David Lynch: In the City of Dreams

Mulholland Drive (Directed by David Lynch)

David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ was originally developed as a two-hour pilot for a TV series in 1999, but was rejected by ABC. It was re-conceived by Lynch as a feature film with $7 million in French funding from CanalPlus. The extra money allowed for additional shooting and a new round of post-production. ‘Mulholland Drive’ premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim. 

On release, Mulholland Drive polarised critical reactions. It was however, nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Director as well as a Cannes Film Festival award for Best Director, which Lynch shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There. 

The film tells a multi-layered story focusing on Betty Elms, an aspiring actress recently arrived in Los Angeles, who becomes friends with an amnesiac who she discovers is recuperating from a car accident at her flat. Typically, in a David Lynch film, things are stranger and more complex than they initially appear. 

The story has a dreamlike quality while leaving the complex narrative open to interpretation. Though there are differing interpretations about the film's meaning, David Lynch has chosen to take this as a virtue of the film: openness, complexity, a delight in uncertainty. Lynch himself has chosen to playfully highlight this aspect of his story. According to David Lynch in the film’s subtitle the film is: "A narrative of a young man and woman, set in the city of dreams.", an invitation to see the film as a simple story that belies the disturbing aspects of the narrative.

Mulholland Drive consists of a variety of juxtapositions. Dark dreams, fantasies, non-linear stories, combine with the paranoid feel of the camera work, intricate sound and lighting to compose a chilling tale of contemporary American dislocation. 

This skillfully constructed use of contrasts draws viewers into the picture, creating an unsettling scenario compelling the audience to abandon preconceived ideas of cinema, taking the audience on a unique journey. 

Our stereotypical characters are just what the film refers to as "a love tale in the city of dreams." Behind the scenes, these many types of actresses (blonde, bright-eyed Hollywood hopeful, dark femme fatale, egotistical director, and sinister puppet-masters) exist. Naomi Watts uses figures from Hollywood's “golden era”, such as Doris Day and Tippi Hedren, as a reference for Betty. Watts described Betty as “already settled in a life she doesn't identify with, but she is being re-energized and prepared to start over, even if it is someone else's life.” 

This is where Mulholland Drive's revelatory impulse resides. By juxtaposing these walking, talking stereotypes with unusual settings, Lynch creates an almost dreamlike atmosphere throughout the picture. His setups (narration, lighting, and sound) result in audio-visual disorientation for the characters. In some cases, we, as the observer, experience joy and then horror. Anyone familiar with the earlier works of David Lynch will notice that this is typical Lynch approach to his material. 

Through the course of its many twists and turns, the narrative deceives and persuades us, enticing us into a false feeling of security before devastating us. It is a a psychological rollercoaster that is both exhilarating and exhausting. The story is structured very meticulously and leaves the viewers with more questions than when they first saw the film. 

Ultimately, David Lynch offers a surreal, drug-fueled nightmare. It may be seen as the culmination of his career and arguably his finest work. The world of dreams in which Lynch places us is dense with conflicting ideas, sentiments, and emotions that keep us wanting more. 

David Lynch spoke about the film to music website NY Rock in Oct. 2001:

NY Rock: Your actors often say they have no idea what your movies are about when they’re making them. Do you like keeping your cast as disoriented as your characters?

      

David Lynch: Well, not like a game, no. But what’s important is that the actors have all they need to go forward with a character. Just like the way we all go through the world. We don’t know all there to is know about the world. But we know our role, even though to a certain degree we don’t know that. So it’s partly to protect the whole thing, and not have anything leak out of it. Sometimes, when you say things out loud, some of the power leaks out of the thing.

  

Is it important to you that the audience comes away satisfied with understanding what they’ve just seen?

      

Yes. In that process, the characters walk in. They start talking, you feel a mood, and you see a thing. And it can string itself together into a story that thrills you. Since I’m a human being, and if I stay true to those ideas that were thrilling to me, I hope that others have that same thrill. And the beauty of it is that I enjoy catching the ideas. I enjoy translating them, and I enjoy sharing them.

  

Are we supposed to not quite know what’s going on with some of these characters when the movie is over?

      

I think you do. It’s like eventually life seems to make sense, even though a lot of times it doesn’t seem to, or little bits of it don’t. And I think that with the human mind and intuition going to work, there’s some feeling your way to know what every character is. The mind can almost not help itself, but go and find harmonics in the real world.

  

How do you develop a movie like ‘Mulholland Drive’, that is so episodic?

      

When you make a feature film, there are ideas that like come on a Tuesday, and ideas that may come three months later, that go in the story before the ideas you got on Tuesday. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that one day the whole thing is done. 

And how it got there is made up of so many strange things, that it isn’t funny. It’s just a blessing that it’s done, and you feel good about it. That’s the way anything happens. Like paintings take so many strange courses before the painter says, this is finished. 

I like to go into a theater, see those curtains open, and feel the lights going down. And go into a world and have an experience, knowing as little as I possibly can. And I think we owe it to an audience to let them experience a thing for themselves.

Mulholland Drive (Directed by David Lynch)

Mulholland Drive is quite an enigmatic tale. Are you obsessed with mysteries?

      

Well, I don’t like mysteries that involve the government and foreign countries, and things like that. I like closer-to-home mysteries. Like Rear Window, that’s my cup of tea.

  

How important is style when you’re telling a story?

      

Style comes out of ideas. Sound, pace and locations come out of ideas. Characters, everything comes out of ideas. Never go against the ideas, stay true to them. And it will always tell you the way you go.

  

How do you work so eccentrically within Hollywood?

      

I’m not within the Hollywood system. I’ve never made a studio picture. I live in Hollywood and I love Hollywood. But there is no such thing as the Hollywood system. It’s always changing. And I’m surprised that I’ve been so fortunate, that I keep getting to make films. But I’m not part of the system.

  

But you’re very vocal against the Hollywood establishment in ‘Mulholland Drive’. You pretty much equate them with thugs and gangsters.

      

Yeah, but if I said, Okay, I’m going to make a film about the Hollywood industry, that would be absurd. It came out of the ideas. This story is a little bit about the business in what it touches, but it’s about other things as well.

  

What do you admire about Hollywood, and is that an easy question to answer?

      

It doesn’t matter if it’s an easy question to answer. I love the light. I love the feeling in the air that I sometimes catch of old Hollywood. And I love the feeling in the air of L.A., of we can do anything. It’s a creative feeling in L.A. It’s not stifling to me, and it’s not oppressive. It’s a feeling of freedom. And maybe it comes from the light. I don’t know; it’s something in the air.

  

Then where does the Justin Theroux character in ‘Mulholland Drive’ fit in, the director who has his hands tied and life threatened by his studio?

      

You can do anything, but sometimes we get ourselves in situations where we run into some trouble. I’m not saying L.A. is a place where you just skip by. There is a feeling, to me, that sure you can get in trouble. But you can get out of it too. And there is a feeling of wanting to create something in that town. I don’t know where it comes from.

  

Why did you choose a coffee shop for the restaurant setting in the movie rather than one of those swank eateries so identified with LA?

That’s the beauty of life, that you can sometimes find good food in a good coffee shop.

Mulholland Drive (Directed by David Lynch)

There are a couple of naked, sex-crazed women in ‘Mulholland Drive’. How do you approach nudity in a movie?

      

Behind it all is not violating the character. And keeping it in line with the fact that at least one of the girls was very much in love. So keeping it in the correct feeling is the key. Too little nudity breaks it, and too much breaks it. So I’m always looking for that balance point, and through action and reaction.

