On John Cassavetes’ Style

Faces (Directed by John Cassavetes)

“John Cassavetes’ Faces is the sort of film that makes you want to grab people by the neck and drag them into the theater and shout: "Here!" It would be a triumphant shout. Year after year, we get a tide of bilge that passes for "the American way of life" in the movies.

“We know it isn’t like that. We don’t live that way and neither does anyone we know. What Cassavetes has done is astonishing. He has made a film that tenderly, honestly and uncompromisingly examines the way we really live.

“The central characters are middle-aged, middle-class and rather ordinary: a man and his wife. They have everything in the world they desire, except love and a sense of personal accomplishment. They’ve become consumers in the most cruel sense of that word: Their only identity is as economic beings who earn and spend money to sustain a meaningless existence. They don’t do anything, or make anything, or create anything. They use.

“This is not only a crisis but a trap, because society has left them stranded without any means of breaking out. During a long night when their marriage reaches the breaking point, they discover only two ways to kick loose: alcohol and adultery. One of the problems with this class of society is that it provides so few ways to boil over.”

– Roger Ebert.

“Cassavetes wiped away the old vocabulary of doing films. A lot of this came from his New York actors, the street-life sound, and from the ability the new lightweight equipment gave the filmmaker. When I saw Shadows, with the camera right in that house giving such a direct communication with the human experience, with conflict and love and all of this, it was as if there were no camera there at all, as if you were living with these people. Once we saw that, we all realized that you can’t sit around and talk about making a film, you gotta just go do it. He exemplifies independence: Don’t be taken in by them. Do what you feel, what you feel in your heart. Don’t be cut down. He was like an uncle in the way he talked to you about this.”

– Martin Scorsese.

John Cassavetes took his first serious move towards being an actor in 1949, when he enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Following graduation, he performed in provincial theatre and enlisted in the Army Reserves, where he was a member of the performing arts organisation. Cassavetes began his career in the early 1950s, landing tiny television parts and appearing in his first credited film, The Night Holds Terror (Andrew L. Stone, 1955). He met Gena Rowlands, who was also a student at the institution, during this period. On 19 March 1954, the two married, and though their partnership was not always easy – professionally or emotionally – it was one of the great cinematic partnerships. From 1954 until 1956, Cassavetes appeared in dozens of television shows, including a notable role in Don Siegel's film Crime in the Streets. Cassavetes was also preparing for his directorial debut prior to securing the main part in the television series Johnny Staccato (1959–60). 

As Cassavetes described it, "Shadows [1959] started as a dream on 13 January 1957 in a New York loft." That loft was home to The Cassavetes-Lane Workshop, a collaborative effort between Cassavetes, theatre director Burt Lane, and a group of young actors who workshopped scenes based on initial character sketches and situations. The objective was to turn these improvisations into a full length film. Cassavetes issued a plea to listeners on Jean Shepherd's Night People radio programme to help finance the production of a film, through donations. While race was a factor in the creation of Shadows, Cassavetes rejected any overt message. While the film's premise was oprn to debate, the creative nature of the endeavour was unmistakable: "it was an experiment throughout, and our primary purpose was to learn," Cassavetes said. 

The film's grainy starkness, improvised dialogue, jerky editing, occasionally incongruous mise-en-scene, and dramatic changes in focus and lighting all contributed to Shadows' energy. The unaffected performances of Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, and Hugh Hurd – who play a trio of siblings threatened by racial ignorance and the parameters of racial identity – are aided by Cassavetes' penchant for long takes; when a scene went wrong, he would restart it from the beginning to give the actors time to settle in and bring the characters to their fullest realisation. Shadows is unmistakably a film of its day, replete with the urban bustle, banter, and brooding posturing associated with the "Beat Generation." Individuals lecture about art and ruminate about life in this bohemian atmosphere. Sexual and relationship conversations range from casual and unimportant to intense and therapeutic. The film's wider storey is concerned with the instability of family relations, a theme that runs through most of Cassavetes' work. 

Following three preview screenings of Shadows, a 15-day round of reshoots resulted in around an hour of new, more polished content. Some, particularly writer and director Jonas Mekas, who saw and loved the rougher early version, saw the final release as a commercial surrender. Contrary to its finishing title, which implies that the film is an improvisation, the majority of what made it into the final cut was written. While several street shots were shot on the fly, disguising the camera and filming from a distance to avoid being stopped by police due to the crew's lack of permissions, numerous interiors were constructed sets at the Variety Arts studio. The much-lauded aesthetic of the picture was born of necessity and inexperience. “The things for which we were applauded were the ones for which we attempted to cure,” Cassavetes later said. Elsewhere, he said, "We had no idea how to make a film. I never saw myself as a director.” Nonetheless, he was now a director in demand. Cassavetes was quickly and rather unexpectedly awarded a contract with Paramount, which included the option to direct a picture of his choosing with a modest budget, studio staff, and famous cast. Although Too Late Blues (1961) was an attractive project on paper, the six-week production, rigid filmmaking philosophy, and lack of opportunity for spontaneous creativity resulted in a conventional, predictable work.

Despite its production conditions, Too Late Blues carries over a recurring Cassavetes subject from Shadows - that of creative integrity in the face of opposing objectives. This drama about trendy musicians and their professional and personal conflicts is inhabited by rowdy men bound by volatile relationships, as they are so often in Cassavetes' work, who find themselves at odds over individual objectives. Additionally, the extra subplot of a troubled relationship between John "Ghost" Wakefield (Bobby Darin) and Jess Polanski (Stella Stevens) provides surprising sexual candour, but is otherwise clichéd and cold.

Too Late Blues employs a more controlled and balanced approach than Shadows, giving the picture a more consistent, although less energising, visual identity. Even the debates get more sophisticated within the boundaries of the clearly scripted. In contrast to Shadows' narrative variety, with its sometimes shaky but always dynamic structure, Too Late Blues' tempo becomes mired down in forced seriousness. The film makes a determined effort to be trendy, with language that Tom Charity describes as a "self-conscious mixture of jazz jive and hardboiled poetics." However, Marshall Fine says that Too Late Blues seemed "naive and square" even in 1961. In the end, it's a solid sophomore effort, though one that was artistically compromised. 

Cassavetes' follow-up production, A Child is Waiting (1963), was produced by Stanley Kramer, the renowned "problem cinema" producer. With Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland appearing as instructors at a school for the mentally disabled, this is the most apparent example of polished, Hollywood shine in Cassavetes' work. The film's visuals are accompanied by a mournful soundtrack, and though it successfully tugs at the melodramatic heartstrings, its tone is usually subdued. It is also possible that this is Cassavetes' most sentimental work. A less personal endeavour, A Child is Waiting touches on recurring Cassavetes themes, including the search for meaning and purpose in life, the notion of normality in an aberrant world, and the difficult balance between professional obligation and personal emotion. Nonetheless, the picture marked a low point in Cassavetes' unto then, brief career as a filmmaker. Conflicts with the frail Garland, disagreements with Lancaster, and interference from a possessive Abby Mann, the original novel's author, were worsened by subsequent confrontations with Kramer over the final edit. 

Cassavetes' much more distinctive follow-up was a more striking effort – a feature-length home movie funded entirely out of his own earnings. Faces (1968) is a fascinating, uncomfortably personal portrayal of middle-age melancholy and the resulting breakdown of connection. Faces was "a triumph of begging, borrowing, and on occasion, stealing whatever was required to create it." The six-month production (which took place mostly at night to allow everyone to work their day jobs) resulted in 150 hours of video, which was culled from a screenplay that weighed in at roughly 320 pages. Faces came to an end after three years of post-production labour with a rough cut of 230 minutes. Despite its logistical difficulties, Faces benefited from being an entirely autonomous production from conception to finish, which meant no aesthetic sacrifices. 

