,
although non-professionals often require more effort on my part.
I think it's because of all the rehearsal you do with actors beforehand
that when they improvise,
it doesn't have that annoying makeshift feeling.
I see it in so many films today that it has become a mania.
When you use improvisation,
you have argued about it and worked on it so much
that doesn't seem like improvisation.
It is.
I don't like that impromptu feeling you mention.
I have some ideas about it.
I think if we ask people to say things that they say in their everyday lives -
For example, a girl who works in a bakery.
There is one in "The Bakery Girl of Monceau" and also in "The Sign of Leo".
If I ask a girl who works in a bakery
give someone bread or tell them how much it costs,
It will be very natural, but anything else would seem forced.
In the field, if I ask a farmer
Say something you say every day, that's okay.
So you have to know what to ask him.
You can't give him a line and have him say it. You have to use your own words.
Since we are talking about the filmmaking process,
you often have the finished film in your head.
You have broken it down into shots in advance, correct?
If that is.
I am not saying that montage is unnecessary.
In fact, I always take part in the editing.
It surprises me that some directors don't.
I participate in the montage almost frame by frame.
But that does not mean that it does not do a "decoupage",
breaking down the film into separate shots and sequences before shooting.
My films, to use Bazin's words,
they take shape in the "decoupage", not in the montage.
For me it is completely unthinkable
deliver a film to an editor,
as many directors do, and ask them to mount it
and then say, "Okay," or correct it,
but without taking the initiative.
No, I know in advance precisely how the film will be edited.
You could say that it is part of the staging.
Dividing it into scenes and takes is part of the staging.
Recently, for fun, I produced some shorts
in which i asked the actors to come up with a script.
I didn't exactly follow the script.
I corrected things, rewrote the dialogue, etc.
and I directed the staging, but I did not appear in the credits as director.
Figured by "Cutting".
For me, the "decoupage" is extremely important.
In the history of cinema, there was a director who had two credits in all his films:
"Directed by" and "Filming Script of."
That was Marcel Carné.
I did not know that.
In those shorts, I was featured as "Shooting Script, Eric Rohmer."
One director who took this to the extreme was John Ford.
He only filmed what was absolutely necessary,
shots that would be in the final cut.
"The Collector" approached that.
For example, reverse shots in conversation scenes
They weren't filmed like we're filming this, every angle captured without interruption.
We only filmed the actor who was speaking.
Any shot of an actor listening was done separately.
But that was an extreme case. We did it to save money.
Yes, the final cut of "The Collector" was 8,200 or 8,800 feet,
and we only rolled a little over 16,000 feet total.
You told me the lab thought it was short.
In addition, the assembly took only a week
precisely because you had planned each shot in advance.
And since there were so few,
it was easy to put them together.
It was actually more complicated than that.
My editor, Jacquie Raynal,
who later worked on films in the US -
He left because he had gotten a paid editor job,
and we didn't pay him.
So they left me to fend for myself.
It was very hard, because there was no sound.
All he had was a lead track.
So I had to lip-read the actor's lines. I had to learn a lot to ride it.
So I made a preliminary cut.
I essentially edited the film,
but then Jacquie came back and made corrections.
This is how we got more funding.
We screened the 90-minute film without sound, in black and white.
We didn't even have the money to make a color copy.
So we screened a 90 minute silent film,
in which an infinity of incredible things happened,
but we didn't quite know what.
The producer, from Beauregard, then said
that he would advance the money to finish the film.
I hope he was not disappointed later.
No, the film was a success.
Yes, it was a critical, and even public, success.
The cinema was packed for months.
I remember how Nestor Almendros started.
We were filming a short near the Arc de Triomphe,
and a cameraman left.
I was tired
of our way of working and not getting paid,
so he put the camera on the sidewalk.
Nestor was there, because he always nagged me to be on set,
to take photos or lend a hand in whatever.
We didn't know he was a cameraman, and he said,
"I know how to use it. I can do it."
We did not know that he had already shot several films in Cuba.
He picked up the camera, and so it began.
In your collaboration with him,
the next great film was "The Collector".
I remember a story about that.
