Writing with Luis Buñuel

The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (Directed by Luis Buñuel)

The range of Jean-Claude Carriere’s collaborations over nearly six decades is extraordinary: Jesús Franco (The Diabolical Dr. Z), Louis Malle (Viva Maria!, The Thief of Paris, May Fools), Jacques Deray (La piscine, Borsalino, The Outside Man, Le gang), Christian de Chalonge (The Wedding Ring, in which Carrière stars alongside Anna Karina), Marco Ferreri (Love to Eternity), Patrice Chéreau (The Flesh of the Orchid), Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum, Circle of Deceit, Swann in Love, The Ogre), Jean-Luc Godard (Every Man for Himself, Passion), Daniel Vigne (The Return of Martin Guerre), Andrzej Wajda (Danton, The Possessed), Nagisa Oshima (Max mon amour), Jean-Paul Rappeneau (Cyrano de Bergerac), Héctor Babenco (At Play in the Fields of the Lord), Wayne Wang (Chinese Box), and Philippe Garrel (In the Shadow of Women, Lover for a Day, The Salt of Tears).

All the while, Carrière carried on writing novels and working in the theater, and he considered his friendship and professional relationship with the legendary Peter Brook as vital as the one he had with Buñuel. With Brook he worked on theatrical productions of Shakespeare and Chekhov, while their mounting of The Mahabharata, a nine-hour play based on the Sanskrit epic was a landmark achievement. 

As a screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere collaborated with Luis Bunuel on six film classics including The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie and Belle Du Jour. Here he describes their unique way of working:

Buñuel had a type of surreal, I would say, tendency, or inclination and I did as well. We were never rational. When he made An Andalusian Dog, his first film with Salvador Dali they had one rule. The rule was that when one of them proposed an idea the other had three seconds, no more, to say yes or no. They didn't want the brain to intervene. They wanted an instinctive reaction coming, hopefully, from their subconscious.

We used this process often although it was not easy. When you propose something you always want to explain your reasons for why you proposed this or that. And that must be - you know - put aside. It is a very difficult way of working. It requires a very alert mind to constantly be creative and invent and find new things to propose - all without becoming exhausted. Gradually, step by step you discover, and I'm quoting Buñuel here, that the human imagination is a muscle that can be trained and developed like memory. It is one of the faculties of the brain that knows no limits. If I learned one thing from Buñuel, that would be it.

In an interview with the BFI, Carriere explains his working methods on their final collaboration on Buñuel’s memoirs My Last Sigh (1982).

“He couldn’t work any more – he was 79 or 80. When I proposed that we write a book about him he refused, so to convince him I wrote one of the chapters, just as if I were Buñuel himself. When he read it, he said, ‘I think I wrote it!’ And I said, Well, in a way you did’, because from talking to him so much I knew his character and his history. So then we started to work exactly as if it were a script: working together in the morning, talking, then me alone in the afternoon, writing. The imagination is a seamless capacity of the mind. But it is also a sort of muscle.”

An obituary piece in criterion.com, tells the story of Carriere’s first encounter with Luis Buñuel. 

It was in Cannes, and Buñuel, already in his early sixties, was looking for a young collaborator for his next project, an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel, Diary of a Chambermaid. His producer had tipped him off to a promising talent who, in his early thirties, had already written a novel (Lizard, 1957), worked with Jacques Tati, and made an Oscar-winning short film with Pierre Etaix, Happy Anniversary (1962).

Buñuel approached Carrière and asked, seemingly out of the blue, “Do you drink wine?” Carrière immediately sensed that this was a make-or-break question. Not only did he drink wine, Carrière was happy to report, he made it. He’d been raised by a family of vintners in southwestern France. That first lunch together went so well that Carrière skipped out on the festival and headed straight home to bone up on his Mirbeau. Within a few weeks, he and Buñuel had launched a collaboration that would produce six features as well as Buñuel’s 1982 autobiography, My Last Sigh, which, as Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New York Times, “may be quite simply the loveliest testament ever left by a film director.”

Carrière had been captivated by movies since he was a child, and as a teenaged student in Lyon, he ran a film club. “I was very stirred up at the age of twenty by Los Olvidados and Él,” he told Jason Weis in the International Herald Tribune in 1983, referring to two of Buñuel’s films from the early 1950s. “Buñuel is clearly a greater man than Picasso,” he added. “You have to go all the way back to Goya to find a figure of that importance. That is, Picasso is a great painter, but he’s only a painter. You can write books, make films, without ever thinking of Picasso. But whatever you do, in the Spanish world, whether you’re a novelist, painter, filmmaker of course, man of theater—at a given moment you’re going to meet up with Buñuel.”

At the outset, Carrière’s admiration for the director got in the way of their work together. Buñuel insisted that his writing partner stop approving of every idea he floated. He had to learn how to say no. Buñuel introduced a working method he’d picked up from the Surrealists, the veto. One partner proposes an idea and the other has mere seconds to deliver a thumbs up or down. “Once somebody says ‘No,’ the other one had no right to discuss,” Carrière explained to Colleen Kelsey in Interview in 2015. “He was looking for the first instinctive reaction of his partner without any reasoning. When you start reasoning, you can justify anything. But when you give a very immediate and instinctive reaction, you cannot . . . It’s a very beautiful way of working; one trusts the other.”

In Belle de jour (1967), their second collaboration, Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine, a housewife who lives out her sexual fantasies at an upscale bordello. For Melissa Anderson, this is Buñuel’s “most intricate character study—but of a protagonist who resists definition; the heroine, frequently trussed up and mussed up, retains an odd, opaque dignity in her debauchery.” Deneuve’s Séverine is an “exquisite blank slate lost in her own masochistic fantasies and onto whom all sorts of perversions could be projected.” Buñuel and Carrière’s films are never defined by character because “psychology is enemy number one,” as Carrière told Weis. “Because it paralyzes and limits.”

In 2019, on the occasion of a Carrière retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Lawrence Garcia surveyed the filmography for the Notebook. Regarding his work with Buñuel, Garcia found that The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), in which the dinner plans of six middle-class friends are interrupted over and again, is “the ideal instance of the pair’s collaborations, while The Phantom of Liberty [1974], though its stock has risen since its original run, tests the desirability of their methods in pure, uncut form.” With That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), Carrière and Buñuel “craft a fine career-capper.