Faces is Cassavetes at his most emotional. The penetrating titular close-ups of the people at their most energetic establish a deep familiarity via jagged cutting and extremely erratic shot choices. The film's coarseness depicts the manner in which everyone involved behaves. Men may be vulgar, with intermittent and caustic cruelty, while women may be rowdy, with their own social/sexual norms of behaviour. Each group is ready to criticise the other, rather than admitting their own vulnerabilities and frailties. The film is a whirlwind of audiovisual components, making it impossible to discern what is scripted and what are ad hoc digressions. The air is filled with screaming, laughter, enthusiastic gesticulations, and constant movement. The speech loops endlessly in mostly meaningless interactions, and there is no traditional plotline to speak of. Faces, on the other hand, is a character-driven depiction of lives ruled by an ever-changing variety of emotions. Physical and spoken interactions are verbose, and responses are unpredictable, reflecting and affecting the film's formal elements. When merely filming in the trenches of fierce conflict, the turbulence is captured in painful detail and for an extended period of time. The viewer, like the protagonists, is pushed through emotional trauma.

Cassavetes began Faces with no expectations, yet the picture became a box office success, winning multiple accolades and critical acclaim and grossing more than US$8 million. It "offers a very profound dissection of male and female role-playing – and the explosive intensity of honest behaviour when the roles are shed," Fine writes. Cassavetes believed the filmmaking process to be the happiest period of his life.

In the following extract from his book ‘Cassavetes On Cassavetes’ the film critic and writer Raymond Carney discusses Faces interspersed with extracts from John Cassavetes discussing his attitude toward the film.

Raymond Carney: American viewers were divided in their opinion. Though many appreciated Faces, at least as many had major problems with it. One frequently voiced objection was that Cassavetes failed to explain his characters’ motives and the causes of their behavior. As early as Too Late Blues he had argued that he didn’t want to explain too much because the work the viewer had to do was an important part of the experience. Faces went even further in this direction – confounding viewers’ expectations, placing them in a problem-solving stance and forcing them to stay in the flow of experience.

John Cassavetes: The first part of the script was structured very carefully to set up a whole new pattern of thinking so that the audience could not get ahead of the film. Most people think, ‘Oh yes, this is what’s going to happen in the next moment.’ What happens with Faces, though, is that the first half of the film really bugs people because it doesn’t fit an easy pattern of behavior. Well, I don’t know anyone who has an easy pattern of behavior. I know people who are just sensational one minute and absolute bastards the next. Terribly funny one minute and morose the next. And these moods come from specific things that I can’t put my finger on because I don’t know their whole life. And we can’t put their whole life on the screen. So I’ve got to depend on the actor to identify with his role enough that he can express those things. And to get it on the screen is something miraculous.

It’s antagonism. With Faces you’re getting so many vibrations from people and you’re seeing people behave so honestly, when they stop you get irritated. You identify with a character and then he does something you don’t want him to do, it becomes personal. You can’t stand for it not to have the answers every moment. You don’t want to waste your time going through their self-exploration. You want them to get right down to it and give you the answers. Other movies make me bored. I want them to go faster, you know. Hurry up. I want it to go faster because I’m not interested in it. I like things that evolve.

Although at the end of the following statement Cassavetes confuses the 183-minute version of his film with the final edit, his point is still valid.

JC: People prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films. And then you discover that people prefer that because they’ve already caught on to what you wanted to say and are ahead of you. So that there’s a sort of competition between them andyou, and you try to shake them up rather than please them: you show them that you know what they’re going to say so as to be more honest than they can imagine. For example, when Faces opens, the couple are lying in bed, laughing. The audience wants to join them but they’re not included yet. The characters dictate the terms to the audience.

Other viewers were frustrated by Cassavetes’ unwillingness to explain his characters’ problems in psychological terms – holding the viewer on the outside of opaque, impenetrable surfaces. Cassavetes felt that tracing behavior back to psychological causes was to simplify it.

JC: I’m a very literal man. I never look for anything underneath. I don’t know why people always want to understand, work out hidden meaning and motivations. Surely the only reason for trying to work out someone’s motivation is if you’re scared of them. Otherwise you just feel for people, don’t you? You love them or you hate them. This is a film about people’s surfaces, isn’t it?

Another issue for many viewers was what they felt to be Cassavetes’ toughness or cynicism, at least in part because of his avoidance of the stock-in-trade of Hollywood filmmaking: swoony, romantic relationships between characters and between the viewer and a character. Cassavetes readily acknowledged this aspect of his style.

JC: The movie hates ‘sensitivity’. Sensitivity is hypocrisy in the self-pitying way. True sensitivity should be truly honest. That’s what we strove for: brutal, unsentimental honesty.

A related issue was that Cassavetes’ characters almost never verbally expressed love or affection for one another. (Later in life, Cassavetes said he actually went through the scripts of both ‘A Woman Under the Influence’ and ‘Gloria’ and deleted lines of dialogue where a character used the word ‘love’.)

JC: I really resent being liked openly. I don’t find any challenge in being liked. It’s a form of agreement and very often agreement doesn’t really get anywhere. I always feel that when someone says ‘I love you’, they really mean ‘I hate you’. It seems to me something’s wrong when someone has to express that or wants to hear it. It expresses some fear or doubt.

In a parallel vein, the highest compliment Cassavetes could pay his characters was to say that they weren’t ‘sentimental’ – meaning that they didn’t feel sorry for themselves, or stop and bemoan their situation, but gamely ‘went on’, doing the best they could with the hand they were dealt. (He would later argue that that is what made the central character in ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie‘ admirable.)

JC: In Faces there’s this scene with Florence, the middle-aged lady, and the hippie. I get a lump in my throat every time I see it. Gets me every time. Here’s this beat-up broad out to seduce a young guy she picked up at a discotheque and she tries everything and doesn’t care how ridiculous or pathetic she looks. She wants this guy and she wants to get him in the sack. I think she might have succeeded if that younger chick hadn’t been there too, all cool and available. The point is the middle-aged lady tried. She fought; she struggled; she wouldn’t give up. Isn’t it better to fight to see your fantasies realized – fight and lose, rather than suffer and dream away in silence? What I love about all of the characters in Faces is that they don’t quit. They will make jackasses of themselves but they try to keep going. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong if you try.

The excitement of watching Faces is to see a different point of view, not a romanticized point of view like a Hollywood movie would make it or a self-justifying point of view as some other filmmakers might make it, but to see totally unedited behavior, to look at a life experience without any point of view outside of the people themselves. I think that is some- thing different from other movies. It’s fascinating to me. And painful too. I sit there not as the maker of the film. I’m looking at the film as an outsider. Not as a film. I’m relating to certain characters in the thing that are part of me. Some of them behave as I behave. And some don’t. But I like or dislike them not on the basis of my writing, but on the basis of their acting, on the basis of what they mean to me. I don’t think thedirector creates anything. I liken it to a reporter’s function – if it happens, something’s going to come out, and if it’s dull, nothing in the world is going to save it.

Even at the peak of ‘Faces’ success, Cassavetes understood that popularity was a trap.

JC: My films are about personal things – marriages breaking up, love transformed by mutual treachery, the difficulty that two people have in communicating even though they live together. These are the problems which I have tackled and which concern me and concern others. Some- times people find this painful to accept or they think that my ideas are wrong or simply they’re not interested in the difficulties which exist in communicating with others. But I am very interested in this. With my actors I try to explore it and try and relate it to their daily lives. I can’t ask people who are comfortable with their lives, with no problems, to be spectacularly interested in my work. It’s not made to please people. Many press agents told me, ‘For God’s sake, don’t sell the movie on middle age.’ But I’m sure there are some middle-aged people around. I always feel left out of most other movies. They have nothing to do with me.

I don’t care if people like our films or not. As long as I can make these films and say what I want and work with people I love and who are not afraid to express themselves, whether it’s popular or not. If we want to give Faces away to universities, we will do that. If we want to bury the film and never let anyone see it, we can do that. In other words, it’s ours. So that if it plays in a festival, fine. If it doesn’t play in a festival, fine. If people love it, fine. If they don’t, OK too.

– Extract from Cassavetes on Cassavetes, by Raymond Carney.

