In the Limelight: Bertrand Tavernier

“All my life I have been fighting to do my films”

“In the Limelight: Bertrand Tavernier” – Bertrand Tavernier in conversation with Peter Cowie. Berlinale Talent Campus, February 8, 2009.

Peter Cowie:

Bertrand Tavernier was very fortunate in that he began his career when the French New Wave was just at its peak, when all those great directors of the 1960s were in full flower, and also when the American classic cinema of the 1930s, 40s and 50s was being rediscovered. Bertrand began as a critic, working for magazines such as Positif, he was a publicist working with several prominent French directors and American directors, but it wasn’t until 1974 that he made his first feature, which instantly, not only won a Special Jury Prize here in Berlin, but made him a reputation around the world. THE CLOCKMAKER OF ST PAUL (L’horloger de Saint-Paul, 1974), which is set in his native Lyon. Thereafter he has made a stream of memorable films, dealing you could say with perhaps three themes. The family in particular, with family issues, history, particularly World War 1, and with political and social issues. Currently he has IN THE ELECTRIC MIST with Tommy Lee Jones in Competition this year. 

Bertrand, the theme of this year’s Berlinale Talent Campus is “Turning Points“. The turning points in a career in the wider sense, the turning points in a film, which a screenwriter creates, or a director creates. We know each other since the 1960s, but I knew you first as a publicist, I saw you in Cannes, going to screenings, I thought of you almost as a member of the press, and then suddenly you become a film director. What was the turning point that took you behind the camera?

Bertrand Tavernier:

The turning point started years before. In fact since the age of 13, I wanted to be a film director. At 13, I did not know exactly what it was, I just wanted to imitate John Ford. I wanted to write with the image in the way that the writers I was reading at this age, Jules Verne, Jack London were writing with words. I thought that somebody like John Ford was writing with image, and when I was seeing the film I was recognising images and scenes and I wanted to do that. And my parents did not agree. So I had to fight to get to that. I always had that in mind, so at first I tried the usual way, to get friendly with the director, to become assistant director, so I did that with Jean-Pierre Melville, and I was a terrible assistant director. I was shy and petrified with fear. Jean-Pierre Melville was very frightening. In fact I started with Volker Schlöndorff. Volker was Second AD, and I was third or something like that. But Melville hated the First Assistant Director and refused to have him on the set. So Volker really became the First AD and he took me with him, and that was the beginning of a nightmare. And at the end, Melville said, you will be a lousy assistant director, and he was right. He said: “But I think you can be good as a publicist.” He introduced me to the producer of his film, Georges de Beauregard, and said, “I know you need somebody to do the publicity for this film”, and I was hired. So I was fired at six as AD and I was hired at six-thirty as publicist. So in fact there was no real turning point. There was a way of getting to film direction. I became a publicist, I was on Chabrol’s set, I was in the editing room with Godard and so on, and then I became independent when I left Beauregard. I worked with my friend Pierre Rissient, and we only worked on films we liked. But I was always thinking that one day I would become a director. So, in fact I was delaying the turning point, and when I decided, that became difficult. I had to fight for about two years to find the financing and money for the project.

Dreadful movies as good experience

Peter Cowie:

Before that you did some dialogue for…

Bertrand Tavernier:

Before that I did some dialogue for a lousy film, one of the worst French films to be made. And then an Italian film. Two dreadful movies. But that is a good experience. And I did some very bad shorts, which I directed. I thought I should first learn about life before I start a feature film. And my wife at the time helped me, and the fact to have children helped me, to do a film not as a film buff but as somebody who knows a little bit about life. 

Peter Cowie:

She helped you with the screenplays didn’t she?

Bertrand Tavernier:

Later on she became a screenwriter. With A WEEK’S HOLIDAY (Une semaine de vacances, 1980) and A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY (Un dimanche à la campagne, 1984) and others. But she helped me in daily life. In how not to copy the films of others. Not to imitate American films. To incorporate in the film your own feelings, your own emotions, the life around you. In this she was a great help. 

