The fact that Jacques Demy was shooting a film in Hollywood was the main reason for our trip to America.
The film is called Model Shop, and it continues the story of Lola, as previously recounted in Demy’s Lola.
Jacques Demy calls his film “a kind of loveless love story.” Demy in Hollywood? That won’t change much, certain people will say (thinking perhaps of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Ladies of Rochefort, and recalling that he was already making American-type movies while still in France). Doubtless, they’ll anticipate a sort of grandiose return to nostalgic things.
But this is really not true. First of all, Demy’s films have never pretended to imitate an American model. These films (which, moreover, had a long French tradition behind them) were in fact so French, that we had seldom heard our language spoken with such veracity in a movie.
If Model Shop is profoundly American (but in a different sort of way), it is because Demy, in his quest for Lola, happened to find along the way an America that soon became the essential object of his quest. Thus he opened his film to all the winds and currents of America today, especially to everything that is unique about the state of California, whose largest city, Los Angeles, is a place most people do not know well, or know only superficially.
Los Angeles is a city that Demy has visited, loved, and understood, especially its people—and it was his wish to remain as close as possible to people that implied a way of shooting far removed, both in technique and spirit, from the ponderous machinery of the studios. In this sense also, the film is non-Hollywood, even though American, and doubtless American because it is non-Hollywood, for it is a truism that what is being done in Hollywood today has almost ceased being American and ceased to be cinema—but that is another story.
Here, then, is a film that should be doubly precious to us, both because it allows us to rediscover ourselves and our cinema, and because it permits us to rediscover America through Demy’s kind, penetrating, and original way of looking at it—to have a fresh look at this country which too many positive or negative (but also passionate, if not downright neurotic) clichés too often prevent us from seeing very well.
—Michel Delahaye
Question: What are the circumstances that allowed you to make a film in the United States?
Answer: It was largely because of Columbia Pictures’ executive Jerry Ayres. I met him when I came here to receive the Academy Award for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. He called me the next day to ask me to come and see him at Columbia. I expected the meeting to be somewhat cold and formal, but he simply wanted to talk to me about the film, to ask me what had made a film such as that possible. We have been good friends ever since, and we have continued to write each other.
Then I came back here last year for the San Francisco festival, and I saw him again. I spoke to him of a vague plan I had in mind, and told him that I was very much tempted to make the film I was planning in Los Angeles. He said: “Wonderful! Let’s make a deal with Columbia.” And in a week it was all arranged. The surprising thing is that Columbia signed a contract with me without my even having a scenario, which is extremely rare. They thus signed me up as scenarist, producer, and director. I accepted this contract as director-producer so as to have more freedom, for it allows me to have direct contact with the studio without having to go through a producer, which does away with any kind of intermediary and gives me all the freedom I want at every stage of the production.
So all this happened very fast, without any major problems, and with only a few conditions attached. That is to say, for example, that in return for the complete freedom I was given, I guaranteed that I would make an inexpensive film on a very small budget. It’s what is called a “below the line” film here. It’s a $500,000 film, not including actors’ salaries, which would correspond in France (taking into consideration the standard of living here, which gives people about two and a half times as high a salary as in France) to a film of 120 million francs—including color, naturally. We agreed on this, and there have been no difficulties.
And, naturally, among the things I got and insisted on getting was the right to the “final cut,” which is very rare here, for they lag a little bit behind us in this respect. If I had merely been the director, I don’t know whether I would have been given this right, but as producer-director I could have it.
Q: In view of this, and since there is so often trouble getting this famous final cut, why aren’t there more directors who become producers?
A: Because it’s also a responsibility. Because the whole thing falls on your shoulders if you’re a producer. You have to do the whole thing right, from beginning to end, including the financing. You have to give full guarantees regarding the work schedule, and so forth.
In my case, I had begun by asking Columbia for all the freedom I wanted, and it was they who offered me this contract as scenarist-producer-director, so as to make sure I would have it.
Q: There is also the fact that they accepted the film without a scenario. One can’t help wondering in this case, too, why that isn’t done more often.