Alfred Hitchcock Talks to Francois Truffaut

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Once a week for ten years, beginning in 1955, Hitchcock introduced his popular television show with a formal “good evening, ladies and gentlemen” spoken in an exaggerated British accent, sounding something like a movie version of an English butler. He was sarcastic and ironic; he mocked his sponsors and himself. He had, in short, a good time at everyone’s expense, his own included. The publicity and public exposure his appearances provided was invaluable. Despite the fact that Hitchcock coveted a quiet, creative life, he wanted everyone to know who was responsible for the films he created, as evidenced by the fact that he quite literally wrote himself into his films by means of brief, silent cameos in almost all of them. These, and the television series, guaranteed an almost personal engagement with his audience.

Hitchcock wanted another kind of engagement, however. As Robert Kapsis has pointed out, he wanted critical, even scholarly, recognition of his work. This began in the late fifties in France, a country that always took filmmaking seriously. The first book-length study of his work was written in 1957 by two French critics who would soon become important directors in their own right: Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. In 1962, one of the most famous of the “new wave” of French directors working in the late fifties and throughout the sixties, Francois Truffaut (who made, among many other films, The Four Hundred Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, and Fahrenheit 451), began a career-long interview with Hitchcock. The result was many days of conversation, conducted with the assistance of a translator, that finally appeared in a book called, simply enough, Hitchcock/Truffaut. In it, Hitchcock continued what he did in most other interviews. He talked about the structure of his films, his love of the form of film itself, and all the things that could be accomplished with it. He talked about his profound awareness of the audience and how they could be manipulated to respond the way he wanted them to. He never talked about the narrative depth of his work, about its emotional and psychological complexities (the closest he gets is the reference in the interview to his own desire for orderliness in his life). Otherwise, he always left interpretation to others.

In the following extract Francois Truffaut talks to Alfred Hitchcock about “Pure Cinema,” Playing His Audience Like an Organ, and Psycho.

F.T Before talking about Psycho I would like to ask whether you have any theory in respect to the opening scene of your pictures. Some of them start out with an act of violence; others simply indicate the locale.

A.H. It all depends on what the purpose is. The opening of The Birds is an attempt to suggest the normal, complacent, everyday life in San Francisco. Sometimes I simply use a title to indicate that we’re in Phoenix or in San Francisco. It’s too easy, I know, but it’s economical. I’m torn between the need for economy and the wish to present a locale, even when it’s a familiar one, with more subtlety. After all, it’s no problem at all to present Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the back- ground, or London with Big Ben on the horizon.

F.T. In pictures that don’t open up with violence, you almost invariably apply the same rule of exposition: From the farthest to the nearest. You show the city, then a building in the city, a room in that building. That’s the way Psycho begins.

A.H. In the opening of Psycho I wanted to say that we were in Phoenix, and we even spelled out the day and the time, but I only did that to lead up to a very important fact: that it was two-forty-three in the afternoon and this is the only time the poor girl has to go to bed with her lover. It suggests that she’s spent her whole lunch hour with him.

F.T. It’s a nice touch because it establishes at once that this is an illicit affair.

A.H. It also allows the viewer to become a Peeping Tom.

F.T. Jean Douchet, a French film critic, made a witty comment on that scene. He wrote that since John Gavin is stripped to his waist, but Janet Leigh wears a brassiere, the scene is only satisfying to one half of the audience.

A.H. In truth, Janet Leigh should not have been wearing a brassiere. I can see nothing immoral about that scene, and I get no special kick out of it. But the scene would have been more interesting if the girl’s bare breasts had been rubbing against the man’s chest.

F.T. I noticed that throughout the whole picture you tried to throw out red herrings to the viewers, and it occurred to me that the reason for that erotic opening was to mislead them again. The sex angle was raised so that later on the audience would think that Anthony Perkins is merely a voyeur. If I’m not mistaken, out of your fifty works, this is the only film showing a woman in a brassiere.

A.H. Well, one of the reasons for which I wanted to do the scene in that way was that the audiences are changing. It seems to me that the straightforward kissing scene would be looked down at by the younger viewers; they’d feel it was silly. I know that they themselves behave as John Gavin and Janet Leigh did. I think that nowadays you have to show them the way they themselves behave most of the time. Besides, I also wanted to give a visual impression of despair and solitude in that scene.

F.T. Yes, it occurred to me that Psycho was oriented toward a new generation of filmgoers. There were many things in that picture that you’d never done in your earlier films.

A.H. Absolutely. In fact, that’s also true in a technical sense for The Birds.

F.T. I’ve read the novel from which Psycho was taken, and one of the things that bothered me is that it cheats. For instance, there are passages like this: “Norman sat down beside his mother and they began a conversation.” Now, since she doesn’t exist, that’s obviously misleading, whereas the film narration is rigorously worked out to eliminate these discrepancies. What was it that attracted you to the novel?

A.H. I think that the thing that appealed to me and made me decide to do the picture was the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue. That was about all.

F.T. The killing is pretty much like a rape. I believe the novel was based on a newspaper story.

A.H. It was the story of a man who kept his mother’s body in his house, somewhere in Wisconsin.

F.T. In Psycho there’s a whole arsenal of terror, which you generally avoid: the ghostly house . . .

A.H. The mysterious atmosphere is, to some extent, quite accidental. For instance, the actual locale of the events is in northern California, where that type of house is very com- mon. They’re either called “California Gothic,” or, when they’re particularly awful, they’re called “California ginger-bread.” I did not set out to reconstruct an old-fashioned Universal horror-picture atmosphere. I simply wanted to be accurate, and there is no question but that both the house and the motel are authentic reproductions of the real thing. I chose that house and motel because I realized that if I had taken an ordinary low bungalow the effect wouldn’t have been the same. I felt that type of architecture would help the atmosphere of the yarn.

F.T. I must say that the architectural contrast between the vertical house and the horizontal motel is quite pleasing to the eye.

A.H. Definitely, that’s our composition: a vertical block and a horizontal block.

F.T. In that whole picture there isn’t a single character with whom a viewer might identify.

A.H. It wasn’t necessary. Even so, the audience was probably sorry for the poor girl at the time of her death. In fact, the first part of the story was a red herring. That was deliberate, you see, to detract the viewer’s attention in order to heighten the murder. We purposely made that beginning on the long side, with the bit about the theft and her escape, in order to get the audience absorbed with the question of whether she would or would not be caught. Even that business about the forty thousand dollars was milked to the very end so that the public might wonder what’s going to happen to the money.

You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story; they like to feel they know what’s coming next. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts. The more we go into the details of the girl’s journey, the more the audience becomes absorbed in her flight. That’s why so much is made of the motorcycle cop and the change of cars. When Anthony Perkins tells the girl of his life in the motel, and they exchange views, you still play upon the girl’s problem. It seems as if she’s decided to go back to Phoenix and give the money back, and it’s possible that the public anticipates by thinking, “Ah, this young man is influencing her to change her mind.” You turn the viewer in one direction and then in another; you keep him as far as possible from what’s actually going to happen.

In the average production, Janet Leigh would have been given the other role. She would have played the sister who’s investigating. It’s rather unusual to kill the star in the first third of the film. I purposely killed the star so as to make the killing even more unexpected. As a matter of fact, that’s
why I insisted that the audiences be kept out of the theaters once the picture had started, because the late-comers would have been waiting to see Janet Leigh after she has disappeared from the screen action.

Psycho has a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating. I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ.

F.T. I admired that picture enormously, but I felt a letdown during the two scenes with the sheriff.

A.H. The sheriff ’s intervention comes under the heading of what we have discussed many times before: “Why don’t they go to the police?” I’ve always replied, “They don’t go to the police because it’s dull.” Here is a perfect example of what happens when they go to the police.

F.T. Still, the action picks up again almost immediately after that. One intriguing aspect is the way the picture makes the viewer constantly switch loyalties. At the beginning he hopes that Janet Leigh won’t be caught. The murder is very shocking, but as soon as Perkins wipes away the traces of the killing, we begin to side with him, to hope that he won’t be found out. Later on, when we learn from the sheriff that Perkins’ mother has been dead for eight years, we again change sides and are against Perkins, but this time, it’s sheer curiosity. The viewer’ emotions are not exactly wholesome...