  

What’s behind the darkness of mood that you cultivate with such intensity?

      

It’s not like you do something just to do something. You are true to the ideas. Each scene has a mood, a pace and a kind of feel that the ideas gave you. And so you try to stay true to that, and all the elements that go together to make it.

  

How hard is it to mix sinister and comic moments?

      

No, no, that’s the beauty of it. When ideas come to you that are not just one genre, there are many things floating together. It’s beautiful, and a lot like real life. You know, you’re laughing in the morning and crying in the afternoon, and there’s a strange event after lunch. It’s just the way it is.

  

What are you thoughts about the influence of the digital revolution on moviemaking?

      

It’s just like the pencil and the paper. Everybody’s got a pencil and paper, but how many great things are written. These are tools, but you have to focus on the ideas and tell the story. It’s all about the story, and how the story is told. 

Some of these new tools do open the world for a bunch of new stories. But I don’t think we know what those are yet, because right now this is kind of an experimental time. But I think a bunch of stories are going to pop up that marry with those kinds of new qualities.

– Excerpted from ‘Prairie Miller: Interview with David Lynch’ at NY Rock.

Alfred Hitchcock: On Making ‘The Birds’

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 American thriller The Birds, centres on a coastal Californian community that is subject to a strange, terrifying, unexplained attack by hordes of aggressive birds. 

At the outset, a chance meeting in a California store between Melanie Daniels (played by Tippi Hedren) with a lawyer from her home town of Bodega Bay, Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), compels Daniels to impulsively follow him to Bodega Bay. A bird swoops down on her, lacerating her forehead as they are ready to embrace. Shortly after, there are a flurry of more assaults by birds in the area, culminating in Brenner's family and Daniels driving away, under the watchful gaze of the birds. The last image is both terrifying and unfulfilling for viewers, since Hitchcock doesn't provide any explanation for the unusual and horrific events that have transpired. 

Before any actual violence takes place, Hitchcock takes his time in The Birds, developing the personalities of Daniels and Brenner and emphasising their ties for increased tension. Both Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette have notable performances as Brenner's mother, Lydia, and his previous love, Annie. This Daphne Du Maurier book was turned into a feature film by screenwriter Evan Hunter, who wrote under the pen name Ed McBain. To great effect, Hitchcock used synthetic noise rather than using a musical soundtrack. In preparation for the film, Hitchcock studied an odd, real-life attack on a California town. 

Hitchcock was 63 when he worked on The Birds and felt secure enough to dispense with the normal gears of story logic. The MacGuffins that drive previous narratives, even the need for an “explanation” in the final scene of Psycho to explain Norman Bates split personality to the audience. The Birds, however, offers no such conclusions or anchor in psychiatric logic. It moves on its own terms, there is no score that tethers it, and nothing that gives solace to an audience. Hitchcock agonised over how to conclude the story. Rather than providing a well-rounded scripted finish, which would have been tidy, predictable, and formulaic, he opted for non-resolution instead, allowing for an open ending: a great closing image that leaves the future in limbo and the enigmas of the story still intact.

As part of the Alfred Hitchcock retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 1963, the exhibition culminated with the American premiere of Hitchcock’s recently completed ‘The Birds’. As part of the retrospective, Peter Bogdanovich conducted an extensive interview with Alfred Hitchcock about his career. The interview concluded with Hitchcock discussing the making of ‘The Birds’, his preparations for his next film ‘Marnie’ and some unrealized projects.

In The Birds, as in a lot of your films, you take ordinary, basically average people, and put them into extraordinary situations.

This is for audience identification. In The Birds, there is a very light beginning, girl meets boy, and then she walks right into a complicated situation: the boy’s mother’s unnatural relationship to him, and the school teacher who’s carrying a torch for him. This girl, who is just a fly-by-night, a playgirl, comes up against reality for the first time. That transmits itself into a catastrophe, and the girl’s transition takes place.

What do you feel the picture is really about?

Generally speaking, that people are too complacent. The girl represents complacency. But I believe that when people rise to the occasion, when catastrophe comes, they are all right. The mother panics because she starts off being so strong, but she is not strong, it is a facade: she has been substituting her son for her husband. She is the weak character in the story. But the girl shows that people can be strong when they face up to the situation. It’s like the people in London, during the wartime air raids.

Isn’t the film also a vision of Judgment Day?

Yes, it is. And we don’t know how they are going to come out. Certainly, the mother was scared to the end. The girl was brave enough to face the birds and try to beat them off. But as a group they were the victims of Judgment Day. For the ordinary public – they got away to San Francisco – but I toyed with the idea of lap-dissolving on them in the car, looking, and there is the Golden Gate Bridge – covered in birds.

How did you come to choose The Birds as a vehicle?

I felt that after Psycho people would expect something to top it before going on to something else. I’ve noticed that in other ‘catastrophe’ films, such as On the Beach, the personal stories were never really part of it at all. I remember a film called The Pride and the Passion which was about pulling that huge gun. Well, they stopped every night to have a bit of personal story; then the next morning they went back to the gun again. It was terribly devised, no integration at all. They don’t realize that people are still living, emoting, while pushing the gun. That was one of the things I made up my mind to avoid in The Birds. I deliberately started off with light, ordinary, inconsequential behavior. I even compromised by the nature of the opening titles, making them ominous. I wanted to use very light, simple Chinese paintings of birds – delicate little drawings. I didn’t because I felt people might get impatient, having seen the advertising campaign and ask, ‘When are the birds coming on?’ That’s why I give them a sock now and again – the bird against the door, bang! Birds up on the wires, the bird that bites the girl. But I felt it was vital to get to know the people, the mother especially, she’s the key figure. And we must take our time, get absorbed in the atmosphere before the birds come. Once more, it is fantasy. But everything had to be as real as possible, the surroundings, the settings, the people. And the birds themselves had to be domestic birds – no vultures, no wild birds of any kind.

Aren’t there a lot of trick-shots in the picture?

Had to be. There are 371 trick-shots in it, and the most difficult one was the last shot. That took 32 different pieces of film. We had a limited number of gulls allowed. Therefore, the foreground was shot in three panel sections, left to right, up to the birds on the rail. The few gulls we had were in the first third, we re-shot it for the middle third, and for the right-hand third, using the same gulls. Just above the heads of the crows was a long, slender middle section where the gulls were spread again. Then the car going down the driveway, with the birds on each side of it, was another piece of film. The sky was another piece of film, as was the barn on the left, and so on. These were all put together in the lab.

How do you feel, on the whole, about using trick-effects and process-shots?

It is a means to an end. You must arrive at it somehow. A very important thing about The Birds: I never raised the point, ‘Can it be done?’ Because then it would never have been made. Any technician would have said ‘impossible’. So I didn’t even bring that up, I simply said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’ No one will ever realize that had the pioneering technical work on it not been attempted, the film would not have been made. Cleopatra or Ben Hur is nothing to this – just quantities of people and scenery. Just what the bird trainer has done is phenomenal. Look at the way the crows chase the children down the street, dive all around them, land on their backs. It took days to organize those birds on the hood of the car and to make them fly away at the right time. The Birds could easily have cost $5,000,000 if Bob Burks and the rest of us hadn’t been technicians ourselves.

Marnie (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

What will Marnie be like?

It is the story of a girl who doesn’t know who she is. She is a psychotic, a compulsive thief, and afraid of sex, and in the end she finds out why. In terms of style, it will be a bit like Notorious

Marnie is a thief, but evidently we are in sympathy with her. How is this achieved?

