Claude Chabrol: The Art of Suspense

Les Bonnes Femmes (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

Born in Paris in 1930, into a comfortable middle-class family, Chabrol was evacuated during the war to the isolated rural village of Sardent in central France. Already a film enthusiast, he set up a makeshift cinema in a barn where he projected German genre films, which he advertised as American ‘super-productions’.

After the Liberation, he returned to Paris, where he studied first pharmacology, then Law, while, at the same time, immersing himself in the thriving cine-club scene. At the Cinematheque Francais, he met Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, and was soon invited to write articles for Cahiers du Cinema. A devoted fan of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, he collaborated on a book about Hitchcock with Rohmer which became the first serious study of ‘the master of suspense’.

Backed with money inherited by his wife, Chabrol wrote, produced and directed Le Beau Serge in 1958, a film often cited as the first New Wave feature. Shot over nine weeks in Sardent, using natural light and real locations, the film portrays a detailed picture of working class life in a bleak provincial village. Reflecting the influence of both Rossellini and Hitchcock, the film plays on the theme of ‘the double’, with it’s two young protagonists, Francois (Jean-Claude Brialy) and Serge (Gerard Blain), mirror opposites locked in a power struggle. Le Beau Serge was well-received, winning an award at the Locarno film festival, and a lump sum of money from the Film Aid board, which enabled Chabrol to start production on his next film before the first had been released to the public.

Les Cousins (1959) again featured actors Gerard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy, as a pair of polar opposites, in a plot that effectively reverses the action of the earlier film. This time Blain plays the outsider, a visitor from the country to Paris, who struggles to find a place in his cousin’s social set, just as Brialy found it difficult to re-enter the closed world of the village in Le Beau Serge. Otherwise, however, it is hard to believe that the two films came from the same director. In contrast to the long takes and lyrical landscapes of his first film, Les Cousins is brash, fast-paced and urbane, with an undercurrent of biting satire.

Les Cousins was another critical and commercial success, earning a Best Film award at the Berlin Film Festival, and becoming France’s fifth largest box office success of 1959. Chabrol’s innovative approach to financing became a blueprint for other filmmakers to follow. Meanwhile, the production company he had set up, AJYM, was now able to support the debut films of Jacques Rivette (Paris Nous Appartient) and Eric Rohmer (Le Signe Du Lion). He also served as a technical advisor for Godard on A Bout De Souffle (1960). By using his success in this way, Chabrol was instrumental in getting the New Wave up and running; which in turn contributed to the press reports of unselfish interdependence and collaboration within the movement.

Chabrol’s next film, A Double Tour (1959), was a first excursion into the thriller genre, and displayed many of the concerns – murder, deception and obsession – that would dominate his later work. For his next film, Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), Chabrol assembled a strong female cast including Bernadette Lafont and Stephane Audran. The film, which follows the lives of four young women working in a shop in Paris, again combined documentary realism with Hitchcockian suspense. On the surface, an easy-going comedy/drama about the love-lives of four working girls, the humorous tone is soon offset by an undertone of tension. Its detailed depiction of Paris and memorably enigmatic ending, make this one of the masterworks of the Nouvelle Vague. 

Chabrol’s subsequent releases, Les Godelureaux (1960), L’Oeil Du Malin (1961), Ophelia (1962), and Landru (1962) failed to recapture his earlier success – until the release of Les Biches in 1968 inaugurated a series of film classics which established Chabrol’s reputation. (newwavefilm.com)

In the following extact, Claude Chabrol discusses his early films with Mark Shivas for an article first published in 1963:

Le Beau Serge (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

Mark Shivas: What do you think of your first film, ‘Le Beau Serge’, these days?

Claude Chabrol: I still quite like the opening, and I quite like the village, La Creuse, where I stayed during the war. I hate the film’s ending.

MS: It was symbolic, though, wasn’t it?

CC: But it didn’t come out very honest. In my mind it corresponded to something quite precise, something one often comes across in the world, but...

MS: What were the things that mainly interested you in the making of the film?

CC: First of all, there was the village which I knew well, and I liked the people there very much. That part of it I enjoyed doing a lot. But at the same time I was learning the technical side, and that lost us lots of time!

MS: Haven't a lot of documentary things about the village been cut out during the montage?

CC: At the outset, the film was at least two and a half hours long. Luckily I showed it to some people and they said, ‘Aië, aië!’ so I cut three quarters of an hour. And in comparison with the original scenario I’d already cut half an hour. So it could have lasted three hours. It was cut mainly in the transitions, and then there were two things which took up a hell of a lot of time. The cutting was done so that the film could be more successful commercially, but I took care to make sure that the topography of the village was respected. So in order to get from one place to another, even if it meant going right across the village, one went right across following the guy or whoever it might be. That took plenty of time!

Then there were things like the baking of bread and scenes in the bistro with people talking among themselves that had nothing to do with the subject of the film but seemed to me to be indispensable at the time. You see, even the tables of the bistro were of very old wood, and so much wine had been spilt on them that they had a unique color. Henri (Decaë) had rendered this color so well that I would have liked to have it in the film. But then everything would have been interminable.

Le Beau Serge (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: Had you ever worked with actors before? Rivette began, for instance, with actors in a short film.

CC: No, I hadn’t done anything interesting. Short films aren’t really the same. But for Le Beau Serge I mainly chose friends and old hams. In using these people, I realized that I liked barnstormers and actors who exaggerated a little. I always encourage them to grimace. If you are afraid you go (makes expression of horror by shrinking back with eyes popping), if you are happy you go (throws up hands in glee)! It’s because of this taste of mine that from time to time actors grimace. The ones I used in Le Beau Serge were good, but not good at that.

