The Storyteller - Interview with Suso Cecchi d’Amico

The Leopard (Directed by Luchino Visconti)

Suso Cecchi d’Amico (1914-2010) was one of the most prolific screenwriters in European film history. She wrote over 100 screenplays from 1947 including Bicycle Thieves (1948), most of Luchino Visconti’s films including Senso (1954), White Nights (1957), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Leopard (1963), Ludwig (1972) and Conversation Piece (1974); as well as films for Antonioni, Fellini, Rosi, Luigi Comencini and Monicelli. She also collaborated with Martin Scorsese on the documentary My Voyage to Italy (2001).  

Giovanna, better known as “Suso”, Cecchi, was born to a well-off Tuscan family and brought up in a sophisticated atmosphere. Her mother came from a well-known theatrical family, and her father, Emilio Cecchi, was an author and prominent literary critic. 

At a young age, Suso's father became the head of Cines, a leading film company, gaining valuable experience and exposure to cinema in the process. She married Fedele d'Amico a member of the Christian Left wing of the anti-fascist resistance, as well as an editor of an underground journal.  Later in his career, he became one of Italy's foremost musicologists. 

Suso d'Amico worked alongside her father on translations of Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, as well as works she translated and staged by Luchino Visconti in the 1940s that included the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Achard, Jean Anouilh, and Ernest Hemingway's The Fifth Column. 

She began her screenwriting career in 1946 with two films directed by Luigi Zampa: To Live in Peace, a tragicomic drama set in a village occupied by the Germans during World War II, and the box office hit Angelina: Member of Parliament, which starred Anna Magnani. 

She was drawn to the neo-realist movement, and her involvement in The Bicycle Thief (1948) a breakthrough film brought the work of Vittorio de Sica to international attention. The Bicycle Thief was a joint effort, in which at least six acknowledged writers were engaged, including Cesare Zabattini, a prominent neo-realist theorist.

The following is an edited extract from an interview with Suso Cecchi d’Amico from 1999 with Mikael Colville-Anderson in which she discusses her distinguished career and her approach to the craft of screenwriting. 

MCA: It’s safe to say that you’ve had an illustrious career writing for a great number of Italian directors. How did it all start?

SCA: Actually, it was someone else’s idea. It was not my plan at all. It was because I knew all the cinema people in Rome since my father was a very well-known writer. I can remember being given a screenplay to read because they wanted a young woman’s reaction. I have done the same thing with my own children throughout the years. Given them a comedy to read to see if they thought it was funny or not.

Then one day someone asked me the question. Why don’t you write a screenplay? I said I would give it a try but it had never occurred to me before that. At that point I had done many translations of literary works, so I merely approached it as another job. They were pleased with what I did and asked me to stay on.

Bicycle Thieves (Directed by Vittorio De Sica)

MCA: Did that first effort become a film?

SCA: No, but not because it was a bad script. It was because of a reaction. Let me explain. Ponti wanted to produce a film ‘inspired’ by the big hit at the moment, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. So we were working on a story based on a particular novel. I had a very important team: the director Castellani and two other writers: Alberto Moravia and Ennio Flaiano.

We were sitting around the table discussing the story when we heard on the radio that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It was quite a shock. We looked at each other and said, ‘what on earth are we doing?’ We stopped working and went over to Ponti and said, ‘Look. We are not interested in this story. Let us do something alive. Something that deals with life’. So we never finished that story á la Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde.

MCA: So the atom bomb dropped and...

SCA: Yes. That story about a professor and a girl suddenly seemed so... Well, we just knew we had to do something different.

MCA: What film came of that fateful experience?

SCA: To Live in Peace (Vivere in pace, 1947). It was directed by Luigi Zampa and based on a little story I had written.

MCA: That was your first film.

SCA: Yes, but I still only regarded it as a job. Screenwriting is the work of an artisan, not a poet. Let us be clear about that. I am not a poet, I am an artisan.

The Lady Without Camelias (Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni)

MCA: So screenwriting is not an art, it is a craft.

SCA: In my opinion. But then cinema is not art either.

MCA: Never has been?

SCA: It may be that it gives you that impression but it is reality. Art must be created by one person alone. Cinema is the work of a team and on a team there are unexpected elements. The sun going behind the clouds, the actor coming down with a cold. But true creating, true art is the work of one person. I’m sorry to disappoint you about the work of the screenwriter. It can be very useful, very beautiful work. Work that can carry the same weight as a written story but it cannot live on its own.

MCA: A lot of screenwriters have found their inspiration in literature. Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, etc. So many screenwriters want to be writers and believe they are writers. The act of writing a screenplay, inventing characters and writing dialogue. Isn’t that still writing?

SCA: Yes, but a screenwriter writes with his eyes. That’s very important. A writer must find the words to describe things. A screenwriter must invent the images. It’s quite different. All the discussions comparing the two are useless. They are two different things. Two different forms of expression. You can’t compare a word with an image.

Le Amiche (Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni)

MCA: Literature’s influence on cinema is obvious. But has cinema influenced literature?

SCA: Oh yes. A great influence. Especially since the war. The young people today are much more accustomed to literature that has been influenced by cinema. So often you read new novels which resemble film treatments but it is not great literature. In Italy we have never had a narrative tradition in literature like they have had in England or America. There has only been one big novel, I Promessi Sposi, by Alessandro Manzoni, that’s all. A very poor narrative tradition. Now we have thousands. Not very important, not very talented, all very young. And there is no doubt that it all descends from cinema.

