How did you choose the texts included in Une vie de cinéma?
There was a vast amount to choose from. On France Culture alone, I had conducted 1,200 interviews over 26 years; I had also published numerous books of interviews and worked regularly for Positif for nearly 60 years. So I wanted to select pieces that struck me as more distinctive than others and, above all, encounters that had been memorable for me.
Naturally, I’d met Claude Sautet and Francesco Rosi, but I’d already written books about them. The aim here was to revisit a few particularly standout moments. I’m thinking, for example, of Francis Ford Coppola. I’d chaired the press conference for Apocalypse Now at Cannes, and then Danièle Heymann and I’d met him in California for L’Express. The interview had gone so well that he’d said to us: ‘I’ve still got a lot to say. Come with me to San Francisco; you’ll stay at my place for four or five days and we’ll carry on.” Staying at Coppola’s, hearing his father play the piano in the morning, talking to him about Russia because I’d just come back from there and he was preparing to go there: all of that was quite exceptional.
I was also struck by Serge Gainsbourg, because you don’t necessarily expect to hear him speak as a filmmaker. His answers were incredibly precise. He wasn’t the provocative Gainsbourg we’re used to, but a man extremely keen to show that he had a firm grasp of cinema, that he understood the technical aspects and knew how to apply them, right down to the choice of lenses.
Finally, I was keen to give space to the actors, whose vital role is often underestimated by film critics. The general public, however, is under no illusion: they go to see films more for the actors than for the directors. I therefore included interviews with Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose comments were remarkably insightful. When they aren’t being asked about the colour of their clothes or their young children, actors have very profound things to say about their art.
Your trip to the USSR also bears witness to a different era of cultural journalism.
Indeed. L’Express sent me to the USSR, at the invitation of the Soviets, to put together a feature that took up nearly fifty pages of the newspaper. Some pages were only a single column wide, but the whole thing was still immense. Today, I’d probably be given just one page, with people asking: ‘Who on earth could possibly be interested in Russian cinema?’
I had truly travelled the length and breadth of the vast USSR: Uzbekistan, Georgia, Armenia, the Baltic states and, of course, Moscow. There I met producers, actors, directors and screenwriters who told me about the new generation. This was after Khrushchev’s Thaw, at a time when Soviet cinema was experiencing a veritable boom. Those three weeks had fascinated me.
What, then, distinguished the Italian film scene from the French New Wave?
What has always struck me about Rome is the fluidity of social circles.
At friendly gatherings – by no means high-society affairs – Francesco Rosi would rub shoulders with Sergio Corbucci or Ettore Scola: there was no hierarchy amongst them. In the great comedies of Dino Risi or Pietro Germi, you’d find cinematographers who also worked with Antonioni, Fellini or Visconti. Shooting a comedy didn’t strike them as beneath them in the slightest.
There was therefore far greater solidarity amongst these artists. Most were on the left, whether communists or not — Rosi was not, Visconti was —, and their bonds may have stemmed from Italy’s recent history, the Liberation and, if not always the Resistance, at least opposition to fascism. In France, by contrast, the bonds that had united the members of the New Wave quickly unravelled: Chabrol no longer socialised with Truffaut, and Truffaut no longer socialised with Godard. In Italy, exchanges and collaborative work continued; Fellini had worked alongside Rossellini, Pasolini alongside Fellini, and they all belonged to the same pool of talent.
It should also be remembered that Italian comedy was not recognised by critics, not even in Italy. Italian critics looked down on it and scarcely mentioned it. The French, notably Positif, played a very active role in bringing it to prominence. We interviewed the screenwriters and directors; it was only then that Comencini, Lattuada, Risi and Monicelli were accepted as great filmmakers in their own right. In a way, we taught this to the Italians themselves.
Has French comedy taken anything from this legacy?
The French film scene has changed a great deal. Back in the 1960s, there were already great comedy filmmakers: Philippe de Broca, Michel Deville and Jean-Paul Rappeneau. Today, there are many French comedies, and they are often very mediocre, but some are also more socially and politically engaged than in the past. You can sense that they have been influenced by Italian comedy; I’m thinking, for example, of Pierre Salvadori.
