Paul Schrader: On Bresson’s ‘Pickpocket’

The above video is taken from Paul Schrader’s excellent introduction to the Criterion Collection edition of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket: ‘the most influential film in my creative life’.

Bresson’s consummate tale of crime and redemption follows Michel, a lonely young pickpocket whose days are spent working the streets, metros and train stations of Paris. His devotion to the art of pickpocketing becomes a compulsion. As his obsession grows he experiences fear, elation, a world of feeling. He takes lessons from a master and works with a criminal gang. This underworld milieux brings him into contact with his interlocutor and confessor, a police detective who resolves to apprehend him.

Schrader draws intriguing parallels between the character of Michel in Pickpocket and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, tracing Bresson’s film back to Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (Bresson’s inspiration for the film) and how the idea of a ‘soul in transit’ then became the inspiration for the screenplay of Taxi Driver. 

Schrader first saw Pickpocket in Los Angeles in 1969, ten years after it was made, and wrote a celebrated two-part review which he later refined in his seminal book Transcendental Style in Film. 

Schrader calls Bresson a ‘perverse’ director, in that Bresson’s style works in ways that run counter to traditional narrative filmmaking. Instead of adding elements and flourishes to underscore the story, Bresson strips things away, leaving the audience off-balance, paring the story down to its fundamental aspects. Bresson uses a rigid and austere style to ward off superficial emotional responses, intent instead on creating a ‘transformation’ – from the material to the spiritual realm. For Bresson this transition is key: ‘There must, at a certain moment, be a transformation; if not, there is no art.’ 

John Cassavetes: On Being Independent

Faces (Directed by John Cassavetes)

John Cassavetes’s fourth feature, “Faces,” from 1968, is a classic independent production made before such things were in vogue. He financed the film himself from his paychecks for acting gigs and even with a mortgage on his home; the star is his wife, the actress Gena Rowlands; he filmed in their house and edited in their garage; and when the film was completed, he distributed it himself. Then it received three Oscar nominations (Cassavetes, for Best Original Screenplay, and the film’s co-stars, Lynn Carlin and Seymour Cassel, for Best Supporting Actress and Actor). Even more important than its acclaim is its artistry: “Faces” is the core of Cassavetes’s work. He started his career as an independent, with “Shadows” (1959), which he financed with a precursor to Kickstarter, an appeal on a radio show. He then directed two Hollywood features, “Too Late Blues” and “A Child Is Waiting,” and chafed under studio restrictions. The freedom with which he made “Faces” bore aesthetic fruit. With this story of marriage on the rocks and the desperate quest for love, Cassavetes conjured an air of tragic exuberance that’s as original as it is thrilling. The liberated actors blend impulsive comedy, intense physicality, and agonized tenderness; the spontaneous camera work offers soul-baring closeups and sculptural compositions. With its unsparing confessional drama, “Faces” set the themes, the moods, and the styles for the rest of his career. It also inaugurated a new era in the history of cinema, opening possibilities that most directors have yet to confront or even admit.

– Richard Brody

In the following extract John Cassavetes discusses his approach to independent filmmaking.

It’s hard to explain what ‘independence’ means – but to those who have it, film is still a mystery, not a way out. There are other independents, of course, but they haven’t really hit the limelight yet, so not enough is at stake. To still do what you want after ten years, twenty years, is some- thing. I’ve known a lot of filmmakers who started out with enormous talents and lost momentum. I don’t say they’re selling out, but somehow if you fight the system you’re going to lose to it. That is basically the point. I don’t care whether you’re a painter or an architect, you can’t fight the system. In my mind, if you fight the system it only means you want to join it. So it is very important that you do something you like, that you’re involved in enough to hold your interest no matter how long it takes. If the film doesn’t involve you, it’s what we call a ‘stepping- stone’ picture, you know, a stepping-stone to art, and that’s all right too. Take a guy like Polanski who did pictures in Poland, Knife in the Water and later Repulsion. You could see in those works a pulse that was meaningful and creative and intense. You can’t dispute the fact that he’s an artist, but yet you have to say that Rosemary’s Baby is not art. It is a dictated design – boom, boom, boom, boom. People are used within that design to make a commercial product to sell to people. I’m not saying that is bad. I was in it. I’m fine. I’m happy. But it isn’t art. I think Dirty Dozen in its way is more artistic because it’s compulsively going forward, trying to make something out of the moment without preordaining the way the outcome is going to be.

The real tragedy is that other poor young filmmakers are coming along who will go out and conform before they’ve even opened their mouths. This whole culture – there is only one art in America, and that’s money. Raising money, and business. That’s what everyone is interested in: screwing somebody and making profit. We went to the Pratt Institute the other night and one of the kids said, ‘16mm is not for me.’ You know? ‘It’s not for me! We want to get out of this student stuff! We want to get into the real thing!!!’ I make films for the big studios, but I’ve never told them the truth. I’ve never been nice to them, and the understanding is there that I go my way and they go their way. If I can’t do what I want with them, I’ll go 16mm, and if I can’t do it there, I’ll go to 8mm.

Los Angeles is a movie town. Most of the people who work there are connected in one way or another with the entertainment industry. All of them are filled with ambition and ideas. To be an individual in Los Angeles is like being an individual in the Army. To retain a personality that comes out of a lifetime of hard work is a virtual impossibility. It is not because there is no talent and that people don’t come with the same vitality to Hollywood, but rather because the rules stress low-profile, subdued voices, mellowness, polite fear and vicious hypocrisy. The expression ‘to fit in’ is used in Hollywood. ‘To fit in’ is to give up your mind in favor of your position. Occasionally a character escapes. A single-minded fanatic, obsessed with separate visions of family, pain, driving the straight ones crazy while trying to transfer those feelings into a slick medium – a medium so regulated, so intoxicated with profits, so violently and quietly competitive that its boundaries make the Berlin Wall seem like something out of Disney.

I work with a group of people who tell me to go screw myself all the time and who disagree and say, ‘I don’t like the picture,’ and who are honest, and who work hard, and who are disciplined by themselves. And that keeps me alive. It’s staying with people that you’re comfortable with. Not that agree with you, but are comfortable with and not assuming a posture of being somebody, because you’re never going to be anybody! You just enjoy the work. It’s like somebody says, ‘When we have some money we’re going to really be happy,’ or ‘When we get this car, then things are going to change.’ They never change. The only time they ever change is when you have good times. So if you can work with people and enjoy yourself and talk only about what’s at hand, only about your movie and going into your movie and getting deeper into it and getting laughs out of it and abusing it, and treating it like a person. Because listen, that love affair’s going to last, what – a couple of months or a year? – and then you’re going to leave that movie and that’s the end of it. I haven’t seen Shadows since the day we finished it. It’s really a brutal thing, but I have no further interest once a picture has been finalized. I don’t think I will ever see Faces again. It’s like a love affair that’s gone.

We always try to think about what was the very best time of our lives. Usually it’s college or something like that. Making Faces was the very best time of my life – because of the people. I’d never met people like that, and I’m talking about every single member of that company and cast, people who made my life really worth living. I never thought once during the whole time we were making that film that there was anything else in the world except those people; they were that devoted and pure. There is a certain desire to making a film, when you really put it in and put it up and you know no limit and you’re really willing to die for the film you’re making. Now that sounds crazy. If you die for your country, it’s not so good, but in film if it’s the last thing you ever do, you want your picture to be done. With that attitude, making it that way, a man moves through life really using himself, really making something of his life.