MCA: A great deal of literary tradition has been lost then?

SCA: Without a doubt.

MCA: But you have been greatly influenced by literature.

SCA: Yes. I’ve stolen a lot.

MCA: You’ve stolen?

SCA: Yes. I’ve always said that stealing from literature is important. Take Dostoyevsky for example. We have stolen so much from him. Characters, situations, what have you. Look at Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 1960). It’s clear. Rocco is the Prince. Of course it’s different but it comes from Dostoyevsky.

MCA: Is the future of cinema in danger?

SCA: Yes, because all we have now are mediocre films.

Rocco and His Brothers (Directed by Luchino Visconti)

MCA: Is it necessary to go back to the old masters?

SCA: You can still return to them for inspiration. There is still a lot of material there. But the young people don’t read the classics. Maybe those small condensed books you can buy. Just imagine Tolstoy. Imagine how many characters you can steal from War and Peace alone. (she smiles) Marvellous, rich characters.

MCA: Who is your greatest inspiration?

SCA: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky – I’m confessing my theft here (laughs) – but those two and there are so many more.

MCA: How is it to have spent so many years as a screenwriter? Especially since you began rather reluctantly.

SCA: I still really enjoy it and I am still working. Unfortunately we are not living in a good time for cinema. The disaster is that films cost too much to produce. You become too careful...

When I began making films it was very inexpensive to produce them. In Italy, back then, the cinemas were obliged to show Italian films for a minimum of 18 days in the peak seasons. That meant that nobody killed themselves if they made a disaster. You could make some money but you could never lose a lot. That gave the producers and writers the courage to make the films they wanted to make. Because that is what is important, to make films for yourself and not to think about profits. If you are pleased with what you have done, that is enough. Nowadays you have to write films that can be understood by the Japanese. I have no idea what the Japanese like. You must make films that travel all over the world. It is not enough to make films for yourself and your friends.

White Nights (Directed by Luchino Visconti)

MCA: Your work with Visconti had a great influence on your career. What about the other directors you have worked with?

SCA: The first director I worked with was a very modest man, Luigi Zampa. He worked with a passion and did as he pleased. He was a very popular director and it was a great experience to work with him. I am very grateful to him. It was much more simpler then. It was for him that I wrote the best screenplay I have ever written in my life – in my opinion. It wasn’t the best film, The City Stands Trial (Processo alla città, 1952), but it was the best screenplay.

MCA: What about De Sica?

SCA: Working with De Sica was a great experience. He was an actor and it was different to work with him because it was like seeing your work on a stage. It is absolutely necessary to work closely with a director. To understand what he likes, how he feels, what he wants. I think it’s useless to write something that doesn’t feel right for the director. For example, comedy. It is impossible to teach comedy to someone. If the director doesn’t understand comedy it is pointless.

The first film I wrote for Antonioni – Camille Without Camelias (La Signora senza Camelie, 1953) – we thought it was a comedy. I wrote it together with Antonioni. He was a very amusing man, believe it or not. Full of humour. We wrote it as a comedy and when we started shooting and I saw the first dailies I thought it was a disaster. And it was. It was impossible for him to make a comedy. He didn’t have the rhythm for it. After you’ve seen his later work and you could never imagine that he would make a comedy.

The second was with a young man, very nice, very clever. He had been Monicelli’s assistant for years and was directing his first film. It was a kind of a sequel to Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street (I Soliti ignoti, 1958), a very funny, popular film. It was a disaster. He didn’t have the rhythm either. You can’t teach it. There was never a moment of doubt that he didn’t have a talent for comedy. He was Monicelli’s assistant and was an amusing fellow.

Salvatore Guiliano (Directed by Francesco Rosi)

MCA: Is it difficult to collaborate with a director?

SCA: Sometimes. You have to figure out what the director wants. You can impose your point of view on him but he doesn’t think it’s right for him it’s better not to insist.

MCA: You’ve written many comedies in your career.

SCA: I’ve written many comedies and enjoy writing them very much. It is my favourite genre. Writing comedy is best when you are a team. Not drama. Writing drama is best done alone. But comedy is best written in a team. You must laugh when you’re writing and you can hear immediately if the lines are funny or not when you say them to each other.

MCA: What do you think about the anonymity of the screenwriter? Is it enough to be the lady who wrote for Visconti or the guy who wrote for Polanski? What is the writer’s role in the process? Is it a good thing that the writer is anonymous?

SCA: The writer is very important. The screenplay is the reason that there is a film to make. He is one of the most important people in the process and the only one who deserves to be called author. However, as the director can’t do without the writer, the writer can’t do without the director. That brings you to the conclusion that the film is a common work created by many indispensable people.

MCA: But the director gets all the credit.

SCA: Yes, but that is even silly. When I started, the director was not that important. The only names you knew where that of the actors. All those American comedies we loved so much in the 30’s, we knew all the actors and actresses names, not the director.

Senso (Directed by Luchino Visconti)

MCA: Looking at the credits of your earlier films, it appears that there were many writers involved in the screenplay.

SCA: When I was young I had a group of friends and we made films together. We were all on the set, even the writers, all the time. For the films we did during neo-realism – or what they call neo-realism – we had no money so we just shot on the streets or in houses. We couldn’t afford actors and there weren’t many actors around because the standard of theatre was very poor. Besides, all the theatres were bombed. So, we just found people on the streets. You would meet a person who was right for the role and ask them to play it. That was it.