The previous cameraman had been offered a paid job,
So he left, and I don't blame him.
Then Nestor said, "I know how to film," so we started shooting.
So I was also interested in cinematography,
although I had never done it professionally.
We used reversible color film,
so the lighting had to be perfect.
You couldn't correct the color, as there was no negative.
I knew we had been shooting up to that point with an aperture of 2.8.
So Nestor took the camera
and I asked, "What opening are you going to use?"
He said, "I'll use 3.2." He checked with the photometer.
The light can change, of course.
I said, "The light is the same as before, and he used 2.8."
He replied, "Good. I can use 2.8."
Well, I panicked.
I thought, "If you don't know what to use..."
In the end, he was right. It went right.
It was between the two values.
He was very clueless.
It wasn't technical at all. It gave the impression -
But it was a false impression. He never spoiled everything.
In "The Collector", a mistake would have been fatal,
very difficult to correct.
His distraction gave him an artistic air,
but he always complied.
He also had an excellent eye for framing,
even though he was extremely myopic.
He wore contact lenses.
And nothing happened.
While I had had cameramen that weren't myopic ...
And I really wish they didn't see so well
I remember many cameraman that, if you filmed on the street
and you asked them to film a poster,
they said, "It's very visible. You don't have to do a close-up."
Well that's not true.
He is too small to read, especially on TV.
Another feature of your job
it's your use of music,
or rather, its extremely limited use in the "Moral Tales".
"The Sign of Leo" had a lot of music, because it was about a musician.
I assigned the music
to a talented musician named Louis Saguer.
It was a sonata for cello similar to Bartók's sonata,
which at that time impressed me deeply.
I preferred having composed music to using pre-existing music.
I thought I had music for the whole movie
but it was the musician himself, and I thank him, who said -
In a scene where the hero goes down a very noisy street,
He said, "Don't use music here. The noise from the street is very beautiful."
I followed his advice,
and as a result, the music is very discreet.
Later, in the "Moral Tales",
The truth is that I wanted -
Especially for "The Collector",
The truth is that I wanted to create an interesting audio environment.
It had a very rich palette:
the harsh noise of cicadas ...
the song of birds, etc.
But in reality, there were also engine noises,
especially light aircraft
that were flying over the filming location.
This is what happened:
For financial reasons, but also for the reasons stated,
because the planes were truly unbearable ...
we replaced the background sound with the sound of cicadas,
that were present at the location, and birdsong.
I did extensive research on the birds in that region in July,
and I got pretty good at it.
I could name them all, although I've already forgotten.
I remember you were in contact with ornithologists and bird song specialists,
and every bird song in "The Collector" is accurate.
Exactly. We do not use any bird song. We had woodpeckers
or whatever was native to the region.
Native birds present during the season
who sang at that specific time.
However, I found the aircraft noise, used sparingly, to be interesting.
So I put the airplane noise back in during the erotic scenes,
and it worked quite well.
Recreated the problems of direct sound recording
on a film without direct sound.
For example, when the main character looks at Haydée and wants to kiss her,
that's when a plane passes.
There is also another moment like this.
This effort to build such a rich and varied sound environment
It must have diverted you from the music.
I have a funny story about that.
I needed music for the credit sequence.
You had some kind of African or Polynesian drum in your house.
I said, "I want very simple music, maybe just percussion.
We don't have to hire a composer. "
I think Haydée was friends with a musician,
and I had written something, but I didn't like it. It was too complicated.
I said, "I want something else like that," and started hitting the little drum,
And you started tapping a pot
And we record it.
I gave it to my editor and said, "I want something like that,"
but I don't have a musician. "She said," This is great. We will use it. "
So we keep it.
This idea of being contrary to music
it was more opposition
the use of music to manipulate emotions.
Yes, I have talked about this often.
Music is an easy way out.
Music gives meaning to an image,
but an image and its sound should provide that meaning on their own.
I have always paid careful attention to the sound environment of a film.
I had to do it in "The Collector", because there was no direct sound,
but in the other films too -
In the sound mix.
Certain sound engineers I worked with
they weren't interested in background sound, and some were.
In any case, the first ones I hired
They weren't very keen on background sound so I recorded it myself.
