My Journey Through French Cinema (2016)

Bertrand Tavernier: Self

Photos 

Quotes 

• Bertrand Tavernier : "Dernier Atout" is a brilliant but minor film of Becker's. The real shock cam in seeing "Casque d'Or" at the Noctambule on Rue Champollion where I used to play hooky. I was staggered by the serene assurance with which Becker managed to create a tragic climate that he usually distilled with more restraint... Here the tragedy hits you frontally. What's striking is his formal and visual command, the narrative elegance, and the way this mastery never interferes with the emotion, never makes the work impersonal. It's a film in which you constantly feel the character's heartbeat. The mise en scène flexes emotion like you flex your muscles.

• Bertrand Tavernier : There's a remark that applies to Becker as well that Jacques Rivette made about Hawks: the he put the camera at eye level.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Becker is one of the French directors who best understood and mastered American filmmaking. He was a huge fan of Hawks and Lubitsch. That passion for American movies is evident in all his films. First his love of jazz in "Rendez-vous de juillet." Like all American filmmakers, he knew how to convey that sense of space and time.

• Bertrand Tavernier : The first movie that really impressed me was directed by Jacques Becker. It was "Dernier Atout." The film that som impressed me was the work of one of France's greatest filmmakers. One that I would worship. At age 6, I could've make a worse choice.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Like many American directors he knew that pace is everything. And pace in Becker's films is quick, crisp, and lean. It's a pace in tune with the characters' feelings. It's not contrived.

• Bertrand Tavernier : I get the feeling Renoir's dolly shots were a reaction against his father's attempt to abolish depth of field. He admired his father deeply, but wanted to find a visual approach that didn't copy him. A way of staking out his territory.

• Bertrand Tavernier : One Sunday afternoon I got my second movie shock with a French film. Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion." I saw it in a theater on Faubourg Montmartre called 'Le Club.' I arrived in the middle of the film, in a scene that immediately impressed me by its power and its emotion... You have to imagine a teenager watching the scene, his head full of stories of the Occupation, the Resistance, everything my father told me. Each shot, each moment had such resonance, blending a past that was still very present with a World War I story... When the film was over, I was totally stunned. I remained in the theater to watch it again.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Gabin was the first actor to lend a sort of tragic substance to the notion of a people's hero and a working class hero.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Maurice Jaubert was 30 when the talkies arrived. He was the first composer to grasp what sound film could offer. Unlike many of his colleagues, he didn't se the soundtrack or the actors' voices as the composer's enemy... He despised the conception of music that reigned in American studios. He didn't think you should arbitrarily stick the same type of orchestra, the same type of musical color or language. He believed music should find the heart of a film. It should come in when words can no longer translate emotions. Music prolongs them.

• Bertrand Tavernier : French composers in the 1930s, '40s, '50s, and '60s were some of the world's finest. There are reasons for such excellence. First, most Hollywood directors had no say in the musical score right up into the mid-1950s. Conversely, the big French directors worked in harmony with the composers of their choice. The climate and music culture was totally different... The Americans were deeply influenced by romanticism, as well as by Bruckner, Mahler, Brahms, and the Vienna school. The French were influenced by Ravel, Debussy, Poulenc, and the new Berlin musicians: Kurt Weill and Paul Dessau. They were incredibly talented, often novel and modern, in tune to the films, good at counterpoint. Yet they were ignored.

• Bertrand Tavernier : I want to recount what Gabin told me: "Renoir called a meeting in 1940 at the Negresco." He added, turning to Darrieux, "Remember, Danielle? You were there. He brought us together and said, 'Folks, I'm off to the US to convince them that Marshall Petain's regime is a good idea.'" And Gabin said to me, "It floored me. I was a child of the Popular Front." He added, "Renoir, as a director: a genius, as a person: a whore." That was Gabin's opinion. He also said, "One thing I can't forgive him for, when you're the son of Auguste Renoir, you don't take American citizenship."

• Bertrand Tavernier : Gabin has been much maligned. It's been said that he betrayed his prewar ideals, that he became gentrified... Gabin betrayed? One must remember that he left France for the United States to avoid the Collaboration. That afternoon I spent with him, he told me, "Tavernier, you gotta remember, I'm one of the only Frenchmen who paid to go to war. I had to buy back my Universal contract." He added,"Do you think he thanked me? That guy, that pituitary gland, that Flemish giant rabbit?" He meant De Gaulle. Gabin had enlisted. The ship carrying him to Italy was bombed one night. That was the night his hair went white.

