Reflecting Realism: An Interview with the Dardenne Brothers

The Son (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Olivier (Olivier Gourmet) works as a lone carpentry instructor at a vocational training centre for at-risk youth. He is bothered by a sore back and an inability to communicate with others effectively. However, he has found a way to survive in a nondescript apartment in his own quiet way. He appears to be uninterested in anything other than his work. 

Olivier's routine is upended when Francis (Morgan Marinne), a sixteen-year-old recently released from a juvenile detention centre, arrives. The teacher realises the boy is the one who murdered his small son five years ago during a robbery. The same day, Olivier's ex-wife Magali (Isabella Soupart) calls to announce her pregnancy and decision to marry her lover. His reaction to her demonstrates that they have had difficulty grieving the loss of their son and that this schism resulted in their separation. To summarise, Olivier's stiff body reveals burdens he has struggled to bear and even more difficult to release. 

At first, the teacher is adamant about not having Francis in his class, but he eventually relents. The young man is serious about pursuing a career in carpentry. Olivier steals the keys to his place after discovering where he lives. He lies in the boy's bed for a brief moment. He later meets Francis at a fast food restaurant and impresses him with his ability to judge distances with his eye. 

The two go on a trip to the mill to purchase wood for the training center's projects. The boy approaches Olivier about becoming his mentor, but the teacher requires some clarification first. He interrogates him about his stay in the detention centre. Francis describes the robbery and strangling a boy who refused to let go of him as he attempted to steal a car radio. Olivier is desperate to hear Francis express regret, but none is forthcoming. When they arrive at the mill, the atmosphere is charged with tension, and the teacher's body language oozes with anger and impending violence. 

The Son is a haunting parable that contains numerous instances of quiet dignity. However, only the most daring filmgoer will be able to navigate Alain Marcoen's hand-held camera work, which is heavily focused on Olivier's neck. There is no music accompanying this master woodworker's daily activities. Nonetheless, the Dardenne brothers have crafted a touching storey of moral imagination in an austere and unusual manner, concluding with an unexpected grace note that defies precise measurement.

The Son (2002) was Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s fifth fiction feature following the international success of La Promesse (1996), and Rosetta (1999). They are credited with introducing a unique realistic aesthetic into European narrative cinema, drawing precise social portrayals characterized by restless camerawork, detailed performances and a concern with the urban dispossessed. In the following extract the filmmakers discuss The Son and related topics in an interview first published in Cineaste magazine in 2003. 

Cineaste: The relationship between parents and children seems to be at the heart of your films – ‘La Promesse’, ‘Rosetta’, and now ‘The Son’. Why?

Luc Dardenne: It was the father who interested us the most. What is a father? What does it mean to be a father? Of course, for there to be a father there has to be a son, or a daughter. In La Promesse, the father, Roger, is outside the law – he is illegal, he traffics in immigrants; he takes up space in the unemployment line; he lies so that he can cut in front of people. He lets a man die and pulls his son Igor into the scheme, making him an accessory. He treats his son as if he were an accomplice, a member of the same gang. But he does not show his son the rules. He is not teaching him how to grow up, to become a man. He is teaching him to become a crook and simply a kind of friend, an associate.

Murder, however, is not what a father is supposed to teach. The father – well the parents, really, because there is also obviously the mother – are the ones who say to a child, ‘Do not kill.’ In La Promesse, it is actually because of Roger that Igor is able to find another ’parent’ and thus to free himself from the coercive relationship with his father. And it is a woman, Assita the foreigner, who is instrumental in accomplishing this change. Because of her Igor discovers guilt. He comes to regret having participated in a murder with his father and learns that not everything is permitted. Assita assumes the role of the father, the adult who says, ‘No. Not that. This, yes, but not that. Right and wrong are different, you cannot confuse them.’

La Promesse (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

La Promesse was the moral trajectory of a boy. The same is true in The Son. Olivier is haunted by the murder of his son by this boy, Francis. He feels somehow that it is legitimate to want to avenge oneself; what becomes illegitimate is finding satisfaction in it. How will Olivier withstand the action of not avenging himself? He has become a kind of father for Francis – even though he is the father of the child who died. He has transformed his own son into Francis. Can he teach, bequeath, his trade to this boy? Certainly, the greatest lesson Olivier gives the teenager is not killing him. That is what can save this kid – teaching him that murder is an act that only perpetuates itself from generation to generation. Perhaps this is the reason why Francis approaches Olivier at the end, because Olivier did not kill him. It is not in order to ask forgiveness. Olivier does not say he forgives him. It is more as if the boy is thinking, ‘He didn’t kill me. Normally he would have. But he didn’t.’ That is the lesson the boy learns.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: This is a story about transmission.

LD: Yes, about what one gives to the next generation. We do not wish to get carried away with accusations against adults, against parents; but, as La Promesse suggests, we feel that these days it is as if we adults no longer want to die to allow the generation coming after us to live. In order to educate someone, you have to know how to die so that he or she can live; so that, simply put, they can take your place. We adults want to be immortal, we want not to die. Somehow it is as if, when all is said and done, we have this desire to eat our children, like the Greek god, Cronos. In short, we have nothing to say to our children anymore unless it is, ‘Hey, go play, get out of our hair! We like you. We give you birthday parties. We do everything you want, but we have absolutely nothing to say to you. We have nothing to pass on to you.’ That is a bit of what we felt and what we attempted to show, how adults were trying to be adolescents and not fathers, not mothers – just buddies.

La Promesse (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Cineaste: A question about ‘The Son’: generally speaking, films that explore the theme of forgiveness in any serious manner are not common in the history of cinema. How was it that you decided to develop a project around this topic?

LD: Actually, our idea was not to write a scenario about pardon but rather about the interdiction against murder, and about desire as well. Obviously, if an act is forbidden, the desire to commit it must also exist – otherwise the act would not be forbidden. It was Olivier who attracted us. We asked ourselves what a human being is and came to the definition that certainly a human being is an individual who succeeds in not killing. Because killing is a human possibility. We wanted to see how we could push Olivier to the point of killing this adolescent and then have him not do it. How someone could remain human in such circumstances – that is what interested us. Olivier is no angel. If the boy were to say, ‘Yes, I regret what I did,’ Olivier would have become a real bastard if he just simply killed him. But suppose that the boy gets down on his knees, cries, asks forgiveness? Olivier might say, ‘Well, OK, fine – goodbye.’