A: I think it’s because in my case two factors entered in. First, the success of Umbrellas, which gave them a certain confidence in me, and then the fact that I was letting them in on a very inexpensive production. The whole film can be wrapped up for about a million dollars, including publicity. This is very cheap for Hollywood, for today the most modest film, the smallest little thing shot on a set, costs around two million dollars.
Q: What is curious is that generally they aren’t all that interested in films with small budgets.
A: There, too, what entered in was a certain snobbery, their feeling that they were doing the right thing.
For they have come to realize in America that European films have a certain audience, and even a real future at the box office. This was at a time when quite a few Hollywood films were flopping. For example, Belle de Jour is doing extremely well right now. Last year it was Blow Up, and there was also the Czech film, Closely Watched Trains, which was a huge success. I could give you ten other examples like it.
Q: As for the cost of shooting, there has been another problem, I think—the fact that a budget such as the one you set up has been almost doubled because of conditions that have to do with technical matters, unions, and other restrictions under which shooting is now being done here.
A: Yes, it’s a film that should have been much cheaper, but they haven’t reached that stage in Hollywood yet. Because the unions are so powerful that they require a minimum film crew of forty here, for one example. There are a bunch of other absurdities that I rebelled against. For example, you have a makeup man who’s there to make up faces (and can go down as far as the neck), but if you must make up a shoulder, you have to call in another makeup man who is called the “body makeup man,” whose work begins at the neck.
In my film there’s a scene in which Anouk Aimée doesn’t have any clothes on. They told me: “In that case you’ll have a body makeup man.” I said: “No, nothing doing, her body will stay the way it is, because body makeup is always terrible, so in a word, I don’t want any body makeup man.” That caused all sorts of trouble, but they ended up not forcing a body makeup man on me when I didn’t need to make bodies up. But if I had needed one, I would have had to put up with one.
I could cite a dozen examples of this sort, in which the union intervenes to force people on you that you could get along without. I can understand that, in part: Their point of view is that a maximum number of people ought to have work, but I can’t defend this point of view when it works against the freedom of cinema, a kind of free cinema, that is, I and quite a few others want to create.
It’s all part of the system. The point of view of the studios and the unions is this: You have to give work to as many people as possible, which increases the budget, but the American market is so enormous that you can permit yourself to have an enormous budget—so it’s a vicious circle.
Let’s take a large company that employs two thousand persons on its permanent staff. To amortize this, the general overhead, and all the rest of it, they have to go in for huge productions. The company has to make a ten-million-dollar film every year (so as to bring money in every year), and so big stars are necessary (for the star system still exists, and nothing can be done about it—it is still king). Well, big stars mean big budgets. And that’s another vicious circle. But there is this enormous market that guarantees them distribution, a market that must be fed, that feeds them, and permits them to feed their people all year round. Things go round and round that way. Except that in the midst of all this, they’re beginning to produce a few small-budget films.
In fact, the future in Hollywood, when all is said and done, is the Underground cinema. It’s all those people who are shooting 16mm film. There are more and more of them now, and they’re completely free, like Andy Warhol.
Q: But faced with the failures of the system, and faced with the Underground cinema, haven’t the people in the studios had to think of reforming at least some of their methods?
A: Of course, the studios, the producers, have all been upset about the situation. They’ve all said to themselves that films cost too much, that there has been too much time wasted, too much money, too much energy, that the unions’ demands were too tough, and so on. And they found the solution by saying to themselves: Well, we’ll go make our films in Europe—in Italy, in Spain—or in England, because you can employ fewer people there, you can pay them less, and so on. But the result is that this makes for a bastard cinema that is neither European nor American, and one which aggravates the problems of the European and American film industries in the bargain.
Q: This bastard cinema is created right in Hollywood too, insofar as the young filmmakers who have come here the last few years seem to be trying to make a vaguely “European” sort of film that is only a parody of what they’ve swiped from Europe, and at the same time a parody of everything good that Hollywood ever made in the past.