MCA: What do you mean by ‘what they call neo-realism’?

SCA: It was only afterwards that someone else, somewhere else in the world decided to call it ‘neo-realism’ and write many books about it. Despite the fact that it was only a little group of friends who just wanted to make films and went out into the streets to do so. If we had as many newspapers and magazines back then as we do now, maybe many of us would have become journalists instead of making films. But there weren’t many papers and making film was inexpensive and we merely wanted to tell our stories about our experiences of that era.

For example, Roma, Open City (Roma, città aperta, 1946) was made by Rossellini without a producer. All the friends who were involved went out rounding up raw film for Rossellini to shoot his film. Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) was more expensive because De Sica was such a well-known actor in Italy. He got the most important lawyer in the country to finance the film, a clever man who understood that something may come out of this venture.

We worked on the screenplay for months. Going around Rome and collecting stories to tell. The beginning of the film was loosely inspired by a short story written by a painter about a bicycle. Apart from that, we just wandered around Rome together. We wanted to make a portrait of Rome at that time, so soon after the war.

The Leopard (Directed by Luchino Visconti)

MCA: On the full credits of the ‘Bicycle Thieves’ there are seven or eight different writers credited. That seems strange today when writers fight tooth and nail for the credit.

SCA: Yes, because it wasn’t important who got the credit. We were friends who wanted to make films. That was the only important thing. One of the writers credited was dead when we made the film. He was a friend of De Sica who had wanted to work on the next film but he died before we started shooting. De Sica put his name on as a kind of tribute.

All the films at that time had many writers credited. Often we put our friends names on just so they could get paid and then told the producer we had consulted them. We did that for Fellini when he was young and had no money. So there are films out there for which Fellini is credited as the screenwriter, but he never wrote them. I saw an old film a few days ago and there were nine screenwriters. I know exactly who the writers were and there were certainly not nine of them. (laughs)

MCA: Your name is most often associated with Luchino Visconti. Did that collaboration have a big influence on your career?

SCA: I had already made several films before working with Luchino. We were very good friends when I first worked with him. He was a perfectionist. He wanted to know everything about the film process and he could have done every job on the film set, from the lighting to the camera to the screenwriting.

On the first screenplay we wrote together, which wasn’t made, we both wrote equally. He was more than a sparring partner. However, as we made more films together, I wrote most of the screenplays. On the Proust project, I hardly spoke with him during the writing process because we knew each other so well. That was the easiest screenplay I ever wrote.

Ludwig (Directed by Luchino Visconti)

MCA: You used to make Visconti tell you the story, verbally, so that you could understand what he wanted to do.

SCA: Yes. That was very important. And then we would discuss the story. We were talking about literature before and I recall that Visconti and I, even though he didn’t live very far from here, wrote many, many letters to each other. If someone were to read those letters they wouldn’t understand them because we had so many names, so many references to literary characters that it would seem like some kind of code. We had the same passion and knowledge for literature.

MCA: You mentioned that you are still active as a screenwriter.

SCA: Yes, I have been writing on various things. Among others, I have written for Martin Scorsese on his documentary My Voyage to Italy. Years ago he was here with Fellini and told us the story about how Italian cinema influenced him growing up in New York. Fellini suggested that he make a film about it and we have worked together on that. But now that film has become much bigger than he expected. It went from one hour to three hours. Also, I am writing various screenplays. I still enjoy it very much.

MCA: You were often on the set as the screenwriter. That is rare these days.

SCA: Yes, in the old days it was very important. Especially in the neo-realism period. We always had to change the dialogue. If a scene was written for the sunshine and it rained, we would have to change it on the spot. And Visconti wanted me there. He was very faithful to what I had written but I was always on the set.

MCA: They were glamorous times. Do you miss those golden days of Italian cinema?

SCA: Very much so. Mostly because it was done with passion. Because you were making the films you wanted to make.

Conversation Piece (Directed by Luchino Visconti)

MCA: Haven’t you ever considered directing?

SCA: No. They’ve asked me so many times but I know that I don’t have the character for it. It would be a disaster. I always use one example. If the producer of a Fellini or a Visconti film went to them and asked if the 30 horses they wanted in such and such a scene could be cut down to 10, Visconti and Fellini would both shout, ‘No, no, no. I’ve changed my mind. Now I want 50 horses and I won’t continue until I get them’. I couldn’t do that. I would probably settle for five horses. No, I’m very bad at being in command. You need to have a very particular character to be a good director.

MCA: After over 100 films you must have developed some personal rules which you use when you write.

SCA: I’ve been working for so long that I have developed some laws, some rules that I work with but I never tell them to my pupils when I’m teaching. They would think I’m crazy. But I do remember a booklet I read many years ago. It was written by an assistant to Cecil B. DeMille. She wrote that every scene should contain three elements: the crucial moment of a situation, the beginning of a new one and the end of the first one. I thought that was amusing. I have kept that in my head for many years.

MCA: What are your views on the so-called ‘Hollywood’ structure?

SCA: I don’t think it is so important. I have my own rules and don’t like that something simply MUST happen in the 12th minute or what have you. One must write with instinct. But the three act structure has worked for centuries, so it must be a good thing. Whenever I am asked to write about the screenplay I always read books written by my colleagues as inspiration. Jean Claude Carriere’s book, The Secret Language of Film is really one of the few that has made a lasting impression.