However, this kid does not do that. He is not conscious of what he did; he even seems to think it was a matter of small importance. This provokes Olivier. So even though he asks himself why not teach the boy his craft, why not help this kid as he has others, we have to ask ourselves if Olivier did not, in his heart, unconsciously wish to avenge himself after all. And then he finds himself faced with the possibility of committing murder. I think that when Olivier almost kills Francis, but then gets up, he is ashamed because he almost became like the boy. He almost became a murderer, too. Killing, then, is a human possibility. It is easy. Well, difficult too, because you leave traces; you have to hide the body. That part is complicated; the killing is easy. Olivier realizes that he was almost caught in a repetition. For us the film is about how to get out of this repetition.

La Promesse (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Cineaste: Memory seems to be a central theme in ‘The Son’. The father has too many recollections and the boy practically none.

LD:Yes.

JPD: Yes, and you could say that Francis’s body seems to remember. He is not well and has to take medications in order to sleep. You could also say that the entire journey Olivier makes in the film is to free himself from these memories. Life returns a bit at the end of the film and begins to reestablish its prerogatives. Olivier is a man so caught up in his memories that they have become a prison for him. This is not so in the case of his ex-wife. She has not forgotten, but she has begun to live again. Not Olivier. In spite of his involvement helping his students, teaching them a trade, he continues to be obsessed by his memories. They are the only thing that interests him. Why did he decide to teach in that kind of school – a school where he is likely to meet someone like Francis? If he chose to teach there it is because one day he said to himself, perhaps unconsciously, that he was going to meet his son’s murderer.

Cineaste: So when Olivier forces Francis to admit that he had killed a child, this is not necessarily meant as an act of charity towards the youth? Although, even if Olivier is acting out of his own interests, such a verbal admission is still, nonetheless, a charitable act that will free Francis and allow him to take up his life again and to grow up.

JPD: Of course. It represents a way out for both of them. But a way out does not mean forgetting – it means being able to continue to live. You can go on living without forgetting.

Rosetta (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Cineaste: The sense of Olivier as a carpenter is very strong in your film. Why did you choose to give him this particular profession?

LD: In fact, in our first drafts we made Olivier a cook because we wanted something alive – preparing food, cooking, nourishing – to contrast with the presence of death in the story. But then we got a little scared of the knives because that was becoming a bit symbolic. As soon as Olivier would have gone to pick up a knife and with the audience’s knowledge that the boy had killed – the effect would have been dreadful! The idea of a carpenter came from the fact that carpenters are always measuring. Once we had decided on a carpenter the scenario was easy to do because we knew what woodworkers are, how skillful they are, how they wear overalls with a special pocket for their folding ruler, how they use a pencil to mark. And woodworking as a choice was interesting, too, because carpentry shops really exist in these schools for social rehabilitation.

Most significantly we chose carpentry as a trade for Olivier because in the end – if you consider the film in terms of a purely cinematographic sense of form – you have a man and a boy, and between them a murder that is of special significance to Olivier. How will they be able to approach each other? They are closed up in a car, for example. How will we be able to calculate, to measure the distance between these two bodies? We have that night scene where Francis measures the distance between his foot and Olivier’s. And when the moment comes for them to touch each other, will it be to forgive or to kill? Thinking about carpentry really allowed us to understand what we were trying to do in this film.

Rosetta (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Cineaste: In ‘The Son’ there seems to be the suggestion that, beyond physical constructions, Olivier is also bedeviled by building problems of a more metaphysical nature, such as the challenge he has faced for five years to reconstruct a meaningful life for himself after the death of his son. Olivier appears to come to the conclusion, perhaps not consciously, that Francis is salvageable building material in the sense that the youth is capable of building a life as a responsible adult. Are there hints here of religious allegory? Might your film be a kind of morality play for the modern world?

LD: Certainly when we set out to make this film we were aware that Christ was the son of a carpenter; and, therefore, that his father must have taught him a little of the trade. And that Christ died on a wooden cross. However, that was not our point of departure. I can understand how a Christian might say he or she sees the story as being about forgiveness. Why not? We, however, did not take the pardon all the way to its conclusion because we saw the main problem as being Olivier himself. At the end of the film, the protagonist does not kill the boy, whom he has forcibly restrained; later, after he has been released, Francis then approaches Olivier. Olivier is now able to teach the lad his trade.

These actions might be understood as a kind of forgiveness by some people; but Olivier does not say, ‘I forgive you’ to the boy, and the boy does not say, ‘I ask your pardon.’ To have a scene of forgiveness, it would have been necessary for the boy to ask for it. And there is the question we obviously asked ourselves – can Olivier grant forgiveness in his son’s stead? No. We did think that Olivier’s being able to teach his trade was not really such an insignificant decision. Perhaps in twenty years, when the boy will be a thirty-something-year-old man, he will write Olivier a letter thanking him for not having killed him. At that point he will understand fully all that he does not understand now.

The Son (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Cineaste: Why are there so many silences and so little dialogue in your films?

JPD: In fact, The Son is a film about the difficulty of speaking: Olivier has difficulty saying, ‘It was my son you killed,’ and Francis has difficulty saying what he had done. We are more interested in trying to give meaning to a scene by the way we film the relations between the characters’ bodies and what gestures a character makes – how he passes a cup to someone else, how he pours coffee into his cup. This is more interesting than presenting actions as pretexts for talking. Words come afterwards, when you cannot do anything else. In general I think there is too much talking in movies; it is an easy thing to do. But why clutter up a film with chattering?

Cineaste: Given the emphasis you place on characters’ gestures, do you use any special techniques working with your actors to get them to express what you had in mind?

LD: On the set we do not speak to the actor about why his or her character does this or that. No psychological explanations on why a character acts a certain way. Certainly actors have their own opinions; they make their own films in their heads. On the occasions when an actor tries to speak to us about such opinions, we always try to contradict him in order to keep him slightly off-balance.
What we do with the actors is also very physical. The day filming begins we do not feel obliged to do things exactly the way they were rehearsed; we pretend that we are starting over from zero so that we can rediscover things that we did before. The instructions we give the actors are above all physical. We start working without the cameraman – just the actors and my brother and me. We walk them through the blocking, first one then the other, trying several different versions. They say but do not act their lines. We do not tell them what the tone of their lines should be; we just say that we will see once the camera is rolling. At this point there is no cameraman, no sound engineer, no lighting. Then we set up all the camera movements exactly and the rhythm of the shot, which is usually a long take. Doing it this way allows us the ability to modify the actors’ movements or any small details. Then we begin and the actors really say the dialog for the first time. If a line is not delivered as we would like it, we do not say, ‘No, you should say it this way.’ It is rather, ‘Not like that, hold back.’ We ask for less, less, less, more neutral, more blank. We try to comment in a way that is negative and physical so that the actors themselves can bring something to the process.