• Bertrand Tavernier : [referring to Jean Gabin]  He had trouble getting back in movies, under Marlene Dietrich's influence. She pressed him to refuse "Les Portes de la nuit." Prevert was furious at Marlene Dietrich, "that idiot who spent the war in Beverly Hills who thought our script was anti-French. She had no idea what Occupation was like."

• Bertrand Tavernier : Early on I had a keen interest in certain film composers, and I realized with what originality some directors used them, favoring the timbre of one or more solo instruments rather than a full orchestra so dear to Hollywood. Three strong memories: the guitar in "Jeux Interdits" - the influence of the zither in "The Third Man"... The harmonica in "Grisbi." The incredible sound of Miles Davis' trumpet in "Ascenseur pour l'echafaud."

• Bertrand Tavernier : It was here, I this park, in the house that stood there, that those first images fired my imagination. I especially remember one afternoon, my parents took me out to the terrace that overlooked Lyon. I was 3 years old, it was September '44. And I saw lots of flares lighting up the sky. They announced the entrance of troops liberating Lyon. American and French troops. All around me people were laughing and clapping. It was a festive atmosphere. And I've never forgotten that sight. I've never forgotten that light in the sky. And when I went to the movies and suddenly light filled the screen and the curtain opened, I thought of the lights in the sky. The screen about to light up symbolized in a way the hope I sensed around me during that moment on the terrace.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Becker had much in common with Bresson. There's a kinship in their stylistic purity, in their formal refinement.

• Bertrand Tavernier : He was an incredibly warm person, always ready with a laugh, who you were inclined to believe even when it turned out he was giving you nonsense. I think he so wanted to charm and not disappoint the person he was talking to. Much of what he told Truffaut and Rivette turns out to be highly debatable. No, Renoir didn't hate the studio. That's totally untrue. Many of his scenes, including some of the best, were shot in the studio.

• Bertrand Tavernier : The camera follows a character in a wide shot, loses him to focus on another, then switches from a long shot to a medium shot without resorting to a reverse angle shot... Renoir had this stroke of genius, adding people throughout the scene.

• Bertrand Tavernier : It's enough to watch the fluidity with which Renoir blocks out group scenes - meals, meetings - the way characters cut each other off, how the dialog overlaps, to demolish the criticisms about his technical ability.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Jean Gabin and I talked about Renoir at length one afternoon. I spent 5-6 hours with Gabin, who said to me, "Tavernier, let me tell you: I learned my craft with Renoir and Duvivier. Renoir taught me everything about acting, how to act, how to modulate one's performance, how to hold back or on the contrary let oneself go. Duvivier taught me everything about playing to the camera.

• Bertrand Tavernier : There's something particularly French about "Grand Illusion."

• Bertrand Tavernier : Often Renoir's camera movements aren't there to accelerate the action. They're used to link the background with what's about to happen in the foreground. These movements bring together what's going on in the background and the foreground. They're very subtle, sometimes lyrical variations on depth of focus. Lateral movements combine with perpendicular movements of the characters who come from the back and approach the camera.

• Bertrand Tavernier : "Touchez pas au grisbi" is 20 years ahead of its time... Becker creates one of the cinema's first anti-heroes. In doing so he plays havoc with the Gabin myth. Gabin the romantic hero in this film is a rather jaded fiftysomething who wants to turn in early and even refuses Jeanne Moreau's advances.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Gabin was my passport to understanding the spirit of the Popular Front.

• Bertrand Tavernier : People said he played Gabin. A bunch of crap! Gabin was versatile. He wasn't the same as prime minister... As a truck driver, he didn't have the same walk. Even if he moved at a slow pace, it wasn't the same slow pace... He was someone who espoused any trade in an incredibly organic, visceral fashion, making us believe he'd been at it for 15 years... He invokes the character's past without it ever being described. That's what made him so brilliant.

• Bertrand Tavernier : France in the 1950s was changed by the war. There were no more utopias, but wounds to heal.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Renoir told me one day, you have to make a film thinking that you'll change the course of history. You need that arrogance. But you also must be humble enough to think, if you touch two people, you've done something extraordinary.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Jaubert was probably the greatest film score composer of that time, the most diverse, the boldest, the one who best understood film in a very intimate, powerful manner, and who best understood mise en scène.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Films like "Le Doulos" and "Le Deuxieme Souffle" have become cult for directors from Tarantino to John Woo, to the detriment of a more personal segment of his work, where I find the more private Melville. He virtually never talked about it. The Melville in the Resistance under various pseudonyms: Cartier, Nono, who make it to England from Spainafter an exhausting odyssey in which he lost his brother. He never spoke to us about his pain. He told me that he went to England finally to be able to see Michael Powell's "Life and Death of Colonel Blimp." Melville, who fought in Italy and France, then combated the communist union to impose his own crew, his way of shooting, his vision.