MS: Do you prefer to use their natural mannerisms?

CC: Yes, there was the way in which Jean-Claude (Brialy) runs. That was very useful to me. It was when I saw him run like that I made him wear the scarf, because it suited him. Gerard Blain rolls his shoulders like this…when he walks, so I told him to walk faster to accentuate the fact. Little guys with complexes about their size often do things like this to make them look bigger. Hawks must have noticed this too in Hatari! On top of all this rolling motion, he was often supposed to be drunk as well, seeming to lean on one leg first and then the other.

MS: Did you have more technical than acting problems?

CC: I had my main problems with that infernal device they call the camera-blimp! That was dreadful. All the same, there are one or two things I like. In the camera movements there are some that don't serve any purpose: when a man walks across the main square, I put down all the tracking rails I had, maybe four hundred, five hundred meters of rail! I had already intended to do lots of camera movement – travelings which started here and ended there, crossing the main square, ending by going through a door into a house! Fantastic! As the camera followed the actor through the door, he was obliged to walk on the rails – clack, clack, and you could see them too! Then we had to go through little doors inside which there was no room for anything much more than the camera. Poor (Jean) Rabier, he had a hell of a time working on the framing.

Les Cousins (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: What was it about the subject of ‘Les Cousins’ that interested you particularly?

CC: I had both Les Cousins and Le Beau Serge prepared at the same time, in fact; I had the idea for Les Cousins but I couldn’t do it because it would have been too expensive. Construction-wise Le Beau Serge was at once too long and without enough incident for its length. The pieces about the father-in-law were added later. Les Cousins was just three pages long when written down. The situations were more compact. It has more construction. Le Beau Serge was economical, and it was good on the village, but the story was rather tricked up. The people in Les Cousins are real.

MS: What do you like especially in ‘Les Cousins’?

CC: I’m very fond of the tomatoes à la Provencale, and I quite like the second surprise party. The man who breaks the chains... things like that. The background to the party... nothing quite like it on the screen for twenty years... I think I broke all records there! Madness. There’s everything there – Wagner, girls with bare feet, the lot!

MS: Weren’t there repercussions from that film?

CC: Not particularly. There was a little. People didn’t think there were any Fascists in France then: they were that stupid. Now they can see that it was true.

MS: The characters?

CC: I like the character played by Brialy, and Carolus (Blain), quite well. It’s sad that a chap as frank as he ends up a victim of his own foolishness.

Les Cousins (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: Is (Paul) Gégauff’s part in it mainly concerned with the characters or with the construction of the script?

CC: It’s not the construction which is Paul’s part, but the dialogue, which is real Gégauff dialogue. It succeeds in saying in two pages what would have taken me four to say. That’s very useful because it allows you to do a lot more in the same amount of time. And also by Gégauff are one or two little things such as the scene where they talk about the erotic quality of their skin. The whole story depends on this, he would say: it’s a story about skin texture. He wrote that scene in about half an hour.

MS: Didn’t he have any ideas as a scenarist?

CC: No, no, no ideas of construction.

MS: So the symmetrical construction of the film is your work?

CC: Yes, I like symmetry. I like it when everything comes together at the end, but one mustn’t strive for symmetry. It annoys me to strive for ‘rhymes.’ It’s good working with Gégauff because he takes a delight in destroying casuistry. I like what Paul does.

A Double Tour (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: What was it that appealed in the subject of ‘A Double Tour’?

CC: I read Stanley Ellin’s book when I was doing my military service and there was one thing which I found very remarkable then: a chap who’s very conformist and then suddenly takes off rejoicing into nature. The subject was impossible. There was one thing in it about a key which locks a granary. I have never understood whether the important thing was that it was locked or that it was unlocked! So I cut that out. And I amused myself with the mythological aspects of the story: Leda, and there were swan references in the house! Then there was the scene of the row between the man, Dacqumine, and his wife, the first version of which was refused by the Hakims who were producing the film: it was much more horrible than the scene we eventually shot. It was entirely physical with the bloke saying to his wife, ‘You look a mess, your armpits smell bad,’ and other nasty things. Finally there was the character of the Hungarian, Laszlo (Jean-Paul Belmondo). He interested me. But at the same time, this was a mistake because the film would have done better at the box-office without him. It didn’t do badly, but without this bizarre guy, spectators would have been less upset by the film. He was a worrying element, spending his time saying and doing outrageous things to offend people.

MS: In ‘A Double Tour’ André Jocelyn plays the role of a person who excludes or destroys beauty, a person who seems to crop up quite a lot in your films – ‘L’Oeil Du Malin’ and ‘Ophelia’ as well.

A Double Tour (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

CC: Joselyn represents a certain type in French society — the son of a good family, rather degenerate, a bit queer. Jocelyn is good at portraying that kind of character.

But let’s imagine a young chap who’s intelligent, sensitive, kind, handsome, who lives in a milieu which is unintelligent, insensitive, ugly, hard, and yet he cannot abandon the milieu because his roots, his family are in it. When he comes face to face with something that contradicts what he has been brought up to, it’s inevitable and normal that he will try to destroy it. In L’Oeil Du Malin it’s a bit different: the wish for destruction comes more from the man’s mediocrity than from anything else. The reaction is to turn their destruction outwards, preferring to fire on others. One finds the same sort of thing in present day politics – the young people who have become plastiqueurs. I’m sure their origins aren’t so different from those of the Jocelyn character in A Double Tour: they’re people who have problems inside themselves, inside their families. That sort of character interests me a great deal.