I have also studied Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) for many years in order to learn from the structure and try to use it in my own work. I have seen that film countless times. But again, that is my own way of working.

MCA: Finally, is there any film in the history of cinema that you wish you had written?

SCA: (thinks for a long moment) I would have to say A Slave of Love (1976) by Nikita Mikhalkov.

– ‘The Storytellers: Interview with Suso Cecchi d’Amico’. By Mikael Colville-Andersen (original article here).

Francois Truffaut: Autobiography and Alter Ego

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

A cinephile from a young age, François Truffaut first made his cinematic mark as an outspoken critic for Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, opposing the French film industry’s established form and techniques and urging for the director to be regarded as the ‘auteur’, or author, of the film. 

Truffaut then became an auteur himself, beginning  with The 400 Blows, which won him the best director award at Cannes and introduced the French new-wave to an international audience. 

While still a young film critic, Truffaut had made his first film, Une visite, in 1954, an eight-minute short with Jacques Rivette as cinematographer and Robert Lachenay as assistant about a man who moves into an apartment with a woman and unsuccessfully tries to seduce her. Truffaut treated the picture as an exercise and did not believe it worthy of release. 

Francois Truffaut's subsequent foray into filmmaking was an adaptation of a Maurice Pons novella titled Les Mistons. Filmed in 1957 in Nimes with a small crew and a low budget, Gerard Blain and Bernadette Lafont starred in the film. The novel, set in rural France, follows a gang of young guys ("mistons," which translates approximately as "brats") who get obsessed with a beautiful young woman. They cause mayhem for the two of them, jealous of her intense romance with her partner. 

Although it was barely twenty minutes long, Les Mistons touched on a number of topics that Truffaut would revisit in subsequent films: love, children, writing, and death. While the premise is straightforward, Truffaut's ability as a filmmaker is immediately obvious. His use of composition, lighting, music, and location all contribute to the creation of a charming story whose episodic structure expresses the underlying ideas and emotions well. 

The film was well received and gave Truffaut a measure of confidence in his directing aspirations. Truffaut attended the Cannes Film Festival as a critic in May 1958, having penned an especially strident attack on the French cinema business the previous year, accusing it of making "too many poor pictures" and describing Cannes as a "failure”. Barred from entry to Cannes by the organisers, Truffaut still  managed to attend. Truffaut had written in the same article that “The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.”  Truffaut's would soon get the opportunity to put his ideas into reality. He had nurtured a semi-autobiographical screenplay, The 400 Blows.  The success of Les Mistons had elevated Truffsut’s status, and funds for a feature were now available.

The 400 Blows remains one of Truffaut’s most popular and seminal works. It was followed by two key films of the French new wave, Shoot the Piano Player – adapted from the David Goodis’ thriller Down There – and Jules and Jim – the story of a love triangle set in pre-war Paris. 

Truffaut also continued to follow the exploits of The 400 Blows main character Antoine Doinel — played by Jean-Pierre Léaud — through the 1970s (Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, Love on the Run), while directing such classics as Day for Night and The Last Metro, which displayed his passion for art and life. 

Shortly before his untimely death in 1983 Truffaut was interviewed by Bert Cardullo. The discussion mainly centered around the making of The 400 Blows. In this extract Truffaut talks about his early career and how his filmmaking process was influenced by his work as a film critic and his lifelong obsession with watching movies. 

We know you were a film critic before you became a director. What film was your first article about?

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times [1936], an old print of which I saw in a film club. It was seized afterwards by the police because it was a stolen copy! Then I started writing for Cahiers du cinéma, thanks to André Bazin. I did an incendiary piece in Cahiers against French films as typified by the screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, the fossils of French cinema. That article got me a job at the weekly Arts and Entertainments, where I wrote the film column for four years.

I think being a critic helped me because it’s not enough to love films or see lots of films. Having to write about films helps you to understand them better. It forces you to exercise your intellect. When you summarize a script in ten sentences, you see both its strengths and its weaknesses. Criticism is a good exercise, but you shouldn’t do it for too long. In retrospect, my reviews seem more negative than not, as I found it more stimulating to damn rather than praise; I was better at attacking than defending. And I regret that. I’m much less dogmatic now, and I prefer critical nuance.

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

You were a film critic for four years, but all the while you were looking for an opportunity to make a film, right?

Oh yes, absolutely. I started making little movies in 16mm that weren’t worth showing. They had all the same flaws as most amateur films: they were extremely pretentious; and they didn’t even have a storyline, which is the height of conceit for an amateur. I probably learned something from this work, like how to suggest rather than show. But in the first of these shorts, there was nothing but doors opening and closing – what a waste!

My first real film, in 1957, was Les Mistons – ‘The Mischief Makers’ in English. It had the advantage of telling a story, which was not common practice for short films in those days! It also gave me the opportunity to start working with actors. But Les Mistons also had commentary interspersed with its dialogue, so that made making it much simpler…

Is it awkward for a writer-director to have been a critic first? When you start a scene, does the critic in you tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘I don’t think so!’