John Cassavetes – excerpted from Cassavetes on Cassavetes, ed. R. Carney.

Sam Peckinpah: ‘Dying is not fun and games’

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

From its stark opening sequence, in which children observe a swarm of ants devour scorpions, through to its violent bullet-riddled ending, The Wild Bunch (1969) is an unrelenting journey into a world of nihilistic violence.

Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads an ageing gang of criminals on one final assignment in 1913: robbing a railroad store. Unfortunately, Bishop's former comrade Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who was blackmailed into chasing down his old friend for sleazy railroad tycoon Harrigan, is waiting in ambush with a gang of bounty hunters. The group becomes aware of the ambush and mayhem ensues. A deafening chorus of gunfire, shattering glass, and whinnying horses serves as the music to an epic gunfight that would serve as the focal point of a lesser western, but serves as simple prelude to the rest of Sam Peckinpah's cruel, elegiac tour de force. 

The remaining members of the group pass the laughing youngsters again on their way out of town, who are now burning the ants and scorpions alive. 

After establishing his stall early on with the inhumanity of cackling infants and slow-motion deaths, Peckinpah spends the next two hours thrilling us. A riveting, beautifully filmed train robbery, an exploding bridge, and a final machine-gun massacre all figure in this storey of hardened criminals caught up in the attempt to sell stolen weaponry to the dissolute General Mapache (Emilio Fernández) during the Mexican revolution. Repeated sequences of scotch consumption and hilarity hammer home the film's overall tone of cheerful submission in the face of a terrible conclusion. Any viewer who downs a shot each time the gang drinks will find themselves slurring long before the end credits, while the grizzled felons' combined laughing is almost as prevalent as gunfire.

The following article by Roger Ebert, from 1969, following a press screening of The Wild Bunch, gives an idea of the contemporary response to the film’s notorious depiction of violence and the director Sam Peckinpah’s defence of it.

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which is possibly the most violent film ever made, stirred up a bitter controversy. Film critics split into many camps at an extraordinary press conference, and even co-stars William Holden and Ernest Borgnine seemed slightly squeamish about the movie. But just about everyone agreed that The Wild Bunch will be this summer’s top box-office draw, for better or worse.

The film was screened for some 350 film critics during the weeklong Warner Bros. 7-Arts international film festival, festival, a showcase for six new Warners’ films. The audience reaction was extreme. Some people walked out. Others closed their eyes. When the lights went up, the applause was matched by boos and hisses. And then the arguments started. They are likely to continue all summer, providing fodder for countless articles and talk shows.

Peckinpah’s film is set in the Southwest and Mexico, circa 1913. The bunch of the title are a group of professional killers and bank robbers who have nearly reached the end of the line. They’re anachonisms, 25 years too late for the wild West, hoping to pull off one more good job and retire. A life of violence has unsuited them for anything else. They’re crude, filthy, bloodthirsty, raunchy and stupid. But they have a kind of honor and loyalty to each other.

The film opens with an extraordinary bloodbath of about seven minutes in length: a temperance parade is caught in the cross-fire between the Wild Bunch and a group of scurvy railroad gunmen led by Robert Ryan. Several civilians are gunned down just for the hell of it. The opening scene is the most violent I’ve ever seen on the screen – except for the closing scene.

By the films end, the bunch has escaped into Mexico and gotten involved in a scheme to steal U.S. army rifles for an ersatz rebel general. They’re double-crossed, caught between the general, Ryan’s men, and the Army. And in a final incredible bloodbath, some 200 men, women and horses die in an orgy of violence. You have never seen anything like it.

Having said this much, let me say that I admire The Wild Bunch and consider it an important act of filmmaking. It is easy enough to protest against the automatic violence of the Italian Westerns; it is legitimate to worry whether movie violence is somehow connected to the violence in American life. But The Wild Bunch, it seems to me presents death and violence in such definitive (indeed, even excessive) terms that it becomes, paradoxically, a statement against violence, and a reaction to it.

Peckinpah (previous credits: Ride the High Country, Major Dundee) has, first of all, made a magnificently directed and acted film. Holden, Borgnine, Ryan and Edmond O’Brien are particularly effective in roles that make their previous tough-guy characterizations look transparent. Peckinpah has marshaled an army of stuntmen and special effects men for his battle scenes and for a tremendous scene of the destruction of a bridge.

And the final bloodbath is the most effectively photographed battle since Orson Welles’ Fallstaff. Dying behind a machine gun, Holden maniacally mows down dozens of soldiers, civilians, anyone within range. I never thought, a lady in the audience complained, that I’d live long enough to see William Holden shoot a woman.

Peckinpah introduces a new technology of violence in those scenes. Blood actually spurts from gunshot wounds; we are shown the face of violence rather than the comic-strip substitute supplied by most Westerns.

All of this held little weight with most of the critics here, I gather. They considered the film to be an exploitation of violence – and they let Peckinpah and his co-stars have it with both barrels at a press conference the next morning.

I have only one question, said the lady from the Reader’s Digest. Why was this film ever made?

We wanted to show violence in real terms, Peckinpah said. Dying is not fun and games. Movies make it look so detached. With The Wild Bunch people get involved whether they like it or not. They do not have the mild reactions to it.

Why did everyone bleed so much? another lady asked.

Lady, Borgnine said, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?

But both Borgnine and Holden seemed to be rather dazed by the film themselves. Holden reportedly doesn’t like it much; he feels it’s too violent and needs additional cutting. Borgnine told the press conference: When I was handed the script, to be quite honest with you, I did not read into it all the controversy it seems to have stirred up. I had made violent films before, of course; Westerns and war pictures. Ths is a script about people who have outlived their time, who have anachronisms. I accepted it on those terms.

When we were actually shooting, we were all repulsed at times. There were nights when we’d finish shooting and I’d say, My God, my God! But I was always back the next morning, because I sincerely believed we were achieving something.

What about the rumors, one critic asked, that there was a near-mutiny on the set in reaction to Peckinpah’s overkill?

No mutiny, Peckinpah said.

Another critic asked: Don’t you think you may have occasionally passed over that thin line between what an audience is willing to accept, and what it isn’t? We felt that when the general slits the kid’s throat, that was the point beyond which we really had difficulty...

I know what you mean, Peckinpah said. There is a very, very thin line, and I think we operated as close to it as we dared. We hope that, for most audience, we stayed on this side of the line. But I am willing to admit that we may have passed over it at some point. We feel the violence is a catharsis, a release, but sometimes the line is hard to find.

To tell you the truth, Peckinpah added after a short pause, I really cannot stand to see the film myself anymore. It is too much an emotional thing. I saw it last night, but I do not want to see it again for perhaps five years.

– Sam Peckinpah: Dying is not fun and games, by Roger Ebert, June 1969.

Article here

Michael Winterbottom: On Adapting Jim Thompson

The Killer Inside Me (Directed by Michael Winterbottom)

The pulp writer Jim Thompson, wrote over 30 novels and is  known for writing some of the bleakest noir ever put to page. Stephen King, who claims Thompson among his favorite authors, wrote with a kind of wonder of Thompson’s desolate stories. “There are three brave lets” in Thompson’s writing, King explained in the introduction to Thompson’s Now and On Earth: “he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.” 