The strength of Italian cinema lies precisely in its ambiguity. To laugh at a flaw is to strip it of some of its gravity; it is also, not without a touch of complacency, to accustom the audience to putting up with it. This tension between criticism and indulgence is what gives great Italian comedy its richness.
What memories do you have of discoveringApocalypse Now at Cannes?
To prepare for the press conference, I’d gone to the technical run-through. Every night, the directors screen their films to check that the sound and picture are in order. The screening took place at midnight. I obviously didn’t want to see the film for the first time that very morning at half past eight, before interviewing Coppola; so I planned to watch it, reflect on it, and then get two or three hours’ sleep.
I was so fascinated, so blown away, that I got up at seven in the morning to watch it again. So I watched Apocalypse Now twice in the space of a few hours, before chairing the press conference. For me, there was never any doubt that it was a truly great film. Coppola was already a monumental filmmaker: he’d directed the first two instalments of The Godfather, The Conversation and The Rain People. But Apocalypse Now completely won me over, even though the film sparked fierce controversy. Many festival-goers at the time were backing Volker Schlöndorff’s The Drum, including the jury president, Françoise Sagan.
Did the sheer scale of the shoot foreshadow Coppola’s subsequent difficulties?
After Apocalypse Now, Coppola embarked on various experimental projects whilst, at the same time, attempting to return to success through major productions. Yet he never quite recaptured the immense triumph of Apocalypse Nowand The Godfather. He nevertheless remains one of the major filmmakers of his generation – the generation of Italian-Americans, but not exclusively so.
At the time of this interview, he was announcing Megalopolis, a massive project he described as a sort of contemporary Metropolis. His immediately preceding films, which were far more experimental, hadn’t entirely convinced me, but this project was set to bring him back into the limelight.
Why did you give such prominence to writers, particularly Harold Pinter?
I was keen to feature great writers in the book, including several Nobel laureates, because I myself am very passionate about literature. I read a great deal and have a background in literature. Harold Pinter struck me as a screenwriter of the very highest order, quite apart from the fact that he was a tremendous playwright.
I had met him whilst working on L’Ami retrouvé. I preferred to keep the interview focused solely on that one film rather than spreading the conversation across several topics. Pinter speaks wonderfully about his craft. Writers are often – and quite naturally so – more at ease with words than filmmakers: some directors find it very difficult to explain what they’re looking for, whereas Pinter possessed a remarkable capacity for analysis.
He regarded Jerry Schatzberg’s The Return of the Friend as one of the best films he had written, even though the work is very rarely mentioned. The trilogy he made with Joseph Losey — The Servant, Accident and The Messenger — naturally remains his greatest achievement in cinema, but The Return of the Friend is a very fine film.
How did one gain the trust of such an unapproachable man?
I think I secured this interview because I had dedicated a book to Jerry Schatzberg, illustrated with his photographs and films. I can’t recall the exact circumstances, but Schatzberg probably recommended me. Such encounters often work like that, through a chain of trust.
That’s how I was able to produce, with Luc Béraud, All About Mankiewicz, a filmed interview lasting nearly two hours with Joseph L. Mankiewicz — the only one he ever granted in this format — because Elia Kazan, his close friend, had recommended me to him. One act of trust thus opens the door to another encounter: little by little, it snowballs.
Did Mario Vargas Llosa also have close ties to the world of cinema?
Vargas Llosa is a novelist whom I hold in high regard, as I do many great Latin American writers. I knew he had worked in cinema and, to mark the publication of one of his books by Gallimard, Paulo Antonio Paranaguá and I managed to arrange a meeting with him. It was then that we discovered the extent of his involvement with the cinema: he’d worked as a film critic, helped direct a film and written a screenplay for Ruy Guerra that the filmmaker was unable to shoot. The interview reveals just how significant cinema has been in his career.
Why did you place controversies at the heart of the book?
There were, of course, many others: scathing attacks, editorials in Positif where I teased my colleagues. But I believe controversy is necessary. I am sometimes asked how a critic can bring himself to criticise other critics. I find this objection astonishing: since the 18th century, the entire history of literature has been made up of controversies between critics.