MS: It’s the opposite in ‘Ophelia’, isn’t it, a bit like ‘Vertigo’, where the character wants to make his dream concrete and thus destroys the real thing?

CC: It’s very much like Vertigo, and that’s a film I admire very much. I saw it again when I was making Ophelia and I found it totally unbearable. I found ridiculous arguments so that I could say to myself, ‘What is all this driveling nonsense?’! But the arguments that I used to myself when I was making Ophelia were ridiculous.

MS: ‘Vertigo’ certainly had its influence, because there were things in ‘L’Oeil Du Malin’; there were very similar shots.

CC: Oh yes.

A Double Tour (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: And the color in ‘A Double Tour’... the field of poppies. You said that the main problems were Decaë’s.

CC: There’s one thing which I hate about color films... people who use up a lot of their despairing producer’s money by working in the laboratory to bring out the dominant hues, or to make color films where there isn’t any color. The hell with that! I like to have the screen full of color, twenty colors on the screen at once, fifty colors. There are no dominants despite what people have said.

MS: It must have been awful for Decaë...

CC: Yes, but the result was very faithful... and it was horribly complicated. I mean the golds and the interiors, with the windows with the colored glass giving the faces three colors at once. The relationship between the interiors and the Provence exteriors was very important, and coordinating the ideas of the decorator and costumier, the cameraman and the director, are specially important in color movies, and much more difficult than for a black and white film. I like making black and white films in natural surroundings, but I much prefer shooting a color film inside a studio where the colors are easier to control. Some colors are very difficult to render, and you must compensate to get the color you want on the screen. It’s pretty complicated, but not so much for me as for the cameraman. I say to him, ‘You see this, you see that. I want that exactly rendered as it is. Is that possible?’ In the studio there are no troubles about the sun going in!

A Double Tour (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: ‘A Double Tour’ is very exact on the colorings of the south of France.

CC: It was also very important to get the decors right for the South. There were family photos in the house we used, and the paternal grandfather of the house looked exactly like Dacqmine.

MS: Were you happy with the actors there?

CC: That was rather complicated. Everything was prepared, the locations were chosen and all that. My first choice for Leda was Suzy Parker but she didn’t fit in with the decor at all. So Antonella Luaidi was chosen. The plot had to be modified a bit... she became an Italian who had known a Hungarian in Japan. Rather remarkable! I also wanted Charles Boyer for the Dacqmine part. On the other hand Madeleine (Robinson) was just what I had wanted.

MS: Jean-Paul Belmondo’s gastronomic orgy was quite something...

CC: Yes, I’ve often noticed that in films people don’t really stuff themselves full when they’re eating. So now I work on the principle of having at least one meal in all my films. After all, one must eat. And after all, again, it’s very scenic. It’s difficult to put across on film, to get everyone in the shot without cutting to and fro. I’ve often thought of having a table made with a hole in the middle for the camera to film meal scenes!

Les Bonnes Femmes (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: ‘Les Bonnes Femmes’ is perhaps your most ‘symmetrical’ film.

CC: Symmetrical? From the symmetrical point of view it’s symmetrical!

MS: In the montage or what?

CC: In my last version there was a final quarter of an hour of flashes of people in the street leaving their work between six and seven. That was cut. At the outset it was more symmetrical. The whole thing came full circle.

MS: Most people either think that ‘Les Bonnes Femmes’ is a masterpiece, or they’re violently against it.

CC: I wanted to make a film about stupid people that was very vulgar and deeply stupid. From that moment on I can hardly be reproached for making a film that is about stupid people. I don’t think that it’s a pessimistic film. I’m not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live. When we wrote the film the people were, for Gégauff, fools. It was a film about fools. But at the same time we could see little by little that if they were foolish, it was mainly because they were unable to express themselves, establish contact with each other. The result of naïvety, or a too great vulgarity.

People have said that I didn’t like the people I was showing, because they believe that you have to ennoble them to like them. That’s not true. Quite the opposite: only the types who don’t like their fellows have to ennoble them.

Les Bonnes Femmes (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: But the cinema is an art of identification and that makes it annoying for the spectator. And that is perhaps the reason for the film’s failure commercially.

CC: As the film shows vulgar people, who explain themselves instinctively without any kind of mask, so spectators and critics talk about ‘excess.’ But the girls aren’t shown as idiots. They’re just brutalized by the way they live. They’re simple girls who are impressed by savior-faire, by people who do things, tricks and conjurors for example. Maids and shop girls love this sort of thing. The poetical side doesn’t really interest them. You see much more grotesque things going on every day than you do in Les Bonnes Femmes. Actually it wasn’t a group of girls in the film. In effect it was one.

Les Bonnes Femmes is the one I like best of all my films. I like Ophelia too, but I prefer Les Bonnes Femmes.

Ophelia was not quite what we wanted. I think it was shot too late. It should have been made sooner and nearer the time when I had the idea. And then it wasn’t shot just where I would have liked: the chateau I had wanted had been sold and that was annoying. And we had changed the scenario around too much by the time the film was made. But I like Ophelia very much...

MS: What is the difference between the projected version of ‘Ophelia’ and the present one when finally made?