The director Stephen Frears, who adapted Jim Thompson’s The Grifters for film, was struck by the relationship between Thompson’s work and certain aspects of classical Greek tragedy. Thompson’s uncompromising noir informs and feeds back into these tragic aspects to create a vision of a hell in earth; an a stark but recognizable—vision of present day life. This relationship is particularly evident in Thompson’s 1952 masterpiece The Killer Inside Me.

Killer Inside owes much to traditional noir tropes. The principle character, small-town sheriff Lou Ford, is obsessed with setting right a wrong. His brother, he believes, was killed by a corrupt local industrialist. Ford devises a strategy to bring the man down, beyond the law, by setting his son up with a prostitute. Ford however falls in love with the woman himself, but continues with the scheme: to murder both the prostitute and the son and make it look like a murder-suicide. The plan falls apart in the best noir tradition, leading Ford to kill further to cover up his initial crime. The crimes become increasingly savage as Ford’s recklessness grows, but Ford continues to remain convinced right until the end that he’s in control of events and can, ultimately, not face the consequences. By the novel’s end, Ford is in jail and reflecting, in his typically calculated manner, on his crimes, his reasons, and his own state of mind.

British director Michael Winterbottom’s faithful recent adaptation divided critics and audiences. Here he discusses his approach to the book and adaptation in general.

Q: Your method of adapting novels—Tristram Shandy, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge—is not to be strictly faithful to the story or methodology of the source text. How did that play out here?

A: Well, it was the opposite, really. When I read the book, I thought that you could almost film it. The book tells its story through dialogue. Jim Thompson is a brilliant dialogue writer and plotter. And then I approached the people who had the rights, and they already had a version of the screenplay which they’d sent me. In terms of individual scenes, it was very close to the book anyway, but the order had been changed. So my approach was to go back to the original story of the book and really keep the film as accurate and as faithful to the text as possible.

Q: What themes in the novel captivated you, and which of your own did you want to incorporate?

A: I think one of the great things about the book is the pace of the narrative. Within a few pages, the story’s being set up. Lou’s gone to meet Joyce Lakeland, there’s been a moment of violence and sex, and really from that point on, Thompson keeps the story moving so new things are constantly happening. The story unfolds incredibly fast and it was that, I think, that made me feel it would be kind of interesting to make into a film.

Q: The Killer Inside Me is structured as a first-person narrative told by a deranged personality. Was there something about the psychology of Lou Ford that especially intrigued you?

A: Obviously, if you read a book and want to make it into a film, there have to be lots of things you like about it. There’s something about the way Lou narrates his own story that makes you feel sort of close to him, and makes you feel as well that’s something going to happen to redeem him. And what’s brilliant about the way Jim Thompson tells the story is you’re constantly feeling that you’re going to come to this moment of knowledge—and then the book ends! [Laughs] There’s a great story in the middle of the [narrative] that Lou Ford tells. He’s read somewhere that there was a guy who was happily married, who had a wife and a couple of children, and then he got a girlfriend in the neighboring town, and he’s happy with the girlfriend. And one day they discover the girlfriend had been killed and that the wife and children had been killed as well. And as he’s telling the story, he wonders, Why does someone do that? People do these things for no apparent reason, without any explanation. Newspapers are still full of stories like that, about people who seem to live normal lives, love their children and wives, and then they decide to destroy everything, to tear everything up. Lou is that sort of character. The people who he kills are quite close to him. A lot of people in the story love him, a lot of people love him despite the fact that he’s been violent towards them. So there’s a sense of the kind of waste that violence creates, which [anchors] the movie, rather than the psychology of why he does it. There are psychological explanations in the book, but it’s more the sense of that pointlessness and waste, and the tenderness of the situation that attracted me.

Q: A lot of readers of Thompson’s novels have seen aspects of Greek tragedy at play in his work.

A: For me, it’s Shakespearean as well. There’s a sense of this person who people do love, he does have this ability to inspire trust and faith. And yet, whether because of what happened in his childhood or what his father did to him, he feels worthless in a sense. When he’s destroying other people, he’s trying to destroy himself. He feels like he’s not worthy of being happy or being loved. So you have all this kind of stuff going on. Obviously, there’s a big play on fathers in the novel: the relation- ship between Lou and his father, but also between Lou and Sheriff Bob Maples, who’s a sort of alternative father figure, and between Chester Conway and Elmer Conway, who’s another bad father. There’s a pattern of relationships with fathers and surrogate fathers that runs through it. So it’s an incredibly rich book, you know, it’s not necessarily a naturalistic novel. But it’s full of human emotions.

Q: I’m just wondering if Thompson’s connections to cinema interested you at all.

A: In terms of his own writing?

Q: Yeah, his writing for Kubrick, for instance.

A: That would not be a reason for me to make a film of this book. The reason is because it’s a great book and when I read it, I felt it would be a really interesting film to make, and completely different from the films I normally write. In the end, when you choose a film, it’s for that reason. The material is interesting. It’s not that surprising that Jim Thompson had a connection to cinema because he’s brilliant at dialogue, he’s brilliant at stories, and the worlds he writes about in his novels seem like worlds that would be interesting for cinema. I think with Kubrick—I’m not sure what kind of credits he got on the two collaborations [The Killing and Paths of Glory]—I think he got an “additional dialogue” credit on one. I was talking to his daughter, who came onto the set, and she was saying that, you know, he did a lot more work on it than that. So that’s kind of fascinating, but it wasn’t the reason for making the film, obviously...

Q: In general, you invoke genre—road movies, for example—without retaining all the expected codes. Did you see yourself trying to steer clear of certain noir conventions with this film?

A: Only in the sense that from the beginning we didn’t want to do a pastiche of the 1950s. We didn’t want to shoot it in a particular style because of genre or the content of the story. So it’s not a particularly noir-looking film. Jim Thompson is a great writer, but he’s a very simple, direct writer. He’s very focused on the story and the character and what’s happening and why are they doing that. Really, he’s writing very lean and kind of spare. So it was trying to be true to that more than [make it] look or feel like a noir fifties’ film. So in that sense, perhaps, we got away from generic convention, I’m not sure. But basically, it’s okay, this is how the book works, and [we said] let’s find an approach to the film that will be in keeping with that...

Q: In the past, when you’ve made period dramas like Jude or The Claim, you always manage to retain a very contemporary language and feel to the way you dramatize things. Is that something you’ve continued here, with The Killer Inside Me?

A: Well, I think Jim Thompson’s stories are actually very contemporary, and one of the things is that it’s someone writing in the early fifties about small-town Midwest America, talking about the sex and violence that goes on behind closed doors. The dialogue we’re using in the film is very much taken from the book. Even so, it feels very contemporary because when you read the novel, it’s very fresh. You really don’t feel you’re reading a creaky old period piece.

– Excerpted from Michael Winterbottom. Interviews. Edited by Damon Smith, 2009.

John Cassavetes: On Writing ‘Husbands’

Husbands (Directed by John Cassavetes)

In 1970s Husbands the film's opening subtitle describes it as a "comedy about life, death, and freedom," and these are indeed the film's principal themes. Shaken by the loss of a close friend, three friends embark on a persistently raucous study of what may have been and what might come next. Their introspection results in a profound sense of self-evaluation, but the men are primarily living for the moment as they confront unpleasant truths about themselves, their mortality, and their relationships.

