In fact there is one passage I like: about the ginkgo tree. At one point I asked her about gardening, which I’d been told was one of her big passions, and she started to talk about her favorite trees in Paris, in particular the ginkgo on the Place de l’Alma. I promised to look out for it the next time I was there. She said they’d planted a lot of them in New York, on Fifth Avenue in particular, and that Paris would do well to do the same. They’re so beautiful, and so robust, and so beautiful because they’re so robust. It’s the only tree that withstood Hiroshima. When she says that, you can’t help feeling that she identifies with the ginkgo, she withstands everything, she’s survived everything. She was just out of adolescence when she became the biggest star in French cinema, and she’s been in the spotlight practically ever since. Together we were to look back on her legendary career, which spans almost half a century. Thirty or so film stills chosen by her were to serve as the guiding thread for an eight-page interview. That was the idea, and it seemed reasonable enough; unfortunately it didn’t work. I suspected that would be the case when I got home after the interview. I did my best to reassure myself that in two hours of recordings there had to be something worthwhile, but when I received the transcription yesterday and scoured through it, pencil in hand, I had to acknowledge that apart from the ginkgo and two or three other things, there’s nothing. And I mean nothing. It’s certainly not her fault, I’d like to think it’s not entirely mine either, but this verbatim record deserves to be archived as the prototype of the muddled interview, with an interviewer who’s completely out to lunch and an interviewee who doesn’t feel at all concerned, and I have to ask, How did this happen?
All things considered, I guess I should have seen it coming. A few days earlier I’d read Close Up and Personal, a collection of diaries she’d kept throughout her career, most often when shooting abroad. These diaries are remarkable: simple, clear, penetrating. What’s also remarkable is that when she shoots Tristana, she has the same writing—style and handwriting—as when she shoots Dancer in the Dark, thirty years later. Such precocious maturity and such consistency are impressive. Anyway. After the diaries I read a recent interview with her by the filmmaker Pascal Bonitzer. He’s a friend of mine, I called him up and asked, How was Deneuve? There was a silence, then an afflicted sigh: “Atrocious. Or at least … She was fine, I was atrocious, I’m still pissed off at myself…” I reread the interview. Okay, nothing to write home about, but nothing to make you want to commit hara-kiri either. Still, I thought, I’ll have to do better than that. I read some more, watched her movies again and again, but didn’t prepare any questions. I thought to myself, Things’ll happen as they happen, let’s put our trust in the flow of the conversation. Because I was thinking in terms of a conversation, and not of an interview. Just why that was the case costs a bit of pride to explain, but I have to explain it, otherwise this whole story would be incomprehensible.
If the people at Première, which commissioned this piece, had called me up and just asked me to interview Catherine Deneuve, I would have said, Look, I admire Catherine Deneuve, her beauty, her talent, her career, but there are other people I admire, I’m no longer a journalist, and even when I was, I didn’t like doing interviews, it creates a relationship that makes me feel uncomfortable, so, no. But they said something else: We’re thinking more of a writer than a journalist, and Catherine Deneuve asked for you. That’s not the same thing. That becomes: Catherine Deneuve would like to meet you, and you answer, yes, absolutely, all full of yourself. I let my thoughts wander: She’s read my books, seen my films, maybe she’ll ask me to write a role for her—or let me know that she wouldn’t be averse to my thinking about it. I daydream, talk with people I know: Catherine Deneuve wants to meet me. I’m not a groupie by nature, but still, I’m on the top of the world this week. I read the great chapter that the author and politician Frédéric Mitterrand dedicated to her in his memoir The Bad Life and copy these words in my notebook: “Courteous even in disdain, distant even in warmth, attentive and inaccessible, available and secretive, passionate and restrained, bold and cautious, generous and distrustful, aware of the privileges won by your beauty and reluctant to exploit them, cultured without being intellectual, loyal to the point of possessiveness, sophisticated and simple, greedy and self-controlled, free and conventional, brazen and modest, strong and vulnerable, seeking excellence in all things and despising counterfeits, cheerful and sad, there and not there…”1 This list of contrasts will serve me as a guide. I won’t ask laborious questions such as “And how was working with Buñuel? And Truffaut?” I’m not a journalist looking for anecdotes, but a writer, like Patrick Modiano, who, word has it, is a good friend of hers, and he’s going to have to move over and make room for me. This won’t be a classic interview but a portrait of the real Catherine Deneuve, full of nuances and complicity. A conversation, an exchange. An encounter. That’s it: an encounter.