CC: I pushed it more towards having fun. And then the original version was more serious. I had the film Hamlet interposed in it. I put the guards back in and a bit where they chase Jocelyn, who puts on a cap and scarf to make them think he’s breaking into the grounds of the chateau. I was obliged to change some of the scenes between Ivan (Jocelyn) and the girl (Mayniel). I’m very fond of Juliette, but she wasn’t quite what I had in mind at the outset for the part. I wanted a girl with a sort of angelic quality, more ethereal, so that one should understand the impossibility of any erotic quality there. I like the little film within the film and the reception that goes with it because it’s more normal than the rest of the film. The hero is normal in comparison with the rest of them. He’s not at all mad. In the context of all the other monstrous people around, the relationship of Jocelyn and Mayniel is not at all strange.

– Mark Shivas interviewed Chabrol for Movie, No. 10, published in June 1963. Text copyright © Mark Shivas.

Il Divo: Interview with Director Paolo Sorrentino

Il Divo (Directed by Paolo Sorrentino)

The filmmaker and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino was born in 1970 in Naples. His debut film as a screenwriter, The Dust of Naples, was released in 1998. He started making short films at this time, including L'amore non ha confini in 1998 and La notte lunga in 2001. His feature-length directorial debut, One Man Up (L'uomo in più), earned him the Nastro D'Argento award. 

He achieved international acclaim in 2004 with his psychological thriller The Consequences of Love (Le conseguenze dell'amore), which follows a lonely and reclusive businessman named Titta as he develops feelings for a beautiful waitress named Sofia in the café where he goes every morning to solve puzzles in the newspaper while avoiding contact with other customers. As Titta and Sofia grow closer, she learns the reason for his secrecy: he once lost money owned by the mafia on the stock market and is now a drug addict in thrall to the Mafia. 

Sorrentino's follow-up feature film, The Family Friend (L'amico di famiglia), premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2006. It is the tale of a cruel loan shark who develops an obsession with one of his clients' daughters. 

Sorrentino's subsequent film, Il Divo tells the story of fabled Italian politician Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister, who faced accusations of conspiracy, Mafia involvement and state terror. Starring Toni Servillo as a chillingly vampiric Andreotti, the labyrinthine intrigues of Italian politics are used to explore the inscrutable personality beneath the controversy. 

The film, which received the Cannes Film Festival's Prix du Jury, reunited Sorrentino with Toni Servillo, who plays Andreotti, from The Consequences of Love. 

With Il Divo, Sorrentino establishes a distinct political lineage of postwar Italian cinema, evoking the works of Francesco Rosi, Elio Petri, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, a debt Sorrentino himself  acknowledges. Of relevance is the fact that all of Il Divo's main Hollywood cinematic intertexts are either gangster films or have criminal psychopaths as protagonists: e.g., Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs; Scorsese's Taxi Driver; and De Palma's The Untouchables.

Il Divo finishes with a dramatisation of one of Andreotti's many Mafia collaboration trials. The scene opens with a tracking shot that echoes the bravura sequence toward the conclusion of The Consequences of Love, inaugurating the scene of Titta di Girolamo's trial by the Mafia in a direct inversion of Andreotti's trial here. The tracking shot in il Divo is fundamentally identical to the previous one, as it starts with Servillo framed in medium close-up from behind, moving down the courtroom corridor with the Steadicam following at a constant distance. 

Sorrentino came to the attention of a wider audience in 2013 with the release of The Great Beauty, a stunning picture filmed in Rome that earned him an Oscar, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe. This philosophical film that established Sorrentino's international reputation begins with a remark that encapsulates it: "To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength”. 

The Great Beauty could be described as a journey into the heart of Rome, led by Toni Servillo's main character, an ageing socialite, writer, and journalist who strolls through the streets of Rome, observing the lives of its inhabitants, young and old, rich and poor, and reflecting on his own life and past experiences. The film gained notoriety for Sorrentino's artistic arrangement of breathtaking images of Rome. The film is also a mirror of Rome and Italy's decadence, particularly the decadence of the upper class, and is often linked to Fellini's legendary La dolce vita.

The following interview with Sorrentino on the making of Il Divo took place at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008.

Directors from all periods have recounted Italy. Do your films talk about the south of Italy, or the country in general? Do you consider yourself a southern director? Do you see yourself as belonging to the tradition of political directors like Rosi and Rossellini?

PS: First of all, I’m very curious about other people. About their psychology, their feelings, their foolish, crazy or routine behavior. I’m interested in characters more than anything else; in real life, and therefore in films. These people who intrigue, fascinate or disgust me, may be Italian and therefore representative, albeit partially, of Italian society, and sometimes symbolic of it, as in the case of Andreotti. Political directors like Rosi and Petri are giants who can never be equaled. You can watch them, but not imitate them. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make political films today. On the contrary, we must. Only we have to find a new approach to keep pace with today’s cinema, which has changed so much since the days of the above-mentioned directors.

You depict a corrupt Italy in your latest film. Has the situation improved since the Andreotti years?

PS: Apparently not. But no one talks about corruption in Italy today, although it exists and proliferates. I think people don’t talk about it because Tangentopoli (Bribesville) was a shock for us. A revolution that did not limit itself to deciding who was honest or dishonest, but, consciously or not, changed politics and the previous political class, with endless polemics, backlashes and terrible personal tragedies.

The characters in your films always exist outside the system, like the singer Tony and the soccer player Antonio, in ‘One Man Up’, the exiled man in the pay of the Mafia in ‘The Consequences of Love’, the squalid usurer in ‘The Family Friend’, and now the exceptional politician. Is marginality a source of inspiration to you?

PS: What you’re saying about marginality applies to my previous films, but not to ‘Il Divo’. Indeed, the opposite is true for this film. Andreotti is anything but marginal. He’s a man of power who knows the ways of the world better than others, who knows how to integrate, to take the lead or to blend in, according to which is most advantageous. He is a man who combines cunning with intelligence at the highest most unimaginable level, which has enabled him to govern Italy for many years.