F.T. Would you say that Psycho is an experimental film?

A.H. Possibly. My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider that very important. I don’t care about the subject matter; I don’t care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it’s tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve some- thing of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. It wasn’t a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film.

F.T. Yes, that’s true.

A.H. That’s why I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers, to you and me. I can’t get a real appreciation of the picture in the terms we’re using now. People will say, “It was a terrible film to make. The subject was horrible, the people were small, there were no characters in it.” I know all of this, but I also know that the construction of the story and the way in which it was told caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional.

F.T. Yes, emotional and even physical.

A.H. Emotional. I don’t care whether it looked like a small or a large picture. I didn’t start off to make an important movie. I thought I could have fun with this subject and this situation. The picture cost eight hundred thousand dollars. It was an experiment in this sense: Could I make a feature film under the same conditions as a television show? I used a complete television unit to shoot it very quickly. The only place where I digressed was when I slowed down the murder scene, the cleaning-up scene, and the other scenes that indicated anything that required time. All of the rest was handled in the same way that they do it in television.

F.T. I know that you produced Psycho yourself. How did you make out with it?

A.H. Psycho cost us no more than eight hundred thousand dollars to make. It has grossed some fifteen million dollars to date.

F.T. That’s fantastic! Would you say this was your greatest hit to date?

A.H. Yes. And that’s what I’d like you to do—a picture that would gross millions of dollars throughout the world! It’s an area of film-making in which it’s more important for you to be pleased with the technique than with the content. It’s the kind of picture in which the camera takes over. Of course, since critics are more concerned with the scenario, it won’t necessarily get you the best notices, but you have to design your film just as Shakespeare did his plays—for an audience.

F.T. That reminds me that Psycho is particularly universal because it’s a half-silent movie; there are at least two reels with no dialogue at all. And that also simplified all the problems of subtitling and dubbing.

A.H. Do you know that in Thailand they use no subtitles or dubbing? They shut off the sound and a man stands somewhere near the screen and interprets all the roles, using different voices.

– Good Evening. Alfred Hitchcock Talks to Francois Truffaut about “Pure Cinema,” Playing His Audience Like an Organ, and Psycho.

Akira Kurosawa: Some Random Notes on Screenwriting

Akira Kurosawa, Japan's most acclaimed filmmaker, created an astounding body of work that stands as a testament to artistic brilliance. Though he is most renowned for his samurai epics like as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, his intimate, contemporary dramas such as Ikuru and High and Low are also as powerful. The director's first significant phase began in the postwar era with Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, two arresting noirs that launched a long partnership with combustible leading man Toshiro Mifune. Kurosawa acquired international prominence in the early 1950s with Rashomin, a seminal work of nonlinear storytelling that sparked international interest in Japanese film. In the years that followed, the auteur maintained a fertile dialogue with the West, gaining inspiration from everything from Shakespeare to Dashiell Hammett and developing cinematic methods that would influence directors as divergent as George Lucas and Sam Peckinpah. 

Kurosawa began filming Dersu Uzala (1976) in 1975, a harrowing survival tale set in the Siberian forest. With substantial financial backing from Soviet and Japanese sources, the director had the time and resources to create on an epic scale once more. The resulting picture was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and received the Moscow Film Festival's Gold Medal. It marked Kurosawa's triumphant return. 

Kurosawa directed Kagemusha (1980) in 1980, with financial backing from American directors George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. The film is a spectacular—but deeply humanistic—Samurai epic about a condemned criminal who assumes the identity of a deceased warlord. The film won the Cannes Film Festival's Golden Palm and a slew of other international accolades. Kurosawa received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director in 1985 for Ran, a Japanese adaptation of King Lear that included some of the most stunning fight sequences ever filmed. The triumph of these two epics cemented Kurosawa's position as one of modern cinema's masterpieces. 

Kurosawa then directed Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990), a film adaptation of the director's own midnight hallucinations at the age of 80. Although few could deny the picture's aesthetic magnificence, the highly personal film received mixed critical reviews. Rhapsody in August (1991), a more mainstream production geared at Western audiences and starring American actor Richard Gere, received an even more negative reception. Madadayo (1993) returned to more typically Japanese subject matter, telling the storey of an ex-professor who lives in a hut and refuses to acknowledge his impending death. Several of Kurosawa's screenplays were adapted into films in the mid-1990s, most notably Bruce Willis's Last Man Standing (1996). 

Kurosawa, a subtle innovator, purposefully shunned many of his postwar colleagues' aesthetic tricks and emotional exhibitionism in favour of rational but complex structural development, compositional precision, and meticulous character study. His apathy toward limiting cultural rituals contributed to his becoming the most catholic of his country's film makers. In 1989, the director received an honorary Academy Award for "achievements that have inspired, pleased, enriched, and thrilled audiences worldwide and influenced filmmakers worldwide."

The following comments were originally made by Akira Kurosawa in 1975 as advice to young people considering a career in filmmaking. They were adapted by Audie E. Bock and published as an appendix to Kurosawa’s Something Like An Autobiography.

When I begin to consider a film project, I always have in mind a number of ideas that feel as if they would be the sort of thing I’d like to film. From among these one will suddenly germinate and begin to sprout; this will be the one I grasp and develop. I have never taken on a project offered to me by a producer or a production company. My films emerge from my own desire to say a particular thing at a particular time. The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing.

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. That is what makes a real movie. The script must be something that has the power to do this. 

A good structure for a screenplay is that of the symphony, with its three or four movements and differing tempos. Or one can use the Noh play with its three-part structure: jo (introduction), ha (destruction) and kya (haste). If you devote yourself fully to Noh and gain something good from this, it will emerge naturally in your films. The Noh is a truly unique art form that exists nowhere else in the world. I think the Kabuki, which imitates it, is a sterile flower. But in a screenplay, I think the symphonic structure is the easiest for people of today to understand.

In order to write scripts, you must first study the great novels and dramas of the world. You must consider why they are great. Where does the emotion come from that you feel as you read them? What degree of passion did the author have to have, what level of meticulousness did he have to command, in order to portray the characters and events as he did? You must read thoroughly, to the point where you can grasp all these things. You must also see the great films. You must read the great screenplays and study the film theories of the great directors. If your goal is to become a film director, you must master screenwriting.

I’ve forgotten who it was that said creation is memory. My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.

I began writing scripts with two other people around 1940. Up until then I wrote alone, and found that I had no difficulties. But in writing alone there is a danger that your interpretation of another human being will suffer from one-sidedness. If you write with two other people about that human being, you get at least three different viewpoints on him, and you can discuss the points on which you disagree. Also, the director has a natural tendency to nudge the hero and the plot along into a pattern that is the easiest one for him to direct. By writing with about two other people, you can avoid this danger also.

Something that you should take particular notice of is the fact that the best scripts have very few explanatory passages. Adding explanation to the descriptive passages of a screenplay is the most dangerous trap you can fall into. It’s easy to explain the psychological state of a character at a particular moment, but it’s very difficult to describe it through the delicate nuances of action and dialogue. Yet it is not impossible. A great deal about this can be learned from the study of the great plays, and I believe the ‘hard-boiled’ detective novels can also be very instructive.

Andrei Tarkovsky: Dialogue on Science Fiction

Solaris (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Where 2001 examined the technological progress of man through a notably distant lens from its characters, Solaris devastatingly explores the inner psychology of its protagonist (scientist Kris Kelvin), who is tortured by phantom images of his dead wife aboard a spaceship hovering the Solaris ocean, which is argued to have the special ability to accommodate the most desperate human desires.