It is indeed rather awkward, because not only was I a critic, I have also seen nearly three thousand films. So I always tend to think, ‘But that was done in such-and-such a film,’ ‘Compared to X’s movie, this is no good,’ etc. Plus, however necessary they may be, I’m very skeptical of storylines. So much so that I turn a script’s narrative over in my head endlessly, to the point that often, at the last minute, I want to cancel the filming of it.

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

How, then, do you ever manage to complete a film?

Because the advantage of cinema over novels, for instance, is that you can’t just drop it. The machine’s in gear, contracts are signed. And besides, I like actors a lot, at least some of them –those I choose! There are promises to be kept, there is motivation to keep your word. But once you’ve begun, that type of problem falls away, that doubt of a general nature. Then there are just the daily problems of moviemaking, which are strictly technical and can be solved amid all the noise and laughter – it’s really quite exhilarating. When the filming is over, though, the doubts come back.

What was the provenance of ‘The 400 Blows’?

When I was shooting Les Mistons, The 400 Blows already existed in my mind in the form of a short film, which was titled ‘Antoine Runs Away.’

What caused you to lengthen Antoine’s story and make ‘The 400 Blows’ longer?

It was because I was disappointed by Les Mistons, or at least by its brevity. You see, I had come to reject the sort of film made up of several skits or sketches. So I preferred to leave Les Mistons as a short and to take my chances with a full-length film by spinning out the story of ‘Antoine Runs Away.’ ‘Antoine Runs Away’ was a twenty-minute sketch about a boy who plays hooky and, having no note to hand in as an excuse, makes up the story that his mother has died. His lie having been discovered, he does not dare go home and spends the night outdoors. I decided to develop this story with the help of Marcel Moussy, at the time a television writer whose shows dealt with family or social problems. Moussy and I added to the beginning and the end of Antoine’s story until it became a kind of chronicle of a boy’s thirteenth year – of the awkward early teenaged years.

In fact, The 400 Blows became a rather pessimistic film. I can’t really say what the theme is – there is none, perhaps – but one central idea was to depict early adolescence as a difficult time of passage and not to fall into the usual nostalgia about ‘the good old days,’ the salad days of youth. Because, for me in any event, childhood is a series of painful memories...

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

Does the screenplay of ‘The 400 Blows’ constitute in some ways your autobiography?

Yes, but only partially. All I can say is that nothing in it is invented. What didn’t happen to me personally happened to people I know, to boys my age and even to people that I had read about in the papers. Nothing in The 400 Blows is pure fiction, then, but neither is the film a wholly autobiographical work.

Let me put my question another way: it has often been said that Antoine Doinel was you, a sort of projection of yourself. Could you define that projection, that character?

There is indeed something anachronistic or composite-like about Antoine Doinel, but it’s difficult for me to define. I don’t really know who he is, except that he is a kind of mixture of Jean-Pierre Léaud and myself. He is a solitary type, a kind of loner who can make you laugh or smile about his misfortunes, and that allows me, through him, to touch on sad matters – but always with a light hand, without melodrama or sentimentality, because Doinel has a kind of courage about him. Yet he is the opposite of an exceptional or extraordinary character; what does differentiate him from average people, however, is that he never settles down into average situations. Doinel is only at ease in extreme situations: of profound disappointment and misery on the one hand, and total exhilaration and enthusiasm on the other. He also preserves a great deal of the childlike in his character, which means that you forget his real age. If he is twenty-eight, as Léaud was in 1972, you look at Doinel as if he were eighteen: a naïf, as it were, but a well-meaning one for all that.

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

A related question: Is it because Montmartre holds personal childhood memories for you that you came back to it in at least two of your Antoine Doinel films – the first two, as a matter of fact – ‘The 400 Blows’ and ‘Love at Twenty’ (1962)?

Yes, most likely. It’s easier to orient myself when I shoot on familiar streets. Also, when you’re writing, you tend to think of people and places you know. So you wind up coming back to these familiar places and people for my method of writing, I started making ‘script sheets’ when I began work on The 400 Blows. School: various gags at school. Home: some gags at home. Street: a few gags in the street. I think everyone works in this way, at least on some films. You certainly do it for comedies, and you can even do it for dramas. And this material, in my case, was often based on memories. I realized that you can really exercise your memory where the past is concerned. I had found a class photo, for example, one in the classic pose with all the pupils lined up. The first time I looked at that picture, I could remember the names of only two friends. But by looking at it for an hour each morning over a period of several days, I remembered all my classmates’ names, their parents’ jobs, and where everybody lived.

It was around this time that I met Moussy and asked him if he’d like to work with me on the script of The 400 Blows. Since I myself had played hooky quite a bit, all of Antoine’s problems with fake notes, forged signatures, bad report cards – all of these I knew by heart, of course. The movies to which we truants went started at around ten in the morning; there were several theaters in Paris that opened at such an early hour. And their clientele was made up almost exclusively of schoolchildren!

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

As a former critic, if you had had to talk about ‘The 400 Blows’, would you have spoken about it in the glowing terms used by most critics?

No, I don’t think so. I honestly think I’d have liked it, because I like the ideas in the picture – they’re good ideas – but I wouldn’t have gone so far in praising The 400 Blows as the critics did. I couldn’t have called it a masterpiece or a great work of art, because I can see too clearly what’s experimental or clumsy about it.

Could you say something about the relationship, in your career, of ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ to ‘The 400 Blows’?