Aside from marginality, your characters, and therefore your films, are always marked by loneliness and melancholy; why?

PS: These feelings are often seen as negative, while they have always been genuine feelings for me, ever since I was a boy. Melancholy and loneliness stimulate the imagination and fantasy. Moreover, they’re universal feelings that we all have to reckon with sooner or later.

Your protagonists are always very ambiguous but they have a human side, though well-hidden, despite their apparent immorality. Can you explain this paradox?

PS: I don’t believe in precise, univocal definitions when it comes to individuals. People change with time and according to the situations in which they’re involved. You can be human and ambiguous at the same time. I don’t see the individual as monolithic. We are all extremely vulnerable, but very good at adapting and faking.

As a director you have a certain tendency to embellish the ugly. Why is that?

PS: It’s not something pre-established. When you tell a story you’re faced with a series of situations, actions, habits, landscapes. It doesn’t really matter whether they are beautiful or ugly in real life, because a film must necessarily have an aesthetic quality, which, for me at least, has to be gratifying. Cinema has the extraordinary power to change the aesthetic perception of tragic or horrific events. The great war films do not neglect the horror of war, but undoubtedly give it a ‘wonderful’ aesthetic image.

So, is a director’s point of view moralist, in the sense of the moralists of the eighteenth century, as opposed to libertine? For instance, do you think moralists see love as a power and libertines see it as a weakness?

PS: Since I’m absolutely crazy about pop music, whose lyrics are loaded with the word ‘love’, I would simply say that love is a power for everyone.

I get the feeling that for you, the sentimental weakness of your characters is their hidden
strength, and their humanity derives from this weakness. Do you think humanity springs from weakness?

PS: Individual weaknesses or failures can, in many cases, be a means of redemption for a person. It’s simply that an individual becomes stronger when faced with a spectre or when he realizes how low he has sunk. Unfortunately, it’s not a fixed rule. If it were, there would be no more suicides.

Regarding your movies…  How does seeking formal beauty enrich your screenplays?

PS: In various ways. There’s no fixed rule, thank goodness, otherwise a film would be boring.  However, I’ve always liked cinema that strives for formal beauty, and have nearly always remained indifferent, as a viewer, to films that suffer because they appear to develop randomly, haphazardly, even when the latter is simply a technique: The crane in ‘The Consequences of Love’; the loan shark sewing the bride’s dress in ‘The Family Friend’; Andreotti walking along the street in ‘Il Divo’.

How do your create your scenes?

PS: I plan them, at home, before shooting the film. I prepare them twice: first, after reading the screenplay, solely in relation to the story; second, after doing the location scouts, which give me more precise, detailed visual elements for creating a scene. I rarely improvise on the set, and only if I have a brilliant idea. But brilliant ideas are so rare. And they can often be wrong. I imagine the film while sitting in an armchair, and then I draw the storyboard. Besides, that’s what a filmmaker’s supposed to do: imagine the film before it exists. I project it in my head beforehand, and it is always more dazzling and precise than the end-result.

Tell us about the actual shots, which appear to be very important to you. Do you always work with the same cinematographer?

PS: Everything’s important in a film, not just the shots. Even the sound man’s mood or the quality of the catering. Any microcosm, in this case a set, can fall apart for the slightest, most insignificant thing. It’s absurd, but it’s a fact. A single shot, if well-thought out and balanced, can enthrall and say more than ten pages of dialogue – that’s why shots can’t be left to chance or delegated to others. Because it’s my job to make the film communicate and, God willing, to enthrall the audience. I always work with the same cinematographer because, naturally, he’s very good and because an understanding with the crew, and first and foremost the cinematographer, is essential to doing a good job.

How do you compose your shots? Your characters always seem like tiny figures in a vast
setting.

PS: I sit down and imagine the shots, while keeping the scene, the dialogue and the meaning of the scene fixed in my mind. I repeat, I imagine them. I imagine the lenses that are required, the angles, the height of the camera, the camera movements and the characters, and where the focus will be. All these variables are directed towards a single goal: making the scene work according to the presuppositions established in the screenplay. I imagine these things pretty accurately, and make any corrections on the set, together with the cinematographer.

Your direction conveys a vision of the world that is derisive, pathetic and political yet full of hope. How do you explain this paradox?

PS: My ‘vision of the world’ (that’s a bit high-sounding) essentially pivots on irony, which I aim for constantly. I look for it everywhere. I don’t know if it works. Life is tragic enough, and irony is the best antidote.

This is your third film with Toni Servillo. Tell us how you work, how you direct him. How did he get into the part of Andreotti?

PS: My way of directing Servillo has become increasingly minimal with every film. I don’t mean that I no longer direct him, but we know each other so well that we understand each other immediately and there’s no need to explain everything in detail. These are the advantages of knowing one another. I think the secret of our partnership, which, all things considered, is a fruitful one, is trust. An indispensable element, especially when the character is as delicate and charged with meanings as Andreotti. I was very struck by Toni Servillo’s way of getting into the Andreotti character. I had
prepared a lot of footage of the real Andreotti for him, but he chose not to watch it. He preferred to go with the screenplay and the fundamental characteristics I had chosen to depict Andreotti. I think the most difficult thing about this character is his impassiveness, his extreme restraint, because thoughts and moods had to be communicated with the slightest changes of expression while maintaining that impassiveness. So it was certainly not an easy part to play.