This comes under the heading of rooting for the evildoer to succeed – because in all of us we have that eleventh commandment nagging us: ‘Thou shalt not be found out.’ The average person looking at someone doing evil or wrong wants the person to get away with it. There’s something that makes them say, ‘Look out! Look out! They’re coming!’ I think it’s the most amazing instinct – doesn’t matter how evil it is, you know. Can’t go as far as murder, but anything up to that point. The audience can’t bear the suspense of the person being discovered. ‘Hurry up! Quick! You’re going to be caught!’

[Bogdanovich concludes by listing several ‘unrealized projects’, Frances Iles’ 1931 novel ‘Malice Afterthought’, David Duncan’s story ‘The Bramble Bush’, which Hitchcock worked on during 1953-54, ‘Life of a City’, and Ernest Raymond’s ‘We, the Accused’, based on the Crippen case. Hitchcock commented on the last two projects.]

Life of a City

This is something I’ve wanted to do since 1928. I want to do it in terms of what lies behind the face of a city – what makes it tick – in other words, backstage of a city. But it’s so enormous that it is practically impossible to get the story right. Two or three people had a go at it for me but all failed. It must be done in terms of personalities and people, and with my techniques, everything would have to be used dramatically.

We, the Accused

This was the story of a man who murdered his wife, ran off with his secretary, and was arrested on board ship, in about 1910. It is almost the definitive case of murder, trial and execution. It would be a very long picture, with detailed characterization, but I’m afraid it’s terribly downbeat – and the man is middle-aged – so it wouldn’t be very commercial. And you would have to spend some money on it.

– Alfred Hitchcock: 1963 interview with Peter Bogdanovich at MoMA.org

Ingmar Bergman: Why I Make Movies

Fanny and Alexander (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Ernst Ingmar Bergman, a Swedish film and theatre director, writer, theatre manager, playwright, and novelist, was born on July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden, and died on July 30, 2007, on the island of Fårö, Sweden. This prolific filmmaker directed or scripted over 60 feature films and over 150 stage performances, and penned over 100 books and essays. Ingmar Bergman was a master of many genres, cinema, theatre and autobiography. 

An extremely common motif seen in many of Bergman's films is the importance of broken families, unsuccessful artists, and a God who is absent, coming to symbolise our incapacity to connect with one other. 

Actors, writers, and playwrights most notably Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, and Strindberg are influential not just in Bergman's theatrical work, but also throughout his whole career as an artist. 

Starting with the 1961 film Through a Glass Darkly, many of Bergman's films have been set on and shot on the island of Fårö, northeast of Gotland. The popularity of Bergman's films abroad has been linked to his keen dramatic sense, penetrating dialogue, portrayal of female sexuality, and sincerity of the performances and existential themes.

An important characteristic of both Bergman's work for the stage and for cinema is the recurring use of collaborators who are devoted to the director. Most notably, the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and the actors Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, and Bibi Andersson.

The ties between the life and work of the artist are as convoluted as they are intriguing in the case of Ingmar Bergman. Bergman often made references to his youth and childhood experiences, which were an integral part of his creative vision. 

In a 1960 magazine article, Ingmar Bergman wrote about how a film begins for him – ‘with a chance remark... a few bars of music, a shaft of light across the street’. His respect for the magic of movies remains an inspiration for writers and directors today.

During the shooting of The Virgin Spring, we were up in the northern province of Dalarna in May and it was early one morning, about half past seven. The landscape there is rugged, and our company was working beside a little lake in the forest. It was very cold, about 30 degrees, and from time to time a few snowflakes fell through the gray, rain-dimmed sky. The company was dressed in a strange variety of clothing – raincoats, oil slickers, Icelandic sweaters, leather jackets, old blankets, coachmen’s coats, medieval robes. Our men had laid some 90 feet of rusty, buckling rail over the difficult terrain, to dolly the camera on. We were all helping with the equipment – actors, electricians, make-up men, script girl, sound crew – mainly to keep warm.

Suddenly someone shouted and pointed toward the sky. Then we saw a crane high above the fir trees, and then another, and then several cranes, floating majestically in a circle above us. We all dropped what we were doing and ran to the top of a nearby hill to see the cranes better. We stood there for a long time, until they turned westward and disappeared over the forest. And suddenly I thought: This is what it means to make a movie in Sweden.

This is what can happen, this is how we work together with our old equipment and little money, and this is how we can suddenly drop everything for the love of four cranes floating above the treetops.

Smiles of a Summer Night (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

My association with film goes back to the world of childhood. My grandmother had a very large old apartment in Uppsala. I used to sit under the dining room table there, ‘listening’ to the sunshine that came in through the gigantic window. The bells of the cathedral went ding dong, and the sunlight moved about and ‘sounded’ in a special way. One day, when winter was giving way to spring and I was five years old, a piano was being played in the next apartment. It played waltzes, nothing but waltzes. On the wall hung a large picture of Venice. As the sunlight moved across the picture, the water in the canal began to flow, the pigeons flew up from the square, gesticulating people were engaged in inaudible conversation. Bells sounded, not from Uppsala Cathedral, but from the picture itself. And the piano music also came from that remarkable picture of Venice.

A child who is born and brought up in a vicarage acquires an early familiarity with life and death behind the scenes. Father performed funerals, marriages, baptisms; he gave advice and prepared sermons. The Devil was an early acquaintance, and in the child’s mind there was a need to personify him. This is where my magic lantern came in. It consisted of a small metal box with a carbide lamp – I can still remember the smell of the hot metal – and colored glass slides: Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, and all the others. The Wolf was the Devil, without horns but with a tail and a red mouth, strangely real yet incomprehensible, a picture of wickedness and temptation on the flowered wall of the nursery.

When I was 10 years old, I received my first rattling film projector, with its chimney and lamp. I found it both mystifying and fascinating. The first film I had was nine feet long and brown in color. It showed a girl lying asleep in a meadow who woke up and stretched out her arms, then disappeared to the right. That was all there was to it. The film was a great success and was projected every night until it broke and could not be mended anymore.

The Seventh Seal (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

This little rickety machine was my first conjuring set. And even today I remind myself with childish excitement that, since cinematography is based on deception of the human eye, I really am a conjurer. I have worked it out that if I see a film with a running time of one hour, I sit through 27 minutes of complete darkness – the blankness between frames. When I show a film, I am guilty of deceit. I use an apparatus which is constructed to take advantage of a certain human weakness, an apparatus with which I can sway my audience in a highly emotional manner – make them laugh, scream with fright, smile, believe in fairy stories, become indignant, feel shocked, charmed, deeply moved, or perhaps yawn with boredom. Thus I am either an impostor or, where the audience is willing to be taken in, a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks with an apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any performer in history would have given anything to own or to make use of it.

A film for me begins with something very vague – a chance remark or a bit of conversation, a hazy but agreeable event unrelated to any particular situation. It can be a few bars of music, a shaft of light across the street. Sometimes in my work at the theater I have envisioned actors made up for yet unplayed roles.

These are split-second impressions that disappear as quickly as they come, yet leave behind a mood – like pleasant dreams. It is a mental state, not an actual story, but one abounding in fertile associations and images. Most of all, it is a brightly colored thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious. If I begin to wind up this thread, and do so carefully, a complete film will emerge.

Wild Strawberries (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

This primitive nucleus strives to achieve definite form, moving in a way that may be lazy and half-asleep at first. Its stirring is accompanied by vibrations and rhythms that are very special, and unique to each film. The picture sequences then assume a pattern in accordance with these rhythms, obeying laws born out of and conditioned by my original stimulus.