The meeting is set for the Panthéon, that old cinema in the Latin Quarter bought by the film producer Pascal Caucheteux, who produces Arnaud Desplechin’s films among others. Desplechin and Caucheteux are almost like a second family to Deneuve, and when the first floor of the cinema was renovated into a lounge-bar, she took charge of decorating it. Rummaging around in secondhand stores and flea markets, she picked out the armchairs, couches, lamps, and bookshelves, which she filled with books that look as if they’ve been read over and over. The whole place is warm and welcoming, you feel good there. To one of the rare sensible questions I’ll ask her—what would you have done if you hadn’t become an actress?—she’ll reply, “I think I would have married very young, had children very young, and divorced quite quickly, so I would have worked. In an architect’s office, maybe, or in decorative art: I’ve always liked that.” But let’s take it from the start. She arrives. Blue pants and sweater, glasses, her head of blond hair, and that rapid, so recognizable way of speaking that made the director Jean-Paul Rappeneau say she had the ideal tempo for an actress: the maximum number of syllables in the minimum number of seconds, without missing a beat. I joke a bit, taking obsessive pains to come across as simply and naturally as I can: it’s quite something to be face-to-face with Catherine Deneuve—I spent the morning wondering how I should dress, to look good without putting on my Sunday best … “So did I,” she said. “First I thought I’d wear a skirt, then since these couches are so low, I finally decided on pants…” Emboldened by her simple, unaffected air, I tell her about my phone call with Pascal Bonitzer, and thinking it will amuse her and maybe even warm her heart, I say that poor Pascal still has regrets about the interview. She’s neither amused nor touched. “He regrets it? He’s right. It wasn’t good, he didn’t work hard enough.” O-kay. I hear the warning bells, but they don’t stop me from going into a tailspin of my own. I start saying such things as “One senses that it’s important to you to be meticulous…” Dot dot dot.
What was she supposed to answer, the poor thing? “It’s true, meticulousness is very important.”
After that, we turn to lucidity, honesty, coherence, her candor that borders on curtness, all virtues that I ascribe to her in a benign, ethereal tone, as if steeped in an ineffable inner life. Once we’ve exhausted the list of her superior moral qualities, we start looking through the photos she’s chosen: “Oh, yes,” I say, “I saw that film a long time ago, but I still have fond memories of it. It was very beautiful I think.”
“I think so, too. Very moving.”
Caught up as I am with not going by the book and with having a simple, natural conversation between two human beings, I don’t ask a single real question, and consequently I don’t get a single real answer. In my defense it must be said that I’m starting to feel more and more uncomfortable. What am I doing here? She’s the one who asked for me, me and no one else, and she lets me struggle without so much as mentioning it. As the Goncourt brothers wrote bitterly about a woman they knew: “There was nothing in her that had read our books.” Or seen my films, or anything at all. Back when I worked as a journalist, I interviewed Sigourney Weaver, who made a point of asking me if I had any brothers or sisters. I wasn’t naive enough to believe she wanted to know; I was perfectly aware that she’d no doubt been coached, and that this was something she had to do in one form or another with all the journalists she’d talk with that day; nevertheless this effort to make the interview resemble something like a normal exchange seemed to me well-intentioned. I wasn’t expecting Catherine Deneuve to reverse the roles and start asking me about my life, my work, or my favorite colors, but still, a wink, a word in passing, to remind me that she had chosen me would certainly have boosted my confidence and made me want to write the best article possible about her. At the very least it was in her interest, it would have cost her little. She must have known that, I suppose, but she didn’t say a thing. Unfortunately, I lacked the presence of mind to ask her why not. That’s what would have been simple and natural given the situation, but I didn’t say anything either, and I still wonder today what stopped her from taking the first step.