The influences of american cinema

Peter Cowie:

You mentioned American cinema in passing, and I can give some publicity to your wonderful new book “Mes amis Américains” (published by Actes Sud/Institut Lumière) with something like 800 stills, and pages of interviews and recollections of all the filmmakers you have met in America.

Bertrand Tavernier:

From John Ford to Quentin Tarantino.

Peter Cowie:

And you have restored to respectability someone like André De Toth for example, but what is interesting is that this is not really reflected in your cinema. Your cinema remains very personal, in a way very French, very classical, it is not melodramatic in the way that much American cinema is…

Bertrand Tavernier:

I learned things from those people. I learnt how to deal with the location. I learnt how to root the character in a place. I learnt a sense of place. Something which is missing from new films now. Not from Clint Eastwood, not from the Coen Brothers. But when I would see a film by John Ford, the way they were filming the landscapes. It was not just a landscape. It was fitting the characters, the emotions of the characters. I mean, you cannot forget the first scene of THE SEARCHERS (John Ford, 1956). The door opening, somebody very far away walking, and you immediately feel the place, the time, the loneliness. And all of this without a word, you find this is somebody coming from a tough experience, maybe war, and he is not happy, there is a sadness. You have all that in fifteen seconds. And I learned that from them. But I didn’t want to copy. I wanted to be in France with all the people who were good before me, but to try not to do an American film in France. 

Philippe Noiret as “actor-fetish”

Peter Cowie:

You mentioned the importance of rooting your film in a place, and your first film THE WATCHMAKER OF ST. PAUL had a wonderfully evocative feel for Lyon, which was your native city, and a city not often seen in cinema up to that point. Everything was set in Paris, particularly the New Wave films, so this came as quite a shock. We are going to see an extract from the film, and then I would like to talk to you about it.

[A clip is screened – THE WATCHMAKER OF ST. PAUL.]

Peter Cowie:

Philippe Noiret instantly became an “actor fetish” for you, and in a way, seeing him as a young man, I am sure you identified with him. And throughout your career until his death he was such a pillar of your cinema.

Bertrand Tavernier:

He was my brother, my best friend, my alto-ego… I absolutely love him. I owe him everything. Before dramatic film, he had mostly played in comedy, and he was very good in some of the Yves Robert comedies. I saw him very often on the stage playing Schiller or Victor Hugo.

Peter Cowie:

He was also in La pointe-courte (1954) by Agnes Varda?

Bertrand Tavernier:

Yes, but he was not happy with the film, and it was not a typical part for him. After that he had a lot of success but with comedies. I wanted him for the part in The Clockmaker of St. Paul. I sent him the thirty pages I had written. After lunch with each other, and I will never forget the name of the restaurant, “Yvonne”, he said yes. Then, when I wrote the screenplay, there were two writers who had been blacklisted for political reasons because they were either too old or rejected by the New Wave cinema. I worked with them, not to make a statement against the New Wave. I had been a press agent for most of the New Wave directors, but because I thought they were good. I wrote the screenplay, and then for two years we were turned down by every producer in Paris. And Philippe stood by me. He came with me, we were insulted and he still stayed. After six or seven months I would have understood if he had said, “listen Bertrand, I believe in the film but you cannot get the finance”. But no. He always supported me. I asked him a long time ago afterwards: “Why did you stay so long?” He said: “I just believed in the project. And I have given my word.” And when we did the film, he did it with half of the money he could have taken, and I owe him my career. So, he is more than an actor. He was a gentleman. And he loved IN THE ELECTRIC MIST, the book of James Lee Burke. One of the last things we talked about when I saw him about a week before he died was about the book. He wished me good luck. I shared many close moments with him. He is part of my life. 

Do not become the prisoner of plot!