François Truffaut’s articles, which have been republished by Gallimard, were incredibly scathing towards his colleagues at Le Figaro, Positif and other newspapers. Truffaut was still a critic when he wrote those pieces. Why should he have had the right to do so and not me? If film directors respond to critics, they are labelled bitter, jealous or furious at having been treated unfairly. If critics are not allowed to respond to one another either, their profession would be the only one in France to be immune to all criticism: that would be paradoxical, to say the least.
My controversies also stemmed from a situation that is perhaps less visible today. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, a sort of coalition brought together Les Inrockuptibles, Les Cahiers du cinéma, Libération and, to a lesser extent, Le Monde. I found this closeness incestuous and dangerous, because it created a prevailing orthodoxy. Some critics were losing their independence: they would systematically support filmmakers they knew or socialised with, whilst savaging others – despite their high calibre – such as Robert Altman, John Boorman or, in France, Bertrand Tavernier and Claude Miller.
I feared that, through cronyism and systematic bias, film criticism would lose its credibility and, consequently, its effectiveness. That is exactly what has happened. Today, certain newspapers may publish a glowing review, proclaiming that a film is exceptional or the best of the year, yet it will attract no more than 1,300 cinema-goers. This means that the public no longer pays any heed to what they say.
I have a deep love for film criticism; it has been my lifelong passion. I was therefore saddened to see it lose its influence, even though it is the only real counterbalance to advertising and the power of the media. It alone can enable as yet little-known artists to achieve recognition.
So criticism isn’t simply about ‘criticising others’?
Certainly not. Alongside polemics, travel pieces and interviews, I have brought together in this book some twenty essays devoted to the films that made a lasting impression on me between my early days, in 1963, and 1974. It was a very concentrated but extraordinarily fruitful period: the great films of modernity, established filmmakers such as Joseph Losey and Ingmar Bergman, and new voices from all over the world — from Brazil, Quebec, Belgium (with André Delvaux), Switzerland, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
I have also included around twenty written tributes penned on the occasion of a filmmaker’s death or a retrospective. These are artists who have been a part of my life. They are obviously not all represented here, but I have chosen those to whom I had paid a special tribute: Alain Resnais, whom I knew very well, and Claude Sautet, whom I admired greatly. Sautet was long looked down upon by snobbish critics; today we realise that his films stand the test of time wonderfully.
Can one separate a work of art from its creator’s moral conduct?
If we start scrutinising the moral lives of all the great artists, there won’t be much left. We would first have to clear the museums of Caravaggio’s works, as he killed a man and committed abominable acts. The same logic would have to be applied to a great many writers and artists.
I believe we were going through a period of puritanical prurience at the time, which I hoped would pass. The controversy surrounding Alain Delon, for example, struck me as absurd. I did not like Delon as a man and I disapprove of his political views, but, as Thierry Frémaux put it, Cannes had not awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize. He was an actor in the films of Losey and Visconti, both of whom were communists and were not ashamed to associate with him. He remains a truly great actor.
Roman Polanski committed a reprehensible act; he nevertheless remains a truly great filmmaker. Seeking to remove his films from the Cinémathèque or prevent a retrospective being dedicated to him strikes me as absurd. Following that logic, one would also have to remove André Gide from the Pléiade series because of his relationships with very young boys in North Africa.
I’m also thinking of Lillian Gish. She had entrusted her archives to a university in Ohio, which had named a cinema after her. Students then pointed out that she had starred in The Birth of a Nation, a racist and morally repugnant film, but also a masterpiece of cinema history. The university removed her name from the cinema — without, however, returning the archives. This contradiction speaks volumes.
Why do you consider Francesco Rosi to remain an essential filmmaker?
To me, he is the greatest political filmmaker of the 20th century, without exception. I even rank him above Eisenstein, because he is far more complex and never black-and-white. He is also an innovator of form. Salvatore Giuliano has influenced almost all the great political filmmakers: Ken Loach pays tribute to him; Oliver Stone, Coppola and Scorsese recognise him as an absolute master.
Rosi hasn’t truly fallen into oblivion, as his name remains, but his films have become difficult to see. The Parisian critics I mentioned played a part in discrediting him. Gérard Lefort made a name for himself by headlining his review of Chronicle of a Death Foretold as: ‘Chronicle of a Piece of Rubbish Foretold’. He often declared himself very proud of that phrase; for my part, I would be ashamed to have written it. However weak a film may be, one does not treat a great filmmaker in this way. One may expose a charlatan or deem the inclusion of a mediocre director in the competition to be scandalous; one does not take advantage of a less accomplished work to drag the creator of masterpieces through the mud.