Husbands is an emotional experience, one that is difficult to pin down or easily digest. Filmed and acted with a gruelling directness, with certain sequences proceeding without narrative progression and little character revelation. It emanates unceasing activity and conversation, and Cassavetes' probing camera, which remains subjective and observational, captures with an unrestrained, almost random reality. “ Like life, it’s also very slow and depressing in areas,” writes Tom Charity. “The one thing it’s not is a shorthand film.” Private macho bravado seeps into the public realm, signifying a self-centeredness and recklessness regardless of the context. The men's interactions with women are clumsy, inarticulate. Cassavetes continued to edit the picture seemingly searching for a satisfactory version. Despite its brilliant exuberance, humour, despair, darkness and indulgences, or perhaps because of it, the final result was a critical and commercial failure.

Perhaps Geoff Andrew comes closest to best describing the great achievement of Husbands:

“But Cassavetes no more condoned the men’s boozily boisterous behaviour than he condemned it. He wasn’t interested in judging his characters as they embark on their binge, first in New York, then in London, following a friend’s funeral. Rather, his concern was always to represent human behaviour, in all its flawed, self-contradictory perversity, as honestly as he could. And if that meant showing a trio of middle-aged New York commuters being irresponsible, selfish, petulant, boorish, even boringly repetitive at times, so be it. The truth isn’t always attractive.

“The truth is fascinating, however, and it’s important. More to the point here, it’s also rare in American cinema, since film has usually been primarily regarded – by the Hollywood studios, at any rate – not as art but as a) a means of making money, and b) a source of entertainment, pure and simple. So endings should be clear, closed and happy, characters should be easily categorisable as good or bad, and stories should adhere to conventions already known to be popular.

“Husbands is a marvellous example of his methods. With its ultra-naturalistic performances, its simple, meandering narrative (‘story’ is far too strong a word for what happens) and its long takes, it makes for a warts-and-all study of male pride, self-pity, frustration and friendship that is at once properly serious and sharply funny.

“It’s the kind of brave, devil-may-care film that shows up the artistic timidity – and, indeed, the dishonesty (be it emotional, social, political or psychological) – of so much mainstream cinema. Small wonder Cassavetes remains one of the most important influences on filmmakers keen to preserve their independence. He understood, and repeatedly proved, that one didn’t have to tell lies in order to be entertaining. After all, what could be more interesting than life as it’s lived by recognisably real human beings?”

In the following excerpts John Cassavetes discusses his approach to writing a screenplay, how it relates to his life and how artistic freedom determines the path the script takes.

Before Husbands was a screenplay, I must have done about 400 pages of notes. I thought about it for several years. Then there was a screenplay. My first draft was abominable – all the pitfalls of that first-told tale – a slick farce predicated on men running away from their wives to the lure of the will. There are certain catchphrases that people are attracted to made famous by Time magazine, such as ‘Swinging London’ – and there’s always someone standing around behind you who says, ‘That sounds funny,’ but when you look into the eyes of two artists who want the best for themselves and want to be associated with something that has some meaning that’s not good enough. The characters were empty. During the second half of 1968, Ben, Peter and I passed dozens of revisions of the script around everywhere we went. From Rome [where most of the interiors of Machine Gun McCain were filmed] we had been to Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco [where the exteriors for Machine Gun McCain were filmed], Los Angeles and back to New York [where Gazzara lived and Cassavetes was supervising the release of Faces]. We had followed each other around using every spare moment we could find to assess the values of three men – three New Yorkers with jobs, who had passed the plateau of youth, who were married and happy and living in Port Washington, Long Island, the commuters’ paradise. That’s as far as we got in one year. Long conversations until five o’clock in the morning. Back and forth the story went.

The characters in Husbands are quite different from those in Faces. I mean Faces was about people who were just getting by. These guys don’t want to just get by in life. They want to live. I don’t really know what Husbands is about at this point. You could say it’s about three married guys who want something for themselves. They don’t know what they want, but they get scared when their best friend dies. Or you could say it is about three men that are in search of love and don’t know how to attain it. Or you could say it is about a person of sentiment. Every scene in the picture will be our opinions about sentiment. I try to talk to the actors and try to find out what I really think about sentiment. It may turn harsh or bitter; but I can allow anything as long as I know we are honest. We worked with no story, basically no story except what I mentioned, and worked for a year to try to solve it and to gain, to get something out of it.

When you make a film whose interest is to take an extremely difficult subject, deal with it in depth and see if you can find something in yourself, and if other people can find other things within themselves that they will be able to develop in their personal life, it’s great. After being an actor for a few years you really don’t care about money, fame or glory anymore; those things are good, but you need something more.

Cassavetes’ elusiveness about the subject of his film was neither modesty nor coyness. He believed that to lock himself into a predetermined story or a preconceived conception of his characters’ identities was too limiting. To play a ‘character’ in a ‘narrative’ was to reduce the sliding, shifting complexity of life to cartoon clichés.

Each moment was found as we went along – not off the cuff, not without reason – but without a preconceived notion that forbids people from behaving like people and tells a ‘story’ that is predictable – and untrue. I hate knowing my theme and my story before I really start. I like to discover it as I work. In Husbands the off-the-set relationship between Gazzara, Falk and myself determined a lot of the scenes we created as we went along. It was a process of discovering the story and the theme. When you know in advance what the story is going to be, it gets boring really fast. At one point we decided that we weren’t even going to shoot in London; Peter broke into laughter and so did I. What a ter- rific thrill to tell the truth – to not protect some stupid idea that doesn’t work. From then on, it didn’t matter if it was London, Paris, Hamburg – or Duluth!

I believe that if an actor creates a character out of his emotions and experiences, he should do with that character what he wants. If what he is doing comes out of that, then it has to be meaningful. If Peter and Ben and I have three characters, why should a director come in and impose a fourth will? If the feelings are true and the relationship is pure, the story will come out of that. If you don’t have a script, you don’t have a commitment to just saying lines. If you don’t have a script, then you take the essence of what you really feel and say that. You can behave more as yourself than you would ordinarily with someone else’s lines. Most directors make a big mystery of their work; they tell you about your character and your responsibility to the overall thing. Bullshit. With people like Ben and Peter you don’t give directions. You give freedom and ideas.

An actor can’t suddenly deny or reject a part of himself under the pretext of playing a particular character, even if that’s what he would like to do. You can’t ask someone to forget themselves and become another person. If you were asked to play Napoleon in a picture, for example, you can’t really have his emotions and thoughts, only yours. You could never actually be Napoleon, only yourself playing him. I’ve never wanted to play a role. Honestly, I never have! That indicates to me that you want to step forward and show someone something, and that terrifies me, really. What you want to do is be invisible as that character, so that there’s no pressure on you worrying about the outside world.

You made a role yours not by ‘acting’, but by believing in it, by adding something of yourself to it, by playing it personally.

I get bored seeing two people that are supposed to be in love, who kiss, screw or whatever they do. I get bored by that because they’re only supposed to do those things. I don’t really believe that they’re doing that, and I couldn’t care less. It always struck me when I used to go see pictures as a kid at Times Square that when it came to the love scenes everybody used to boo. But once in a while you’d see a picture like Red Shoes, and no matter how tough the audience was, they would root for the love story because these people didn’t pretend to be in love with each other – they were in love with each other.

All the people I meet make up my films. I make movies not about somebody else’s, but my life!
But the deepest connection between the actor and the character is their shared sense that it is critical to seize the moment and not let life pass you by.