If that embryonic substance seems to have enough strength to be made into a film, I decide to materialize it. Then comes something very complicated and difficult: the transformation of rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones, and scents into words and sentences, into an understandable screenplay. This is an almost impossible task.

The only thing that can be satisfactorily transferred from that original complex of rhythms and moods is the dialogue, and even dialogue is a sensitive substance that may offer resistance. Written dialogue is like a musical score, almost incomprehensible to the average person. Its interpretation demands a technical knack plus a certain kind of imagination and feeling – qualities that are often lacking even among actors. One can write dialogue, but how it should be delivered, its rhythm and tempo, what is to take place between the lines – all this must be omitted for practical reasons. A script with that much detail would be unreadable. I try to squeeze instructions as to location, characterization, and atmosphere into my screenplays in understandable terms, but the success of this depends on my writing ability and the perceptiveness of the reader, which are not predictable.

Through a Glass Darkly (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Now we come to essentials by which I mean montage, rhythm, and the relation of one picture to another: the vital third dimension without which the film is merely a dead product from a factory. Here I cannot clearly give a key, as in a musical score, or a specific idea of the tempo that determines the relationship of the elements involved. It is quite impossible for me to indicate the way in which the film ‘breathes’ and pulsates.

I have often wished for a kind of notation which would enable me to put on paper all the shades and tones of my vision, to record distinctly the inner structure of a film. For when I stand in the artistically devastating atmosphere of the studio, my hands and head full of all the trivial and irritating details that go with motion picture production, it often takes a tremendous effort to remember how I originally saw and thought out this or that sequence, or what the relation was between the scene of four weeks ago and that of today. If I could express myself clearly, in explicit symbols, then the irrational factors in my work would be almost eliminated, and I could work with absolute confidence that whenever I liked I could prove the relationship between the part and the whole and put my finger on the rhythm, the continuity of the film. Thus the script is a very imperfect technical basis for a film. And there is another important point that I should like to mention in this connection. Film has nothing to do with literature; the character and substance of the two art forms are usually in conflict. This probably has something to do with the receptive process of the mind. The written word is read and assimilated by a conscious act of the will in alliance with the intellect; little by little it affects the imagination and the emotions. The process is different with a motion picture. When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion; putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of images plays directly on our feelings without touching on the intellect.

The Silence (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has as much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not by way of the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence. Ever since childhood, music has been my greatest source of recreation and stimulation, and I often experience a film or play musically.

It is mainly because of this difference between film and literature that we should avoid making films out of books. The irrational dimension of a literary work, the germ of its existence, is often untranslatable into visual terms – and it, in turn, destroys the special, irrational dimension of the film. If, despite this, we wish to translate something literary into film terms, we must make an infinite number of complicated adjustments that often bear little or no fruit in proportion to the effort expended. I myself have never had any ambition to be an author. I do not want to write novels, short stories, essays, biographies, or even plays for the theater. I only want to make films – films about conditions, tensions, pictures, rhythms, and characters that are in one way or another important to me. The motion picture and its complicated process of birth are my methods of saying what I want to my fellow men. I am a filmmaker, not an author.

Thus the writing of the script is a difficult period but a useful one, for it compels me to prove logically the validity of my ideas. In doing this, I am caught in a conflict – a conflict between my need to transmit a complicated situation through visual images and my desire for absolute clarity. I do not intend my work to be solely for the benefit of myself or the few but for the entertainment of the general public. The wishes of the public are imperative. But sometimes I risk following my own impulse, and it has been shown that the public can respond with surprising sensitivity to the most unconventional line of development.

Winter Light (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

When shooting begins, the most important thing is that those who work with me feel a definite contact, that all of us somehow cancel out our conflicts through working together. We must pull in one direction for the sake of the work at hand. Sometimes this leads to dispute, but the more definite and clear the ‘marching orders,’ the easier it is to reach the goal which has been set. This is the basis of my conduct as director, and perhaps the explanation for much of the nonsense that has been written about me.

While I cannot let myself be concerned with what people think and say about me personally, I believe that reviewers and critics have every right to interpret my films as they like. I refuse to interpret my work to others, and I cannot tell the critic what to think; each person has the right to understand a film as he sees it. Either he is attracted or repelled. A film is made to create reaction. If the audience does not react one way or another, it is an indifferent work and worthless.

I do not mean by this that I believe in being ‘different’ at any price. A lot has been said about the value of originality, and I find it foolish; either you are original or you are not. It is completely natural for artists to take from and give to each other, to borrow from and experience one another. In my own life, my great literary experience was Strindberg. There are works of his which can still make my hair stand on end. And it is my dream to produce his A Dream Play someday.

The Virgin Spring (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

On a personal level, there are many people who have meant a great deal to me. My father and mother were certainly of vital importance, not only in themselves but because they created a world for me to revolt against. In my family there was an atmosphere of hearty wholesomeness that I, a sensitive young plant, scorned and rebelled against. But that strict middle-class home gave me a wall to pound on, something to sharpen myself against. At the same time my family taught me a number of values – efficiency, punctuality, a sense of financial responsibility – which may be ‘bourgeois’ but are nevertheless important to the artist. They are part of the process of setting for oneself severe standards. Today as a filmmaker I am conscientious, hardworking, and extremely careful; my films involve good craftsmanship, and my pride is the pride of a good craftsman.

Among the people who have meant something in my professional development is Alf Sjöberg, who directed my first screenplay, Torment, and taught me a great deal, as did [film producer] Lorens Marmstedt after I directed my first (unsuccessful) movie. I learned from Marmstedt the one unbreakable rule: You must look at your own work very coldly and clearly; you must be a devil to yourself in the screening room when watching the day’s rushes. Then there is [screenwriter] Herbert Grevenius, one of the few who believed in me as a writer. I had trouble with scriptwriting and was reaching out more and more to the drama, to dialogue, as a means of expression. He gave me great encouragement.

Finally, there is Carl-Anders Dymling, my producer. He is crazy enough to place more faith in the creative artist’s sense of responsibility than in calculations of profit and loss. I am thus able to work with an integrity that has become the very air I breathe – one of the main reasons I do not want to work outside of Sweden. The moment I lose this freedom I will cease to be a filmmaker, because I have no skill in the art of compromise. My only significance in the world of film lies in the freedom of my creativity.

Persona (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Today, the ambitious filmmaker is obliged to walk a tightrope without a net. He may be a conjurer, but no one conjures the producer, the bank director, or the theater owners when the public refuses to go to see a film and lay down the money by which producer, bank director, theatre owner, and conjurer live. The conjurer may then be deprived of his magic wand. I would like to be able to measure the amount of talent, initiative, and creative ability that has been destroyed by the film industry in its ruthlessly efficient sausage machine. What was play to me once has now become a struggle. Failure, criticism, public indifference all hurt more today than yesterday. The brutality of the industry is unmasked – yet that can be an advantage.

So much for people and the film business. I have been asked, as a clergyman’s son, about the role of religion in my thinking and filmmaking. To me, religious problems are continuously alive. I never cease to concern myself with them, and my concern goes on every hour of every day. Yet it does not take place on the emotional level but on an intellectual one. Religious emotion, religious sentimentality, is something I got rid of long ago – I hope. The religious problem is an intellectual one to me: the problem of my mind in relation to my intuition. The result is usually some kind of tower of Babel. Philosophically, there is a book that was a tremendous experience for me: Eino Kaila’s Personality. His thesis that man lives strictly according to his needs – negative and positive – was shattering to me, but terribly true. And I built on this ground.

