From Cinéma (Paris) 193, December 1974, 84–90. Reprinted by permission of Dominique Rabourdin.
Q: Could you talk about shooting Caine?
A: When I got married to Christa Lang, who I met here in Paris, we went to Mexico for our honeymoon. That was a joke! I thought it was funny to bring my wife to Mexico on our wedding voyage, in order to make a movie there that I’d written in six, no five, days. Crazy! I told the Mexican producer I’d written it for children, the men living under the sea, and the sharks.
Q: After you finished the film, it was recut by the producers and retitled Shark!
A: I don’t like [producers] making changes. Cutting things out. I have a lot of experience, so I’ll say, “I’ll make you a movie, and you can’t change anything.” [Producers] always say, “Of course not, never. “Yeah! I’m tired of fighting with rich people so they won’t change anything.
Q: What about your film, which was going to be called The Eccentrics?
A: In 1968, I’m drinking at home, the phone rings, there’s someone on the line who says, “I have money, I want you to work with me, I’ve already invested in Chimes at Midnight.” I say: “You mean Orson Welles’s Falstaff? Give me your phone number.” I hang up. I call a journalist I know, who says, “This guy’s for real.” I pour myself another glass. I call the first guy, I say, “OK, some journalist told me that you’re not a liar.” He [Emiliano Piedra] says, “I’m coming to America with my associate.” “What the hell?” I tell him. “You don’t have to come to the United States.” He says, “I like to look people in the eyes.” I laugh. It’s like Gary Cooper, he wants to look me in the eyes! And they come, both of them. I tell them, “Write up the contract and give me the money.” I get my bearings. I contact the actors, there was Jennifer Jones as the woman, Geraldine Chaplin as the girl, and Maurice Ronet—he was in France—as the man. I start building the set, a houseboat, a boat that you can live on. I need a special boat, otherwise I can’t film. I need to raise the partitions, lower the floor so the camera can move.
Four days before filming, the youngest producer comes to tell me that an associate wants to buy his piece of the film and make it all himself. He adds: “I have just as much money as him. We’re both going to court to say we’re no longer in business together.” I say, “I’m looking you in the eyes.” I add the final word: “It’s over, understand?” I didn’t want to be making a film where there were relationships like that, associates bickering, wives set against their husbands, I don’t like that stuff. Do people do that in the business world? To lose time, with all these personal problems?
Q: What is Rialta?
A: A film I made in Mexico two years ago. But the producer stopped the filming. They didn’t like what I was doing. I think that I’m going to bring them to court because they owe me money. I’m thinking about it, I don’t really like court cases. I’ve never fought a producer, but that guy went to idiot school, and graduated at the top of his class.
Q: Why did you write Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street as a novel after the film?
A: When I finished shooting it, I went to Rome to do the editing. And this great German [literary] editor, who’d read the script in German, asked why I didn’t make a book out of it. I told him, all right, and I wrote it in a hotel in six weeks. As for the film, I made it in Germany, but I made a really big mistake in using the crews there. It was a bad experience with the cameramen. Just terrible.
For the female lead, I didn’t want one of those women straight out of the thirties or forties, a vamp. What a bunch of crap! I wanted a girl who looked like a spouse, a student, who is comfortable going into a store, who looks like everyone and no one, nobody extraordinary, who could talk to you and also talk to Willy Brandt. I auditioned some German women. Some femme fatales. Ridiculous! Then I thought of [my wife] Christa Lang, and I knew she could do it. That was the character I wanted. She said, “I’m not coming.” She was going to a university, getting her degree. I told her, “I have to film in three days.” And she told me that it was more important for her to earn her degree, and I told her that in fifty or one hundred years, movies will be different, but education won’t be. And she came.
Q: How do you deal with what “really happened” when you write a screenplay?
A: When you tell a story, you have to lie and condense; otherwise the audience will drop you. I don’t know if Proust lied at certain points, about the madeleine, for example. When [Swann] eats it, he sees his past, his mother, his aunt, the years gone by, that’s for a great screenplay! It’s visual. That’s pure cinema. When you write a screenplay, you change things. Proust did that. He changed some of the things that his memory brought back to him. Because it was better that way. He put a character in here, and not there, because it was better.