Shoot the Piano Player, my second feature film, was made in reaction to The 400 Blows, which was so French. I felt that I needed to show that I had also been influenced by the American cinema. Also, after the exaggerated reception and publicity for The 400 Blows its disproportionate success – became quite agitated. So I touched on the notions of celebrity and obscurity in Shoot the Piano Player – reversed them, in fact, since here it is a famous person who becomes unknown. There are glimpses in this film, then, of the feeling that troubled me at the time.

Shoot the Piano Player (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

I had made The 400 Blows, in a state of anxiety, because I was afraid that the film would never be released and that, if it did come out, people would say, ‘After having insulted everyone as a critic, Truffaut should have stayed home!’ Shoot the Piano Player, by contrast, was made in a state of euphoria, thanks to the success of The 400 Blows. I took great pleasure in filming it, far more than in The 400 Blows, where I was concerned about Jean-Pierre Léaud. I was wondering whether he would show up each day, or, if he did, whether he had had a fight the night before and would appear on the set with marks all over his face. With children, we directors worry more, because they do not have the same self-interest or self-regard as adults.

Léaud’s work gave birth not only to ‘The 400 Blows’, but to the whole Antoine Doinel saga, which I think is unique in the history of cinema: starting in 1959, to follow a character for twenty years, watching him grow older over the course of five films. Let’s talk now about the other films in the cycle: ‘Love at Twenty’, ‘Stolen Kisses’ [1968], ‘Bed and Board’ [1970], and ‘Love on the Run’ [1979]. At the end of ‘The 400 Blows’, we left Jean-Pierre Léaud on the beach. He had just escaped from a reform school, where he had been up to some mischief and had suffered various misfortunes.

When I brought him back, in Love at Twenty – which was really just a sketch, called ‘Antoine and Colette,’ as part of an anthology film – he was eighteen and perhaps living on his own. In any case, you no longer see his family in this film. Antoine is starting his professional life, working in a record company, and we see his first love affairs a few months before he must go into the army. Stolen Kisses is simply the continuation of the adventures of Antoine Doinel. It is the same character: like me but not me; like Jean-Pierre Léaud but not Léaud.

Stolen Kisses (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

I must say that I like to start with more solid material than this. I like having two or three reasons to make a movie: say, the coming together of a book I want to adapt or an atmosphere I want to depict with an actor that I want to film. In Stolen Kisses, I admit, I just wanted to work with Jean-Pierre Léaud again; I more or less set a specific date by which I wanted to begin making a film with him. And with my screenwriters Claude de Givray and Bernanrd Revon, I sat down and said, ‘What are we going to do with Léaud?’ For his professional life, we adopted a perfectly simple solution. Leafing through a phone book, we found an ad for private detectives. We thought, ‘Here’s a job you don’t see in French films, usually only in American movies about a famous detective named Marlowe.’ But it should prove funny in France. For Doinel’s romantic life, I suggested putting him opposite a girl his own age, even younger. We’d even suppose that he wrote her when he was in the army and therefore already knows her. We would then have him live what I think is every young man’s fantasy: an affair with a married woman. I thought right away of Delphine Seyrig for the part of the married woman, because I didn’t want this affair to be sordid but instead a bit dreamlike or idealized.

In ‘Bed and Board’ you were examining the problems of romantic relationships. How did you approach them?

Not really as problems. More as a chronicle, with some happy scenes and some serious or dramatic scenes.

Bed and Board  (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

‘Shoot the Piano Player’ has similar changes of tone.

It does. They were planned in that film, since they were also in the American David Goodis’s source novel – but the changes of tone were reinforced during the shooting because I realized I was faced with a film without a theme. The same thing happened spontaneously in Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board, themselves movies without clear subjects: some days during the shooting I stressed the comical side, other days the dramatic side. Compared to what I did in Stolen Kisses, though, in Bed and Board I tried to be much funnier when something was funny, and much more dramatic when something was dramatic. It’s the same mixture in both films, but in Bed and Board I just tried, so to speak, to increase the dosage. And I did this in part by showing Antoine Doinel as a married man.

It was around ten years later that I made Love on the Run, which included flashback sequences from the earlier Doinel films and had the feeling of a conclusion for me. When the characters in Love on the Run talk about a memory, I was able to show that memory, while still telling a story happening in the present and with new characters. There is a summing up in this film, since I had already decided that, once it was finished, I would no longer use the character of Antoine Doinel.

Bed and Board  (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

So, in the end, you were happy with this film?

To tell the truth, I wasn’t happy with Love on the Run. This picture was, and still is, troubling for me. People may well enjoy it, but I’m not happy with it. It didn’t seem like a real film to me. For one thing, the experimental elements in it are too pronounced. A movie often has an experimental feel in the beginning, but by the end you hope it feels like a real object, a real film, so that you forget it’s an experiment.

But in defense of your own movie, it’s a kind of diary on film. You watch a character through his evolution.

Yes, but did he really evolve? I felt that the cycle as a whole wasn’t successful in making him evolve. The character started out somewhat autobiographical, but over time it drew further and further away from me. I never wanted to give him ambition, for example. I wonder if he’s not too frozen in the end, like a cartoon character. You know, Mickey Mouse can’t grow old. Perhaps the Doinel cycle is the story of a failure, even if each film on its own is enjoyable and a lot of fun to watch.