Where 2001 can be argued as having a relatively positive view towards progressing space travel and thus forwarding the Apollo agenda, Solaris is quite pessimistic towards human space travel. Where technology in 2001 is intended an awe-inspiring display of choreographed beauty, the technology of Solaris is decrepit and useless, and the halls of the spaceship act as largely abandoned canals of depression and defeat rather than a locale for progressive innovation... Space travel is viewed in Solaris as a largely futile, lonely, and unattractive venture. Human space exploration has not led to a final accomplishment here as much as it has simply come to a standstill...
                             – Landon Palmer:  Kubrick’s ‘2001’ vs. Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’

Solaris (1972) is arguably Tarkovsky’s most approachable film. While it is far from conventional in its story and structure, it stands centrally in relation to his other films: behind him were his impressive debut, Ivan's Childhood (1962), and his first epic masterpiece, Andrei Rublev (1966); ahead of him were the experimental, personal, Mirror (1975), Stalker, a philosophical, bleak work, and finally, two difficult, contemplative films made in exile, Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). 

Tarkovsky had seen Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and reportedly thought it unemotional and cold. Reports at the time suggested Tarkovsky’s film was a direct response to 2001. Tarkovsky undoubtedly uses more individual characters and the human drama is more central than in Kubrick’s film. Nonetheless, Tarkovsky’s film, while a reaction to Kubrick’s cannot hide its influence. Both films establish their narratives in a leisurely manner, with considerable time spent tracking around the space sets; both films employ a widescreen mise-en-scene approach that benefits from superior art direction; and both films generate an aura of mystery that begs for countless explanations. 

Unlike 2001, Solaris, on the other hand, is permeated with sadness, which grips the picture even before it departs from Earth. We watch the protagonist, a space psychologist called Kris Kelvin, gaze at underwater reeds as if they were a drowned woman's tresses in the sombre prologue. Kris, as played by Donatas Banionis, seems perpetually scarred, delayed by some unfathomable sadness. He will depart on a trip to the space station Solaris, a once-thriving experiment that has gone awry; it will be up to him to decide whether or not to shut down the research station. He prepares by watching a video from a scientific symposium regarding Solaris's problems.

Humans seem to be enslaved to equipment and television pictures, disconnected from the natural world around. At Solaris, Kris discovers a dilapidated space station that is empty save for two obsessed scientists while Kris's colleague has already committed suicide, leaving him a recorded warning about hallucinated visitors having "something to do with conscience." Kris's deceased wife, Hari, constantly materialises by his side. Whether she is a doppelganger, the embodiment of a decade's worth of grief-stricken memories, or a delusion, she is real to Kelvin. He has the ability to hold her and talk to her, and hence is the author of her existence. Tarkovsky expands this concept to all of our connections, both past and present, and questions their very existence. Do we adore the people around us, or do we adore our perceptions of them? How much access do we really have about someone, apart from our own mental colouring of their character? 

Tarkovsky often confronts us with such profoundly disturbing concepts, arguing that we may not be the centre of everything after all. Solaris is a picture that not only dazzles and confounds with its visual splendour and remarkable set design, but also with the thoughts that underpin each frame, exhibiting harrowing human concepts into a lifeless environment. 

Tarkovsky's experiments with pace, attempting to "discover Time inside Time," have his camera track up to the sleeping Kris, distorting the moment until we join his dream. In the film's beautiful closing scene, Kelvin returns to his parents in the picturesque country house home shown in the opening scenes – but this reassuring mirage is a huge duplicate manufactured by Solaris's planet-sized brain. Although it seems to be home, Kelvin will never be able to return. 

“The protagonists in Solaris were tormented by disappointments, and the path out we presented them was sufficiently illusory,” Tarkovsky subsequently wrote in his film biography Sculpting in Time. “It was in dreams that they discovered their own roots - those roots that permanently connect man to the Earth that gave birth to him. However, even such connections had become imaginary to them.”

The following conversation is from an interview by Naum Abramov with Andrei Tarkovsky that took place in 1970 while the great Russian director was working on his adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. Initially billed in America as the Soviet Union’s reply to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), at first glance, both films share similar concerns in exploring mankind’s unsettled role in the universe and the consequences of detachment from his natural habitat. However, it’s evident that each film’s view on space, and mankind’s role within it, are quite different:

ABRAMOV: You’re working on a film adaptation of the science-fiction novel ‘Solaris’, by Stanislaw Lem. Lately, the science-fiction genre has attracted the interest of many prominent filmmakers. This seems to be an indication of how the genre answers some sort of inner need for contemporary viewers and filmmakers alike. Complex, intellectual-artistic content can be combined in one film with aspects of a purely entertaining spectacle directed toward the widest possible audience. I think this is especially true for the genre of science-fiction in cinema. Viewers of different levels of sophistication would appreciate different elements of these films; in some cases the philosophical content, in other cases, the strictly superficial, dramatic, exciting aspects of the plot.

In your opinion, what needs are satisfied in our time by the genre of science-fiction in cinema? Is it a desire to see the scientific and technological progress of humanity, incarnated in the vivid imagery of a contemporary film? Is it the expression of philosophical thought within the strange and thrilling context of a flight into space; the future of our planet; or the story of some brave, new invention? Maybe it’s the striving of the writer and filmmaker to study people’s character, our contemporary character, with the dramatic events dictated by the genre?

And finally, why have you turned to science-fiction, a genre which is so new to you?

TARKOVSKY: The questions you’re asking, as far as I understand, are connected on one hand with filmmaking and on the other hand with the viewer. But first, I want to explain why I decided to adapt Lem’s novel, Solaris. Whether or not my first two films are good or bad, they are, in the final analysis, both about the same thing. They are about the extreme manifestation of loyalty to a moral debt, the struggle for it, and faith in it – even to the extent of a personality crisis. They are about an individual armed with conviction, an individual with a sense of personal destiny, for whom catastrophe is an unbroken human souI.

I’m interested in a hero that goes on to the end despite everything. Because only such a person can claim victory. The dramatic form of my films is a token of my desire to express the struggle and the greatness of the human spirit. I think you can easily connect this concept with my previous films. Both Ivan and Andrei do everything against their own safety. The first physically, the second in a spiritual sense. Both of them in a search for an ideal, moral way of living.

As for Solaris, my decision to adapt it to the screen is not at all a result of some fondness for the genre. The main thing is that in Solaris, Lem presents a problem that is close to me: the problem of overcoming, of convictions, of moral transformation on the path of struggle within the limits of one’s own destiny. The depth and meaning of Lem’s novel are not at all dependent on the science-fiction genre, and it’s not enough to appreciate his novel simply for the genre.

The novel is not only about the human mind encountering the unknown, but it is also about the moral leap of a human being in relation to new discoveries in scientific knowledge. And overcoming the obstacles on this path leads to the painful birth of a new morality. This is the ‘price of progress’ that Kelvin pays in Solaris. And Kelvin’s price is the face to face encounter with the materializatron of his own conscience. But Kelvin doesn’t betray his moral position. Because betrayal in this situation means to remain at the former level, not even attempting to rise to a higher moral level. And Kelvin pays a tragic price for this step forward. The science-fiction genre creates the necessary premise for this connection between moral problems and the physiology of the human mind.

ABRAMOV: And nevertheless, even though you emphasize your indifference to the genre, you are resolving this philosophical problem which concerns you within the genre of science-fiction. lt seems to me that science-fiction creates such special conditions of cinematic representation for itself that it’s impossible just to shrug them off. The filmmaker encounters different intellectual and artistic capacities in a novel and a film. He deals with the cinematic incarnation on screen of what was created by the imagination of the author of a literary work, with the need to provide the fantastic with a plastic specificity.

These questions must have presented themselves to you.


TARKOVSKY: The complexity in adapting Solaris is an issue of film adaptations in general and secondarily an issue of science-fiction adaptations. These are the two fundamental issues of my current work. The first issue relates to the principles of a work of literature in general. Prose possesses the special characteristic that its imagery depends on the sensory experience of the reader. So, no matter how detailed this or that scene is developed, the reader, to the degree of his own experience, sees that which his own experience, character, bias, and tastes have prepared him to see. Even the most detailed descriptions in prose, in a way, will elude the control of the writer and the reader will perceive them subjectively.