Peter Cowie:

En passant, you mentioned your co-writers at The clockmaker of St. Paul, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, and you have done a great deal to champion them…

Bertrand Tavernier:

Yes, but here again, I never made a statement against the New Wave. I admire Chabrol, I admire Godard, I just thought, when they attack Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, they attack the wrong target. Aurenche and Bost have written some great films, where the dialogue and screenplay were not dated. When there was a problem in the film it was because of the direction. When they said a line was too obvious, it was because it was filmed in a close-up in an obvious way. I worked mostly with Aurenche, and he was the youngest person, he was anarchistic. He was the one who kept telling me not to become the prisoner of plot, but to get inspiration from life. Life is the better screenplay than me. He was someone so funny, so wise. Even at 82 he was much younger than most people. He still had in his mind his companionship with the surrealist movement, with Jacques Prévert. He and Bost wrote a masterpiece called DOUCE (Claude Autant-Lara, 1943), in which there is a scene, and I paid tribute to them in SAFE CONDUCT (Laissez-passer, 2002), there is a scene in which an important character, a countess, goes to give food to a very poor family. When she leaves the family, she says: “I wish you patience and resignation.” And then a young guy goes after her and says: “You should have wished for impatience and revolt!” That was in 1943. Writing “impatience and revolt” in an occupied country was a provocation. And it was a provocation that was understood by the audience. During the first few months of the release of DOUCE the audience was applauding the line. Then the French censorship cut the scene. And it was restored in the print after the liberation. So, I decided, when I saw the film before THE CLOCKMAKER of st. Paul, I decided I wanted to work with people, who, when my country was occupied, were writing “impatience and revolt”. That was the decision. For me, I wanted to know them, and I wanted to work with them.

Respect for the profession of the screenwriter

Peter Cowie:

In a way, what sets you apart from the New Wave writers, is that they wanted to write their own screenplays, and you had a respect for the profession of the screenwriter.

Bertrand Tavernier:

Yes, but not only that. I will never forget when Pierre Bost saw the first print of THE CLOCKMAKER of st. Paul. He said, Bertrand, you have done the most autobiographical and personal film, by working with us, than if you had written it yourself. We allowed you to put everything you had in your mind, we helped you. They are the opposite of good craftsmen, who are imposing a kind of craftsmanship on the screenplay. They helped me to make films that were very personal, very close to me, but in a way that was less obvious. Billy Wilder said, you should never work with “yes-men”. You should work with a writer who should be the Minister of Opposition. He said, I did some great screenplays with Charles Brackett, and there were never two people who were more opposed to each other. I was a democrat, Jewish guy from Berlin, he was a WASP, a conservative. And we did together SUNSET BOULEVARD (Billy Wilder, 1950) and all those masterpieces, and yet we were totally different.

Fighting to get a film off the ground

Peter Cowie:

After THE CLOCKMAKER of st. paul, after you had so much difficulty in setting it up, you had been refused by all these producers, was it then easier to get finance afterwards?

Bertrand Tavernier:

No. All my life I have been fighting to do my films. I did several films, even the last ones, where I had to put my own money in the film. ‘ROUND MIDNIGHT (1986) was possible only because I was going to be paid only at the end of the film if there was no going over budget. My salary was one of the first things which was to go if we went over budget. So I was not paid. But as I was working with a great producer, and he saw very quickly that we were not going over budget, in spite of the contract, he gave me a little money during the making of the film. LIFE AND NOTHING BUT (La vie et rien d’autre, 1989). Nobody wanted to do it. L627 (1992), nobody wanted to do it.

Peter Cowie:
What about Un dimanche à la compagne?

Bertrand Tavernier:

No, that was easier. It cost nothing. It was shot in 34 days. I thought I was going to do a film for television but my producer wanted it to be for the cinema.

Peter Cowie:
Was it your first costume film?

Bertrand Tavernier:

No, my first costume film was my second film, THE JUDGE AND THE ASSASSIN (Le juge et l’assassin, 1976). Costume was being done by everybody. I kept making remakes and I was saved by an American company, by Paramount, who decided to give a little bit of money and so we were able to do the film. I know what it is to fight to get a film off the ground and it is part of the job.

a film about steps into the world of life

Peter Cowie:
We have an extract from LIFE AND NOTHING BUT. Would you like to say something about the film before?