A: Yes, for since they come from another generation, they have or have had a desire at a certain moment to do something else. But in the end they gave in and obeyed the laws of the old system. They’ve never tried to rebel against it, nor even to improve it, and I don’t really think they want to. In the case, for example, of Stuart Rosenberg, Norman Jewison, Curtis Harrington, and other young guys who made their first film two years or so ago, none of them really wants to change the system. I think that that’s what the real trouble is—they’ve accepted everything, the laws of the studio and its conditions. It’s only the free-lancers, the independents, who do anything interesting, those working in 16mm always. It’s a bastion, and practically impregnable. And as long as the young people of this so-called “New Wave” in Hollywood don’t have the courage to say, No, this can’t be, we want to make personal films, with a certain point of view, with a certain perspective; as long as they don’t go that far, nothing will ever change.
Q: Aside from that, the concept of a personal film must in any case—for good reasons or bad—be rather foreign to people in Hollywood.
A: It absolutely doesn’t exist. Just as the notion of style totally escapes them. Style, or cinematic language (which is dear to Bresson, Resnais, Godard, and has always interested me, too) are notions that are completely foreign to them. But I am speaking here of people in the studios, for you obviously find others who for their part have thought about this. I know that people like George Cukor or John Ford are perfectly aware of the way that they handle film.
Q: What is the real reason for the studios’ insistence on reserving the right to do the cutting themselves, when there are so many directors who demand this right?
A: Remember that Hollywood is an industry, that the studios are organized like factories, and that the product that comes out of them is a manufactured one. Therefore the task of judging the quality of a product cannot be left to one single person. Whether it’s the length of a scene or a shot—and with all the more reason—when it’s a question of editing, it would not be reasonable to leave it up to one individual to decide. It must be left in the hands of a number of people.
In any case, I was lucky enough to have a certain reputation here, thanks to Umbrellas, but if I hadn’t had that, I would never have obtained the right to the final cut.
Q: How does it happen that certain companies are less set in their ways than others?
A: Because they are often headed by the sons of the old bosses, or by people who are younger. At United Artists, there’s David Picker, who took over from his uncle, if I’m not mistaken, and is thirty-seven years old. He knows the problems and tries to face up to them. At Columbia there’s Jerry Ayres, who is very young, and there’s also Stanley Schneider, who’s around forty. At Paramount, there’s Bob Evans. And it seems to me that at Fox, Zanuck’s son has taken over the management of the studios. This is a very recent phenomenon, for these people have been placed in their present positions in the last two years.
Q: How does the film crew function during shooting, both as individuals and as professionals? Are they more precise or faster than in France, for instance?
A: They’re all very, very professional. This has already been said, but I’ll say it again because it’s true, and it’s very important. The actors and actresses, for example, are always on location at the exact time they should be, and know their lines perfectly. And they generally know how to do everything you ask them to do. It’s really a very great satisfaction to work with American actors. It was all the more pleasant for me because I also had to work with Anouk, who wasn’t really professional at all. She would arrive late, and wouldn’t know her lines. But that’s perhaps part of her charm, even though it costs a great deal. All the others, though, men and women, were absolutely irreproachable.
As for the technicians, it was exactly the same thing. They too were very professional. But with American technicians you mustn’t improvise. They have to be told in advance, otherwise they’re lost. So you have to tell them at least a week in advance if you need a traveling shot or a flash bulb on the camera. Because if you ask them the last minute, it takes half a day to get it. And that’s the other aspect: The system’s like a heavy machine that takes a long time to get moving.
Aside from that, when they have the materiel, everything is perfect. The sound, for instance, is always simply amazing. I’ve never seen the like in France. They work with a Nagra. And I’ve had up to six microphones in a room, with two or three boom-men. And different sorts of microphones, according to how you want to cover the lines and the sounds. And the sound is impeccable everywhere. I never had a chance to have two boom-men in France, and I’ve never seen more than two microphones used. Moreover, you don’t even have time to see them installed; everything is done very quickly and very precisely. And everyone is very calm. Nothing like French film crews. And they’re friendly, smiling, relaxed. And, finally, even though the machine sometimes seems ponderous, the people are freer, because they each have one specific thing to do and they do it well. There are four of them on sound, for example, where there would be two in France. But the four of them do an eight times better job.
Q: What pleasant or unpleasant surprises have you had with the technical equipment? As a whole it seems to be a little bit on the outmoded side.