The Son (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Cineaste: It strikes us that your characters run a lot. They always seem to be hurrying, and your camera is always following them from behind.

JPD: Well, since I can never be a viewer in the same sense that you are, I see things from a different angle; and, personally, I have another impression. I feel rather that in The Son it is more a question of waiting. In Rosetta we are in a dash towards something she wants – a job. Everything she does is out of her will to have, to be, to exist, to run, and the camera tries to stick to her heels. In The Son it is more a question of waiting for a word that is supposed to be spoken but is not forthcoming, and of waiting to see what Olivier will do. Even Olivier does not know. We try to show this, to take seriously the fact that when Magali asks Olivier why he is doing all this, he says that he does not know. We wanted to have the acting and the mise-en-scene reflect this state of imbalance. Maybe he is going to kill the boy; maybe he is going to teach him his trade. Maybe in teaching he will also want to kill him. So, except when we are following Olivier up and down the stairs, my impression is that we are stuck to him waiting to escape this situation.

And seen from behind. Quite so. Perhaps when there are more views of a person’s back than usual, then when you see the face, you really look at it – more than you would if you had been looking at it all the time.

LD: We filmed Olivier from the back for a lot of reasons, really. Not too long ago I saw a photograph by Dorothea Lange that I think suggests one of these reasons. The picture shows a woman of color, perhaps seventy or seventy-five, seated on a bench, probably in a New York park or street, and we are viewing her from behind. I had the feeling – very subjective –  that I was seeing her whole life there on her back, on the nape of her neck. Looking at her from this angle gave me the impression of a story, one of suffering perhaps. There she was looking at the world in front of her and there on her back were the traces of her entire history. There was today’s world and the character outside of it with her own particular history that the world does not notice, but we do perceive it because we are behind her. And I said to myself that Olivier is pretty much like that. There is the entire story with his son – which we do not know when the film begins; but observing him from behind we see something private and peculiar to him. However, it is something that he cannot see because he cannot look at his back.

The Son (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Cineaste: In your films we see many characters who come from the working class and who really strive to work. Would you comment on the sociopolitical positions that have led to your interest in depicting such characters.

JPD: Oh la . . . This may stem from sociopolitical positions, but it also comes from our stance as filmmakers. Making a film is also a pleasure; it is fun. Although it is also a job, no one is forcing us do it. You have to do things that you want to do, and there are certain things that you want to film more than others. You not only have to be interested in filming but you also have to be able to find a certain element of passion and desire in the process.

It is true that our characters belong to the working class or at least to what used to be the working class. You might say that Roger in La Promesse is déclassé, a man who no longer belongs to a class. He does not have a job, although we can guess that he once did have a job. Quite visibly he does not come from the upper middle class. Rosetta, too, has been ‘de-classed.’ The working class is no longer the working class. It is no longer structured as it was at the beginning of the last century. We are truly at the end of an age, of industry, of what we have known for a hundred years. Perhaps in an immediate sense, it is because we have lived a good part of our lives within this time that we choose to film it and to anchor our stories around these de-classed people. If our characters had been from the 1920s or the 1930s we would not have filmed them in the same manner. Nor would we have told the story of a former worker who becomes an exploiter of foreign laborers. Such a character does not belong in the twenties or thirties; he belongs in a period when the social structures are becoming destructured. In such times you see people who are a bit lost, who try to live by exploiting those worse off than they; people who, like Rosetta, are trying to survive.

The Son (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

The Son is more abstract since Olivier is someone who has a connection with manual labor. Such an attachment does exist, quite strongly, where we come from. Even Roger, who exploits immigrant labor, works and gets his hands dirty – even if it is to bury someone. He pushes wheelbarrows around; he labors. We explained why Olivier is a carpenter. But it might have been possible, and quite interesting, to make him teach French or math to kids who have not succeeded in the regular schools. In the end, the way we depict our characters has something, and at the same time, nothing to do with sociopolitical positions.

LD: But perhaps filming gestures and very specific, material things is what allows the viewer to sense everything that is spiritual, unseen, and not a part of materiality. We tend to think that the closer one gets to the cup, to the hand, to the mouth whose lips are drinking, the more one will be able to feel something invisible – a dimension we want to follow and which would otherwise be less present in the film. How does one capture what happens when a gesture is taught? For example, when Olivier teaches the boy the movements of his trade. Yes, there is certainly the fact that the other person will do the same thing, but something else is happening, too. How can you capture that on film? Perhaps by filming the gestures as precisely as possible you can render apprehensible that which is not seen?

– Joan And Dennis West: ‘Taking The Measure Of Human Relationships: An Interview With The Dardenne Brothers’ (Cineaste, Fall 2003). 

Jim Jarmusch: Open Letter to John Cassavetes

Night on Earth (Directed by Jim Jarmusch)

‘Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?’ - Jim Jarmusch 

Originally from Akron, Ohio, a teenage Jim Jarmusch travelled to New York City in 1971 to study American and English literature at Columbia University. He spent his final semester before graduation studying French literature in Paris. Jarmusch was a frequent visitor to Paris's Cinémathèque and developed an obsession with films. He returned to New York and went to graduate film school at NYU but found the experience dispiriting. He did however meet famed filmmaker Nicholas Ray and Tom DiCillo, who would later become the cinematographer on his first two feature films.

Jarmusch gained valuable knowledge about technical aspects of filmmaking prior to dropping out of New York University, but he had to relearn how to work with actors. Jarmusch, like his idol John Cassavetes, is an actor-driven director. He begins by developing the characters, frequently with an actor in mind, and then "the storyline sort of reveals itself around the character" (

After dropping out of NYU he opted to expand his final effort, a short film, into the feature-length Permanent Vacation, which one critic called as an 80-minute prologue about drifting. Jarmusch then began work on Stranger Than Paradise, which began as a 30-minute short film filmed using 40 minutes of unused film stock supplied by German filmmaker Wim Wenders. Jarmusch eventually acquired a tiny sum of money - $120,000 – and was able to finish the film. Stranger is a road film about two down-on-their-luck New York City losers: Willie (John Lurie) and Eddie (Richard Edson). Their dull, aimless existence is upended when Willie's cousin (Eszter Balint) visits from Hungary for a few days before moving on to Cleveland. It was an immediate success and set the tone and style for his later distinctive work.  