What about the scene in which Andreotti confesses while looking into the camera Is it a dream or a fictitious element that has nothing to do with History with a capital ‘H’, since we know Andreotti has never confessed? Maybe this scene will cause a scandal in Italy...

PS: For me, it is a dream. It couldn’t be otherwise. But it is also cathartic, for the film-goer and, perhaps, for Andreotti. I don’t know if I’ve touched on the truth, but, as the author of the story, I felt that, at least for a moment, I had to divert my objective gaze from the character and the events, and hazard an interpretation of things, establish a political, and not a penal responsibility. Regarding the latter, I never presumed to act the judge.

Another scene that conveys the character’s ambiguity is the one in which Andreotti and his wife are watching the Italian pop singer Renato Zero on television: filming the characters in tight close-up seems to fine-tune their emotions.

PS: This is another key scene in the film. I attempted to apply to the Andreottis a ‘dizzying’ dynamic that can occur in any couple’s relationship, in other words, that terrible feeling that the person with whom we’re sharing our life is a complete stranger. It’s an agonizing moment, which leaves us feeling completely lost. I’m sure it happens to all couples who’ve been together for some time. When Andreotti’s wife experiences this doubt it inevitably gives rise to a thousand more. They are no longer the usual doubts, like if your spouse is cheating on you, but doubts concerning the fate of a state, of a country, of millions of ordinary people, because Andreotti wielded so much power over the years that he decided many things in Italy.

Tell us about your relationship with music, which is an important element in your films. It’s amazing how it actually seems to be part of your way of filming. Would you say that your film language is musical?

PS: I’d like it to be musical, but I doubt that it is. Instead, I use the emotions that music arouses to write a scene more effectively. I need music to write a screenplay. It can create dizzying emotions, and a certain feeling of power or suspense – which helps me to create scenes that I want to be powerful or suspenseful. I don’t write a single word until I have a new ‘library’ of sounds that are right for the feeling of the film I’m going to develop. Inevitably, a lot of the music that has inspired the writing of a scene, winds up in the actual film.

– Interview with Director Paolo Sorrentino; via emanuellevy.com

Nicholas Ray: The Last Interview

Johnny Guitar (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

After producing local radio programmes during his adolescence, Nicholas Ray joined architect Frank Lloyd Wright's newly founded and utopian Taliesin Fellowship in 1931– a formative influence in which he acquired an appreciation for architectural balance in character creation and visual composition.

Ray became involved in the left-wing Theatre of Action after relocating to New York in 1934, where he came under the influence of Elia Kazan. He also developed an interest in southern folk music, which resulted in close relationships with Alan Lomax and singers such as Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Josh White, as well as a weekly radio show for CBS in the early 1940s that evolved into wartime work for the Voice of America under John Houseman. 

Ray taught himself filmmaking in 1944 by studying closely Kazan's first feature, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, from beginning to end, at Kazan's invitation. Houseman would later produce Ray's first feature They Live By Night (1947) (and the subsequent On Dangerous Ground [1951]). 

Ray was effectively protected from blacklisting in spite of his political radicalism due to his protracted work for Hughes between 1949 and 1953, which included work on Roseanna McCoy (Irving Reis, 1949), The Racket (John Cromwell, 1951), Macao (Josef von Sternberg, 1952), and Androcles and the Lion (Chester Erskine, 1952), as well as directing six other RKO features. 

Ray's most significant and highly praised films were created in the 1950's. In a Lonely Place' had one of Humphrey Bogart's greatest performances, followed by another superb noir, 'On Dangerous Ground' in 1951. Ray next directed two Westerns, 'The Lusty Men' in 1952 and 'Johnny Guitar' in 1954,

his first colour movie, and one of his most lyrical works—featuring a stylized mise en scène that often borders on operatic.  

Its quirky style extends to its story which revolves around a struggle for supremacy between the two female leads, Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge, 

In 1955, 'Rebel Without a Cause,' became his best-known and highest-grossing effort, establishing his reputation as a first rate, inventive director. Additionally, the film secured James Dean's legacy as a symbol of angst-ridden adolescent rebellion and established a youthful Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo as popular performers. 

Ray's success continued with 1956's 'Bigger Than Life,' starring James Mason and dealing with middle-class drug issues, and the following year's 'Bitter Victory,' a war narrative set in the African desert. Additionally, Ray directed 'The True Story of Jesse James' in 1957, featuring Robert Wagner who replaced James Dean in the title role.

Ray’s films are notable for their focus on the position of the outsider who refuses to conform to mainstream society's customs. He had considerable influence on subsequent generations of filmmakers, most notably in France, where the "new wave" of filmmakers, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette, all paid respect to him. In one instance, Godard famously remarked that "cinema is Nicholas Ray."

La Furia Umana titled ‘Nicholas Ray: The Last Interview, with Kathryn Bigelow and Sarah Fatima Parsons.’ In his preface, Tom Farrell gives the background for the interview, and added that it originally appeared in the July, 1979, issue of the French magazine Cinématographe:

In May 1979, during a break from filming Lightning Over Water in collaboration with Wim Wenders, Nicholas Ray granted an interview to Kathryn Bigelow and Sarah Fatima Parsons. It was to be Nick’s last interview before dying of heart failure about a month later. At that time, Kathryn Bigelow was a graduate film student at Columbia University, where she earned a master’s degree, but had not yet directed her first feature film. Her close friend, Sarah Fatima Parsons, was a journalist from West Germany… Although suffering from cancer and going in and out of the hospital for treatment during the final weeks of his life, Nick Ray was remarkably lucid in this conversation about his work, making it a valuable source for further study. 