A: Yes, it’s quite disappointing. The camera, for instance, is still a dreadful Mitchell without a reflex viewer, which I detest. The cameramen are clever, but even the cleverest cameraman makes mistakes in parallax correction. You can’t frame the image precisely—you can’t get a precise shot. And I finally caught on why. In most American films, aside from Welles’, there’s no movement. You stay where you are, and there’s hardly even a panoramic shot. You can also see how American films are set up: field and depth-of-focus, and that’s all. So they haven’t felt the need for a reflex camera.
Q: There must be some here, though.
A: There’s one in Hollywood, a Mitchell. They got it this year. I rented it. But since the film was held up, it got rented out somewhere else, and I couldn’t have it.
Besides this camera, they have the Arriflex. They don’t have the Caméflex because they had lots of trouble with it when it came out ten years ago.
Q: The cutting tables look like they came out of a museum.
A: It’s scandalous, because they date from the very earliest days in Hollywood. All this materiel was bought by the studios forty years ago—it’s old as their rules and regulations—and since it belongs to them, they see no reason to buy something else so long as it continues to function. No reason to buy other cameras, other cutting tables, or other electrical equipment. But there was an exception on this latter point, because I made them buy quartz lights for my film. Nobody in Hollywood used them. In fact, I’m to meet Hitchcock, who’s heard of them and would like to know how they work.
I had them buy these lights so as to film a natural set inside a house, because they have only big floodlights. Quartz lights are very small and can be placed in any corner of a ceiling, but they still have large old-fashioned studio floodlights which are ten times bigger for the same candlepower. And there’s absolutely no way to use them in natural interiors.
In any case, when I had the quartz lights brought in, there was general astonishment. This is curious, for in France they’ve been used for the last ten years. Anyway, I got the lights thanks to Michel Hugo, the cameraman. He’s French, but he wasn’t familiar with this technique, for he’s been here for the last twelve years (he left the French film world long before the so-called “New Wave”). So he looked around, and finally found a company that made this sort of light—for advertising, as I remember. But since they’d never been used in the studio, we had to talk the purchase over. They didn’t understand. They kept saying: “But you have all the equipment you’ll be wanting here.” I had to demonstrate to them that this equipment couldn’t be used in a little house in Venice.
You see, they seldom shoot on natural sets. First of all, they don’t know how to, and second, they don’t see why they should, since they have a studio that belongs to them that doesn’t cost them anything and has to be used, just as all the people they employ have to be put to work. Moreover, it’s much more comfortable in the studio.
Q: But, on the other hand, there seems to be a whole collection of cranes.
A: Yes, they have everything that’s needed. Little ones, middle-sized ones, big ones. I was thunderstruck when they showed me the Chapmans: twenty enormous, brand-new cranes. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use them on the film.
I’ll probably have to put up a fight for new cutting tables, for they’re really a catastrophe. They’re the first moviolas—they’re noisy, you can’t see anything on them—but they’re the ones they’ve been working with since the earliest days of Hollywood. They may very well call touching memories to mind, but as far as working on them goes, it’s dreadful.
There isn’t a single modern cutting table in Hollywood. There’s no Steenbeck, there are no Italian tables. There’s one in San Francisco that John Korty sent to Europe for. He’s the only person who has one of them.
Q: On the other hand, I’ve noticed that the camera stand is a fine Italian Elemack. Are there many of them here?
A: Yes, but it’s a recent thing. On the other hand, they don’t have any stands with a gyroscopic head that allows the level of the camera to be changed during a scene. That simply doesn’t exist here. So I had several scenes where the framing is off because I couldn’t change the level.
All this, on the technical plane, is really amateurism. I can’t get over the fact that an industry like the one here, which stakes millions and millions of dollars on its films, still works the way it did back in Charlie Chaplin’s day.
I know, of course, that technique alone doesn’t determine the quality of a film, and often it is meaningless, but all the same when you want to change the level in a panoramic shot and you can’t, and yet you have buildings whichever way you look, you can’t conclude that the situation is entirely as it should be.
Q: Are there other examples of films that have been shot like yours, in natural settings, by other companies?