• Bertrand Tavernier : I admit to having a soft spot for "Leon Marin, Priest." It evokes the Occupation mainly through women's eyes... It was incredibly daring focus a film on theological debates between a communist atheist and a priest... The ambiguity of conversion, but also the frustration of repressed love, that's what Melville dramatized in this devastating masterpiece. The portrait of this priest out of the ordinary, out of time. A resistance fighter.

• Bertrand Tavernier : I worked with Godard on "Contempt," "Pierrot le You," and "Les Carabiniers." Each time Beauregard wanted me to explain that this time Godard was making a real movie, with a real script, written beforehand. It was totally untrue. So I had to show the books that supposedly inspired him. And each time the result was a dazzling work, innovative, visually sublime, but totally unlike the original plan... I saw him shoot his films. I heard Raoul Coutard struggle with erratic definition of Techniscope. He claimed it'd make the film resemble an impressionist painting.

• Bertrand Tavernier : [on Jean-Pierre Melville]  He wanted to form my film education. He'd impress me or rebuff me. "Rauol Walsh is crap, except 'Strawberry Blond', a masterpiece." He had 2 categories of films, crap and masterpieces.

• Bertrand Tavernier : [on Jean-Pierre Melville]  He came up with the great idea of having Cocteau narrate "Les Enfants Terribles." He also came up with the idea, of using Bach and Vivaldi when Cocteau wanted two pianists: Wiener and Doucet... He could be incredibly daring.

• Bertrand Tavernier : [referring to "Contempt"]  I was there when Carlo Ponti demanded that the scene with Bardot in the nude be added... What is rather paradoxical is that in the Italian version, the scene requested by the Italian coproducer isn't there. It was cut, and Delerue's music was entirely redone by the very talented Pierrot Piccioni. I find it rather amusing that an Italian coproducer's request ends up with a film that doesn't contain the scene he'd imposed on the director during shooting.

• Bertrand Tavernier : When we finished "Leon Morin, Priest," Melville made it clear I was a lousy assistant. He was right. He added, "I think you'll be good at defending films, so you'd make a good press agent." He introduced me to Georges de Beauregard, his producer, still reeling from the unexpected success of "Breathless." Georges de Beauregard hired me right off as press agent at Rome-Paris Films, the company he'd just founded together with Carlo Ponti. And so, in 15 minutes, I'd lost my job and found another. I started working on films being completed, such as the wonderful "Adieu Philippine"... I have dazzling memories of certain scenes: the two girls walking in the street, that Rozier filmed fabulously, the scenes shot in the TV studio, and all the hilarious moments with Vittoriio Caprioli as a crooked, penniless producer.

• Bertrand Tavernier : In Lyon, there was a theater called 'Le Club' where I discovered "Bob le Flambeur." The theater was particular in that it had a strip tease number at intermission. I went back 3 times that week, not just for the strip tease, which was pretty basic. A girl took off her clothes on a shabby little stage. She was sitting on a chair. But the film made a big impression on me. The voiceover narration by Melville had me hooked from the start.

• Bertrand Tavernier : "Deux hommes dan Manhattan" sent us into even greater raptures. Again, the charm and beauty of a few nighttime shots, a couple of them filmed by Francois Reichenbach, the tracking shot highlighting Christian Chevalier's lovely song, shot on the main sound stage of Jenner Studios, were disserved by a mediocre script with a string of red herrings.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Beauregard was a gambler. An extrovert, a warm man, who went by instinct. After the success of "Breathless," he asked Godard to bring him others like him. That's how people like Rozier, Demy, Varda, and Chabrol came in. All did movies for Rome-Paris Films.

• Bertrand Tavernier : What did Louis Lumière say to bring out his workers? What was the first order? The first order in the first film in cinema history?

• Bertrand Tavernier : Another thing about Sautet: music. I don't know a filmmaker with such knowledge of music, at once intellectual, passionate and visceral. To hear him talk about Bach was fabulous, to hear him talk about jazz too. We had long discussions about Art Tatum. Too many notes, he thought. You see that in the construction and scoring of his films.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Directing the actors is often done at meals.

• Bertrand Tavernier : Sautet knew how to give form visually to a community, a world, a milieu. He renders that in the script but also in the way he directs his actors, in the way he alternates group scenes and wanderings. Pierre Rissient, one of the first to champion Sautet with me, pointed out this fluid mise en scene.