Some people can’t wait. That’s the only reason I’m attracted to people. Because we don’t want to let the moments go by. Those are the ones I am attracted to. We might not be here tomorrow. I make every picture like it’s the last day of my life. You got anything to say, you put it in there now. Don’t hold back. What are you waiting for?

I make my films out of my problems. You know, I have problems, you have problems. You won’t admit it. I will admit it because I’m an artist. My job is to put emotions out on the surface. Not to report on other people’s emotions, but to put your own emotions out on the surface. My brother had died at thirty and I loved him and my life changed. That’s all. Simple as that. It was over so quickly, and I just had no room in my life. When someone dies that young there is no time to say good- bye. I was young and working and everything else and I couldn’t do anything except stagger around for a while, then try to reevaluate where I was. So I made a picture. I didn’t make a picture about my dead brother; I made a picture that was affected by the death of a best friend and these three men. I dedicated Husbands to him. You ask me why I do these things? I don’t know why I do them. I hope it means something to certain people that have suffered loss and don’t know how to express it.

– Excerpts from Raymond Carney: Cassavetes on Cassavetes.

Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later – Part Two

All discussions of Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise begin with the miracle of its making. Named at Cannes as the greatest French film of all time, costing more than any French film before it, Les Enfants du Paradis was shot in Paris and Nice during the Nazi occupation and released in 1945. Its sets sometimes had to be moved between the two cities. Its designer and composer, Jews sought by the Nazis, worked from hiding. Carne was forced to hire pro-Nazi collaborators as extras; they did not suspect they were working next to resistance fighters. The Nazis banned all films over about 90 minutes in length, so Carne simply made two films, confident he could show them together after the war was over. The film opened in Paris right after the liberation, and ran for 54 weeks. It is said to play somewhere in Paris every day.

That this film, wicked, worldly, flamboyant, set in Paris in 1828, could have been imagined under those circumstances is astonishing. That the production, with all of its costumes, carriages, theaters, mansions, crowded streets and rude rooming houses, could have been mounted at that time seems logistically impossible (It is said, wrote Pauline Kael, that the starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed). Carne was the leading French director of the decade 1935-1945, but to make this ambitious costume film during wartime required more than clout; it required reckless courage.

– Roger Ebert

The following is the second part from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and the author of the 1998 book The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon. Translation by Bona Flecchia and Alexandre Mabilon.

BS: Forty-five years after its original release, Children of Paradise is still playing in Paris and New York. People say the film is timeless and tireless. Why do you think this is the case?

MC: I have no idea. I can’t pretend I know. When we made the film, we thought it was an important one. It was very long, expensive, with lots of sets and characters, so we knew it would stand out that year, if only because of the production values. We looked at the rushes; we were satisfied with them. But I didn’t like to talk about my films anymore, because I’d had so much fun with Drôle de drame, but when it was released, it received a violently negative critique. People didn’t laugh, while I had enjoyed making it so much.

BS: People, both critics and general audiences, often speak of a sense of richness in Children of Paradise, and of how the film communicates an intense, complex feeling, like life itself. Could you explain how you created that feeling?

MC: First of all, it has to do with the number of characters. It’s a pretty straightforward story. Three men are in love with the same woman in different ways . . . Maybe there are four of them. Anyway, there’s the mime, Frédérick Lemaître, and the count. The important ones are three, at least. Lacenaire loves her as well, in his own way. And she loves each one of them too. I mean . . . There’s a critic who tried to explain it, created a metaphor. He said this story is like a photo developer that would react differently to four different chemicals being dropped into different baths. It’s kind of like that, and that’s what makes for its richness and length. It’s not two men loving the same woman, or two women loving the same man. It’s a lot more complicated than that. The first one, the mime, is shy. The second one is a lady-killer who can’t love and who will discover true love. Lacenaire is the intelligent one who wants to impress her. He finds her very intelligent. She’s not very well educated, but she certainly is intelligent. The count wants to appear with a beautiful lady at his side. He begins to love her when he feels her slipping away. So this plot makes for a complex film. Especially when you consider all the supporting roles. When you have to choose forty, forty-two, fifty-three, or however many people are necessary, you say to yourself, “I can’t make any mistakes.” Because you’re like the conductor—and this is the same for the crew—who has to audition everyone in order to form his orchestra.

BS: Do you lose sleep over picking out your crew?

MC: Of course. When you’re shooting, you’re a bundle of nerves. I am not the same man. I mean, I’m less nervous now because I’m older, but when you think of the amount of pressure you’re under . . . It’s not that I’m proud or cocky, but beforehand, I never fully realize what my expectations of the crew are. When I shot Drôle de drame, all I had made was a little film that was a study in style, and I wasn’t afraid of asking [Louis] Jouvet, [Françoise] Rosay, Michel Simon, Barrault. It was a fantastic crew for a quasi-beginner. I asked them to work with me without thinking about it. Port of Shadows was the same. [Jean] Gabin is the one who wanted me to make it; he wanted to do a movie with me.

BS: What has happened to French cinema since?

MC: I wouldn’t know. When I’m on a television show abroad, somebody inevitably asks me, “Marcel Carné, you belonged to the golden age of French cinema . . .” and so on. It saddens me. And unfortunately, I can’t say they’re wrong. Thanks to the war, we had a certain advantage, since the cinema industry was in full swing. So we could more readily get money to make movies. Nowadays, it’s harder. You have to be a businessman.

BS: How do you feel, from where you’re standing, about the aversion of critics in the so-called New Wave to the cinéma de qualité and the studio system?

MC: It could quite simply be called ambition. To say, “Fine, here I go.” That’s what it is. What was serious was when critics followed suit. But then they became afraid of appearing old-fashioned by defending the cinéma de papa, as we call it. And they made fun of its French quality, which is there. They didn’t do anything—nothing important, anyway. They never made a Carnival in Flanders, a Grand Illusion, or a Children of Paradise, forgive my saying so. They made “intimate” films with some kind of elevator music—like Truffaut. I’m not criticizing Truffaut, but one day we inaugurated a movie theater in the suburbs where there were two theaters: a Truffaut Theater and a Carné Theater. And we went up on the stage together. Truffaut had dragged my name through the mud, mind you, but I was very honored to have my name together with Truffaut’s. I’m not sure he felt the same way. He said so many nasty things about me . . . Anyway, he had no comment, which was easy to do after ten years. He finished his speech by saying, “I’ve made twenty-three movies, and I’d give them all up to have done Children of Paradise.” What could I say after that? Nothing. He said it in front of three or four hundred people, but it was never written down . . . I am not upset with him anymore. At that time, if I was in a studio or whatever, and Mr. Godard came in, he said nothing to me, not even hello. It’s almost as if he turned his back on me. I mean, I didn’t like many of his movies, but I found some things interesting once in a while, like in Weekend and Pierrot le fou. Those movies were quite sassy. Well, sassy may be a bit slangy, so let’s say they were bold. When they said, “At least we can shoot on location, something the old filmmakers couldn’t do”—they shot on location, fine, but they owe that to the talents of the photochemists and engineers, not to their own. Negatives now are sensitive even to the light of small fixtures. Where we needed huge ones that weighed twenty to thirty pounds, they have little ones the size of lightbulbs. The same can be said about sound. When I started, we had a truck on the set with a whole system and three technicians, including a boom guy who made shadows on the walls of the set. If they didn’t have the photosensitivity of the new negative, if they didn’t have engineers, and if they had kept the cameras and projectors we used to have, they could have never shot their films on location. It wasn’t easy. I remember I wanted to shoot I forget which film at Paul-Louis Veller’s palace in the Marais. He said, “No way. You’re a good friend, and if you want to organize a dinner for the release, I’ll be glad to help you. But I’ll never let you put your equipment on my antique wooden floor. Even if you were my own son, I would not allow it.”