Jim Jarmusch is a director interested in what occurs on the margins of existence. Like John Cassavetes, he is keen to document the seemingly trivial events that people often fail to appreciate and show that they too are filled with compelling drama. 

Jarmusch’s films are peopled by characters without any sense of direction in life, drifters who accidentally fall into risky situations – much like life itself. It is the delicacy of the speaking and acting in Cassavetes’ films that impresses Jarmusch the most – and Jarmusch is very much a director who prioritises the actor. Jarmusch creates the characters first, often with a particular actor in mind, and then ‘the plot kind of suggests itself around the character’. 

Before filming starts the actors rehearse scenes that are never filmed, but are deemed necessary to establish a tone and identity for when the actual filming begins. This process results in convincing, realistic characters fleshed out with their own shades and subtleties. 

In September 2000, Jarmusch wrote an open letter to John Cassavetes in tribute to the great American film-maker. It was published in Tom Charity’s excellent ‘LifeWorks’.

OPEN LETTER TO JOHN CASSAVETES

There’s a particular feeling I get when I’m about to see one of your films – an anticipation. It doesn’t matter if I’ve seen the film before or not (by now I think I’ve seen them all at least several times) I still get that feeling. I’m expecting something I seem to crave, a kind of cinematic enlightenment. As a film fan or as a filmmaker (there isn’t really a clear dividing line for me anymore) I’m anticipating a blast of inspiration. I want formal enlightenment. I need the secret consequences of a jump-cut to be revealed to me. I want to know how the rawness of the camera angles or the grain of the film material figures into the emotional equation. I want to learn about acting from the performances, about atmosphere from the light and locations. I’m ready, fully prepared to absorb ‘truth at twenty-four-frames-per-second.’

But the thing is this: as soon as the film begins, introduces its world to me, I’m lost. The expectation of that particular enlightenment evaporates. It leaves me there in the dark, alone. Human beings now inhabit that world inside the screen. They also seem lost, alone. I watch them. I observe every detail of their movements, their expressions, their reactions. I listen carefully to what each one is saying, to the frayed edges of someone’s tone of voice, the concealed mischief in the rhythm of another’s speech. I’m no longer thinking about acting. I’m oblivious to ‘dialogue.’ I’ve forgotten the camera.

The enlightenment I anticipated from you is being replaced by another. This one doesn’t invite analysis or dissection, only observation and intuition. Instead of insights into, say, the construction of a scene, I’m becoming enlightened by the sly nuances of human nature.

Your films are about love, about trust and mistrust, about isolation, joy, sadness, ecstasy and stupidity. They’re about restlessness, drunkenness, resilience and lust, about humor, stubbornness, miscommunication and fear. But mostly they’re about love and they take one to a far deeper place than any study of ‘narrative form.’ Yeah, you are a great filmmaker, one of my favorites. But what your films illuminate most poignantly is that celluloid is one thing and the beauty, strangeness and complexity of human experience is another.

John Cassavetes, my hat is off to you. I’m holding it over my heart.

– Jim Jarmusch. From ‘John Cassavetes: Lifeworks’ by Tom Charity.

Kubrick’s Maze: An Interview on The Shining

The Shining (Directed by Stanley Kubrick)

The Shining is Stanley Kubrick’s epic gothic masterpiece – a stylish and eerie adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel. Frustrated writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) arrives with wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and psychic son Danny (Danny Lloyd) to take a job as the winter caretaker of the opulent and forbidding Overlook Hotel. Driven by his frustrations as a writer and his fondness for alcohol, his gradual descent into madness allows Kubrick to explore themes of evil, creativity, the supernatural and of movie-making itself. One of the texts Kubrick and his co-writer Diane Johnson, referred to when adapting King’s novel was Freud’s 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’. The essay, which examines the disturbing effect of strange elements in life and supernatural literature, defines the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’ In other words, the uncanny is ‘something which ought to have remained hidden but which is brought to light.’ The recent documentary ‘Room 237’ wittily recounts various theories about what lies buried beneath the technical and stylistic grandeur of The Shining. From the credible: that it is a fable about the genocide of the American Indians, to the bizarre: that The Shining is a veiled confession of Kubrick’s supposed involvement in faking the NASA moon landings. No doubt Kubrick purposely constructed ‘The Shining’ as a cinematic maze of hidden clues and visual incongruities waiting to be discovered. The following is an edited extract from an extensive interview Stanley Kubrick gave to the film critic Michel Ciment in 1982 about the making of The Shining:

Michel Ciment: In several of your previous films you seem to have had a prior interest in the facts and problems which surround the story - the nuclear threat, space travel, the relationship between violence and the state - which led you to Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange. In the case of The Shining, were you attracted first by the subject of ESP, or just by Stephen King’s novel?

Stanley Kubrick: I’ve always been interested in ESP and the paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been conducted suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its existence, I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of opening a book at the exact page we’re looking for, or thinking of a friend a moment before they ring on the telephone. But The Shining didn’t originate from any particular desire to do a film about this. The manuscript of the novel was sent to me by John Calley, of Warner Bros. I thought it was one of the most ingenious and exciting stories of the genre I had read. It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: ‘Jack must be imagining these things because he’s crazy’. This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing.

Do you think this was an important factor in the success of the novel?

Yes, I do. It’s what I found so particularly clever about the way the novel was written. As the supernatural events occurred you searched for an explanation, and the most likely one seemed to be that the strange things that were happening would finally be explained as the products of Jack’s imagination. It’s not until Grady, the ghost of the former caretaker who axed to death his family, slides open the bolt of the larder door, allowing Jack to escape, that you are left with no other explanation but the supernatural. The novel is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is often all that really matters.

Don’t you think that today it is in this sort of popular literature that you find strong archetypes, symbolic images which have vanished somehow from the more highbrow literary works?