We bought a small tape recorder, an Uther,
but it was fine for recording background sound in locations.
It shouldn't be too light or stand out too much.
Often when the sound engineer did it, he stuck out too much,
and a more "distant" sound was better in the sound mix.
There was a whole segment in the world of film criticism
that lasted a long time, although perhaps things have changed,
that said you were "very French," "very literary,"
that you did not show any interest
in the visual aspect, framing, "decoupage", etc.
or the influence of painting,
all those visual elements so important to your work.
I've always been irritated by how blind people can be with all this.
Paradoxically, I even used to say, "My films are silent films."
When I saw them without sound -
because in the color correction stage, they are projected without sound -
I found it very interesting.
They took on a different meaning
the one they had with sound.
Silent cinema was my introduction to cinema.
I was late to the movies.
But I didn't discover cinema in theaters at that time,
I mean the end of the 30s.
I discovered it at the "cinémathèques", where they showed
the old silent films.
People kept saying, "This is a radio soap opera."
"It's just refined affectation." Things like that.
Just because it has plenty of dialogue doesn't make it "literary" or "theatrical."
The dialogue in a film is completely different from that of a performance.
It is very typical of the cinema.
And I've always said that silent films are the most talkative.
DW Griffith films have enormous amounts of written dialogue.
It is the eternal question:
Is the film closest to the novel or the play?
In the end, it depends on the film.
It would be wrong to say that the novel -
On the surface, the novel seems closer, for example in terms of dialogue.
The dialogue from a novel transfers quite well to the screen,
whereas with a play it is much more difficult.
But I think the textual history of a novel
it is more difficult to adapt to the cinema.
It may be due to the length of a novel.
The logical counterpart of a film is not a novel
but a "nouvelle", or short story.
Like "The Marquise of O...", 60 pages long.
Yes. I kept the whole story intact, all 60 pages.
I have seen many films that are not novels but try to be.
They leave me a little unsatisfied.
It is more interesting for me to find inspiration
in ideas of German Expressionism.
At least the German post-Expressionists of the 1920s
who made films in a genre called "Kammerspiel," or "chamber theater,"
that maintained a unit of space.
In Murnau's films, for example, like "The Last Man",
there is a unity of space and time.
It takes place in one day and in one place, a hotel.
The "Kammerspiel" influenced me a lot,
and I was not the only one in the French film community.
There is a French filmmaker not at all loved by the New Wave,
because he belonged to the previous generation of filmmakers,
but I never disliked it.
I've always had a certain respect for him, and I find beautiful things in his work.
I am referring to Marcel Carné, who loved the work of Murnau and the "Kammerspiel".
He made films that spanned a short period of time
and they often ended as they began.
I have also made use of that resource.
In the "Moral Tales" a moment to think.
No, no so much.
But most of my "Comedies and Proverbs"
they end at the same point where they started.
But the feeling is different from the present in Carné films,
where there is a fatalism and a pessimism.
My films are more optimistic.
Essentially, in the "Moral Tales",
a character is fascinated by a woman who is not for him,
and in the end, he breaks free and leaves her.
So there is a very different feeling.
There is the element of Greek tragedy,
in which, by dramatic necessity, the events unfold in a single location.
On film, you could quote "Rio Bravo".
But you were looking for something more emotional
as in German Expressionism.
If right. I think by trying to -
It can be interesting to try to express the passage of time,
but in the film it always gives the feeling of being a bit contrived.
It's easier in a novel. You can say, "Three years later ..."
In a film you have to express it explicitly or write it in text.
I'm not saying that everyone has to,
but personally I'm more comfortable with a shorter story, with time unit,
and therefore take place -
Get all the ideas you can from a single location.
I say "ideas," in the sense of ideas for staging.
In a certain scenario, I think, "I can use that, and that, and that."
It inspires me.
I have no desire to go find another location.
We now come to "Claire's Knee",
and I have two anecdotes that I like
about nature and the seasons.
The script indicated
that at a certain point we needed roses in bloom,
and in another, we needed cherries ready to pick,
so we had to set the shooting schedule
for the precise moment the cherries were ripe
and the roses were ready to be picked.