In the literal, superficial sense, War and Peace is read and envisioned by thousands of readers; this makes it a thousand different books as a result of the differences in experience between the writer and the reader. In this significantly important aspect is the special relevance and ubiquity of literature – its democracy, if you will. In this is the guarantee of the reader’s co-creation. A writer subconsciously depends on an imaginative reader to see more and to see more clearly than the presented, laconic description. A reader can perceive even the most ruthless, naturalistic details with omission through his subjective, aesthetic filter. I would call this peculiarity of prosaic description to influence the reader ‘aesthetic adaptation’. Principally, it governs perception and the prose author invades the soul of the reader within the belly of this Trojan horse.

This is in literature. But what about cinema? Where in cinema does a viewer have this freedom of choice? Each and every frame, every scene and episode, outwardly doesn’t even describe, but literally records actions, landscapes, character’s faces. And in this is the terrifying danger of not being accepted by the viewer. Because on film there is a very unambiguous designation of the concrete, against which the viewer’s personal, sensory experience rebels.

Some may argue that cinema is attractive because it’s really a source of what is exotic and unusual for a viewer. That isn’t quite right. Actually, it’s just the opposite. Cinema, in contrast to literature, is the filmmaker’s experience caught on film. And if this personal experience is really sincerely expressed then the viewer accepts the film.

I’ve noticed, from my own experience, if the external, emotional construction of images in a film are based on the filmmaker’s own memory, on the kinship of one’s personal experience with the fabric of the film, then the film will have the power to affect those who see it. If the director follows only the superficial, literal base of the film, for example the screenplay, even if in the most convincing, realistic, and conscientious manner, the viewer will be left unaffected.

Therefore, if you’re objectively incapable of influencing a viewer with his own experience, as in literature as I mentioned earlier, and you’re unable to achieve that in principle, then in cinema, you should sincerely tell about your own experience. That’s why even now when all half-literate people have learned to make movies, cinema remains an art form, which only a small number of directors have actually mastered, and they can be counted with the fingers of one hand. To remould a literary work into the frames of a film means to tell your version of the literary source, filtering it through yourself.

ABRAMOV: Where do you draw the line between a filmmaker’s interpretation and the original work? Isn’t there a danger of remoulding the literary work to the point of losing its original stylistics and visual structure?

TARKOVSKY: Working in science-fiction demands great subtlety and sincerity, especially if you’re talking about the issue of perspective. That’s why Lem is such a great science-fiction writer. You would understand what I mean if you read Solaris, Eden, and Return from the Stars.

In Eden, Lem tells about an expedition to a planet where the members of the expedition encounter a reality, the developmental laws of which they cannot comprehend. These laws slip away from understanding, like thoughts just forgotten. The air is filled with guesses and analogies, seen by the naked eye, but they can’t be caught. It’s a very specific, unnerving, and frustrating condition. And Lem does a brilliant job of expressing this condition. He describes in detail everything that the expedition encounters. But more than the detail, he describes what it is the people see, while not understanding what it means.

The same thing is in Return from the Stars. The protagonist returns from a flight to different galaxies. On earth, because of the differences in time (he has traveled at the speed of light), life has progressed through several generations. The returned astronaut walks through the city and doesn’t understand anything. Lem describes everything the astronaut encounters in extreme detail and despite this detailed description, we don’t understand anything either, along with the protagonist. These emotionally tense pieces express, for me, the quintessence of the author’s personal experience projected into the future.

ABRAMOV: The majority of directors of science-fiction movies think it necessary to impress the viewer’s imagination with the concrete details of everyday life on other worlds or the details of a spacecraft’s construction, which often crowd out the central idea of the film. I think Kubrick’s ‘Space Odyssey’ is guilty of that.

TARKOVSKY: For some reason, in all the science-fiction films I’ve seen, the filmmakers force the viewer to examine the details of the material structure of the future. More than that, sometimes, like Kubrick, they call their own films premonitions. It’s unbelievable! Let alone that 2001: A Space Odyssey is phoney on many points even for specialists.

For a true work of art, the fake must be eliminated. I would like to shoot Solaris in a way that the viewer would be unaware of any exoticism. Of course, I’m referring to the exoticism of technology.

For example, if one shoots a scene of passengers boarding a trolley, which, let’s say, we’d never seen before or known anything about, then we’d get something like Kubrick’s moon-landing scene. On the other hand, if one were to shoot a moon landing like a common trolley stop in a modern film, then everything would be as it should. That means to create psychologically, not an exotic but a real, everyday environment that would be conveyed to the viewer through the perception of the film’s characters. That’s why a detailed ‘examination’ of the technological processes of the future transforms the emotional foundation of a film, as a work of art, into a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth.

Design is design. Painting is painting. And a film is a film. One should ‘separate the firmament from the waters’ and not engage in making comic books.

When cinema moves out from under the power of money, namely, the costs of production, when there will be a method for the author of a work of art to record reality as with a pen and paper, paints and canvas, chisel and marble, ‘X’ and the filmmaker, then we’ll see. Then cinema will be the foremost art and its muse the queen of all the others.

– Naum Abramov: Dialogue with Andrei Tarkovsky about Science-Fiction on the Screen. From Ekran, 1970-1971, 162-165. Translated from Russian by Jake Mahaffy and Yulia Mahaffy. In Tarkovsky Interviews. Edited by John Gianvito. University of Mississippi Press, 2006.

   

Jean-Luc Godard: Let’s Talk About Pierrot

Pierrot le Fou (Directed by Jean-Luc Godard)

Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), dissatisfied with his marriage and life, goes on the road with his baby sitter, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and abandons the bourgeois lifestyle. Yet this is no ordinary road trip: Jean-Luc Godard's ninth film is a dazzling blend of anti-consumerist satire, contemporary politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, jarring story about, as Godard put it, "the last romantic couple." Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, with cinematographer Raoul Coutard's sumptuous colour photography and Belmondo and Karina at their most energetic. It was Godard's last youthful turn before moving even farther into radical film.

In 1964, while directing Bande à Part, Jean-Luc Godard stated in an interview his aim to make a film based on the American author Lionel White's pulp crime novel Obsession. Godard defined it as "the tale of a gentleman who abandons his family to pursue a lady considerably younger than he is. She is in collusion with a couple of rather dodgy characters, which results in a series of adventures.” 

When Godard later revealed that his wife Anna Karina would co-star with Jean Paul Belmondo, he essentially created a more 'regular' relationship and permanently altered the tone of the film, as he later described in Cahiers du cinéma: ‘In the end, the casting of Anna and Belmondo altered the whole situation. I pondered You Only Live Once and concluded that, rather than portraying the Lolita kind of couple, I wanted to tell the story of the ultimate romantic couple.’

The addition changed the trajectory of the film – but not quite as much as Godard's emotional engagement in the storyline. As hinted by the title, White's novel was about obsessive desire – specifically, the longing of a middle-aged advertising executive and failing writer for a teenage girl who worked as his children's babysitter. When he abandons his family for her, gets engaged in a murder with her, and leaves with her, she exploits, betrays, and abandons him. He seeks her down and kills both her long-term lover (whom she said was her brother) and the girl herself, desperate and humiliated. Godard – who had said to Belmondo that the picture would be 'completely different' from the text – recast the male protagonist as a failing scholar who rediscovers his artistic ambitions via his passionate love. While travelling with a young girl named Marianne Renoir, this person, Ferdinand Griffon, begins to carry out his lofty artistic goals. Marianne's connections — to a secretive and hazardous network of weapons traffickers and political conspirators – seem doubtful, yet she proves to be Ferdinand's soul mate in his creative endeavour, at least temporarily. 

Although Godard's leading lady uses and betrays the man in the same manner as White's did, Godard's result is more severe: in Pierrot le Fou, Marianne not only breaks Ferdinand's heart, but also destroys the work that was to be his life's labour. Godard's romantic exaltation, which he thought was substituted for the narrative of betrayal and destruction by the casting of Karina and Belmondo, became a personal anguish, for after the film was made, he and Karina had parted.

Godard's earliest films depended on established frameworks to guide his spontaneous innovation, whether they were Hollywood genres (as in Breathless, Band of Outsiders, and Alphaville) or intellectual modernism (as in Vivre sa vie and A Married Woman). However, by the time he began filming Pierrot le fou, the cinema noir traditions upon which it was based had ceased to interest him, and his theoretical references had shifted in response to his political outrage as the Vietnam War worsened. 