Bertrand Tavernier:

There is a wonderful line in the memoirs of Michael Powell. He said he did all his films because he wanted to learn – I could have written this. In fact, LIFE AND NOTHING BUT: I decided I wanted to do a film about the subject when I discovered in 1920 in France there were 354,000 missing persons after the First World War, which was more than the total of the French army. And I thought, this is an enormous figure. In a France of 20 million people… And I wondered, what is a missing person? Is it a deserter? Is it a dead person we have not found? Is it someone who lost his mind and had no papers? Do you find missing persons? And then I discovered I knew nothing about the unknown soldier under the Arc of Triumph. I knew nothing. How did it get there? I went to see a screenwriter with a ten-page storyline and said, this is a story of a woman who is trying to find her husband who went missing in 1920, and it takes place during the people looking for the unknown soldier. And we started working on that. And my greatest pleasure recently after the film was reading something written by one of the most prestigious historian specialists of the First World War, a big article, saying that there was a person who was fifteen years ahead of every historian in France, and this was Bertrand Tavernier because he dealt with a subject we had ignored. That was a great compliment. And for me, this film gave Philippe Noiret his best part.

[A clip is screened – Life and nothing but.]

Bertrand Tavernier:

I think Philippe Noiret is absolutely terrific in that film. Every time I see it, he moves me tremendously. By the way, the film was shot by the DoP Bruno de Keyzer, who just did IN THE ELECTRIC MIST. And in LIFE AND NOTHING BUT he did a beautiful job because we did the film for no money at all. Nobody believed in the film. That was one of the times of my life where I had a producer, René Cleitman, and the guy above him in the group one day wanted to talk to me. He said, Bertrand, nobody will see that film. It is a film about people looking for the dead, this is a very sad, macabre subject, it is horrible, you have all those bodies. I tried to tell him that you will not see the bodies. I don’t want to show decomposed corpses. I want to see them in the eye in the actors who discover them. I think the violence is in the people’s eyes. And he said, this is worse. He said it will be a very sad, dreary film, and I said no, it is not a film about death, it is about life. It is about people who go out from the world of death and they try to make a few steps into the world of life. But he still said no. He said, if you abandon the film, here is a cheque with all your salary, and here is a second cheque to do another film of a subject of your choice. So, he was offering me a lot of money not to do the film. And I looked at him and I said, no. And I saw in his eyes that I am dealing with a madman.

When you speak of turning points, it is a turning point like that... A moment when you cannot drop a film just because someone is offering you more than what you will get by doing the film, and you say no, I believe in the film more than in the money. This happened to me at least three or four times, and it is where you win your freedom.

Anger is not enough for a two-hour-film

Peter Cowie:
You mentioned right at the beginning John Ford, and seeing that extract, you have become John Ford in many ways, because in addition to the historical films, you have the same sense of political indignation as Ford had with say The GRAPES OF WRATH (1940). And you have made films about Lyon I think with your father some years ago as well, you have made L627 about the police force and the problems they have. There is in you this very contemporary quality. You aren’t just this historical or costume film director by any means.

Bertrand Tavernier:

But when you do an historical film you can get angry. The past is not something you have to talk about with reverence. The past doesn’t only belong in the museums. The past lives with you, around you, and if you don’t know it, you will ignore many things in the present. It is what that film says, the fact that the people who ignore the past, they will ignore the present. And you can put indignation and anger and love and admiration in an historical film. I love to get anger and compassion in a film, but also admiration. You cannot only be angry. Anger is not enough for a two-hour-film. You have to have more. In that film, there are moments of anger and there are moments where I admire tremendously the characters of the two women, and the character of Philippe Noiret.

Peter Cowie:

Were the screenplays of Life and Nothing But and later films done by a regular collaborator or screenwriters?

Bertrand Tavernier:

This film was by Jean Cosmos, somebody who I discovered, who had never written a screenplay for a film before. He came from the theatre, he had done radio and a lot of television. In France there is something like a wall between television and movies. The people in cinema despise the people in television. It is not like in England, where Stephen Frears, Ken Loach and many others could travel between television and film. We don’t have that tradition in France. 