A: I don’t know. I don’t think so. This isn’t done in the big companies.
When I talked of filming in real houses, in the streets with the Arriflex, they were rather taken aback. To them filming with an Arriflex is just playing around. The smallness of it is suspect. This is another prejudice that costs them dearly.
So with a few rare exceptions, they almost never shoot in the city outside the studio. They simply use transparencies. What is filmed in the streets, however, are TV advertising films. So perhaps a new school will be born from the advertising film, thanks to those who will have learned to shoot in real houses and make cinéma vérité films.
For advertising films are cinéma vérité. They interview the man in the street to find out what he thinks of a product. In the last analysis this is where new things in cinema are coming from. In any case, this might well be the source of new techniques and new styles.
Q: And television?
A: Television is very classic, almost conservative. They often simply adopt Hollywood’s classic technique for the shooting script. Aside from that, the whole television phenomenon here is something absolutely marvelous—it’s exciting, fascinating. Something we could talk about for hours.
Q : How about your own film? What struck me when I saw Model Shop is that it was really the sequel—and in the spirit—of Lola, and at the same time it is as American as Lola was French. But perhaps you weren’t conscious of that when you made the film.
A: It all happened this way: I left France at a moment when I was a little tired because nothing was happening in Paris or anywhere else. Everything seemed a little dull and dreary to me. Then there were the events of last May, the students’ and workers’ strikes, and I really regretted not having been there, because even from far away it seemed fantastically interesting. Of course, I can’t say how I could have participated in it, but when you’re far away and something like that happens back home, you really feel you’re missing something. But when I left Paris things were really dead, and from a purely personal standpoint I felt as if I were turning around in circles, not to speak of the difficulty of making a film. I felt ill, I was suffering horribly because of my own limitations.
By coming here, I encountered things, problems, that seemed interesting and important to me—this whole business of young people, the hippies, the reactions to the war in Vietnam, the Negroes—the whole mixedup American scene with all its problems. And I was completely fascinated, captivated by this kind of ferment. And the fact that I’d changed worlds, changed languages, opened my mind and gave me a new enthusiasm that I’d partly lost before. It’s illusory, perhaps, but I was a little tired of the whole world I’d been in before (including, moreover, the world of Lola). I had the feeling that I was marking time.
Coming here, I forgot about some of this, and I tried to make a fresh start. I really made the film in that frame of mind—trying to discover something. That’s why I could have called it Los Angeles ‘68.
My own personal world isn’t important at all. I made my film a sequel to Lola because there was suddenly the possibility of doing so. But above everything else this film is a documentary on what Los Angeles was like in 1968, with the problems of young people, what certain young Americans have to face up to, and so on. All that seemed so interesting to me that I tried to forget myself and be the sort of guy who’s just come here with a fresh eye and tries to speak of something that is new to him and appears to him to be fantastically interesting.
This experience really decided things for me: I had the feeling that I had gotten musty in France. You’re struck by something when you get off the boat from France—the freedom of expression here in the press, on the radio, on television. You really have to see it to believe it. When you think of all the things you can say about Vietnam, about education, about American politics, it’s really amazing to a Frenchman. People talk about contraception as readily as about Vietnam, and in terms that would be unacceptable on French television.
Q: So it’s on television, rather than in films, that America now expresses herself, not to mention, of course, the Underground.
A: Apparently. Of all the films I’ve seen here in America, perhaps the most interesting one is that film of Warhol’s, Bike Boy, which is really remarkable, whatever other opinion you have about Warhol’s tastes. This film is really personal, and in America, once you leave the Underground, that’s something exceptional.
I think that from the moment Warhol arrived and got shown, something was accomplished. He expresses himself, he’s seen, he’s heard. Of course, it’s on Sunset Boulevard at the 16mm cinemathèque in a theater with eighty or a hundred seats. And it’s probably the same thing in San Francisco, Chicago, New York. But perhaps there’s not even that in Dallas. Of course, this isn’t a great deal, but it’s enough to make this sort of cinema exist, and the essential thing was for it to exist. What also counts are the universities, with a new audience, a new generation, which show many films and form a sort of parallel circuit. The future of the cinema perhaps lies there.