People ask what are my intentions with my films – my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be.

Shame (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

There is an old story of how the Cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed – master builders, artists, laborers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who rebuilt the Cathedral of Chartres.

Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; ‘eternal values,’ ‘immortality,’ and ‘masterpiece’ were terms not applicable to his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.

Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny each other’s existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal.

Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil – or perhaps a saint – out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts. Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

– This story was originally published in September 1960 issue of Horizon magazine. Reprinted here.

Michelangelo Antonioni: A Study in Color

Red Desert (Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni) 

Red Desert (1964) was Antonioni’s first color film: a bold experiment in tone and design which often borders on the abstract. 

Giuliana (Monica Vitti) is a young mother recovering from a nervous breakdown. Her emotional insecurity propels the film’s journey through Antonioni’s preferred psychological terrain: the isolation, withdrawal and anxiety associated with life in a society where no one really belongs. 

With her engineer husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) absent, Giuliana forms an attachment to businessman Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris). It’s a relationship conducted against the bleak industrialised landscape of the Ravenna valley, a foggy, empty no-man’s land over which cranes and pylons loom like alien installations. 

It’s this nightmarish vision of the future that fascinates Antonioni – a landscape that almost deprives his characters of possibility. As the director once said, it was always the people, not the machines, that were broken in his films. 

Red Desert is the purest articulation of Antonioni’s cinematic vision. It’s a film in which the characters’ alienation is mirrored by an environment which is both forbidding and alluring in its detachment. ‘There’s something terrible in reality,’ says Giuliana at one point. ‘And I don’t know what it is.’ Antonioni’s images exist in a strange realm of their own. 

At times Red Desert feels like it has more in common with modern art than it does with traditional cinematic narrative. Antonioni once said of a Mark Rothko painting, ‘It’s painted anxiety’ – an apt description of Red Desert’s visual landscape. 

For all its formal virtuosity Red Desert is a poignant and compelling journey into a woman’s fractured state of mind. 

Michelangelo Antonioni gave an insight into his cinema and working methods in an interview with Pierre Billard in 1965:

In general, where does the original idea for your films come from? 

It seems to me that no one engaged in creative activity can answer that question in good faith. Lucidity is not one of my outstanding qualities. I look at everything, avidly, and I also think I listen a great deal. One thing is certain: ideas come to me unexpectedly. But I’m not really interested in getting to the bottom of such a question.

What does the writing of the scenario mean for you: clarifying the dramatic line, making the visual aspect of the film more specific, familiarizing yourself with the characters? 

To me, the visual aspect of a film is very closely related to its thematic aspect in the sense that an idea almost always comes to me through images. The problem lies elsewhere. It has to do with restricting the accumulation of these images, with digging into them, with recognizing the ones that coincide with what interests me at the time. It’s work done instinctively, almost automatically, but it involves a great deal of tension. One’s whole being is at stake: it is a precise moral choice. What people ordinarily call the ‘dramatic line’ doesn’t interest me. One device is no better than another, apriori. And I don’t believe that the old laws of drama have validity any more. Today stories are what they are, with neither a beginning nor an end necessarily, without key scenes, without a dramatic arc, without catharsis. They can be made up of tatters, of fragments, as unbalanced as the lives we lead. Familiarize myself with characters? But the characters are not strangers that I may or may not be on intimate terms with; they emerge out of me, they are my intimate inner life.

What does the fact that you work in collaboration with others on your scenario mean to you?

Every time I have tried to let others write parts of a rough script, the result, even if it was excellent from an objective point of view, was something foreign to me, something close to what I wanted without ever coinciding with it exactly. And that gave me a terrible sense of impotence. Then began the great task of selecting, correcting, even adapting work that was as difficult as it was useless, because it inevitably led to compromise. I can never manage to be objective when I judge the work of my collaborators. The film stands between me and them. So, after trying this a few times, I ended up writing almost all the shooting scripts of my films myself. However, I haven’t ruled out collaborations altogether. I don’t choose my collaborators on the basis of our affinities, but for the opposite reason. I need to have people who are very different from me around me, people with whom there can be animated, lively discussions. We talk, we discuss things for months before the film. We talk about a lot of things. Sometimes we also talk about the film, but not necessarily. What I say ricochets off them, comes back to me in the form of criticism, commentary, suggestions. After a certain time, the film becomes clear. It is only then that I begin to write the rough script. I work many hours a day, often beginning at dawn, until I’m completely exhausted.

What form does your script take in its final phase? 

The shooting script is never definitive for me. It’s notes about the direction, nothing more. There are no technical notations such as used to be made. The placing of the camera, the use of various lenses, the movements of the camera, all concern the phase in which the film is shot, not that in which the script is written. I would say the same thing about dialogue. I have to hear the dialogue in the living voices of the actors, that is to say of the characters, within the scene, to decide whether or not it’s right. And then there’s another factor. I believe in improvisation. None of us has the habit of preparing for a meeting to further business, love, or friendship; one takes these meetings as they come, adapting oneself little by little as they progress, taking advantage of unexpected things that come up. I experience the same things when I’m filming.

Can the choice of locations or actors influence the scenario, and if so, how? 

In general, I decide upon the outdoor locations before writing the shooting script. In order to be able to write, I need to have the surroundings of the film clearly in mind. There are times too when an idea for a film comes to me from a particular place. Or more precisely, when certain locales come to mind because of the themes or characters running through my head. It’s sometimes a rather odd series of coincidences.

What possibilities for improvisation do you allow for while you’re filming? 

Speaking of improvisation, I must add something to what I said before. If I think of the past, it’s possible for me to say that I have always lived minute by minute. It’s the way I live even today. Every moment of the day is important to me, every day is a new experience. And this doesn’t change when I’m shooting. On the contrary, the pull of reality increases during shooting, because you’re in an extremely receptive state, and because you’re making new contacts, you’re establishing often unexpected relationships with the crew, and these relationships are constantly changing. All that has a definite influence on my work, and leads me to improvised decisions, and even to radical changes. This is what I mean by improvisation.

How are your relations with the crew? 

Excellent. I try to create a cordial atmosphere. I like to have people laughing and joking around me. People who seem to have no problems. It’s quite enough that I have problems. I admit, however, that I am very demanding. I don’t allow anybody around me to show that he doesn’t know his business. Or that he’s unwilling to work. There is a certain laziness about crews, it’s natural, inevitable. But it’s what I dislike most. When I happen to scream at someone (as all directors do, it seems), I’m railing against this sort of indifference.

What are your relations with the actors? 

I’ve always had excellent relations with actors sometimes too good. Hearing me say that may seem odd, but it’s true. Even with Jeanne Moreau, who claims the opposite, I have never I repeat never had arguments during filming. I know, however, that actors feel somewhat uncomfortable with me; they have the feeling that they’ve been excluded from my work. And as a matter of fact they have been. But it is precisely: this form of collaboration, and no other, that I ask of them. Only one person has the film clearly in mind, insofar as that is possible: the director. Only one person fuses in his mind the various elements involved in a film, only one person is in a position to predict the result of this fusion: the director. The actor is one of these elements, and sometimes not even the most important. There is one thing the actor can’t do, and that is to see himself in the view-finder; if he could, he’d come up with a number of suggestions regarding his acting. This privilege is reserved to the director, however, who will thus limit himself to manipulating ‘the actor element’ according to criteria and exigencies known to him alone. There are various ways of getting certain expressions from actors, and it is of no interest to know whether or not there is a corresponding mood behind these expressions. I have often resorted to foreign actors for practical reasons: agreements with distributors, unavailability of Italian actors, and so forth. But sometimes it was because I thought actors were better suited to the roles than those at my disposal here.