Yes, I do, and I think that it’s part of their often phenomenal success. There is no doubt that a good story has always mattered, and the great novelists have generally built their work around strong plots. But I’ve never been able to decide whether the plot is just a way of keeping people’s attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot is really more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us on an unconscious level which affects us in the way that myths once did. I think, in some ways, the conventions of realistic fiction and drama may impose serious limitations on a story. For one thing, if you play by the rules and respect the preparation and pace required to establish realism, it takes a lot longer to make a point than it does, say, in fantasy. At the same time, it is possible that this very work that contributes to a story’s realism may weaken its grip on the unconscious. Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas. Fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious. I think the unconscious appeal of a ghost story, for instance, lies in its promise of immortality. If you can be frightened by a ghost story, then you must accept the possibility that supernatural beings exist. If they do, then there is more than just oblivion waiting beyond the grave.

This kind of implication is present in much of the fantastic literature.

I believe fantasy stories at their best serve the same function for us that fairy tales and mythology formerly did. The current popularity of fantasy, particularly in films, suggests that popular culture, at least, isn’t getting what it wants from realism. The nineteenth century was the golden age of realistic fiction. The twentieth century may be the golden age of fantasy.

After Barry Lyndon did you begin work straight away on The Shining?

When I finished Barry Lyndon I spent most of my time reading. Months went by and I hadn’t found anything very exciting. It’s intimidating, especially at a time like this, to think of how many books you should read and never will. Because of this, I try to avoid any systematic approach to reading, pursuing instead a random method, one which depends as much on luck and accident as on design. I find this is also the only way to deal with the newspapers and magazines which proliferate in great piles around the house -- some of the most interesting articles turn up on the reverse side of pages I’ve torn out for something else.

Did you do research on ESP?

There really wasn’t any research that was necessary to do. The story didn’t require any and, since I have always been interested in the topic, I think I was as well informed as I needed to be. I hope that ESP and related psychic phenomena will eventually find general scientific proof of their existence. There are certainly a fair number of scientists who are sufficiently impressed with the evidence to spend their time working in the field. If conclusive proof is ever found it won’t be quite as exciting as, say, the discovery of alien intelligence in the universe, but it will definitely be a mind expander. In addition to the great variety of unexplainable psychic experiences we can all probably recount, I think I can see behaviour in animals which strongly suggests something like ESP. I have a long-haired cat, named Polly, who regularly gets knots in her coat which I have to comb or scissor out. She hates this, and on dozens of occasions while I have been stroking her and thinking that the knots have got bad enough to do something about them, she has suddenly dived under the bed before I have made the slightest move to get a comb or scissors. I have obviously considered the possibility that she can tell when I plan to use the comb because of some special way I feel the knots when I have decided to comb them, but I’m quite sure that isn’t how she does it. She almost always has knots, and I stroke her innumerable times every day, but it’s only when I have actually decided to do something about them that she ever runs away and hides. Ever since I have become aware of this possibility, I am particularly careful not to feel the knots any differently whether or not I think they need combing. But most of the time she still seems to know the difference.

Who is Diane Johnson who wrote the screenplay with you?

Diane is an American novelist who has published a number of extremely good novels which have received serious and important attention. I was interested in several of her books and in talking to her about them I was surprised to learn that she was giving a course at the University of California at Berkeley on the Gothic novel. When The Shining came up she seemed to be the ideal collaborator, which, indeed, she proved to be. I had already been working on the treatment of the book, prior to her starting, but I hadn’t actually begun the screenplay. With The Shining, the problem was to extract the essential plot and to re-invent the sections of the story that were weak. The characters needed to be developed a bit differently than they were in the novel. It is in the pruning down phase that the undoing of great novels usually occurs because so much of what is good about them has to do with the fineness of the writing, the insight of the author and often the density of the story. But The Shining was a different matter. Its virtues lay almost entirely in the plot, and it didn’t prove to be very much of a problem to adapt it into the screenplay form. Diane and I talked a lot about the book and then we made an outline of the scenes we thought should be included in the film. This list of scenes was shuffled and reshuffled until we thought it was right, and then we began to write. We did several drafts of the screenplay, which was subsequently revised at different stages before and during shooting.

It is strange that you emphasize the supernatural aspect since one could say that in the film you give a lot of weight to an apparently rational explanation of Jack’s behaviour: altitude, claustrophobia, solitude, lack of booze.

Stephen Crane wrote a story called The Blue Hotel. In it you quickly learn that the central character is a paranoid. He gets involved in a poker game, decides someone is cheating him, makes an accusation, starts a fight and gets killed. You think the point of the story is that his death was inevitable because a paranoid poker player would ultimately get involved in a fatal gunfight. But, in the end, you find out that the man he accused was actually cheating him. I think The Shining uses a similar kind of psychological misdirection to forestall the realization that the supernatural events are actually happening.

Why did you change the end and dispense with the destruction of the hotel?

To be honest, the end of the book seemed a bit hackneyed to me and not very interesting. I wanted an ending which the audience could not anticipate. In the film, they think Hallorann is going to save Wendy and Danny. When he is killed they fear the worst. Surely, they fear, there is no way now for Wendy and Danny to escape. The maze ending may have suggested itself from the animal topiary scenes in the novel. I don’t actually remember how the idea first came about.

Why did the room number switch from 217 in the novel to 237 in the film?

The exterior of the hotel was filmed at the Timberline Lodge, near Mount Hood, in Oregon. It had a room 217 but no room 237, so the hotel management asked me to change the room number because they were afraid their guests might not want to stay in room 217 after seeing the film. There is, however, a genuinely frightening thing about this hotel which nestles high up on the slopes of Mount Hood. Mount Hood, as it happens, is a dormant volcano, but it has quite recently experienced pre-eruption seismic rumbles similar to the ones that a few months earlier preceded the gigantic eruption of Mount St. Helens, less than sixty miles away. If Mount Hood should ever erupt like Mount St. Helens, then the Timberline Hotel may indeed share the fiery fate of the novel’s Overlook Hotel.

How did you conceive the hotel with your art director, Roy Walker?

The first step was for Roy to go around America photographing hotels which might be suitable for the story. Then we spent weeks going through his photographs making selections for the different rooms. Using the details in the photographs, our draughtsmen did proper working drawings. From these, small models of all the sets were built. We wanted the hotel to look authentic rather than like a traditionally spooky movie hotel. The hotel’s labyrinthine layout and huge rooms, I believed, would alone provide an eerie enough atmosphere. This realistic approach was also followed in the lighting, and in every aspect of the decor it seemed to me that the perfect guide for this approach could be found in Kafka’s writing style. His stories are fantastic and allegorical, but his writing is simple and straightforward, almost journalistic. On the other hand, all the films that have been made of his work seem to have ignored this completely, making everything look as weird and dreamlike as possible. The final details for the different rooms of the hotel came from a number of different hotels. The red men’s room, for example, where Jack meets Grady, the ghost of the former caretaker, was inspired by a Frank Lloyd Wright men’s room in an hotel in Arizona. The models of the different sets were lit, photographed, tinkered with and revised. This process continued, altering and adding elements to each room, until we were all happy with what we had.