BS: In Children of Paradise, which character do you identify with the most, in terms of your own sensibility; which one do you admire?

MC: You can’t admire them. They’re all different. I admire Barrault’s sensibility, Brasseur’s ease of speech, and the breeding of the count. Never has an actor seemed so noble as [Louis] Salou. He had so much class . . . I can’t say. The one I feel most akin to is Barrault/Deburau. When all is said and done, I am a big sentimentalist, even if I don’t seem that way. In terms of my private and intimate life, I’m very vulnerable.

MC: No! I don’t think so. There are . . . let me think . . . other unhappy lovers. I don’t know. They did a biography on Molière. He was unlucky in love. What’s funny is that all great men had wives who cheated on them, almost all of them. Even kings—which was dangerous for the one who cheated, but it’s a fact . . . I don’t think so. It may be that, because he communicates more, he is more expressive through his face and gestures than the others.

BS: Is that side of Deburau’s character, his using images as a means of expression, something you feel close to?

MC: Maybe, maybe. Pantomime was not my forte, at least not consciously. But there were some things I showed Jean-Louis by miming them. It wasn’t easy to shoot.

BS: We spoke about the shooting of Children as a series of successes, with very few problems. Didn’t you have any difficulties or friction during the shoot.

MC: No friction at all. When we shot the carnival scene, though, something horrible happened for which I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive myself . . . We shot the carnival scene, and the assistant director told me there were two guys asking for one of the extras in the office. “Do they look French?” I asked. “Yes, they have Nice accents. The extra’s wife is very sick, and she wants to see her husband before she dies.” You understand, we were living in fear back then, so I asked him what they looked like. “They look French. They don’t look like Gestapo . . .” We still didn’t know then. We learned all those things a little at a time. I said, “Did they look at the list of those present?” All the extras usually sign in when they get in, so if someone gets here late or goes for a walk . . . He said no. I said, “Tell them he’s not here.” We continued to shoot, and he came back, saying, “Mr. Carné, I am sorry to insist, but the wife got hit by a tram and had both her legs cut off. She’s going to die without seeing her husband unless he’s at the hospital in one hour.” I wasn’t sure what to do. I had given them an answer, so I sent the assistant director to get the extra. They went into the office, and the assistant director came back five minutes later, haggard. It was two Gestapo agents. I never forgave myself for that.

Remember I told you about a leader of the Resistance in my crew? That was him. I grabbed him and said, “How could you not tell they were Gestapo? They have suits and a certain look. Even I can recognize them. How could you, a leader of the Resistance, not be able to tell?” He told me I couldn’t have told either. They had Nice accents; they looked French. The Gestapo was very influential in Nice.

BS: During the shoot, you had people working clandestinely on the film.

MC: We had [Alexandre] Trauner and [Joseph] Kosma . . . Trauner did the models of the sets, not the sets themselves, for Les visiteurs du soir, and I had to go and get them past Nice, in a faraway town. And there was [Georges] Wakhevitch for Les visiteurs du soir, and [Léon] Barsacq for Children, who accepted the work. It was brave because I risked going to the camps, whereas Prévert, who didn’t choose the crew, didn’t. It was my responsibility. Once, I went over there to see the models, and Trauner wanted to come to Nice to see how the set of the castle had turned out. Prévert talked him out of it and told me he’d almost decked him. After that, he hid in a cabin in the middle of the forest. Kosma was in a little hotel hidden in the trees right outside Cannes. He gave me the lyrics for two songs for Les visiteurs, and he thanked me, the guy who gave him work, by saying that he was the one who had composed the music for Les visiteurs, when it was actually Maurice Thiriet. He did the hunt, the tournament, the entire orchestration. Kosma asked for the rights to it in court and lost. They both did their part. He only gave me two pages. After that, Trauner always tried to brush me aside, almost pretending he was the filmmaker. So I let it go for a while, but finally I told everyone the truth. Furthermore, those two are far from having worked on all my movies. Same with Schüfftan, who made three films with me, out of twenty-three. It’s not many.

BS: What dedication do you want to put on the film when it goes to home video and gets viewed by the entire world?

MC: What I’d do . . . I’ll tell you what moves me the most. When they stop me in the street, if they recognize me, they never tell me I am really talented or that my films are great. They always, always say: “Thank you for the joy you have given me.” So I hope that this disc will provide them with equal joy. It doesn’t move me because I am a very sensitive person but because it makes me happy to hear it. I’ll always remember the first time I went into a theater to see people’s reactions to Hôtel du Nord. I saw them laughing—everybody was laughing. And it made me happy.

For the first part of this interview see here.

– Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later. For further resources on Marcel Carné and Children of Paradise, visit www.marcel-carne.com.

Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later – Part One

A major work in world cinema, Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise) is Marcel Carné's best-known and most-loved film. From the moment a stage curtain opens to reveal the entire expanse of an 1820s Paris boulevard's clutter, disarray, the reciprocity between art and life is evident. Its enduring appeal stems less from individual talents and personalities (although Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Pierre Brasseur were never better) and more from the film's intense ethos of invention and quality, Carné's poised compositional sense, and, most importantly, the film's "warmth and kindness." Carné's theatricalized melodramatic universe, essentially a film about actors performing, blends many performance genres – tragedy, Shakespeare, pantomime – while retaining Poetic Realism's combination of pessimism and romanticism. As Pauline Kael acknowledged, this is a cinema poetry "about the nature and forms of love - sacred and profane, unselfish and possessive." 

The film was completed after two years of delayed production at the Victorine studios in Nice. The building needs for the Boulevard du Crime alone were astonishing, as this is where the majority of the external action occurs. Three months were spent removing 800 cubic metres of earth and replacing it with 35 tonnes of scaffolding. The fifty facades of theatres and other structures required 350 tonnes of plaster and 500 square metres of glass. When Carné learned of the Allies' Normandy invasion in May 1944, he purposefully held down the post-production process. He intuitively recognised that Les enfants du paradis, rather than being the final film of the Occupation, could be the first film of the Liberation. Such a method was appropriate for a film that emphasised the individual's freedom in the face of social constraints: upon its premiere in March 1945, the film became a major economic success, screening in Paris for nearly a year and grossing 41 million francs. According to Jill Forbes, the film's primary significance was its contribution to a nationalist effort, as filmmakers, Vichy sympathisers, and French patriots all desired "to beat the Americans at their own game by producing a stunning film that was distinctively French." If Les enfants du paradis was an overt attempt to rehabilitate the French film industry, it was also a covert attempt to utilise film to confront the horrors of the Occupation. It exemplifies a sort of 'symbolic resistance' in which an occupied populace reclaims its self-respect through "uplifting displays of national narcissism and self-esteem." Indeed, what is particularly remarkable is how Carné and Prévert managed to cloak an allegory of French resistance against German occupation. The picture threw a pall over the careers of everyone involved - unlike Carné, few of its cast members ever achieved such heights again. Nonetheless, its audacious sexual exploration, subversive cultural strategy, and proto-postmodernist blending of high and low art earn it a position in cinema's pantheon.