A conversation with Nicholas Ray shortly before his death, which associates small memory pieces about his life and films.

Nicholas Ray: You know, I hate watching Johnny Guitar on television. But I really appreciate what Andrew Sarris wrote in the Village Voice: With Johnny Guitar Nick Ray reaches the absolute criteria of the auteur theory.

Question: What did you think when you went to Europe and noticed how filmmakers, especially, the French ones, were influenced by your work? Truffaut, for example?

NR: And also Godard, Rohmer. Yes, I did have a strong influence on their work. I’m not sure if it was always for the best. I remember one evening I was driving home during the filming of Rebel Without A Cause. We shot a scene between Jim and Plato. I was whistling. I was really thrilled thinking, My God, the French will adore that scene.

Johnny Guitar (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

Q: Your films have also influenced the new German and American cinema.

NR: I hear that Wim Wenders is going to start a new film soon, Hammett.  He’s a great guy. I think he’s had a hard time with the screenplay.

Q: He originally wanted to write it with the author of the book, Joe Gores.

NR: He tried but it didn’t work out. It seldom does with the author of a book. A lot of filmmakers have failed. I myself thought I could do it, but it was a failure. Authors fall in love with their own words, and you have to be pitiless as a director or screenwriter.

Q: So that it won’t become literature?

NR: Yes, that’s right. I mean it’s another kind of literature. They tend to get excited about one sentence, visualize it, and then it becomes really monotonous. You should never talk about something you can show, and never show something you can talk about.

Q: Doesn’t it have something to do with what actors bring to a film?

NR: Absolutely. An actor can be as talented as another, but if he doesn’t stick to what the director’s intentions are, it all falls down. I adore working with actors.

Johnny Guitar (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

Q: You come from the theater. I would imagine you have a particular method of work.

NR: Yes, I do have my method, as other directors do.

Q: What do you think of all the different interpretations?

NR: It’s one of the beauties of cinema, or of any kind of art for that matter. Sort of a contradiction. I don’t try to manipulate people. You’re on. Do what you want. Some interpretations are shocking to me because they are ridiculous, but then again, why not? I have entered the kingdom of contradiction, but it’s just as well. It adds to the reflection, even if sometimes it drives me crazy.

Q: Are you painting these days?

NR: No, I haven’t in a long time.

Q: What kind of painting are you interested in?

NR: I was always a fan of German and Swedish expressionism. Edvard Munch, and medieval art too. I think my films express this tendency.

Q: Yes, like the colors and set design of the saloon in ‘Johnny Guitar’.

NR: I had it built on the side of a mountain, in the desert, because I loved the shape and color of the rocks there. It’s a kind of medieval Frank Lloyd Wright.

Johnny Guitar (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

Q: For how long did you work with Frank Lloyd Wright?

NR: One year. I was studying theater in New York, but since I come from Wisconsin I would stop at his place once in a while. He came for a conference at Columbia University. I went to listen to him, and then congratulated him at the end. We took a walk together, and he asked me if I would become one of his first students, and I went over there to get a master’s in theater.

Q: When you designed the sets for ‘Johnny Guitar’, did you harmonize the colors specifically after any painters?

NR: I wasn’t inspired by other painters, but of course I followed a principle of pictures. I kept the posse in black and white during the whole film. Herb Yates, the studio owner who was in Europe during the shooting of the film, looked at the dailies when he came back. And he said, Nick, I love what I’m seeing, but it’s a Technicolor film and everything’s in black and white.

Q: You have used stereotypes, black for evil, white for good, and with a lot of humor.

NR: But the black and white are combined within the posse. They are penguins.

Q: The same combination when Joan Crawford wears a white dress with a black shotgun.

NR: That’s baroque.

Johnny Guitar (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

Q: James Dean, who was an archetypal figure of the 1950s, has become trendy again in the 70s. What do you think of this cult of youth? Of the frustrated aspirations of teenagers?

NR: This is all due to the negligence of an opulent society, the non-involvement, the lack of progress.

Q: All those also characterized the 50s?

NR: Of course. It was a time of opulence. It’s easy to put labels on things, but it shouldn’t be that simple. I don’t know all the different forces in the present. This period of searching that we are living now is quite positive, but at the same time there’s a big waste of time, a great irresponsibility. All the rich kids (talking about film students) spending 5000 or 6000 dollars a year to make their films.

Q: Do you think someone who’s rich or supported by their parents doesn’t have the necessary energy to fight for work, or that urgency in the effort?

NR: It’s not a question of being able to fight for work. They are given all possibilities. They can talk about any subject matter they want to. But that’s the point. Those subjects are so trivial.

Q: Which projects would you like to achieve now?

NR: I try to imagine something new. It’s very disappointing not to be totally excited of something. I need that.

In A Lonely Place (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

Q: In your film ‘In A Lonely Place’ Humphrey Bogart for the first time in his career played a fragile character.

NR: Yes, I thought Bogie was fantastic, and in both films I did with him I took the gun out of his hands. The gun was a constant prop for him. For him as well as for me. ‘In A Lonely Place’ was a very personal film.

Q: Do you mean in terms of your marriage to Gloria Grahame? Didn’t she leave you to marry your son?

NR: Oh, yes, it’s good for the tabloids, but not very interesting. It happened years ago.

Q: Oedipus?

NR: No, there’s nothing Oedipal about it. That is always what people believe, but it’s not that terrible really. Oedipus’s fate is to kill his father. But, shit, it’s never been a bloody relationship. They are divorced today. Only two or three close friends have looked at the situation quietly. Everybody thought it was gloomy, and it made me feel like locking my door. And I don’t think it was very healthy for my son. 