Could you tell us how you arranged this stroke of luck?
It was not a stroke of luck.
Almost all my films were easy to make,
with the exception of films based on pre-existing works.
As I wrote the story, it was based on things I had come across.
I wrote my story around roses and cherries.
I asked when the cherries ripened,
and they told me that at the end of June, beginning of July.
In the mountains they mature later than in the lowlands.
So in the filming schedule, I scheduled the scene for early July.
This is how it worked.
But you planted a rose bush.
No, I think Brialy said that.
The rose bush was already planted. I only asked when it would be in bloom.
Because legend has it that you planted the bush at that exact spot
and you calculated exactly when it would bloom.
It could have been true, but the result is the same.
The rosebush was already there,
and I thought it was an interesting point for the film,
so I asked him when it would bloom.
The landscape was perfect with the 1.33 aspect ratio,
because the mountain and the lake filled the entire screen.
I'd like you to talk about the 1.33 aspect ratio
and why was it important to you,
because we always had to fight for your films to be shown
in that aspect ratio.
When I made "Moral Tales", there was only one format.
The new formats, which we call "panoramic,"
like 1.66 or 1.85, they didn't exist yet.
These formats did not exist -
Wait, that's not true, because I shot "The Sign of Leo" at 1.66.
That format did exist.
It was your choice from the beginning -
I thought it would be more interesting to do it at 1.33.
That was the silent film format that you admired.
The format was the same,
but the surface area was different.
In the projection copy of a film with sound,
there is a black band that restores the 1.33 relationship.
The relationship is the same.
In France, films were screened at 1.66, so I had to take that into account.
I found that most filmmakers preferred the 1.66 to 1.33 format.
I don't like it, and I'll tell you why.
First, for the simple reason that this format clips objects.
It does not offer more space. Offers a narrower space.
For example, I like to film people's hands.
If the format is not high enough,
you can stick your face and hands out if the character talks like this,
but if so, which is also interesting,
they don't come out in the shot.
Also, as you said before,
I like to be able to see what is above people's heads,
and in particular, since it is in the mountains, see the mountains.
Everything that has height -
not just mountains, but many things like trees, houses -
disappear in a format that is too much -
I could say too wide, but no -
It is flat, without enough height.
I see it as a negative, not a positive.
It is very important to me that the films are shown in their original aspect ratio.
That means 1.33, and not 1.66, although it is no longer used.
Now it's 1.85, which is terrible for me.
If it is projected at 1.85, the characters are cut off.
I don't know if this keeps happening
but on television they showed Chaplin's films with Charlot's head cut off!
It is a scandal.
For me, it is essential
that these films are shown in their original format.
Although it is true that in the films beginning with the "Moral Tales -"
no, the "Comedies and Proverbs" -
I took precautions to ensure that my films could be shown in 1.66 without problems.
But in the period of the "Moral Tales", they could not be projected in 1.66.
Yes, they could. It's been a mistake before
when I said they couldn't be projected at 1.66.
"Claire's Knee" was often shown at 1.66, and it was fine.
But it was better at 1.33, because you could see the mountains.
I remember we always fought with the projectionists
to display it at 1.33.
Your films are usually made in a specific location,
and that location plays a role in the film.
I attach great importance to the scenarios, and I think they should vary.
I think that is what changes the most.
You can find similarities between the characters and the stories,
but the scenarios change.
In this, he resembles Balzac.
Balzac's stories are always the same, or almost always.
They are stories of intrigue.
But the people who plot the intrigues are not the same,
and the scenarios are always different.
I think the public likes the setting to vary.
When doing cycles or series of films like me,
you must vary the scenarios.
The locations inspire me.
Before writing the script, I visit the location.
If we use "Claire's Knee" as an example,
It was already written, but not for that scenario.
It was set in the suburbs of Paris, but I was tired of Paris.
I wanted a landscape that was cool, or at least familiar,
something brighter, less ordinary.
I thought about filming it in a region known for its natural beauty,
but that he also had an interest in cinema and film festivals.
There was an animation festival there, and those people helped me.