Godard's psychological, cinematic, and philosophical upheaval resulted in a creativity that reached new heights of spontaneity and invention. He told Cahiers du cinéma shortly after finishing the film: "In my past works, whenever I encountered a difficulty, I questioned myself what Hitchcock would have done in my shoes." While creating Pierrot, I got the idea that he would have been unable to respond with anything other than, 'Work it out for yourself.' 

Pierrot le fou is replete with references to art, to French literature, Beethoven. Indeed, the many comical allusions and techniques convey what Godard must have felt of the standard-issue story he employed. The film is replete with contradictions: sublime, powerful images of nature juxtaposed with acrid gasoline haze; the Vietnam War is repeatedly mentioned, implied, and viewed as newsreel footage, there are references to earlier Godard films.

The self-destructive romanticism, creative self-consciousness, the energetically dislocated structure, characteristic of Godard’s cinematic world up to this point, had reached their peak. Pierrot le Fou was Godard's last youthful work, anticipating the approach of later more overtly radical rejections and interrogations of cinematic form.

The following interview with Jean-Luc Godard on the making of Pierrot le Fou was first published by Cahiers du Cinema shortly after the film’s release:

Cahiers: What exactly was the starting-point for ‘Pierrot le Fou’?

Godard: A Lolita-style novel whose rights I had bought two years earlier. The film was to have been made with Sylvie Vartan. She refused. Instead I made Bande à part. Then I tried to set the film up again with Anna Karina and Richard Burton. Burton, alas, had become too Hollywood. In the end the whole thing was changed by the casting of Anna and Belmondo. I thought about You Only Live Once; and instead of the Lolita or La Chienne kind of couple, I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple, the last descendants of La Nouvelle Heloise, Werther and Hermann and Dorothea.

Cahiers: This sort of romanticism is disconcerting today, just as the romanti­cism of ‘La Regie du Jeu’ was at the time.

Godard: One is always disconcerted by something or other. One Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago I saw October again at the Cinematheque. The audience was composed entirely of children, going to the cinema for the first time, so they reacted as if it was the first film they had seen. They may have been disconcerted by the cinema, but not by the film. For instance, they were not at all put out by the rapid, synthetic montage. When they now see a Verneuil film they will be disconcerted because they will think, ‘But there are fewer shots than in October.’ Let’s take another example from America, where television is much more cut up and fragmented than it is in France. There one doesn’t just watch a film from beginning to end; one sees fifteen shows at the same time while doing something else, not to mention the commercials (if they were missing, that would disconcert). Hiroshima and Lola Montes went down much better on TV in America than in the cinemas.

Cahiers: ‘Pierrot’, in any case, will please children. They can dream while watching it.


Godard: The film, alas, is banned to children under eighteen. Reason? Intellectual and moral anarchy [sic].

Cahiers: There is a good deal of blood in ‘Pierrot’.

Godard: Not blood, red. At any rate, I find it difficult to talk about the film. I can’t say I didn’t work it out, but I didn’t pre-think it. Everything happened at once: it is a film in which there was no writing, editing or mixing – well, one day! Bonfanti knew nothing of the film and he mixed the soundtrack without preparation. He reacted with his knobs like a pilot faced by air­ pockets. This was very much in key with the spirit of the film. So the con­struction came at the same time as the detail. It was a series of structures which immediately dovetailed one with another.

Cahiers: Did ‘Bande à part’ and ‘Alphaville’ happen in the same way?

Godard: Ever since my first film, I have always said I am going to prepare the script more carefully, and each time I see yet another chance to improvise, to do it all in the shooting, without applying the cinema to something. My impression is that when someone like Demy or Bresson shoots a film, he has an idea of the world he is trying to apply to the cinema, or else – which comes to the same thing – an idea of cinema which he applies to the world. The cinema and the world are moulds for matter, but in Pierrot there is neither mould nor matter.

Cahiers: There seems at times to be an interaction between certain situations which existed at the moment of shooting and the film itself. For instance, when Anna Karina walks along the beach saying ‘What is there to do? I don’t know what to do’ . . . as if, at this moment, she hadn’t known what to do, had said so, and you had filmed her.

Godard: It didn’t happen that way, but maybe it comes to the same thing. If I had seen a girl walking along the shore saying ‘I don’t know what to do’... I might well have thought this was a good scene; and, starting from there, imagined what came before and after. Instead of speaking of the sky, speaking of the sea, which isn’t the same thing ; instead of being sad, being gay, instead of dancing, having a scene with people eating, which again isn’t the same thing; but the final effect would have been the same. In fact it happened like that not for this scene, but another in which Anna says to Belmondo ‘Hi ! old man.’ and he imitates Michel Simon. That came about the way you suggest.

Cahiers: One feels that the subject emerges only when the film is over. During the screening one thinks this is it, or that, but at the end one realizes there was a real subject.

Godard: But that’s cinema. Life arranges itself. One is never quite sure what one is going to do tomorrow, but at the end of the week one can say, after the event, ‘I have lived’ like Musset’s Camille. Then one realizes one cannot trifle with the cinema either. You see someone in the street; out of ten passers-by there is one you look at more closely for one reason or another. If it’s a girl, because she has eyes like so, a man because he has a particular air about him, and then you film their life. A subject will emerge which will be the person himself, his idea of the world, and the world created by this idea of it, the overall idea which this conjures. In the preface to one of his books, Antonioni says precisely this.

Cahiers: One feels that ‘Pierrot’ takes place in two periods. In the first, Karina and Belmondo make their way to the Cote d’Azur, no cinema, because this is their life; and then, on arrival, they met a director and told him their story, and he made them begin all over again.

Godard: To a certain extent, yes, because the whole last part was invented on the spot, unlike the beginning which was planned. It is a kind of happening, but one that was controlled and dominated. This said, it is a completely spontaneous film. I have never been so worried as I was two days before shooting began. I had nothing, nothing at all. Oh well, I had the book. And a certain number of locations. I knew it would take place by the sea. The whole thing was shot, let’s say, like in the days of Mack Sennett. Maybe I am growing more and more apart from one section of current film-making.

Watching old films, one never gets the impression that they were bored working, probably because the cinema was something new in those days, whereas today people tend to look on it as very old. They say ‘I saw an old Chaplin film, an old Griffith film,’ whereas no one says ‘I read an old Stendhal, an old Madame de La Fayette.’

Cahiers: Do you feel you work more like a painter than a novelist?

Godard: Jean Renoir explains this very well in the book he wrote about his father. Auguste would go away, feeling a need for the country. He went there. He walked in the forest. He slept in the nearest inn. After a couple of weeks he would come back, his painting finished.

Cahiers: Early films tell us a good deal about the period in which they were made. This is no longer true of 75 per cent of current productions. In ‘Pierrot le Fou’, do contemporary life and the fact that Belmondo is writing his journal give the film its real dimension?

Godard: Anna represents the active life and Belmondo the contemplative. This is by way of contrasting them. As they are never analysed, there are no analytical scenes or dialogue. I wanted, indirectly through the journal, to give the feeling of reflection.

Cahiers: Your characters allow themselves to be guided by events.

Godard: They are abandoned to their own devices. They are inside both their adventure and themselves.


Cahiers: The only real act Belmondo accomplishes is when he tries to extinguish the fuse.


Godard: If he had put it out, he would have become different afterwards. He is like Piccoli in Le Mepris.


Cahiers: The adventure is sufficiently total for one not to be able to know what comes next.


Godard: This is because it is a film about the adventure rather than about the adventurers. A film about adventurers is Anthony Mann’s The Far Country, where you think about the adventure because they are adventurers ; whereas in Pierrot le Fou, one thinks it is about adventurers because it describes an adventure. Anyway it is difficult to separate one from the other. We know from Sartre that the free choice which the individual himself makes is mingled with what is usually called his destiny.

Cahiers: Even more than in ‘Le Mepris’, the poetic presence of the sea . . .