I belonged to the Société des Auteurs, defending the rights of the creator, the director against many attacks. Now from the attack of our President Sarkozy, who may be the most uneducated president we have ever had in France since the beginning of time. 

So, I heard this man speaking about the screenwriting in television and everything he said seemed very intelligent and warm and I introduced myself to him and said, I don’t watch television but I would love to see some of your work. And I fell in love. So, when I had this idea for a film, I went to him. He is somebody who I have worked with on four or five films. I think he is a beautiful writer, he is somebody who knows how to write for people who have jobs, he knows how to write for the working class, he knows how to write about some soldier in the First World War. He knows the words, the vocabulary, the way they are speaking. He has a great culture about that. And a great experience. Because he was himself a worker. Because when he was 20, after the Second World War he worked in the Ministry of Reconstruction. So, he worked with people who were rebuilding cities. And he absorbed their behaviour. He was a tremendous help. I have just finished a new screenplay with him about the 16^th Century. 

Cast your screenwriter like you cast actors

Peter Cowie:

Did he do IT ALL STARTS TODAY (Ça commence aujourd’hui, 1999)?

Bertrand Tavernier:

No, IT ALL STARTS TODAY was written by my daughter and by a school teacher. I think you have to cast your screenwriter like you cast actors. For certain subjects I chose people who were part of the subject that I was dealing with. For L627 I wrote with a cop who had never written anything, except when he was arresting somebody…

Peter Cowie:

It is almost like a documentary…

Bertrand Tavernier:

Except that everything is rehearsed and compressed. But it looks true.

So, I wrote it with a real teacher and my daughter. And we got the truth about many things. It is why the film were very well received.

Peter Cowie:

When I saw the Laurent Cantet film that won the Palme D’Or last year (Entre les murs), I thought, that’s funny, Bertrand did that years ago…

Bertrand Tavernier:

It’s not exactly the same, and Cantet is a superb director.

anger against the French system of education

Peter Cowie:

I thought what you did very well was to get the atmosphere, again the non-Parisian…

Bertrand Tavernier:

I love to shoot in the provinces. I am not Parisian, I am not at ease at shooting in Paris. Except I had to do it for L627, but this was a Paris that you never see. We shot in the most terrible places where I had hidden cameras in a van, and you had people selling drugs in front of us, and putting needles in themselves. That was frightening and horrible. But most of the time I like to shoot in the provinces and to explore places. Firstly, you eat very well in the provinces, and this is very good. And this helps the crew.

[A clip is screened – It all starts tomorrow.]

Bertrand Tavernier:

There was a lot of anger in that scene. A lot of love with the children and the teacher, but a lot of anger against the French system of education, which has people called inspectors, who come suddenly into a class to put a grade on the teacher. And most of those people have never even taught in a class. We did not invent anything in that scene. The word autonomy is the basis of modern pedagogy. That was something that had been issued by the French Minister of Education and given to all the teachers. And the guy who wrote that should be condemned for eternity after he dies to be in a class of people aged three and four, in that district where you have 40 percent unemployment, with many of the parents being drunk, and to try to find the meaning of autonomy among these children, half of them not even able to express themselves. It takes six months for some of those kids to say “good morning” because they are so uneducated. The anger I have against such people, when the Minister can issue something like that, they are like Dr Strangelove of our times. They are murderers, these people. I mean, Prince Charles was against the death penalty, except for architects. I would be against people who issue things like that. Because I have worked with the children of that class. Autonomy, it is impossible. Half of the kids need to be watched because they still cannot communicate. So, the film was made about that. 

The camera is part of the action

Peter Cowie:

It is very intensely shot.

Bertrand Tavernier:

Yes. In all the last films I have made, I always wanted to be in the middle of the group. The camera is part of the action. It is not looking at the action from a kind of exterior. I am not an observer. We worked very well with those kids. None of them look at the camera. And Philippe Torreton was wonderful with them. Before starting the film I thought all the scenes in the class would be very difficult, and so I brought Philippe ten days before to the school with the camera crew, and he started to do the class, and we put the camera there and pretended to be filming, so when we started the film, Philippe had been accepted as a teacher. The children loved him. And they were not looking at the camera anymore. We were able to do tracking shots and so on. It was a great experience. And a very moving experience.