That said, Antoine Doinel’s life is just a life – not an exhilarating or prodigious one, but the life of a person with his own contradictions and faults. When I have a man like this as the main character on screen, I focus on his weaknesses. I also did this outside the Doinel cycle: Charles Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player, Jean Desailly in The Soft Skin, and Charles Denner in The Man Who Loved Women are not heroes, either. American cinema is great at depicting ‘heroes,’ but the vocation of European cinema may be to express the truth about people, which means to show their weaknesses, their contradictions, and even their lies...

Love on the Run (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

In 1957 you wrote the following: ‘The films of the future will be more personal than autobiography, like a confession or diary. Young filmmakers will speak in the first person in order to tell what happened to them: their first love, a political awakening, a trip, an illness, and so on. Tomorrow’s film will be an act of love.’ If someone wanted to make movies today, would you tell that person, ‘Tell us about your life. There’s nothing more important or more interesting.’ Or would you say, ‘The industry is tougher now. Conform to it and don’t listen to what I said.’

Very tactfully put... My prediction was fulfilled beyond my wildest dreams – you know that. So I wouldn’t say the opposite today. But I would say, ‘Talk about what interests you, but make sure it interests others, too.’

– From ‘Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran,’ edited by Gary Morris (London: Anthem Press).

Paul Thomas Anderson: Blood and Oil

There Will Be Blood (Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson) 

Paul Thomas Anderson famously dropped out of NYU film school after just a couple of days, intent on beginning a career making movies. At 26, the writer-director released his debut feature, 1996’s Hard Eight, which featured several actors that would become part of his troupe, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, and Philip Baker Hall. Anderson’s real breakthrough, though, came via 1997’s Boogie Nights, an ensemble piece set in the porn industry. His even more sprawling Magnolia – another melancholy love letter to southern California – earned Oscar nominations and high praise; he followed that with the unsentimental romantic comedy Punch Drunk Love, starring Adam Sandler. Then Anderson seemed to disappear.

It turned out he was working on his magnum opus – There Will Be Blood. The film, loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, stars Daniel Day Lewis in a remarkable performance as a single-minded 19th-century oil prospector. A departure from Anderson’s other films, Blood ditches modern-day L.A. and his regular group of actors and focuses largely on one character – Day Lewis is in nearly every scene of the 158-minute film – and the effect of his dark drive on those around him, particularly a young preacher played by Paul Dano. One of 2007’s best films, it renders this seemingly small story huge and powerful. After the film’s release Anderson spoke to The A.V. Club about Day Lewis, the melancholy of finishing work, and ‘message movies’.

The A.V. Club: How did you first encounter Upton Sinclair’s book?

Paul Thomas Anderson: I was in London, in Covent Garden, and it’s impossible to miss. The title is in this enormous red lettering with an exclamation mark. Oil! That was the first I ever saw it, or heard of it. I had never read Upton Sinclair. I didn’t read The Jungle in high school or anything like that. But it’s pretty terrific writing.

AVC: What’s your process of adapting like? Had you ever tried to adapt something before? All of your produced screenplays have been originals.

PTA: It felt like the first thing, but when I first started out, I got a job adapting a book by Russell Banks called Rule Of The Bone. I didn’t do a very good job. I didn’t really know what I was doing in general, let alone how to adapt a book. I really was confused by that, because I loved the book. I remember being taught in school that you would underline things that you liked. I remember just underlining everything as a kid, thinking, ‘This has all gotta be important!’ I would just underline the whole thing! [Laughs.] I remember my dad saying, ‘I don’t think you understand. Just underline key ideas.’ Anyway, I think that’s what I did on that Russell Banks book. I felt like my job was to somehow transcribe it, which in that case, really wasn’t the right thing to do.

So with There Will Be Blood, I didn’t even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write. I can remember the way that my desk looked, with so many different scraps of paper and books about the oil industry in the early 20th century, mixed in with pieces of other scripts that I’d written. Everything was coming from so many different sources. But the book was a great stepping-stone. It was so cohesive, the way Upton Sinclair wrote about that period, and his experiences around the oil fields and these independent oilmen. That said, the book is so long that it’s only the first couple hundred pages that we ended up using, because there is a certain point where he strays really far from what the original story is. We were really unfaithful to the book. [Laughs.] That’s not to say I didn’t really like the book; I loved it. But there were so many other things floating around. And at a certain point, I became aware of the stuff he was basing it on. What he was writing about was the life of [oil barons] Edward Doheny and Harry Sinclair. So it was like having a really good collaborator, the book.

AVC: When you finish a film, are you generally pretty confident in it? At what point in the process do you know that it’s good, or great, or the opposite? Do you need to see it with an audience?

PTA: It’s back and forth all the way along. You definitely have moments of confidence, where you feel like, ‘We got something great today!’ And you go home at night, completely unable to sleep, mad with enthusiasm and confidence. A couple of days later, you’re lost again and struggling to make sense out of something. But that’s okay. I actually enjoyed the struggles that we had trying to shape Blood, to get the pacing right, the rhythm of it. I showed it to family and friends, and we kind of knew the parts that we didn’t like, or that we wanted to work on. Speaking for me and Dylan [Tichenor, editor], we knew the parts that we wanted to work out, that we weren’t happy with. But there’s a certain point where you’re desperate to show it to somebody, and you put it in front of friends and family, and, lo and behold, the thing that you suspected wasn’t working certainly was not working. And then you get that thing that opens your eyes to the bits and pieces you thought were flying that really weren’t as great as you thought. Face to face with having to show it to your friends, you find yourself becoming a little less confident. It’s that battle, a never-ending thing. Then when you do get to the end – I know when we got to the end of this film – we were really happy. I really felt like we did what we wanted to do, that we’d worked it hard enough that we could be proud of it. But that said, nothing prepares you for that melancholy when you’ve finished it. It’s always a little bit depressing.