I remember the part with [Swann’s] mother, when she didn’t say good night to him. He goes to bed, he waits, the door is open. He thinks that his mother is going to come and see him, she’s coming, no, she’s going somewhere else! That’s great cinema. In Search of Lost Time [Remembrance of Things Past] needs to be on the big screen.
Q: Do you have other classic subjects for future films?
A: I have a script about Rimbaud, and another which is ready, about Balzac, I’ll make it one day. I’m mostly interested in Balzac’s human endeavors: you will never see him writing. Is that dumb? No, it’s not; I just choose to forget that he wrote. The man, that’s what counts. It’ll be only at the end, once he’s dead, that the word “writer” appears on the screen.
The screenplay starts with Balzac as a young man, just before he gets to Paris. I like him so much as a character, the son of a whore, the bastard, the snob, who kissed anyone’s ass for a favor, a title. Jesus! He would have been in the middle of talking to you, and he’d see someone important, and say, “Just a minute,” and run off to say, “How are you?” That has nothing to do with Balzac’s works. It would be good for a movie, and I’ll show it. That’s all. That’s how it is. At the end, I say, “The Académie [française] never recognized this man.” Period.
Q: I’d like to ask you a difficult question.
A: Nothing is hard. Except death.
Q: In France, people say that you’re anti-Communist.
A: I don’t care. They’re idiots. You know that that’s idiocy, right?
Q: China Gate is dedicated to those who fought in the war against Communists. And Pickup on South Street is the same thing in a different context.
A: But why would I be an anti-Communist? If I made a movie about Lenin today, people would say that I’m a Communist! It’s idiotic. I don’t give a fuck about being a Communist, or a reactionary. You are never the same as your characters. If I make a film where some dogs are killed, that doesn’t mean I like to kill. When I show combat, I’m not fighting. I make movies I like.
[My wife] Christa [Lang] is really radical. She’s for the people, for the everyday men and women, and she gets really pissed off when people tell her that her husband is a fascist. If my movies or my characters get on my country’s nerves, I’ll make them anyway. I don’t care. It’s my characters that interest me. What we feel is what counts, and not the flags that we wave or the speeches we have to listen to. Knowing whether Stalin was right or wrong, whether Khrushchev was right or wrong, that’s not important, that’s politics. I’m not a politician.
When I made Pickup on South Street, I wanted to be honest about the people I was talking about, because I knew them. The informers, the girls who would sleep with anyone for a couple of bucks, the thieves, the pickpockets, I knew them, that’s life in the United States. But they all think the Communists are beneath them. If you ask me what a Communist is, I don’t know. For me, Russians are people, just people.
Q: Are there current politicians you have strong opinions about?
A: I can’t like Nixon because he’s a Republican, reactionary, and all that goes along with that. But I didn’t like him instinctively, before he got involved with McCarthyism, I saw pictures of him way back, in California, I didn’t know he was going to become Senator, but I didn’t like his face. If I wanted someone to play the role of a really low guy, someone who smiles like a bandit in a western, I would use him. I don’t like what he represents, and if he were here, I’d tell him what really happened with Watergate.
Q: You take an interest in your characters without trying to find out who is better, the executioner or the victim?
A: Unless it has to do with history, obviously. I love the history of the United States, and I know it well, and I’m fully aware that about 90 percent of it is a lie, of course, that we’re living the legend. [In France, also.] Think about the storming of the Bastille, a fascinating subject. I’ve seen reproductions of paintings made by a guy in 1790, in which the Bastille looks like the Empire State Building. [Here is] a more recent illustration, the start of legends. Young Mao and young Chiang Kai-shek were similar in the beginning. There were ten or twenty people, then one hundred, then a thousand, then a million, then in the end 750 million against Chiang. And he was defeated. That’s history, that’s a film I’d like to make. But if I make it, the reactionaries are going to say: he’s a Communist. And that’s stupid!
I have a story called Generalissimo. It’s about a man who, at the end, is all alone on a boulder with people below applauding him, the conqueror. But he has to confront the truth: he’s the conqueror of nothing. That, too, is history.