Peter Cowie:

In CAPTAIN CONAN (Capitaine Conan, 1996) which is the last extract we have, you returned to the First World War…

Bertrand Tavernier:

Yes. It is a book that I read and loved when I was 14. Jean-Luc Godard wrote an article saying that Roger Vercel, the author of the book, was like the French Joseph Conrad. It is a book which is called a novel. In fact, it is not exactly a novel, because Vercel was part of that war. He was wounded, he saw everything that he is speaking about. The book is very true and tells of a moment in the First World War which is very ignored, which is the war in the Balkans, when the French army, helped by the Greek, the Serbian and the British, fought against the Austrian, Bulgarian and Turkish. And, after November 11^th, 1918, the French army stayed in Rumania and fought against the Russians without declaring war. Normally the Russians were still our ally, but they fought for control of the base of Arabia. And that has never been told. That has never been part of the original history. Many young French soldiers died in May, June and July 1919 – and I have seen their graves in Bucharest – but their names are not on the monuments in France. This is not something that is part of the official history. This was one of the reasons why I wanted to do this film. The other reason is the characters in the book. The character of Conan is one of the most fascinating characters I ever dealt with. And Philippe Torreton gives a super performance. 

[A clip is screened – Captain conan.]

Peter Cowie:

When you see the opening shot of the padre leading the prayers, there is a sense of the sheer waste of it all.

Bertrand Tavernier:

That was for me a particularly difficult challenge to do these scenes. I had never done something like that. And I decided to have a few strict principles. First, you will never see the enemy. You will always be from the point of view of the people attacking. I will never cross to the other side. I had read so many letters when people fought for sometimes months in battles and they never saw them, only when the guy was dead. They never saw the person in front of them. I said the camera will always be in the middle. I decided several actions which I gave to the AD. And we never rehearsed. I immediately just said action. If it was bad, start again. But if there is anything good, you incorporate it in your head, and the second take you will start from that. So, like that it will always be fresh. 

People improvised. Some guy tried to find a shoe on a person who was dead and having no luck. A person who was petrified with fear, and this happened in many stories, that you have in the middle of the fear you have a man who was unable to move out of fear. And the cameraman did not know where these moments were. So he was discovering. And I said, I want the shot to have no beginning, no end, I don’t want to know where we are, and I don’t want to see or understand if we are winning or losing. That for me is of no interest. The camera has to be like any soldier fighting at this moment. This is how we did these scenes. 

With the Rumanian army, they were very good, but with the Rumanian crew it was terrible. For instance, you see that huge gun. My production designer did all the drawings and measurements… when the big cannon fired it fired alright, I mean you had smoke and so on. But then when the smoke all disappeared, the gun was completely open, completely exploded. It was like spaghetti! It was so surprising that I laughed. And Philippe Torreton was not happy at all because his great scene was to take that gun and destroy it. That was his great action. And the gun was already completely destroyed. I was saved by the ingenuity of two or three people from the French production design team. They took a pipe from the stove in the cannon and replaced it with a part of the gun which had exploded, and painted it, and in the editing room you cannot see the difference. But at the end, when Conan decides the cannon will be destroyed, I asked the special effects guy, a French guy, to put more dynamite in, to destroy everything, everything that belongs to the Rumanian studio must be destroyed. He said, I will do it, but it is going to be dangerous, so all the actors must be at least 200 metres away. So, there was only one take and one shot. And I said to the actors, you must run at the beginning of the take, because if you are closer than 200 metres when it explodes, you can be wounded. And they ran. And it exploded. And everything was destroyed. That was one of my vengeances against some of the tricks played by the Rumanians.

Shooting in america

Peter Cowie:

We have a few minutes left for questions from the audience. Does anyone have a question for Bertrand Tavernier?