AVC: It’s strikingly dissimilar to the rest of your movies; did you feel, when you were making it, that you were outside your comfort zone?

PTA: The struggles are the struggles no matter what. It definitely felt good to be outside of the comfort zone. I remember feeling like, ‘I should really try to enjoy this, because it will be over so fast.’ And it was. We had such a good time making the film, and I remember jumping ahead to the end, saying ‘In three months, it’s going to be over.’ Quite honestly, I wish we were still making the movie. It’s been really hard to let go of.

AVC: And yet it’s easily the darkest thing you’ve ever done.

PTA: Definitely. But I like that. That’s a good thing – it feels right. [Laughs.]

AVC: You’ve described it as a horror movie. Do you still feel that way?

PTA: I do feel that way, in the way of, ‘What’s the best way to look at this story?’ You’re always coming up with bullshit ways to describe it, that for whatever reason can help communicate to everyone, like, ‘We’ve got to think of this movie as a boxing match between these two guys, and attack it like a horror story.’ Those are just ways to describe whatever the marching orders might be. They come in handy, those kinds of descriptions.

AVC: It’s a bit surprising at how many laughs Daniel Day Lewis gets in uncomfortable spots, especially at the end.

PTA: It’s great, isn’t it? [Laughs.]

AVC: Is that how you felt when watching it with an audience? Were you expecting people to laugh?

PTA: I wasn’t expecting it, but I was hoping for it! We used to laugh so much, but there is this completely nerve-wracking feeling, like, ‘Fuck, I hope they laugh.’

AVC: How much, if any, of Lewis’ character’s misanthropy do you share? I just read this ‘New Yorker’ review that described you as ‘pessimistic, even apocalyptic,’ which seems incredibly off the mark.
PTA: Yeah. Fuck, I’ll take it. Sure. Yeah. [Laughs.]

AVC: But do you have that in you?

PTA: Absolutely, absolutely. We all do, don’t we? I know that I do. It would be insane to say that I don’t, that we all haven’t had murderous thoughts. But we’re socialized. We don’t really do those things that we think about doing.

AVC: Do you have any of the character’s ‘competition’ in you?

PTA: From time to time, certainly yes, of course. But mostly, no. As I get older, I have less and less of it in me.

AVC: You wrote the part for Daniel Day Lewis. Had you met him before?

PTA: I hadn't, no.

AVC: So was sending him a half-finished script a shot in the dark?

PTA: More or less, but we had a mutual friend who had let me know how Daniel felt about Punch Drunk Love, which was that he was incredibly complimentary. So I was armed with that to give me a boost of confidence. Without that, I don't know what I would have done. I mean, yes, I would have made that leap and risked failure. But it was really nice to have that kind of encouragement to think, ‘Well, he liked that.’

AVC: You’ve said that you spent a lot of time preparing, the two of you. What was the process like, working out what his character would be like, and how you were going to tell the story?

PTA: Well, we spent a couple of months together in New York. I just remember a lot of eating breakfast and a lot of walking around, more or less getting to know each other and not talking that much about the movie – just this flirtation, like dogs sniffing each other out, to get to know somebody that you’re gonna get married to. We decided that we would make the film together, or more to the point, he decided that he would make the film with me. [Laughs.] Then we went in separate directions; I was back in California and he was in Ireland. That was a really good time, because we were separately doing our work. I was still working on the script, and he was doing whatever he was doing. We never really asked each other what we were up to that much. As far as I’m concerned, I didn’t need to give him anything more than he wanted to know. I was just there to answer any questions he might have. It was certainly not my job to start babbling away.

Those were really good days, and they accidentally went on for two years, because we tried to get the film going, and we couldn’t get it going, and life intervened. There were babies born, backs broken – he hurt his back. One thing led to another, and we just did that more or less for a year. We thought it was time really well spent, and then when we started filming, I can’t even tell you: It was like we were cooped up in the starting gate, and the second the starting gate opened, we fell flat on our faces with all of this energy. We had the most horrendous beginning of a film, for two weeks, just completely off of the mark. We got it together finally, but it was hilarious. We had been cooped up for too long.

AVC: So did you have two weeks of wasted film?

PTA: A little bit. There was some stuff that was salvageable. There was some stuff that we got that was good, really good, actually. But mixed in was some stuff that I wouldn’t show to anyone – the most embarrassing, off-the-mark kind of stuff...

AVC: Your movies always seem very tidy. They might be sprawling, but they’re very unambiguous. The conceit of so many independent films is to be ambiguous, maybe for its own sake.

PTA: I take that as a high compliment, actually. Thank you. I really do. We could have titled the movie There Will Be A Morally Unambiguous Ending. [Laughs.] That’s really nice of you to say. Thanks.

AVC: Is ambiguity not in your filmmaking genes, then? Does it not appeal to you?

PTA: I don’t know. It would require me to get objective and think too much. I’ll just take the compliment….

– Paul Thomas Anderson. Interview: The Onion AV Club by Josh Modell, January 2nd, 2008 

Full article can be found here