L’Affaire Mattei was virtually impossible to find at the time, particularly on DVD, even in Italy. I believe this was mainly due to the difficulties inherent in Italian co-productions: it is often very complicated to trace the rights holders. The film remains, nonetheless, a masterpiece, rightly awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes. One could also mention Exquisite Corpses, The City Under Siege, Christ Stopped at Eboli or Three Brothers. Rosi produced one masterpiece after another.
You were present on the set of Christ Stopped at Eboli.
Yes, I was in Craco, in Basilicata, in southern Italy, when Aldo Moro was assassinated by the Red Brigades. Filming came to a halt; everyone crowded round the transistor radios to listen to the news. It created a deeply ‘Rosian’ atmosphere: it was as if a Rosi film had suddenly burst into the reality of the shoot itself.
The resemblance between Gian Maria Volonté and Aldo Moro made this impression all the more unsettling. Volonté had, in fact, played Moro in Elio Petri’s Todo modo.
What memories do you have of Raoul Ruiz?
Raoul Ruiz was a friend. He had been close to Salvador Allende and, following the coup in Chile, had sought refuge in France in 1973. He made many films there, as well as abroad. He was a man of extraordinary intelligence, with an absolutely vast store of knowledge.
He told me a very funny story. When he first arrived in France, he was often invited to dinner. He noticed that, as soon as a guest left a party, the others would start to tear him down: they’d criticise the woman he’d brought with him, his outfit or the stupidity of his remarks. To prevent people from speaking ill of him in this way, Ruiz always stayed until the last guest had left. He would therefore leave every party at three o’clock in the morning, utterly exhausted by what he called ‘French bad manners’. Naturally, people could speak ill of him the next day, but he did not seem to have considered that possibility.
Is friendship with filmmakers compatible with a critic’s independence?
Some filmmakers became, if not enemies, then at least people who no longer wanted to see me because I had stopped admiring their films. That is the critic’s lot: one must remain honest. When I no longer liked the films of the Brazilian Glauber Rocha, the Spaniard Carlos Saura or other filmmakers who had disappointed me, we stopped seeing each other.
Marco Bellocchio may not have been exactly a friend, but I knew him very well and his longevity has always amazed me. At Cannes, The Traitor had been unanimously acclaimed despite not winning any awards. Bellocchio was then approaching his eighties and remained, after Rosi’s death, the greatest living Italian filmmaker in my eyes. His youthfulness and energy were incredible.
He was twenty-five when he directed Fists in the Pockets in 1965. Right from that first film, I had the feeling I’d discovered a truly great filmmaker. Many debut films are remarkable; the difficult part is getting the eighth one right. Bellocchio, however, never stopped reinventing himself.
Why do some filmmakers retain this creative vigour well into old age?
It’s all down to the diversity of the human race: some people age very well, others age badly. Very few filmmakers who emerged in the 1960s, such as Bellocchio or Godard, continued to produce works that were genuinely eagerly anticipated.
Some were still making films, but their work no longer interested many people. There were, however, exceptions: Alain Cavalier in France, Jerzy Skolimowski and Andrei Konchalovsky.
I had just completed a book of interviews with the latter, published by Actes Sud and the Institut Lumière: Andrei Konchalovsky: Neither Dissident, Nor Partisan, Nor Courtier. He was over eighty years old and had nevertheless just received two Silver Lions at Venice, for The Postman’s White Nights and Paradise. It is extremely rare for a filmmaker to remain in the limelight for more than half a century after their debut.
Agnès Varda’s final interview in Positif also came about almost by chance.
It wasn’t me who conducted it, but my magazine. Agnès had announced that she would no longer be giving interviews: she adored Positif, she said, but no longer wished to speak. Following the triumph of Varda by Agnès at the Berlin Film Festival, we decided to visit her home to interview her daughter, Rosalie Varda, about their collaborative work.
Agnès came down the stairs, heard that an interview was in progress and couldn’t resist the urge to join in the conversation. And so she gave her final interview, joining in at the end with the one that Positif had come to conduct with Rosalie.