Aside from that, it is obvious that the people in the Underground form a completely marginal group, but their own line of reasoning is responsible for that: They refuse to be integrated. Their personality makes them stay in their corner and not try to have a real distribution. And I’ve come around to understanding them: If I were American, that’s what I’d do.
How could they envisage establishing another system? Or overthrowing the Hollywood system? There have been certain independents who have gotten together to try to form their own distribution network, but so far they haven’t been able to. So now their tactic is to continue as best they can, to be there, to exist.
American cinema was fine when it came to action, to simplicity, and even their reflections on life were always true, human, simple. What happened? They didn’t manage to evolve. They simply noticed that Hollywood films were failures more and more often, and that European films, on the other hand, were successes more and more often. So they attributed this success, not to the simplicity or the truth or the freedom of these films (for basically that was the real reason for their success), but, instead, to a certain intellectualism that, moreover, they had an absolutely flabbergasting notion of.
So they said to themselves—the young generation—the Rosenbergs, the Jewisons, and others, as well as a certain number of producers: We’re going to make problem films, too. But everything was false from the very start, and the result was that they fell into intellectualism in the worst sense of the word, for the problems were taken up in an idiotic sort of way, not really dealt with at all, and the result is ridiculous.
Only the free-lancers can revive American cinema: those of the Underground, the independents, the New York outfit, Shirley Clarke, or Juleen Compton, if she continues to make films here—in short, all those who have really understood something and are working to get people to see it. They are the only ones who can create and implement new ideas.
This is the position of the Underground: They don’t want to integrate with Hollywood, for they have the impression that if they did, it would be the end of them. Is it because of their egos that they talk so much? In any case, they have both a sort of pride and a great sense of insecurity. And perhaps their fear of being eaten up alive comes from the fact that they feel too weak, afraid that if they confront the system, they won’t be strong enough to resist it and will get eaten up by it instead of changing it. I’ve often spoken with directors. I’ve often said to them: But why don’t you get together to protest, to get things your way, why don’t you declare: This is the end of it, we don’t want to do this and that, we’re going to do what we feel like doing. It’s not a question of putting up with the system, it’s up to you to make the first move and to do something else. But they say: No, the system is too strong, we wouldn’t get anywhere!
I try to explain to them that before 1959 we also had a system that wasn’t viable, and that we did our best to replace it with something else and make the films we wanted to make. The result isn’t perfect, naturally, but the fact remains that these films exist and that quite a few young people were able to make films after we came along, something that wasn’t even conceivable before 1959.
They have a few publications here in which they can express their opinions. I tell them: Why don’t you get together and say what you have to say in them, and go on from there to do what you have to do? In any event, you’re the cinema of tomorrow, so go to it! But something isn’t right. They don’t dare. A sort of timidity too, and perhaps at the same time they’re afraid of not always remaining as pure as they are now. Perhaps there’s also a little too much respect for the dollar in their hatred of it or their fear of it.
In their eyes I’m someone who is getting devoured by the system. They’ve all told me that—the people in the Underground, directors, reporters: “What! You’re making a film in Hollywood! Aren’t you afraid of being devoured by the system? You’ll see. They’ll own you body and soul …” I said to them: “Of course not, there’s no reason, I fail to see why I’d be devoured. In any case, I don’t use the system to serve them, but to serve my ends—namely, the film I want to make. I profit from their organization, their method, their technique, eliminating or ignoring everything I don’t like, and I apply all that to my method. But of course the minute the system rears its head, I refuse, I don’t need it, it doesn’t interest me, I wouldn’t know what to do with it, so I have no reason to accept it. If I feel that I can discuss things, I talk, and if I feel that it isn’t worth the bother, then I drop the subject and pretend I’m deaf. So I don’t see how they’d devour me.”
But I’ve never gotten them to admit that. I think that basically they’re not so sure of themselves, and that they’re perhaps afraid they’ll succumb to the dollars.
It’s insane how important dollars are here. If you tell an American that you don’t give a damn about money and want to live as you please, he considers you abnormal. That’s why the rebellion of the young is of such importance—it’s also a rebellion against the dollar.
Translated by Helen R. Lane