The son of one of the directors of a resort
that belonged to a company ...
based in Annecy
He offered to let me film in the center, and I decorated it as a private home.
If you look carefully, you don't see any bedroom.
It doesn't really look like a private house.
In any case, I managed to transform it.
I added a few things.
A fence and things like that.
In general, you didn't like filming in the studio for "Moral Tales",
but you made two notable exceptions:
"Love in the Afternoon" and "My Night with Maud".
Why was it shot in studio? For very practical reasons.
When you can't find a location in France, or at least in Paris -
I mentioned that I visit the location before writing the story.
Some settings are such an essential part of the story
that you can't use just any location.
The location I needed was very specific, and I couldn't find it in Paris.
I went looking for locations and saw many apartments, but nothing was working.
Their layout was bad, and they were also too loud.
That's when Pierre Cottrell,
which was part of our production company, Les Films du Losange,
suggested shooting in a studio.
I hesitated, thinking it would be too expensive,
but we finally found a studio in an old section of Paris.
I knew him from my educational TV programming days.
We don't film in the studio
but in an apartment that had to be transformed into a studio.
I said, "It's fine as it is."
So that's where "My Night with Maud" was filmed.
That was "My Night with Maud".
In "Love in the Afternoon", the room in the attic
was created in a study because we couldn't find -
There was the office of "Love in the Afternoon."
It was modeled on the Les Films du Losange office.
You even copied the buildings across the street.
It was not this room but the next. Plus the view from the windows.
"My Night with Maud" was also filmed at your house.
Françoise, the second main female character,
he lived in a little house "in the mountains," but it was shot in Paris.
It was done for the reasons you have stated: We had no choice.
Still, I felt more comfortable -
We couldn't find an apartment that worked
so we had to shoot it in a studio.
Since then,
I have always avoided studies
Except for period films, which have to be shot in the studio.
There are usually no dreams in your films.
You're a bit allergic to the use of dreams in movies
but you made an exception in "Love in the Afternoon."
Yes, because it is in the prologue.
I believe that cinema is an art based on reality, in the present,
and that it is artificial to show dreams or dreams.
But in that case
it's like it's out of the movie.
It is not in the middle of the plot. He's introducing the character.
And I resolutely made it a little childish
based on a book I read as a child.
Wasn't it when you were doing "Love in the Afternoon"
that you did any work on Ingres?
Yes, there was an exhibition by Ingres
when he was doing "Love in the Afternoon."
Actually, the film was already finished.
But Ingres did not inspire "Love in the Afternoon."
Maybe the socket we used looked like an Ingres, but that only became apparent later.
But you usually do intensive research on painters.
Each of your films has pictorial references.
Painters always inspire me, but I never try to copy them.
Maybe no one will notice
but it can be a basis for discussion with a cameraman like Nestor Almendros,
who loves to paint.
I'll give you an example of "My Night with Maud."
The pictures on the walls I chose myself.
They are enlargements of lunar craters.
They are very photogenic.
Why lunar craters? Because there was a lot of talk about the moon then.
Maybe it was after the first moon landing -
No, it may have been the first rocket to fly over the moon,
But everyone was talking about a moon landing.
There are also photographs, male nudes
By Leonardo da Vinci.
They are very beautiful, and they seemed like a natural choice for a female doctor.
After that, for "Claire's Knee", I thought of Gauguin,
because his Tahitian paintings have mountains,
lush greenery, blue water and all that.
I did not try to reproduce a Gauguin painting.
I just gave the characters beach towels
that they looked like sarongs from Tahiti, that they were so then.
But your films are pictorial on their own, often because of how you frame them.
Shots often look like pictures because of how they are framed.
That comes naturally to me. I don't try to do it.
But in particular
I don't use a set designer, except in period films.
For contemporary films, I decorate the sets myself
and I choose the pictures on the walls.
Sometimes I keep what was there. Sometimes I find others.
I choose paintings for many of my films.
In the "Comedies and Proverbs" series, for "Pauline At The Beach", I used Matisse.
Later, in "Boyfriends and Girlfriends", there were works by Nicolas de Staël.
So you are right. I do use a lot of paintings.