There are similar movie cliches about apparitions.

From the more convincing accounts I have read of people who have reported seeing ghosts, they were invariably described as being as solid and as real as someone actually standing in the room. The movie convention of the see-through ghost, shrouded in white, seems to exist only in the province of art.

You have not included the scene from the novel which took place in the elevator, but have only used it for the recurring shot of blood coming out of the doors.

The length of a movie imposes considerable restrictions on how much story you can put into it, especially if the story is told in a conventional way.

Which conventions are you referring to?

The convention of telling the story primarily through a series of dialogue scenes. Most films are really little more than stage plays with more atmosphere and action. I think that the scope and flexibility of movie stories would be greatly enhanced by borrowing something from the structure of silent movies where points that didn’t require dialog could be presented by a shot and a title card. Something like: Title: Billy’s uncle. Picture: Uncle giving Billy ice cream. In a few seconds, you could introduce Billy’s uncle and say something about him without being burdened with a scene. This economy of statement gives silent movies a much greater narrative scope and flexibility than we have today. In my view, there are very few sound films, including those regarded as masterpieces, which could not be presented almost as effectively on the stage, assuming a good set, the same cast and quality of performances. You couldn’t do that with a great silent movie.

But surely you could not put 2001: A Space Odyssey on the stage?

True enough. I know I’ve tried to move in this direction in all of my films but never to an extent which has satisfied me. By the way, I should include the best TV commercials along with silent films, as another example of how you might better tell a film story. In thirty seconds, characters are introduced, and sometimes a surprisingly involved situation is set up and resolved.

When you shoot these scenes which you find theatrical, you do it in a way that emphasizes their ordinariness. The scenes with Ullman or the visit of the doctor in The Shining, like the conference with the astronauts in 2001, are characterized by their social conventions, their mechanical aspect.

Well, as I’ve said, in fantasy you want things to have the appearance of being as realistic as possible. People should behave in the mundane way they normally do. You have to be especially careful about this in the scenes which deal with the bizarre or fantastic details of the story.

You also decided to show few visions and make them very short.

If Danny had perfect ESP, there could be no story. He would anticipate everything, warn everybody and solve every problem. So his perception of the paranormal must be imperfect and fragmentary. This also happens to be consistent with most of the reports of telepathic experiences. The same applies to Hallorann. One of the ironies in the story is that you have people who can see the past and the future and have telepathic contact, but the telephone and the short-wave radio don’t work, and the snowbound mountain roads are impassable. Failure of communication is a theme which runs through a number of my films.

You use technology a lot but seem to be afraid of it.

I’m not afraid of technology. I am afraid of aeroplanes. I’ve been able to avoid flying for some time but, I suppose, if I had to I would. Perhaps it’s a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. At one time, I had a pilot’s license and 160 hours of solo time on single-engine light aircraft. Unfortunately, all that seemed to do was make me mistrust large airplanes.

Did you think right away of Jack Nicholson for the role?

Yes, I did. I believe that Jack is one of the best actors in Hollywood, perhaps on a par with the greatest stars of the past like Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Cagney. I should think that he is on almost everyone’s first-choice list for any role which suits him. His work is always interesting, clearly conceived and has the X-factor, magic. Jack is particularly suited for roles which require intelligence. He is an intelligent and literate man, and these are qualities almost impossible to act. In The Shining, you believe he’s a writer, failed or otherwise.

Did the scene where he fights with Shelley Duvall on the stairs require many rehearsals?

Yes, it did. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Shelley was able to create and sustain for the length of the scene an authentic sense of hysteria. It took her a long time to achieve this and when she did we didn’t shoot the scene too many times. I think there were five takes favouring Shelley, and only the last two were really good. When I have to shoot a very large number of takes it’s invariably because the actors don’t know their lines, or don’t know them well enough. An actor can only do one thing at a time, and when he has learned his lines only well enough to say them while he’s thinking about them, he will always have trouble as soon as he has to work on the emotions of the scene or find camera marks. In a strong emotional scene, it is always best to be able to shoot in complete takes to allow the actor a continuity of emotion, and it is rare for most actors to reach their peak more than once or twice. There are, occasionally, scenes which benefit from extra takes, but even then, I’m not sure that the early takes aren’t just glorified rehearsals with the added adrenalin of film running through the camera. In The Shining, the scene in the ballroom where Jack talks to Lloyd, the sinister apparition of a former bartender, belongs to this category. Jack’s performance here is incredibly intricate, with sudden changes of thought and mood – all grace notes. It’s a very difficult scene to do because the emotion flow is so mercurial. It demands knife-edged changes of direction and a tremendous concentration to keep things sharp and economical. In this particular scene Jack produced his best takes near the highest numbers.

He is just as good when he walks down the corridor making wild movements before meeting the barman.

I asked Jack to remember the rumpled characters you see lunging down the streets of New York, waving their arms about and hissing to themselves.

Did you choose Shelley Duvall after seeing her in Three Women?

I had seen all of her films and greatly admired her work. I think she brought an instantly believable characterization to her part. The novel pictures her as a much more self-reliant and attractive woman, but these qualities make you wonder why she has put up with Jack for so long. Shelley seemed to be exactly the kind of woman that would marry Jack and be stuck with him. The wonderful thing about Shelley is her eccentric quality – the way she talks, the way she moves, the way her nervous system is put together. I think that most interesting actors have physical eccentricities about them which make their performances more interesting and, if they don’t, they work hard to find them.

The Steadicam allowed you to do even more of those long-tracking shots you have done in all your films.

Most of the hotel set was built as a composite, so that you could go up a flight of stairs, turn down a corridor, travel its length and find your way to still another part of the hotel. It mirrored the kind of camera movements which took place in the maze. In order to fully exploit this layout it was necessary to have moving camera shots without cuts, and of course the Steadicam made that much easier to do.

In the normal scenes you used dissolves and many camera movements. On the other hand, the paranormal visions are static and the cuts abrupt.