In the days that followed I nursed my hurt ego by telling the story to people I knew. It became a sort of a sketch in which I was nice but klutzy and she was polite but odious, like the despotic dowager she plays brilliantly in Valérie Lemercier’s Palais Royal! Everyone I tell it to ventures an interpretation. Pascal Bonitzer’s experience reinforces the view that she intentionally makes people feel uncomfortable and, what’s more, persuades them that they’re the ones who’re not up to scratch. Star behavior, crap behavior. However, it’s only people who don’t know her who think that way. Without exception, those who do tell a different story. I’ve just spoken with the actress Hélène Fillières, who played her daughter in Tonie Marshall’s film Nearest to Heaven. She idolizes Deneuve and was beside herself with excitement and apprehension at the thought of coming face-to-face with her. And the woman she met was simple, direct, straightforward, and feisty: rock ’n’ roll, Hélène says, someone who’s happy to walk around the set in curlers because she knows she’s the object of universal desire, yet doesn’t make a big thing of it. The screenplay had Hélène kiss her on the mouth, and kissing Catherine Deneuve on the mouth was both incredibly sexy and incredibly funny, because with her you can have fun, drink red wine, and talk about men. While her legend surrounds her, it never weighs too heavily. I listened to Hélène Fillières, I listened to the actress Nicole Garcia and to my producer Anne-Dominique Toussaint, who’s eternally grateful to Deneuve for stepping in on a moment’s notice to replace an actress who didn’t show up at the last minute: Deneuve rolled up her sleeves, did the job, saved the film, and never said a word about it. These stories don’t jibe well with my embarrassing and vaguely humiliating experience, and I tell myself that in wanting to be simple and natural, I put myself in a bad situation from the start: while disdaining the role of simple journalist, I didn’t dare adopt another. And totally obsessed with this question, I paralyzed her as well. I quoted to her a sentence I love by Marguerite Duras, about interviewing the opera singer Leontyne Price: “In front of her, I think of her.” I find this sentence dazzling for its simplicity and self-evidence. The essence of Zen, and what I would like to attain, if possible, in this life: face-to-face with a person, to think about that person and nothing else. The problem is that when most people find themselves face-to-face with someone such as Catherine Deneuve—and I discovered that I’m no exception—they think first about themselves, and about the impression they’ll make on her. As soon as you start thinking like that, you’re toast: you’re on the asking side, the side of alienation and misery, and even if she wanted to, she couldn’t help you. She lets you drown, that’s your problem. I think about one moment in the interview. Pascal Caucheteux, film producer and big man around the house, stopped for a moment at our couch and sat down on the armrest. He’s quite gruff, with a shapeless jacket and saggy jeans, the type of guy who doesn’t even look up from his sports newspaper to say hello. She had lit a cigarette, not the first. Torn between unbounded admiration and mounting hostility, I wondered if smoking in a public place where it was clearly forbidden was a mark of likable rebelliousness or if it simply meant: I’m Catherine Deneuve, and I’d like to see who’ll dare ask me to put my cigarette out. Caucheteux jerked mockingly with his chin and said, “Hey!” She pretended not to understand and he said firmly, “The smoke.”
“There’s almost no one here,” she apologized with a laugh, took one last drag, then put out the stub. For just a moment she was the simple, kind woman, not at all annoying or prissy, whom people had told me about and whom I hadn’t seen. For just a moment I stopped seeing myself sinking deeper and deeper, looking in vain for the right place, and saw her. And finally I agreed with Frédéric Mitterrand—it had taken me some time—whom I’d called up the day before and who had said in that inimitable voice of his, “You’ll see, you won’t be disappointed.”
Published in Première, March 2008