Take One (Nov-Dec 1972)

if Day for Night eo film, but then two days later he accepted it on the condition that it be less expensive. Finally, | began shooting with a scenario of perhaps 30 pages — no dialogue, nothing. | knew it would begin with the hero’s coming out of the army, then there would be a time during which he’d be the night-guard at a hotel, then from the hotel he’d go into detective work, then we'd see. | wanted something to do with a married woman (that would be Delphine Seyrig), and something about a young girl that he’d known before the army and with whom he'd had a difficult relationship. And that was all. And then, at that moment, the troubles over the Cinématheque Frangaise erupted. And | was so much involved in that, that — evenings — | didn’t even see the rushes of the film: we were fighting for the Cinematheque. And | had accepted the fact that it was impossible. | was too tired, | wasn’t sleeping at all. | didn’t go to see the rushes. Sometimes, during the shooting, I’d fall asleep. | really believed that we’d continue to the last scheduled week of shooting, but that the film was screwed. | really believed that. Because | still believed, then, that one can only do one thing at a time; and all of a sudden | was forced to do two things. We laughed a lot as we made it, but — nonetheless — | thought the public just wouldn’t accept a character who had no purpose in the film, who was going nowhere. And yet, the film had a subject — | hadn't noticed it but the subject was life in general: love, feeling — a kind of “sentimental education”. But | didn’t see that while | was making the film — | thought it was hollow, that there was nothing, | thought that the reviews would be bad, that everything would be bad. And we almost didn’t finish the film. Indeed, when the film opened there was no one in the theatre. The advertising was very nostalgic, the film sounded like an old story. But | started meeting people in the street who said “Bravo” and “Great!”. And the second week there started to be larger audiences; the third week it doubled. It was really a phenomenon. Good reviews and good box-office too. But it was interesting to make a film that way. | STARTED TEARING PAGES OUT. SSNPS RIGA SI TR IAA ILE UT TEA TILE LIEB SRT What interested me in Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent (The Two English Girls and the Continent) is that we talk a lot these days of nervous depressions, of break-downs. What | found interesting was to do a “period” break-down. And | wanted to show an aspect of love that is never shown: to show that love can make you sick. To make a film where there is sweat, fever, vomiting — all the physical things that correspond to the things that explode in one’s head — things that are not usually shown. So, there are conventional things in the film — like the girl who reads the letter and then faints in the field — but there are also things... It was very difficult to write the screenplay, because it’s a story where the characters are never together — they only write to one another, keep their diaries. Making a film of that was very difficult. It's possible that the script wasn’t very well constructed’ — it was done very fast. Jean Gruault had written a 3'/2-hour screenplay — a number of years earlier — and | had abandoned it; | said, “No, we’re not going to shoot this 10 Stolen Kisses The Two English Girls film.” Then, all of a sudden, in 1970 or '71, | wanted to film something and | had no scripts, only that one — which couldn’t even all be held in one binder: there were three volumes; 1, 2, 3. And | started tearing pages out. With my assistant, | started to reconstruct the film — but we did it too fast, just the same. And | had to go to London every week to audition actresses, because we needed two girls who spoke French very well — the text is very difficult, very literary — and | could never find them. | had to go back every Saturday — at first | thought we’d find two sisters, then | realized we’d never find two sisters. So, | found one and then, a month later, | found the other and we started shooting. It was all too fast. WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO DO. (DRE SET SPIT A a I ae PRET SS CSN I PCR TR eS EE NSE | would very much like to do a film a little bit like the Sergeant York period, or The Big Sleep. Where the scenes in the street, in the forests, on the highway, are all shot in a studio. The American cinema did that during the war — perhaps because the war made it impossible to get to the real locations. And, today, we realize that those were the most political films that Hollywood ever made. There’s a scene in Sergeant York where he’s plowing his field, and the forest, at night, with clouds that are fake, anda thunderstorm that’s fake — lightning and everything — that brings out incredible emotions in me. | FEEL MYSELF BEING WATCHED. PEEL ia? SDN SEF Dee Rk Aa SD ET a) ARS SDR ALN a aan Eee ut See ae alee) AU aL In the Antoine Doinel films I’m afraid — |’m afraid that everything will be taken for real. And, finally, | lie a great deal in those films; there are many lies because | hide myself. Whereas, in my films that are adaptations of novels, | can protect myself behind the book and, because of that, | have sometimes thought that | am more personal in the adaptations than in the Doinel films. | have the impression of having said more than | myself felt or thought in, for instance, Mississippi Mermaid or Shoot the Piano Player than in any Doinel film, because in the Doinels | feel myself being watched, whereas in the adaptations |’m protected — protected by William Irish, David Goodis, etc. MEN ARE STRONGER THAN THAT. ES ES IT ER: OE Oe PPR ae Ps ES Each time that I’ve had a man on the screen who was not Jean Pierre Léaud — each time I’ve had a principal character who was not a child, who was not a woman, and who was not JeanPierre Leaud — I’ve had problems. |’ve had problems with the public and with the critics. That is to say, they do not accept a 40-year-old man as | depict him in my films. | think | show him as he is, but others refuse to accept it; they say that men are stronger than that. Me, | say no, men are not stronger than that. The whole problem is there. The whole problem is there, | think. That | depict men as being a little too weak for the critics, for the public. | WISH. FN Birth Sala ANNIS SRN ot aS AS SCRE Bs NL or tS pe A DO SSE RA Sa SEE SINS 2 2B] | wish that all my films were better. | would like them better if someone else had made them.