In A Lonely Place (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

Q: While shooting ‘In A Lonely Place’ were you aware of Hollywood’s cynicism as strongly as the Humphrey Bogart character is?

NR: No, I don’t think it appears in the film. I tried to treat Hollywood the way I would a Pennsylvania cattle town. In Beaver, Pennysylvania, same things happen as in Hollywood. It’s just not as much in the lights as it is in Hollywood.

Q: The real intensity of ‘In A Lonely Place’ lies in the fact that there’s no way for that man and that woman to get a fresh start. Suspicion triumphs.

NR: Yes, we don’t really know anything about them. In the first draft of the screenplay that I had written with Bundy Solt the end was more clearly stated. He killed her and Frank Lovejoy arrested him. But I didn’t like that ending. So I kicked everyone off the set, except for the actors, and we improvised the ending. We don’t know exactly what it means. It’s the end of their love of course. But he could also drive off in his car and fall off a cliff, stop over in a bar to get drunk, or else go home or to his old mother. Anything is possible. It’s up to the imagination of the audience.

Q: Wim Wenders in ‘The American Friend’ seems to use the narration as an excuse to displace highly complex characters in beautiful and elaborate backgrounds. The story becomes almost superfluous.

NR: And obscure.

In A Lonely Place (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

Q: Is it important to break the narrative linear structure?

NR: It’s the way I’ve chosen for my autobiographical project. It’s not chronological but based on spontaneity. Because things that are of any interest to you, that you write about in the present form, you might as well have heard them half an hour ago on radio, or else when you were nine.

Q: Did you enjoy working on ‘The American Friend’?

NR: I loved it. I enjoy playing once in a while. It allows me to sum things up, to tell myself that my way of working is still the right one. On the first day I found myself doing what I always scream at my actors not to do. We broke it down and began writing my part while shooting. Wim is very patient, and I felt very good, which is not always the best thing for an actor, feeling at ease. Sometimes it’s good to scare them to death.

Q: While shooting ‘Johnny Guitar’ I read that you would bring flowers to Mercedes McCambridge but not to Joan Crawford, or vice versa, just to create a tension between them. Is that true?

NR: One night Joan Crawford got drunk and threw Mercedes McCambridge’s clothes on the highway. She was absolutely great at work, but sometimes anger won over her temperament. They were very different and Crawford hated McCambridge.

Rebel Without A Cause (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

Q: Your films come from a very precise cultural period, and yet they do have a profound influence on our times.

NR: Do you think so? You think my films influence the culture of our time?

Q: Yes.

NR: How is that?

Q: The media project a certain image.

NR: They are reflecting it.

Q: Both.

NR: That isn’t influence.

Q: Doesn’t it work both ways?

NR: The important thing is people.

Rebel Without A Cause (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

Q: Aren’t you talking about conformity?

NR: How far does conformity go? Only a small number of women have gone through the ‘Annie Hall’ syndrome. You see very few of them in cities of 50,000 people or less.

Q: But ‘Rebel Without A Cause’ has influenced the youth culture we were talking about.

NR: It got a lot of people excited over someone they rediscovered. After this resurrection we will need another 20 years to rediscover it in a cave.

Q: Nevertheless, does James Dean symbolize something out of the social order, a sort of rupture that we’re still fascinated by? The film shows the symbols that society has attached to itself.

NR: The real interesting character of the film is Plato played by Sal Mineo. People wanted to believe in a story. There’s no story. I just wanted to influence parents.

Q: To make them understand what they were doing to their kids?

NR: No, what they were doing to themselves. All the parents of that time had become a lost generation, and I always hear the same things about it, the same words. It’s all so dated.

Rebel Without A Cause (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

Q: In ‘Rebel without A Cause’ parents represent law and order.

NR: Yes, I characterized them very deliberately. I’m very prejudiced for young people. But it was hard to reach adults.

Q: Is it a political film?

NR: Yes, Abbie Hoffman said it. Fuck politics. Politics is living.

Q: But in ‘Rebel’ Jim and Judy seem to rebel against law and order, only to return to that law and order at the end... The film works within the space of that ellipse.

NR: That’s when earthquakes happen.

Q: What did James Dean bring to the film?

NR: He didn’t write the dialogue. Stewart Stern and myself did a lot of improvisations. Jimmy was immensely talented due to his open imagination.

Rebel Without A Cause (Directed by Nicholas Ray)

Q: Did he imitate you?

NR: Oh, he would copy my mannerisms, but I don’t think he ever imitated me because that’s an aspect of directing I hate. I never try to show an actor what to do or what to say. He has to find out for himself. The role of the director is to guide him to that state, and then to implement it. Otherwise, everyone is going to imitate the director, and no director however talented can play all the roles.

Q: While directing are you often confronted by actors’ weaknesses?

NR: Oh, yes, it’s a great cathartic experience for them, and they tend to be stronger, becoming aware of their own limitations.

Q: Werner Herzog in ‘Heart Of Glass’ hypnotized his actors, which tends to increase the hierarchy.

NR: To hypnotize an actor is to tell him when to wake up, to walk left, and go down the stairs. An actor must somehow contribute to the direction. One must be able to trust in his spontaneity, to set it in motion. We must help him get there.

Q: The character played by James Dean is sort of a synthesis of his own catharsis, and your concept of what a character should be.

NR: Yes, of my own will to accept or dismiss the character.

– Article also available at: http://nicholasrayfoundation.org