Do you prefer to record the sound on the set or to dub it afterwards? 

When I can, I prefer recording on the set. The sounds, the noises, and the natural voices as picked up by microphones have a power of suggestion that can’t be obtained with dubbing. Moreover, most professional microphones are much more sensitive than the human ear, and a great many unexpected noises and sounds often enrich a soundtrack that’s been made on the set. Unfortunately, we are still not advanced enough technically to be able to use this system all the time. Shooting indoors it’s hard to get good sound. And dubbing also has its advantages. Sometimes I find that the transformation of a noise or of a sound becomes indispensable for certain special effects. Thus in certain cases it is necessary to change the human voice.

Who decides on the exact framing and the camera movements? 

I can’t imagine a director who would leave that up to other people. Excluding or including a detail, even an apparently secondary one, in the film image, choosing the angle of the shot, the lenses, the camera movements, are all decisions essential to the success of a film. Technique is not something that can be applied from outside by just anybody. Practically speaking, technical problems don’t exist. If style is there, it permeates technique. If style is missing, the problem disappears.

Do you shoot any sequences from several angles so as to have greater freedom when you edit? 

Until Red Desert, I always filmed with a single camera, and thus from a single angle. But from Red Desert on, I began using several cameras with different lenses, but always from the same angle. I did so because the story demanded shots of a reality that had become abstract, of a subject that had become color, and those shots had to be obtained with a long­ focus lens. Obviously I have the editing of the film clearly in mind during shooting. And it is only when I am led by circumstances to improvise, and consequently to shoot quickly, that I try to accumulate protection takes.

How much do you have to do with the cutting of your films? 

I have always had an editor at my side on all my films. Except for Story of a Love Affair, this editor has been Eraldo da Roma. He is an extremely able technician with vast experience, and a man who loves his work. We cut the films together. I tell him what I want as clearly and precisely as possible, and he does the cutting. He knows me, he understands immediately, we have the same sense of proportion, the same sensibility concerning the duration of a shot.

What is the role of music and the soundtrack in your films? 

I have always opposed the traditional musical commentary, the soporific function ordinarily assigned to it. It’s this idea of ‘setting images to music,’ as if it were a question of an opera libretto, that I don’t like. What I reject is this refusal to let silence have its place, this need to fill supposed voids. The only way to accept music in films is for it to disappear as an autonomous expression in order to assume its role as one element in a general sensorial impression. And with color films today this is even more necessary.

Do you concern yourself with the public and its possible reactions at any stage of making your films? 

I never think of the public. I think of the film. Obviously, you’re always speaking to someone, but this partner in the conversation is always an ideal one (perhaps another self). If this weren’t true, I wouldn’t know what to base my work on, since there are at least as many publics as there are continents or human races not to mention nations.

What phase of making a film presents the most difficulty, requires the most effort?  

Each film has its own history. One will demand inhuman efforts during shooting, another intellectual tension at the scripting stage, another an iron will during the cutting or the dubbing, when you’d swear that the material you have on hand is completely different from what you wanted. And then we each have our private lives which are not broken off during filming; on the contrary, they acquire new point and bite, giving our work a function that is sometimes stimulating, sometimes debilitating, sometimes calming, and so forth.

Do you feel that the language of film has evolved, and to what extent do you think you have contributed to this evolution? 

My contribution to the formation of a new cinematic language is a matter that concerns critics. And not even today’s critics, but rather those of tomorrow, if film endures as an art and if my films resist the ravages of time.

– PIERRE BILLARD From Cinema 65 100, November 1965. Originally translated in L’avventura. A Film by Michelangelo Antonioni, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969. 

Jean-Pierre Melville on ‘Le Cercle Rouge’

Le Cercle Rouge (Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville)

I’m not interested in realism. All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact re-creation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me: I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing. -– Jean-Pierre Melville

Melville’s films typically feature men of purpose who behave according to strict professional rules of conduct, whether they are portraying the French resistance, the lonely existence of an assassin, or even the life of a priest. Melville orchestrates his movies like a choreographer: movement in his films appear careful and even ritualised, with elements of his Parisian police dramas – guns, hats, gloves, cars, – taking on a totemic significance.

Melville’s films might sometimes look dreamy in their pace, but they include a stylized, gritty realism in their settings. Melville had extensive combat experience during the Second World War when he was a soldier with the Free French. He started making and directing his own films after the war, and his technique was focused on crafting the film's visual appearance in addition to writing and directing. 

Melville, even though he was famous for his pictures on crime, was never focused just on the commercial. He had come to know directors like Robert Bresson and Jean Cocteau while working in the industry, and as such he grasped the potency of reduced complexity and visual symbolism. His films feature chilly slow-motion shots, abrupt cut-aways, and reluctant main characters. These unusual techniques are beyond the mainstream. 

Melville was a contradiction as a filmmaker: a commercial filmmaker who was uninterested in profit, and while rooted in a love of American cinema, he was totally European in outlook. His movies are consistently simple with a purity and elegance that is striking, yet nevertheless possess a thematic and stylistic consistency that earn them the designation of the work of an auteur. 

In its painstaking technique, Melville's movie, the 1967 masterpiece Le Samouraï, captures the intent of laconic brutality and existential dread. It stars Alain Delon as the lonely Jeff Costello, a professional hitman who applies a stringent code of conduct to everything he does. Le Samouraï shows an economy of style, stripping the crime thriller to its essentials punctuated by stylistic set pieces including a lengthy heist scenario and a meticulously staged assault at a nightclub.  

A complex thriller about honour, fortune and fate, Le Cercle Rouge was the director’s penultimate film, and serves as a testament to the director’s singular vision and style. Here, once again, are the laconic, solitary characters, the dark after-hours locations, and the skilfully executed action sequences. All the elements of a classic American crime film but seen through a lens uniquely French in tone.

Melville directs the story with a detached eye, allowing the protagonists to work in a near-mythical world where professionalism and an entrenched code of honour take precedence over life and death. Their origins remain as hidden as their feelings; we learn about them through their deeds rather than through expository conversation. Each of their movements reveals something about who they are. 

This meticulous attention to detail is on full display throughout the Place Vendome. Melville produces a robbery sequence that is on a par with that in Riffifi (1955), the picture for which he was originally hired to direct, and John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), the film noir he admired most. As with the great films of the genre, we are compelled to sympathise with the robbers. We want them to get away with it, but we are well aware that they cannot and will not. The exhilaration lasts only a moment; the red circle of destiny is already closing in on them. 

Le Circle Rouge was the pinnacle of Jean-Pierre Melville's filmography. The film became a major hit in France, owing to the outstanding performances of the four principal actors. Outside of the United States, Melville's gangster epic has slowly increased in popularity, proving hugely influential on the work of Quentin Tarantino and John Woo, among others.

The following discussion of Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece of crime cinema Le Cercle Rouge is excerpted from Melville On Melville, a book-length interview with the great French director by Rui Nogueira first published in 1971.

How do you feel about your twelfth film, ‘Le Cercle Rouge’?