The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and the author of the 1998 book The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon. Translation by Bona Flecchia and Alexandre Mabilon.

Brian Stonehill: What are your fondest memories of the making of Children of Paradise?

Marcel Carné: I shot the film during World War II. I was very bold then, and thinking about it now, it was madness to make such a film in a country lacking the bare necessities. Anyway, I started working on Children of Paradise, and the producer told me that, given the enormous success of Les visiteurs du soir—it had been a big hit at the box office—he now wanted a great film with great impact. It’s rare for a producer to come to a director with such a proposal, so of course I began to think. [Jacques Prévert and I] were living near Nice then, and one day, walking along the promenade des Anglais, scouring for ideas, we ran into Jean-Louis Barrault. I hadn’t seen him since the war began, and we went for a drink. Naturally, we talked nonstop about the theater, and he started to tell us about what had happened to the mime [Jean-Gaspard] Deburau. The artist was at the height of his fame—not that he was world-renowned, because at the time news didn’t travel so fast, but he was very famous in Paris and even in the French provinces. He was walking arm in arm with his mistress—he was wealthy then—when a drunkard called out to him and insulted the woman profusely, calling her a whore and all sorts of names. Seeing that the man was drunk, Deburau pushed him aside. The man, with that insistence peculiar to drunkards, came back at him. Finally, Deburau, exasperated, hit the man with his cane and, by some fluke, killed him. So he was tried, and it was a very public trial. But the reason we were so taken by the story, and why we would have liked to do it, was that the whole of Paris attended the trial only to hear the mime speak, to know what his voice sounded like. We thought it was a fantastic idea. We went back to our country retreat, near Nice, and started thinking. We soon realized that it wasn’t a good idea for a movie, that if we chose Barrault to play the part of Deburau, the audience would already be familiar with his voice. There was no suspense. And on the other hand, if we chose some unknown actor, people would have mocked his voice. So we gave up the idea . . . Well, actually, Prévert wanted to give up, but I said no, because I felt that the period in question—the boulevard du Crime, the theater—and a film paying tribute to it sounded good to me. So I went to the great Musée Carnavalet in Paris, to the prints department, sure that I would bring back some stuff. I also wanted to go to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to a little bookstore I knew about a hundred yards from here, and to another one right behind it, to look for books about that period and its theater. I went to the Carnavalet and had copies of two hundred prints made. I found three or four books about the theater, and in one of those I found out that the upper balcony was called “Paradise.”

BS: And that wasn’t a common expression at the time.

MC: Not common at all. Nobody used it. Now people call it the henhouse, in common terms . . . So we played around with words. There was a toy store that no longer exists, on the rue Saint-Honoré, close to the Madeleine. It was called the Paradise of Children. So we called the film Children of Paradise, but it can bear a double meaning. The children could be the dead, so they are in heaven/paradise, or they could be the actors who play those characters. Also, the actors can be the children of the audience up there in Paradise.

BS: Was the Grand Théâtre actually directly facing the Théâtre des Funambules, the way it is [in the film]?

MC: No, it’s not facing it, it’s next to it. If you look at the boulevard du Crime, the Funambules is farther down, and the Grand Théâtre is on the left. Everything is on the left. There’s nothing on the right except panels of buildings for background shots. But we couldn’t build anything too spectacular, since the set was eighty to a hundred yards long . . . So we worked, we discussed the actors we could use. The great thing about Jacques was that we had the same taste when it came to actors. We liked and hated—well, “hated” may be a bit much, but we liked and disliked the same ones. And that was always the case. There was never a time when I mentioned using an actor and he’d say no because he didn’t like him or her.

So we started working suddenly and furiously. We realized that the film was going to be very long. See, people said that the performers on the boulevard du Crime were geniuses. We had to show that. It’s too easy to say that Mr. So-and-so is a genius. You have to express that he was a genius, was well respected, brilliant, and so on. You have to show it somehow, and that takes up reel time. French movies are generally about an hour and forty minutes long. We realized we had an additional twenty to thirty minutes of footage. People said that there was too much dialogue, although thirty-seven minutes of the film is pantomime. Anyway, we had to add those thirty-seven minutes to the hour and forty minutes. I said I didn’t want that responsibility. The producer was the director of the Studios de la Victorine in Nice. So I went down to Nice to see the producer. I told him everything was going well, that we were happy, and he was enthusiastic about the subject we’d chosen. Then I told him, “There’s a small problem, André [Paulvé]. The film is going to be very long.” He said, “What do you mean by very long?” I replied, “It’s going to be two hours and ten or fifteen minutes.” Of course, he replied, “But that’s going to cost a lot more money. And I’m not going to have any returns.” We thought about it, and he said to me, “Do you want to do it in two parts? Because I could manage that.” Two hours and fifteen minutes does not amount to two parts, so I said, “Listen, I can’t agree to make two parts all by myself. I’m going back to the country to see Prévert.” I had to take a tiny little train. It took three or four hours to travel six or seven miles. It was ridiculous. Jacques and I thought about it, and he finally said, “Yes, we can do it.” I went back down to Nice; the phone didn’t work, or at least not very well, so I had to go back down to tell André whether or not I accepted. I did, on the condition that in Paris, at least at first, they would project both parts in the same movie theater.

When we showed the film to Gaumont, which ended up becoming the final distributor, I said, “This is what the first producer promised me.” They told me they were under no obligation to honor the original producer’s commitment and asked me if I had any documents. I told them that I didn’t, that I simply trusted the producer’s word. We went through what seemed the longest negotiation. They eventually agreed. So we doubled the ticket price. I also asked them, “When you show the three-hour-and-ten-minute film, if I’m right, you’ll show it at 2:00, 5:30, and 9:00.” They said, “Yes.” So I went on, “I’d like for people to be able to buy tickets from the box office at 9:00 p.m.” They said, “That’s impossible—we’ll need one more person.” I said, “Come on, don’t make me laugh.” “Even worse, we’ll need two, since there are two theaters.” But I got them to agree because I had noticed that movies were doing very well during the war. We had no entertainment—no more television, no restaurants. The only thing left was the performing arts. That’s why cinema suddenly took off. French people discovered dance, classical music; they went to concerts and plays . . . I told the producers to do this: we’d sell the tickets at eighty francs apiece, which was double the normal price, and if, at the end of two weeks, revenues were lower, then they could do what they wanted. Revenues didn’t decrease for forty-five weeks. So the film stayed in its original cut.

I don’t know what it’s like in New York, in America, but I had assembled two versions of the movie: one where the film ran all at once, and another where it ran in two parts. The two-parter was shown over two different weeks, so we ran the opening score and a synopsis of what had happened in the first part. When it ran all at once, we didn’t need the synopsis. There was a five-minute intermission, and people would have a beer and come back into the theater, and it would start with Part Two. Pathé always ran the film in two parts, with the synopsis, even if they showed the whole thing at once. The audience got a bit upset, booed a little when they saw the synopsis, but I was never able to get them to show the single-segment version.

BS: What was it like to shoot during the occupation?