There is a relationship between the painting on the wall and the film,
even when the frame is not visible.
Another pictorial aspect
is that you choose the colors of everything that appears on the screen.
I remember that for the rugs of a film,
It took forever to find the right shade of gray
because you insisted on gray rugs.
It was in "Full Moon in Paris."
I remember the gray rugs being a problem.
So you always control the choice of colors.
In "Moral Tales", I decided to assign a color to each film.
Each one was a color of the rainbow,
and they followed the same order.
"The Bakery Girl of Monceau" is yellow.
"Suzanne's Career" the green one.
"My Night with Maud" the bluish black.
"The Collector" the violet. The credits are in purple.
"Claire's Knee" is pink, and "Love in the Afternoon" is orange.
They follow the order of the spectrum, although they do not start at the beginning.
When I did the "Comedies and Proverbs",
I assigned a few colors to each film.
For example, "The Aviator's Wife"
it has green, blue and a little yellow.
"Pauline At The Beach" has blue, white and red.
"Full Moon in Paris" uses gray,
contrasted with strong colors like red, green, etc.
"Boyfriends and Girlfriends" uses the official colors
from Cergy-Pontoise, where it was filmed, which are blue and green.
Also, my scripts are bound with covers of the corresponding colors.
Yes, looking back, we would like to compare your film cycles,
What main difference is there between the "Moral Tales" and those that followed?
It could be said that the "Moral Tales" are more moral, more ambitious.
They ask questions of a moral order.
The "Comedies and Proverbs" lack that kind of ambition.
There are no or very few theoretical discussions.
Instead they deal with jealousy
and the conflicts between the characters.
In the "Four Seasons", it could be said that I revisit
questions of morality and philosophy in a more discreet way,
as in "Tale of Spring".
In all of them, there are more discussions of a general nature.
Will you shoot your next movie digitally?
Do you plan to use aspects of digital media in your future films?
I could stop after my next film
but yes.
At one time, I played the role of prophet,
and I got pretty close.
It wasn't just me, but the entire New Wave.
Like all revolutionaries, we think ahead.
I didn't say that "After me, the deluge",
because I don't think cinema is going to disappear.
It may take another form
but I cannot say what form it can be.
I have no idea what the future of cinema will be.
But yes, I continue to use -
For example, for my next film,
I am going to use a rather complicated procedure.
I will shoot in 16mm, then it will be transferred to video,
and then it will be printed in 35mm.
I don't know why, but it's supposed to -
It gives great control over the image.
One thing is certain:
More and more people will watch classic DVD movies at home,
and DVDs have a level of quality that is more satisfactory to directors.
That is something that is certain in the future of cinema.
I'll admit that -
some people may be outraged - but I don't go to the movies anymore.
I can appreciate one more film, and judge it better,
if I see it on video instead of in the cinema.
This is due to my age.
I've become a little claustrophobic, and my sight -
I have lost the gift of choosing a seat
at the proper distance from the screen,
because often I can't get to that seat, and I can't sit anywhere.
That is why I much prefer to see a film on video,
despite what certain purists think.
Also, if you have a good sound system,
the sound of the film can finally be heard
like it was supposed to when we mixed it,
Checking every roll in the soundstage
and the sound is absolutely perfect.
This is a luxury.
We always had to fight
for the quality of sound in theaters.
Yes, that is true.
I feel very comfortable watching a film on video or DVD at home.
I am very proud of the quality of our sound.
I think, "In the future, with DVDs, people will be able to turn up the volume
and appreciate how well the sound blended."
In theaters, you often don't appreciate the quality of the sound mix.
In terms of aspect ratio, the DVDs respect the choice of 1.33.
My next film will be at 1.33.
But in theaters -
It has always been a struggle.
It won't screen at 1.33.
Actually, yes, it will be, but using a few tricks.
The film will be in 1.85,
but there will be a black strip on each side of the frame,
so on screen it will be 1.33.
The black strips are just as dark as movie black, so they are invisible.
I would like to thank you.
I should thank you for coming here to ask me questions ...
and for contributing your memories as well.
We share the same memories
although sometimes we do not remember things in the same way.
I forget some things, and you forget others.