I don’t particularly like dissolves and I try not to use them, but when one scene follows another in the same place, and you want to make it clear that time has passed, a dissolve is often the simplest way to convey this. On the other hand, the paranormal visions are momentary glimpses into the past and the future, and must be short, even abrupt. With respect to the camera movements, I’ve always liked moving the camera. It’s one of the basic elements of film grammar. When you have the means to do it and the set to do it in, it not only adds visual interest but it also permits the actors to work in longer, possibly complete, takes. This makes it easier for them to maintain their concentration and emotional level in the scene.

How do you see the character of Hallorann?

Hallorann is a simple, rustic type who talks about telepathy in a disarmingly unscientific way. His folksy character and naive attempts to explain telepathy to Danny make what he has to say dramatically more acceptable than a standard pseudo-scientific explanation. He and Danny make a good pair.

The child creates a double to protect himself, whereas his father conjures up beings from the past who are also anticipations of his death.

A story of the supernatural cannot be taken apart and analysed too closely. The ultimate test of its rationale is whether it is good enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you submit it to a completely logical and detailed analysis it will eventually appear absurd. In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

How do you see Danny’s evolution?

Danny has had a frightening and disturbing childhood. Brutalized by his father and haunted by his paranormal visions, he has had to find some psychological mechanism within himself to manage these powerful and dangerous forces. To do this, he creates his imaginary friend, Tony, through whom Danny can rationalize his visions and survive.

Some people criticized you a few years ago because you were making films that did not deal with the private problems of characters. With Barry Lyndon and now with The Shining, you seem to be dealing more with personal relationships.

If this is true it is certainly not as a result of any deliberate effort on my part. There is no useful way to explain how you decide what film to make. In addition to the initial problem of finding an exciting story which fulfills the elusively intangible requirements for a film, you have the added problem of its being sufficiently different from the films you have already done. Obviously the more films you make, the more this choice is narrowed down. If you read a story which someone else has written you have the irreplacable experience of reading it for the first time. This is something which you obviously cannot have if you write an original story. Reading someone else’s story for the first time allows you a more accurate judgement of the narrative and helps you to be more objective than you might otherwise be with an original story. Another important thing is that while you’re making a film, and you get deeper and deeper into it, you find that in a certain sense you know less and less about it. You get too close to it. When you reach that point, it’s essential to rely on your original feelings about the story. Of course, at the same time, because you know so much more about it, you can also make a great many other judgements far better than you could have after the first reading. But, not to put too fine a point on it, you can never again have that first, virginal experience with the plot.

It seems that you want to achieve a balance between rationality and irrationality, that for you man should acknowledge the presence of irrational forces in him rather than trying to repress them.

I think we tend to be a bit hypocritical about ourselves. We find it very easy not to see our own faults, and I don’t just mean minor faults. I suspect there have been very few people who have done serious wrong who have not rationalized away what they’ve done, shifting the blame to those they have injured. We are capable of the greatest good and the greatest evil, and the problem is that we often can’t distinguish between them when it suits our purpose.

Failing to understand this leads to some misunderstanding of A Clockwork Orange.

I have always found it difficult to understand how anyone could decide that the film presented violence sympathetically. I can only explain this as a view which arises from a prejudiced assessment of the film, ignoring everything else in the story but a few scenes. The distinguished film director Luis Bunuel suggested this in a way when he said in the New York Times: ‘A Clockwork Orange is my current favourite. I was very predisposed against the film. After seeing it, I realized it is the only movie about what the modern world really means.’ A Clockwork Orange has been widely acclaimed throughout the world as an important work of art. I don’t believe that anyone really sympathizes with Alex, and there is absolutely no evidence that anyone does. Alex clashes with some authority figures in the story who seem as bad as he is, if not worse in a different way. But this doesn’t excuse him. The story is satirical, and it is in the nature of satire to state the opposite of the truth as if it were the truth. I suppose you could misinterpret the film on this count, if you were determined to do so.

How do you see the main character of Jack in The Shining?

Jack comes to the hotel psychologically prepared to do its murderous bidding. He doesn’t have very much further to go for his anger and frustration to become completely uncontrollable. He is bitter about his failure as a writer. He is married to a woman for whom he has only contempt. He hates his son. In the hotel, at the mercy of its powerful evil, he is quickly ready to fulfill his dark role.

So you don’t regard the apparitions as merely a projection of his mental state?

For the purposes of telling the story, my view is that the paranormal is genuine. Jack’s mental state serves only to prepare him for the murder, and to temporarily mislead the audience.

And when the film has finished? What then?

I hope the audience has had a good fright, has believed the film while they were watching it, and retains some sense of it. The ballroom photograph at the very end suggests the reincarnation of Jack.

You are a person who uses his rationality, who enjoys understanding things, but in 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining you demonstrate the limits of intellectual knowledge. Is this an acknowledgement of what William James called the unexplained residues of human experience?

Obviously, science-fiction and the supernatural bring you very quickly to the limits of knowledge and rational explanation. But from a dramatic point of view, you must ask yourself: ‘If all of this were unquestionably true, how would it really happen?’ You can’t go much further than that. I like the regions of fantasy where reason is used primarily to undermine incredulity. Reason can take you to the border of these areas, but from there on you can be guided only by your imagination. I think we strain at the limits of reason and enjoy the temporary sense of freedom which we gain by such exercises of our imagination.

Of course there is a danger that some audiences may misunderstand what you say and think that one can dispense altogether with reason, falling into the clouded mysticism which is currently so popular in America.

People can misinterpret almost anything so that it coincides with views they already hold. They take from art what they already believe, and I wonder how many people have ever had their views about anything important changed by a work of art?

Did you have a religious upbringing?

No, not at all.

You are a chess-player and I wonder if chess-playing and its logic have parallels with what you are saying?

First of all, even the greatest International Grandmasters, however deeply they analyse a position, can seldom see to the end of the game. So their decision about each move is partly based on intuition. I was a pretty good chess-player but, of course, not in that class. Before I had anything better to do (making movies) I played in chess tournaments at the Marshall and Manhattan Chess Clubs in New York, and for money in parks and elsewhere. Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing, and to think just as objectively when you’re in trouble. When you’re making a film you have to make most of your decisions on the run, and there is a tendency to always shoot from the hip. It takes more discipline than you might imagine to think, even for thirty seconds, in the noisy, confusing, high-pressure atmosphere of a film set. But a few seconds’ thought can often prevent a serious mistake being made about something that looks good at first glance. With respect to films, chess is more useful preventing you from making mistakes than giving you ideas. Ideas come spontaneously and the discipline required to evaluate and put them to use tends to be the real work.