MC: It was a bit troublesome. We met with a lot of obstacles when we shot Les visiteurs du soir, in terms of materials—costumes, sets that needed a coat of shiny paint, or staff, which, you know, is made of plaster and horsehair. Horsehair was hard to come by in those days, so we used grass. Furthermore, we needed insulation material to coat the plaster, so we could paint over it before it dried. But we couldn’t find coating material either—it was requisitioned—so we just painted over the wet plaster, and we’d get big splotches forming on it. So we’d stop the take and cover the splotches. Also, we had a shiny paint for the pavement, and the actors would chip it with their shoes. We had ways of fixing it, but it was aggravating. What’s more, people were famished. We’d put fruit on the table, and the fruit was eaten even before we finished setting up. In the end, sadly enough, we had to inject fruit with phenol so the crew wouldn’t eat it. But we still had to put real fruit there for the takes, so the actors could use it. We warned everyone not to eat the fake fruit—it gave them diarrhea—and said that we’d put fresh fruit on the table only when we started shooting. There was a property man who’d set up the fruit plate. We had huge loaves of bread, and once, during a take, a loaf of bread was in my way, so I pushed it away to remove it from the shot, and it felt surprisingly light. I turned it over—there was a hole as big as my hand. The cameramen had eaten the entire inside of the loaf. Things like this happened every day. Satin, silk, velvet, we couldn’t find any of that stuff.

Children of Paradise, miraculously, was much easier. We didn’t need staff so much as wood for the decor, and we found people willing to sell materials—at outrageous prices, of course. A famous English tailor from the Lanvin store was wonderful about providing us with material for Arletty’s dresses. There were people who had materials that you couldn’t find. There were three or four stores of that kind, but those products were reserved for the German officers. Similarly, there were four or five restaurants in Paris for the superior officers, meaning lieutenant colonels and above. A commander was not allowed to go. I went there, even though the prices were exorbitant, but I liked a good meal. I made a pretty good living . . . Well, I did for a while, and then it got a little worse because, while we were shooting the movie, they asked us to make concessions, and I worked for free for six months or so and had to sell my parents’ house.

BS: Did you have any problems with censorship during the making of the film?

MC: Not at all. And yet we feared we might because people had said as much. In Les visiteurs du soir, there was some political innuendo—like the heart beating under the rock represented the heart of France beating under the occupation. The devil was Hitler. All kinds of things like that were interpreted as symbols, while neither Prévert nor myself had even thought about it.

BS: And during Children of Paradise?

MC: We were very scared. Since the film wasn’t finished, we had to be slyer than they were. What was really annoying was when we had scenes with extras, and God knows there were a lot. In the morning, the Germans came in with their own extras, from the unions, and made us use them. So we had to talk them out of it, since we didn’t like them—they were collaborators, you understand. We didn’t want them, so we invented excuses, saying that they didn’t have the right physique for nineteenth-century France. I’d say, “I have nothing against this gentleman, but I can’t use him.” We cheated like that all the time . . . I mean, it wasn’t all that terrible. What was absolutely terrible was that we were closely watched, because of the Resistance.

One day, I asked for one of the production directors—there were two of them—and I was told he would be back in an hour. I said, “He’s not here?” “No, he went to run an errand.” So I said, “Fine.” An hour passed, and then another. So I asked for the production director again—I forget his name. Finally, I found out that he had run off because there were two Gestapo agents waiting for him downstairs in our second-floor studio. We had opened a garage behind the studio to make it into a costume shop, and he fled that way. If, by chance, we hadn’t, the Gestapo would have seized him. I had an assistant director who—he never told me, but I learned later—was one of the leaders of the Resistance. I was upset, but there were obviously a lot of partisans in the crew.

Anyway, I had some problems because Arletty, as we all know, was the mistress of a Gestapo officer. A well-known one, actually, whom I met by chance once—handsome, intelligent, well educated. People despised her because of the affair, and she used to receive threats, like little wooden coffins.

BS: People say that she was even imprisoned at the time of—

MC: She was. Not exactly imprisoned . . . I had a friend who played a page in Les visiteurs du soir and who was good friends with Arletty. When the Resistance began to surface, she hid at this friend’s house. So he called me on the phone, saying, “Marcel, I have to talk to you.” I told him to come by, and he replied, “No, I can’t leave the apartment. I can only meet you at the bistro downstairs.” I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that he would tell me when we met. So I went right away, since he lived close by. He lived on the other side of the Moulin Rouge; it was about a half-mile walk. When I met him, he said, “Arletty’s hiding out in my home.” I said, “That’s a problem. What should we do? Be careful . . . Can’t she go anywhere else?” During that period, there were snipers on the roofs of Montmartre, and they went into homes and searched apartments. Anyway, he left, and two days later, I got a phone call from him saying that Arletty had been arrested in his house. A bunch of partisans knocked at his door. My friend, like an idiot, opened the door, and one of the partisans suddenly said, “Oh, look at the whore over there! Do you see Arletty over there?” So they arrested her, took her away; they came close to shaving her head at the station. They never hit her, but they were very lewd toward her, called her all kinds of nasty names and put her under house arrest outside Paris. There, she had to go see some kind of judge on a daily basis. The judge began to fancy her. Every day she went, and he joked around with her. One morning he said, “How do you feel this morning, Ms. Arletty?” She answered, “Not very ‘resistant.’”

BS: How was it working with her on Children of Paradise?

MC: She was wonderful. She had such stage presence with that double role. You see, Children was infinitely less hassle than Les visiteurs du soir. That’s what you call luck. I had a fantastic crew, because if the crew hadn’t been so solid and tight, since I don’t have a fascist streak in me, nor am I a born leader . . . I mean, you need a center of gravity. You have all the responsibilities, and people have to respond to you. And I never . . . Well, I had some arguments with the technicians, but even those were very mild. I never had serious arguments, and never argued at all with the actors.

BS: How was it working with Jean-Louis Barrault?

MC: He had a lot of input into the pantomime scenes. I chose him because he was a well-known and remarkable mime. [Étienne] Decroux had trained Barrault for a short while too.

BS: Yes, he was his professor—but there was a bit of friction between the two, wasn’t there?

MC: Yes, there was. There was some in the story, but also offstage.

BS: Is there a parallel between the actors’ lives and their roles in the film? Like when we spoke of Arletty earlier, she was also the victim of a judicial blunder.

MC: She clearly was. It was a perfect ending for the first part. It held together pretty well, especially because the first part is a bit longer than the second, and the opposite is usually no good. There are some rules when directing, you know. While shooting, you think the footage is flowing smoothly, but it’s not all usable. I learned about that with [Jacques] Feyder. He said, “See, I showed this scene at length, but when we come to this set, it’ll have to be shorter.”

BS: Did you learn a lot from Feyder?

MC: Not really . . . Well, yes. I did learn how to direct actors. The main influences in my work come especially from German directors, like Fritz Lang, Murnau, Pabst, and Sternberg, mostly for lighting and such. I’m also a fanatic for American cinema. I often watch B movies on television, and there’s always something. I can watch any stupid movie because of the lighting and photography. In France, we can’t work as well with color as we did with black and white. All the colors are very realistic, which is quite strange. If there’s a lamp here, the light has to come from that lamp. [Eugen] Schüfftan showed—as one of his students noticed—a lighted lamp and no light, just a surreal ray above it. That’s what I mean: if you can’t interpret light, then you have amateur photography. It’s so easy today with these new cameras to shoot a beautiful picture.

For the second and third part of this interview see here and here

– Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later. For further resources on Marcel Carné and Children of Paradise, visit www.marcel-carne.com.