Since there’s no knowing if there will be a thirteenth, l have to talk about Le Cercle Rouge as though it were my ‘latest’ film – as you say when you’ve just completed a picture – but also my ‘last’ film [Melville would make one more film, Un Flic, in 1972]. Which in turn obliges me to speak about my filmmaking career as a whole, as well as my life as a spectator. Maybe I won’t want to make any more films. That could happen, supposing fate decreed that I wasn’t to be allowed to rebuild my studios here, and I decided to go live in America, not to make films there, but to write. So I really am obliged at this point to take stock of twenty-five years of professional activity and some forty-five years’ activity as a moviegoer. I’ll begin by being hard on myself, before moving on to other people. Then I’ll talk about the film, but also about what it’s like working on a film surrounded by people who haven’t at all the same reasons for being involved in it, for living in it, while it’s being made.

All right, then. If I look at myself very objectively, I realize that I’ve become impossible. Not egocentric – I’m not in the least egocentric – but, if I may be allowed to coin a word, opocentric; ‘opo,’ from opus. As I grow older, in other words, nothing matters except my profession and therefore my work, by which I mean the work at hand, which I think about day and night and which takes precedence over everything – I repeat, everything – else in my thoughts... I’m not talking about my affections, of course. So, I begin thinking about the film I’m working on as soon as I wake up in the morning – and I’m always working on one, even if I’m not actually shooting – and only when I go to sleep at night do I stop thinking about it. That’s pretty extreme, and I was made aware of it last night. I was having dinner with Léo Fortel, and at the next table there were two girls and two young men. One of the two men was obviously part French, part Indo-Chinese... and opposite him was a ravishing Asian girl; I think she must have been of mixed parentage, with extraordinary hair – probably a wig – pitch-black, in Joan of Arc style but longer, and the most fantastic face. I was staring at her throughout the meal, but when Léo asked me if I wanted him to get her name and address, I said no. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘But why not?’ ‘Because I don’t have a film in mind for her,’ I said. And I realized that beautiful women interest me only insofar as I can use them in a film. You see how far it’s gone?

 

Le Cercle Rouge is by far the toughest movie I have tackled, because I worked the plot out myself and I didn’t do myself any favors in writing my scenes. I said to myself, ‘This is going to be difficult to shoot, but I don’t care, I want to do it.’ And I did manage to film what I had written. But instead of completing it in fifty days, which would have been normal, it took me sixty-six days.

What is Le Cercle Rouge? Le Cercle Rouge, to my mind, is first and foremost a heist story. It’s about two professional crooks, Delon and Volonté, and another man, Montand, who is a sort of unplanned helper.

As I’ve told you, I wanted to write a heist script long before I saw The Asphalt Jungle, before I’d even heard of it, and well before things like Rififi. I think I also told you that I was supposed to make Rififi? No? Well, I was the person who got the producer to buy the rights: he announced that I was to direct the film, and then I didn’t see him again for six months. Finally, the film was made by [Jules] Dassin, who had the extreme courtesy to say that he would do it only if I wrote to tell him that I was happy about the arrangement. Which I did.

So I’ve wanted to ‘do a robbery’ since about 1950, around the time I finished Les Enfants Terribles. I’d like Le Cercle Rouge to be masterly, of course, but I don’t know yet if it will be; I think the elements are sufficiently interesting to make a good sequence, and time will tell if I’ve set the robbery in the right context or not. It’s also a sort of digest of all the thriller-type films I have made previously, and I haven’t made things easy for myself in any way. For instance, there are no women in the film, and it certainly isn’t taking the easy way out to make a thriller with five leading characters, none of whom is a woman.

Was ‘Le Cercle Rouge’ one of the twenty-two scripts destroyed when your studio burned down?

No. Actually, with my memory, I could have taken any one of those scripts and rewritten it down to the last comma. But if I had, I would have done it differently. I don’t like to repeat myself. I will never film those burned scripts, because I wouldn’t want to do them now even if I still had them in my drawer – which doesn’t mean that I won’t often use ideas from those scripts, as I in fact did for the relationship between the head of Internal Affairs and Captain Mattei in Le Cercle Rouge.

The Cercle Rouge script is an original in the sense that it was written by me and by me alone, but it won’t take you long to realize it’s a transposed western, with the action taking place in Paris instead of the West, in the present day rather than after the Civil War, and with cars instead of horses. So I start off with the traditional – almost obligatory – conventional situation: the man just released from jail. And this man corresponds pretty much to the cowboy who, once the opening credits are over, pushes open the doors of a saloon.

Originally you had a different cast in mind, didn’t you?

Yes. Captain Mattei, who is played by André Bourvil – and played beautifully – was a part originally intended for Lino Ventura. The ex-cop, Jansen, turned crook and alcoholic, was to have been played by Paul Meurisse and not Yves Montand. And I had thought of offering [Jean-Paul] Belmondo the role of Vogel, finally played by Gian Maria Volonté. I think that if Delon hadn’t wanted to do Borsalino with Belmondo, I would have got them both together in Le Cercle Rouge... But every film is what it is, and it stands or falls on its own merits. A film is a moment out of one’s life. In my case, at least, you must remember, it represents fourteen months of uninterrupted work squeezed into twelve – 1968 was a completely wasted year for me, because I’d signed a contract with the Hakim brothers to make La Chienne, and they found a way not to honor it. They made me lose a whole year immediately following the fire at my studios, which was a terrible blow in a lot of ways; because losing the studios and all they represented in terms of money and opportunities was bad enough, but then to be reduced to twelve months of unemployment by a contract retaining exclusive rights over your services and preventing you from doing anything else whatsoever – that is a terrible blow. So, those fourteen months of work squeezed into twelve, because in 1966 I made Le Deuxième Souffle, in 1967 I made Le Samouraï, in 1968 I did nothing, in 1969 I did Army of Shadows, and in 1970 Le Cercle Rouge. Well, when you reach my age, you’re entitled to think that a film is an important thing in your life, because it represents at least a year’s work and then dogs you for another year: you remain the man of last year’s film, or of your last film shown. So in fact a film may be said to take up two years of your life.

In the shooting script for ‘Le Cercle Rouge’, when Captain Mattei is hunting Vogel after his escape, you have him say, ‘He isn’t Claude Tenne. I couldn’t ask the minister of the interior to block every road in France.’ Who is this Claude Tenne?

Claude Tenne was a member of the OAS, and during the Algerian crisis, he was tried and imprisoned for his anti-government activities. He managed to escape from prison on the Île de Ré by folding himself into four and hiding inside a military trunk, a sort of big iron trunk, though not so very big, actually – I have no idea how he did it. And at the time, roadblocks were set up all over France.

At another point in the script, you describe Jansen as follows: ‘Jansen, stretched out on his bed, fully dressed, filthy, unshaven, with a three-day beard. Like Faulkner in one of his alcoholic bouts.’

Yes, I imagine Faulkner or Hemingway as being like that in their bouts of alcoholism. As a matter of fact, I think there are many eyewitness accounts of how Faulkner sometimes used to stay shut up in his room with his bottles for a week, with orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed.

But Jansen’s hallucinations – rats and spiders crawling slowly toward him – are the sort of nightmares Edgar Allan Poe might have dreamed up.

Well, of course. You know that Poe and Melville have a great deal in common... But now I’m getting mixed up, forgetting when I say Melville that it’s not me, but the great...

Could you tell us about your working relationship with the cast of ‘Le Cercle Rouge’?

I had an excellent relationship with Delon during shooting. We have an extraordinary personal understanding, which enables us to work in a very special way.