Question:

How was your experience shooting IN THE ELECTRIC MIST in America?

Bertrand Tavernier:

Exciting. Sometimes challenging, sometimes difficult. But a great experience with the actors, and with the place Louisiana. In the editing room I was so happy that I forgot all the problems with the weather, the mosquitoes, the rain, the changing lights, and some of the rules of the American unions for the crew, which sometimes are for me a bit difficult to cope with. But I concentrated on all the positive things. The beautiful interpretation of Tommy Lee Jones, of John Goodman, and of all the actors. On the whole it was exciting and I learnt a lot.

Peter Cowie:

Is it difficult to judge the performance of an actor who is speaking another language that is not your own?

Bertrand Tavernier:

It is up to the people who see it. John Goodman, when he saw the film, said, this is the best film ever made about South Louisiana where everybody is great. I think, I did ‘ROUND MIDNIGHT in English and Dexter Gordon was nominated for an Oscar. And Marlon Brando sent him a letter, which Dexter read to me on the phone, saying that he, Marlon Brando, felt that that was the first time that he learned something about acting in the last fifteen years, by watching Dexter Gordon. I think I work well with the actors. Whether they are children, or non-professionals, or people like Philippe Noiret… I think the acting in IN THE ELECTRIC MIST is great. And this is something that I enjoy. I didn’t have any difficulty working in English. No difficulty at all.

je ne regrette rien 

Question:

If you look back over your life and career as a director, is there something maybe that you didn’t do that you would like to do? Are you in general satisfied with everything you have achieved?

Bertrand Tavernier:

I don’t regret anything. There are some films where I think I succeeded better than in others, but on the whole, I had a wonderful life. I did the life I chose at thirteen, I did only films, which I wanted to do, I did them without compromising anything. So, the good things, they are mine, the bad things, I cannot blame other people. They are mine too. No, I don’t have any regrets. I don’t have time for regrets. I made all the films I wanted to do. I chose the subject, I chose the story, I chose the cast… The only film I did not originate was D’ARTAGNON’S DAUGHTER (La fille de d’Artagnan, 1994), so I didn’t put at the end, “a Bertrand Tavernier film”, I just put “directed by”. But I had a lot of fun. It was like a holiday. All the swash-buckling, and working with Sophie Marceau, who is very beautiful… But all the other films: I fought to make them. I have some regrets in my personal life, but as a filmmaker, very few. I had that conversation with Billy Wilder. He said, I have suddenly found an even better ending for THE APARTMENT (1960) twenty years after. But if you get into that, you will always find something. 

Question:

I read in Variety that your film is going to go straight to DVD in America, and I think this is a pity, and I would like to know how you feel about that?

Bertrand Tavernier:

I don’t have any feeling about it. I cannot do anything about it so why waste time having a feeling about it. I mean, this is part of a deal, it goes direct to DVD okay, but that is their problem. I remember a wonderful dinner with two wonderful musicians, Ron Carter the bass player, and Terence Blanchard who was writing some great score for Spike Lee’s film. And Terence was saying to Ron: “Ron, remember that album we did for Grover Washington Jr. about songs from different operas? And you did ‘I Love You Porgy’. And you remember the moment where you did that beautiful intro? It was so beautiful and when I was listening to it, I was out of the world, it was so beautiful the way you played, the way you were not playing the melody but were getting inside the melody.” And then suddenly you had the voice of the producer, saying, Mr Carter, you don’t seem to know the melody. And he said, how do you feel to be treated by somebody like that when what you were doing was one of the best things I have ever heard musically. And he replied, why do you have to be angry about an imbecile? I knew I was right, so I did what he wanted, I played ‘I Love You Porgy’, just the notes nothing else, and I know myself what I did before, so I will not lose time by being angry. It is a loss of time. I found him incredibly wise, and I would like to be like him, but it is difficult.

Peter Cowie:

Bertrand, we know that you have got a very busy schedule for your film in the festival, and that you have spared the time to come here to talk to us. We appreciate it enormously. Thank you so much.