Godard: This was deliberate, much more so than in Le Mepris. This is the theme.


Cahiers: Exactly as if the gods were in the sea.

Godard: No, nature; the presence of nature, which is neither romantic nor tragic.

Cahiers: Adventure seems to have vanished today, to be no longer welcome; hence the element of provocation now in adventure and in ‘Pierrot le Fou’.

Godard: People pigeon-hole adventure. ‘We’re off on holiday,’ they say,‘the adventure will begin as soon as we are at the seaside.’ They don’t think of themselves as living the adventure when they buy their train tickets, whereas in the film everything is on the same level: buying train tickets is as exciting as swimming in the sea.

Cahiers: Do you feel that all your films, irrespective of the way they are handled, are about the spirit of adventure?

Godard: Certainly. The important thing is to be aware one exists. For three­ quarters of the time during the day one forgets this truth, which surges up again as you look at houses or a red light, and you have the sensation of existing in that moment. This was how Sartre began writing his novels. La Nausee, of course, was written during the great period when Simenon was publishing Touristes de Bananes, Les Suicides. To me there is nothing very new about the idea, which is really a very classical one.

Cahiers: ‘Pierrot’ is both classical – no trickery with montage – and modern, by virtue of its narrative.

Godard: What is modern by virtue of its narrative? I prefer to say its greater freedom. By comparjson with my previous film, one gets an immediate response. Although I ask myself fewer and fewer questions now, one still remains: isn’t no longer asking questions a serious thing? The thing that reassures me is that the Russians, at the time of October and Enthusiasm didn’t ask themselves questions. They didn’t ask themselves what cinema should be. They didn’t wonder if they should take up where the German cinema left off or repudiate films like L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise. No, there was a more natural way of asking questions. This is what one feels with Picasso. Posing problems is not a critical attitude but a natural function. When a motorist deals with traffic problems, one simply says he is driving; and Picasso paints.

Cahiers: Don’t you think that most great films have been directed by men who had no taste for questions?

Godard: To think that would be a mistake. When one sees an early King Vidor film, for instance, one realizes how far in advance he was of Hollywood even today. Truffaut compared The Crowd to The Apartment. Well, Vidor had already used the famous office shot – which Wilder got from Lubitsch anyway. But great films like that could no longer be made today, or at least not in the same way. So the silent cinema was more revolutionary than the sound cinema, and people understood better, even though it was a more abstract way of talking. Today, if one imitated Chaplin’s method of direction, people wouldn’t understand so well. They would think it a peculiar way of telling a story. It’s even more true of Eisenstein’s films.

Cahiers: For the majority of spectators, cinema exists only in terms of the Hollywood structures which have become convention, whereas all the great films are free in their inspiration.

Godard: The great traditional cinema means Visconti as opposed to Fellini or Rossellini. It is a way of selecting certain scenes rather than others. The Bible is also a traditional book since it effects a choice in what it describes. If I were ever to film the life of Christ, I would film the scenes which are left out of the Bible. In Senso, which I quite like, it was the scenes which Visconti concealed that I wanted to see. Each time I wanted to know what Farley Granger said to Alida Valli, bang! – a fade out. Pierrot le Fou, from this standpoint, is the antithesis of Senso: the moments you do not see in Senso are shown in Pierrot.

Cahiers: Perhaps the beauty of the film springs from the fact that one senses this liberty more.

Godard: The trouble with the cinema is that it imposes a certain length of film. If my films reveal some feeling of freedom it is because I never think about length. I never know if what I am shooting will run twenty minutes or twice that, but it usually turns out that the result fits the commercial norm. I never have any time scheme. I shoot what I need, stopping when I think I have it all, continuing when I think there is more. This is full length dependent only on itself.

Cahiers: In a classical film, one would query the thriller framework.

Godard: On the narrative level, classical films can no longer rival even Serie Noire thrillers, not to mention born storytellers like Giono who can hold you in suspense for days on end. The Americans are good at story­ telling, the French are not. Flaubert and Proust can’t tell stories. They do something else. So does the cinema, though starting from their point of arrival, from a totality. Any great modem film which is successful is so because of a misunderstanding. Audiences like Psycho because they think Hitchcock is telling them a story. Vertigo baffles them for the same reason.

Cahiers: So freedom has moved from the cinema to the ‘Serie Noire’. Do you remember ‘The Glass Key’? The end?

Godard: Not very clearly. I’d like to re-read it.

Cahiers: At the end a woman who has hardly featured in the story suddenly recounts a dream.

Godard: The Americans are marvellous like that.

Cahiers: In the dream, there is a glass key. Just that, and the novel is called ‘The Glass Key’. And the book ends with this dream. If one did something like this in the cinema, people would say it was provocation. This sort of reaction is typical of a public which has a cinematographic pseudo-culture but nevertheless indulges in terrorist tactics.

Godard: This is why the Cinematheque is so good, because there one sees films pell-mell, a 1939 Cukor alongside a 1918 documentary.

Cahiers: There is no clash between ancient and modern?


Godard: None at all. There may be technical progress, but no revolution in style, or at least not yet.

Cahiers: With ‘Pierrot le Fou’, one feels one is watching the birth of cinema.

Godard: I felt this with Rossellini’s film about steel, because it captured life at source. Television, in theory, should have the same effect. Thanks to the cultural alibi, there is no such thing as noble or plebeian subjects. Every­ thing is possible on television. Very different from the cinema, where it would be impossible to film the building of the Boulevard Haussmann because to a distributor this isn’t a noble subject.

Cahiers: Why do you think certain scenes are filmed rather than others? Does this choice define liberty or lead to convention?

Godard: The problem which has long preoccupied me, but which I don’t worry about while shooting, is: why do one shot rather than another? Take a story, for example. A character enters a room – one shot. He sits down – another shot. He lights a cigarette, etc. If, instead of treating it this way, one . . . would the film be better or less good?


What is it ultimately that makes one run a shot on or change to another? A director like Delbert Mann probably doesn’t think this way. He follows a pattern. Shot – the character speaks; reverse angle, someone answers. Maybe this is why Pierrot le Fou is not a film, but an attempt at film.

Cahiers: And what Fuller says at the beginning?

Godard: I had wanted to say it for a long time. I asked him to. But it was Fuller himself who found the word ‘emotion’. The comparison between film and a commando operation is from every point of view – financial, economic, artistic – a perfect image, a perfect symbol for a film in its totality.

Cahiers: Who is the enemy?

Godard: There are two things to consider. On the one hand the enemy who harries you; on the other, the goal to be reached, where the enemy may be. The goal to be reached is the film, but once it is finished one realizes it was only a passage, a path to the goal. What I mean is that when the war is won, life continues. And maybe the film really begins then.

Cahiers: Isn’t this sort of liberty in the cinema rather frightening?

Godard: No more than crossing a road either using a crossing or not. Pierrot seems to me both free and confined at the same time. What worries me most about this apparent liberty is something else. I read something by Borges where he spoke of a man who wanted to create a world. So he created houses, provinces, valleys, rivers, tools, fish, lovers, and then at the end of his life he notices that this ‘patient labyrinth is none other than his own portrait’. I had this same feeling in the middle of Pierrot.

Cahiers: Why the quotation about Velazquez?


Godard: This is the theme. Its definition. Velazquez at the end of his life no longer painted precise forms, he painted what lay between the precise forms, and this is restated by Belmondo when he imitates Michel Simon: one should not describe people, but what lies between them.

Cahiers: If ‘Pierrot le Fou’ is an instinctive film, one might wonder why there are connections with life and actuality.

Godard: It is inevitable, since making Pierrot le Fou consisted of living through an event. An event is made up of other events which one eventually discovers. In general, I repeat, making a film is an adventure comparable to that of an army advancing through a country and living off the inhabitants. So one is led to talk about those inhabitants. That is what actuality is: it is both what one calls actuality in the cinematographic and journalistic sense, and casual encounters, what one reads, conversations, the business of living in other words.

– ‘Let’s Talk About Pierrot’. Interview with Cahiers du Cinema. In Godard on Godard. Edited by Tom Milne. p 215-224.