This was the first time I worked with Yves Montand, who is a very fine actor, but he comes from the music hall and that’s what sets him apart from Delon. Delon is enormously gifted and doesn’t need as much preparation as Montand, who is a perfectionist like me. Montand is the sort of actor who arrives on set in the morning with the whole thing in his head. Everything went beautifully with him too – he’s enormously willing and dedicated. If you want proof, consider what he’s just been doing in [Costa-Gavras’s] The Confession. This man, known to the whole world as a Communist, has had the courage to accept the role in The Confession of a character who accuses the Communist regime of having committed inconceivable crimes... Anyhow, it was marvelous working with Montand, and I hope to make many more films with him. In the first place, because he’s a man of about my age – he’s three years my junior, actually – so he’s easier for me to use as a vehicle than a much younger actor. Alain and Jean-Paul, let’s say, are vehicle characters for me because they are thirty-five years old, and if I give Delon a mustache, that’s it, he’s the man, not just a nice-looking young man but the man. Handsome, maybe, but it doesn’t matter, because it no longer gets in the way. Anyway, to my mind, Montand is also handsome.

 

André Bourvil is an excellent actor, one of the best in France, but he probably isn’t a priori a Melvillean actor. I think he gives a very fine performance in my film, and I’m all the more convinced of this after going through the whole film again on the cutting table: there are moments where Bourvil is absolutely staggering. In his case, I’m very happy about the casting change, because Bourvil brings an element of humanity to the part that I hadn’t expected and Lino Ventura certainly wouldn’t have provided. Lino Ventura would have been ‘the Police Captain,’ and there would have been no surprises. Whereas with Bourvil – thanks to Bourvil – there are quite a few.

As for François Périer, there’s really nothing more to be said. Everyone knows he’s one of our finest actors. I remember the evening I met you outside a cinema where they were playing Le Samouraï, and we both exclaimed together, ‘Périer is fantastic!’ This film can add only a little to his reputation. The astonishing thing, though – and it’s one of the distressing aspects of this business – is that at this moment, François Périer isn’t rated as a star, and he should be. This upsets me, just as it upsets me that [American character actor] Richard Boone isn’t a star. But in this area, it’s still the distributor who lays down the law and not the filmmaker... Distributors won’t take the risk. They always say, ‘No, no, think of the billing, use name actors, etc.’ I think it’s a pity you can’t even think of making an expensive film, costing, say, a billion old francs, with unknowns. I could make a film tomorrow with unknowns if it cost three hundred million, but not a billion. They’ll pay out three hundred million on my name because they know more or less what sort of merchandise they’ll get from me, but they won’t give me more. The billion for Le Cercle Rouge was possible because I had Delon, Bourvil, and Montand, and because there was a sizable Italian coproduction interest, since I was using an Italian actor, Gian Maria Volonté – totally unknown in France, I might add – whom I’d had in mind to play Vogel after seeing him in Carlo Lizzani’s Banditi a Milano.

If you want me to talk about Gian Maria Volonté, that’s a very different story. Because Gian Maria Volonté is an instinctive actor, and he may well be a great stage actor in Italy, he may even be a great Shakespearean actor, but for me he was absolutely impossible, in that on a French set, in a film such as I was making, he never at any moment made me feel I was dealing with a professional. He didn’t know how to place himself for the lighting – he didn’t understand that an inch to the left or to the right wasn’t at all the same thing. ‘Look at Delon, look at Montand,’ I used to tell him. ‘See how they position themselves perfectly for the lights, etc., etc.’ I also think the fact that he is very involved in politics (he’s a leftist, as he never tires of telling you) did nothing to bring us together. He was very proud of having gone to sit in at the Odéon during the ‘glorious’ days of May–June 1968; personally, I didn’t go to sit in at the Odéon. It seems, too, that whenever he had a weekend free, he flew back to Italy. That’s what I call a supernationalist spirit. I once said to him, ‘It’s no use dreaming of becoming an international star so long as you continue to pride yourself on being Italian – which is of no consequence, any more than being French is.’ But for him, everything Italian was marvelous and wonderful, and everything French was ridiculous. I remember one day, we were setting up a rear-projection scene, and he was smiling to himself. I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because...  you’ve seen Banditi a Milano? There are no rear projections in Banditi a Milano. Everything was shot direct, inside a moving car.’ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘And were you shooting night scenes like this? Were you inside a car filming the action going on outside at night?’ ‘Well, no,’ he said, and it seemed to sink in that we weren’t using rear projection just to amuse him. He’s a strange character. Very wearying. I can tell you, I won’t be making any more films with Gian Maria Volonté.

Can you draw any conclusions from the twelve films you’ve made since 1947?

In these twenty-three years, or let’s say these twenty-five years, because after all, it was in 1945 that I founded my production company – I was demobilized in October 1945 and formed the company on November 5, 1945 – in these twenty-five years of professionalism, I’ve done lots of things. First, in 1947, I got the idea of building my own studios, which I did. At one point, I was the only filmmaker in the world to have his own studios. This period lasted from 1949, when I made Les Enfants Terribles, till 1967 – eighteen years in all, with a short break when I gave the studios up for a time, before being able to rebuild them as I wanted. Then in June 1967, they burned down. Nothing much remains, but I am rebuilding them, even though I haven’t received the permit yet from the city of Paris. So parallel to the films I have made... Well, in an article I received yesterday, there’s a sentence that reads, ‘. . . the novel Le Silence De La Mer, which was adapted for the screen by the father of the new French cinema, Jean-Pierre Melville.’ This was published in the Algerian newspaper El Moudjahid, by the critic Ahmazid Deboukalfa. I don’t know this man except by name, but I’m delighted to know that someone outside France remembers from time to time that it was Melville, after all, who shook things up in 1947.

Then in 1957, I built a screening room on the rue Washington, along with editing rooms, but since leasing out screening space and editing rooms isn’t my business, I sold my interest. However, I’ve always felt the need for some parallel creative activity, in building and materials, because cinema isn’t created with ideas alone. There’s the whole mechanical side of it, and, of course, projection. For instance, during the three years my studios were leased out to Pathé-Marconi, I couldn’t stand not having my own screening room, so I built one, which I leased out to other people but could use myself in the evenings to run through any films I wanted to see. This sort of thing will always happen with me. At the moment, I’m ruining myself in advance to create a screening room here on the rue Jenner, which is going to be marvelous because if, for instance, Monsieur Cocteau of Fox were to lend me a print of The Kremlin Letter tomorrow morning, what a joy it would be to screen it here during the morning and then return it to the Balzac Cinema at 1:30 p.m., in time for the first show.

I don’t know what will be left of me fifty years from now. I suspect that all films will have aged terribly and that the cinema probably won’t even exist anymore. My guess is that the final disappearance of cinemas will take place around the year 2020, so in fifty years’ time, there will be nothing but television. Well, I would be happy if I got one line in the Great Universal Encyclopedia of the Cinema, and I think that’s the sort of ambition every filmmaker must have. This is a business in which you have to be not arriviste, certainly not that, nor yet ambitious, which I’m not, but you have to have ambition in what you do, which isn’t at all the same thing. I’m not ambitious, I don’t want to be something – I have always been what I am, I haven’t become anything – but I’ve always had, and I shall always try to retain, this feeling that ambition in one’s work is an absolutely healthy, justifiable thing. You can’t make films just for the sake of making films. If fate wills that I should make more films, I’ll try to remain faithful to this ideal of being ambitious when I start a film; not being ambitious between films, but being ambitious when I start work, telling myself, ‘People have to enjoy this.’ That’s my ambition: to fill cinemas.

– ‘Melville on Le Cercle Rouge’ in Rui Nogueira: Melville on Melville (Martin Secker & Warburg, 1971). This excerpt from criterion.com, April 12, 2011.