What kind of horror films did you like? Did you see Rosemary’s Baby?

It was one of the best of the genre. I liked The Exorcist too.

And John Boorman’s The Heretic?

I haven’t seen it, but I like his work. Deliverance is an extremely good film. One of the things that amazes me about some directors (not Boorman) who have had great financial successes, is that they seem eager to give up directing to become film moguls. If you care about films, I don’t see how you could want someone else to direct for you.

Perhaps they don’t like the actual shooting.

It’s true – shooting isn’t always fun. But if you care about the film it doesn’t matter. It’s a little like changing your baby’s diapers. It is true that while you’re filming you are almost always in conflict with someone. Woody Allen, talking about directing Interiors, said that no matter how pleasant and relaxed everything seemed on the surface he felt his actors always resented being told anything. There are actors, however, with whom communication and co-operation is so good that the work really becomes exciting and satisfying. I find writing and editing very enjoyable, and almost completely lacking in this kind of tension.

– Kubrick on The Shining. An interview with Michel Ciment in ‘Kubrick’.

Claude Chabrol: The Mystery of Character

La Cérémonie (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

Born in 1930, Claude Chabrol was the first of the French New Wave directors into production with Le Beau Serge (1958). He went on to direct a series of classic films starring his wife, Stéphane Audran, including Le Boucher (1969) and Les Noces Rouges (1973). La Cérémonie (1995) was adapted from Ruth Rendell’s novel Judgment in Stone and starred Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie, the new housekeeper of a wealthy family, who befriends Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) – a postmistress with a grudge against the family.

Claude Chabrol, France's master of suspense, dwells on each nasty, icily controlled shot of this impeccably built thriller, all the way to its horrifying, violent end. 

What the spectator is unaware of, but the family is, is Sophie's inability to read — a cause of daily shame. She becomes more relaxed when she befriends the village eccentric, Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert). Both performers are electrifying: Bonnaire is as stern as a freshly scrubbed saint, while Huppert keeps you guessing whether Jeanne is a harmless oddball or a truly deranged individual. 

However, this is a psychological thriller, with overtones of class warfare, and it centres on a strange, strong bond. Is Sophie succumbing to Jeanne's allure? Or is there something sinister afoot? Chabrol's brilliance is that the pair's oddity is perfectly within the limits of acceptable – though peculiar – behaviour, while edging ever closer to a terrifying conclusion.

In crime fiction, criminal behaviour is frequently determined by psychological and societal causes rather than free will. However, Chabrol's desire to explain crime is thwarted by the opposing idea that evil is unfathomable. Sophie and Jeanne's criminal behaviour is not merely a compulsive reaction to social inequity, but rather a strangely prescribed routine. The title's ceremony is, of course, the assassination of the Lelièvre family. This is both terrible irony and poetic justice, as Lelièvre means "the hare," and Sophie and Jeanne hunt with the same weapons as the family.

Chabrol’s interest in thrillers is not primarily as a source of plot and suspense but as a means of exploring the psychology of murder. He is motivated by what he describes as the confrontation between character and story. The focus is on character and how the camera can best describe the inner attitudes of his two leads. The following is an excerpt from an interview with Claude Chabrol on La Cérémonie from 1995:

The starting point was a novel by Ruth Rendell. Her fifth or sixth. The first, I think, to depart from the normal process of police inquiry, with its recurrent detective figure – interesting though that process is. In this instance, the novel is a thriller only to the extent that she has chosen to maintain the formal appearance of a thriller. She might easily have chosen to make it a straight novel. I loved the book when it came out, fifteen or twenty years ago, but I hadn’t thought of adapting it as it was written, with only two characters, the maid and the postwoman. The maid was called Eunice in the book. She was a wobbly, fat thing, unpleasant really. The postwoman was very different too. They were fairly typically British. So time passed. I read other novels of hers. I saw that she was developing, her work was changing. She was the one to suggest I modified the structure. The process of reading her more recent work told me how I should adapt this one.

Caroline Eliacheff helped me in that … she uncovered the underlying psychological and psychoanalytical structure. That enabled us to restructure it without altering Ruth Rendell’s vision. I’ve tried to remain faithful to her way of thinking.

I asked Caroline to clean up the story for me, and she did a much more thorough job than I had expected. When I started working on the book, I had whole chunks of dialogue ready that would consolidate the psychiatric underpinning, so that the characters’ reactions might remain consistent. Otherwise, we would have spun off into insanity. Very often, when films depict psychopaths, they allow one to forget, for the duration of one or two scenes, that the psychopaths are just that. And then the insanity returns. But in reality, insanity is a continuous phenomenon. Here, Sophie’s illiteracy is always present, and Jeanne’s craziness is always there too.

My last political film was Poulet au Vinaigre (1984). What I was interested in then was to show the provincial bourgeoisie as starkly as possible, not in too heavy a way, but so that that critique was definitely a feature of the film. Subsequently, I found no particularly stimulating social phenomena to observe. And it is only now, in the past two years, that I am beginning to reconsider. I had a conversation with a young hooligan which left me with a feeling that society was about to explode, or implode rather, because it’s not just a marginal phenomenon. So I decided to make something of this feeling, but not in too precise a documentary way. Just as well, because Mathieu Kassowitz’s La Haine (1995) makes the point much better than I could have done. Our films are related, in that they reflect the beginnings of this explosion. He sees it as an explosion. I see it as an implosion. The young hooligan I mentioned thought things couldn’t go on like this for long, no more than three or four years. Only two more years left!

I remember an article, I can’t recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone with money could ever say such a thing. Ask the lower orders if class war can ever end! La Cérémonie was an opportunity to deal with this area. Once a screenplay is ready to go, I always try and find a way of including a few personal preoccupations. In this case, it works. The film really does depict a schematic view of class war.

My starting-point is the relationship between the story and a character. On this film, the audience is not aware of the fact that there is no story. The characters gradually reveal themselves, their relationships evolve, but there is no real plot. Like Simenon, I’m a great believer in structures that arise out of the confrontation between different characters. I take an important characteristic that determines the character (e.g. sex, for Betty), and try to monitor its development in relation to others. It’s chemistry, really. A chemistry of affinity. Although I make plenty of thrillers, I am not really interested in plot. What I am interested in is the mystery, the intrinsic mystery of the characters...

- Extract from ‘Claude Chabrol The Positif Interview’, 1995.