One last case now
and a thoroughly exceptional one..
the doyen of competing film-makers,
at 82,
Robert Bresson's entry for France
is L'Argent.
L'Argent is a simple enough tale.
A delivery man, wrongly accused
of disposing of counterfeit money,
gets into trouble with the police.
This incident, which might
have been so easily settled,
ends up turning his whole life
upside down.
One thing leads to another
on a downward spiral
that culminates in the drastic act
of murder.
That's a brief summary,
but what's more important
is the cinematographic writing,
something criticised by some
and praised by others.
Bresson has certainly
received mixed reactions.
When his film was presented in Cannes
and even at the prize-giving,
he refused to talk to the press,
and the press conference
was concluded within a few minutes.
However, we were lucky enough
to be granted an audience
and can bring you this rare interview
in which the great director
discusses his work on camera.
To someone watching
one of your films,
everything seems very carefully
graduated and finely tuned;
everything is foreseen.
When you come on the set
in the morning,
do you, as Renoir said,
let the unforeseen come into a shot?
Renoir said a lot of things
that weren't true,
but some of it was what l said.
But he used actors.
He tried to give the impression
that he was using them,
not as actors who were acting,
but as actors who weren't acting.
l'm really not sure
what that is all about
because an actor can't go back,
can't be natural. He just can't.
So... What was the question?
Let's leave Renoir aside.
So, you arrive on the set to film...
No, l don't know what's ahead of me.
Not at all.
l don't want to know
what l'll be doing the next day.
l want spontaneity.
l don't even know the day before
where l'll be filming.
And ''set'' is not the right word.
The setting is always somewhere real
and the objects are real.
l don't bring anything special.
l try not to think about what
l'm going to be doing the next day.
lt's no different from painting..
a painter doesn't know
what his next brush stroke
is going to be.
He doesn't know that.
If a painter could...
Art cannot exist without surprise
or without, without...
without change.
If a painter knew exactly
what his canvas was going
to look like when he was finished
instead of painting a picture,
he would paint something
amorphous, vacuous, uninteresting.
I try to let ideas emerge
spontaneously.
Sometimes you have to wait
for the ideas
but it's the only way I can work.
I would get terribly bored if l knew
in advance what I was going to do.
Nothing is written down, even...
In this film, because there were
a lot of people, a lot of models,
I often wouldn't know
who was going to be coming.
I didn't know how people
would look under the lights,
how I would be lighting them.
So, no, I don't know anything.
l don't want to.
I want it to be spontaneous.
I want spontaneity, the present.
it's not the past or future,
it's the present, now.
Do they beat you?
You work yourself
to the bone for everyone here.
How come you don't just
throw yourself in the river?
Are you waiting
for some kind of miracle?
I'm not waiting for anything.
How do you combine this spontaneity,
with these shots that typify you...
It's not that I haven't thought
about the film.
I already have made a storyboard,
a plan on paper.
I shut myself up all alone to do this
and, in my mind, I make the film.
After that
I leave the stoyboard aside,
I don't look at it again,
and I shoot the film.
There's an enormous gulf
between the film as it is on paper
and the real film.
They're not the same thing at all.
It's surprising how different
the celluloid and paper versions are.
It has to be a surprise,
and I want it to be total.
You have to come face to face
with the new.
That's very important to me.
Novelty and nature.
Not the natural. Nature.
I want moments like that
to create something within me
and what is created
is what I want to commit to film.
I always want that
to be something new.
I have great faith in beauty, but
beauty is only beauty when it is new.
When you were filming L'Argent,
were you aware
of this sense of renewal
that you were talking about earlier?
Yes, I felt l was doing
things more intuitively,
flinging myself into...
When I film
I think about the editing,
about how each image will be
embedded between two other images,
the preceding one
and the following one.
So, all that does not...
Chance plays a part, too.
Basically, my film
is a product of chance
just as any work of art
is a product of chance.
When a writer sits down at his desk
or scribbles on his knees
he writes one word; he cannot know
how the sentence will turn out.
He has a vague idea,
but perhaps nothing more than that.
His hand leads him on
helping him to continue,
and his state of grace, too,
helps him continue.
But you absolutely must not
know in advance.
You can have a general idea
of the film, of its pace and rhythm.
In fact, you edit it once
in your head while you're filming
and once, with the film in your hand,
or in the editor's hand
when you put it together
all over again.
- Hi.
- Hi.
If you don't mind, l'd like to
digress to the subject of painting.
Isn't there a part of you which is
plagued by a recurrent, nagging pain?
What I mean is we look at your work as a whole,
wouldn't you rather see it in a gallery
than on the shelves
of the film archive?
No, I love the cinema
because I know it's perishable.
l enjoy making something
that won't...
I don't believe in the immortality
of works of art.
Not at all. On the contrary,
I like this spontaneous,
perishable aspect of it.
- But painting...
- It's there at one point in time
and, in a few years, it will be gone.
Painting is something else.
Fame is not something
l ever think about.
To begin with,
I'm far from being famous.
I'm fairly unknown, so I don't
see how... More or less unknown...
it's not something I think about.
I think about
the pleasure of filming.
- But isn't part of you a painter?
- The pleasure of a job well done.
But isn't a small part of you
still a painter?
Not a moment goes by
when l don't think about painting.
l tell my eye to paint,
never to stop painting.
My ear, too, is constantly
finding things.
But that's a good thing.
At a time when painting
is in a state of flux
when the arts are unstable
I find it's good to...
The cinema encourages me.
I believe in cinematographic writing,
I believe that it's
the writing of tomorrow.
Do you think that cinema still
has unfulfilled possibilities?
Oh, yes, of course.
Not in technical terms
but in terms of inner artistry,
it is still lacking in practitioners.
There is one thing that surprises me.
Your films, including your last,
show you to be vey aware of the
world we live in, the present day.
Are you interested
in young film-makers?
You have said that
you don't go to the cinema.
I'm very interested,
but I haven't had time.
I'd like to have more contact
with some of them
because I get a lot of letters,
a lot of phone calls.
After what's happened with this film,
do you suddenly find that
the desire to keep on making films
is somehow stronger?
No, but...
There's a film I'm hoping to make
that I've been thinking about
for a long time.
I might have done it
if I hadn't been able to make L'Argent.
The advance funding for L'Argent
was rejected outright
by the selection committee
three or four years ago
under the last government.
I didn't think I'd be able to make it
without that support.
I wrote quite a lot about Genesis,
the beginning of Genesis,
which is something
I'm very interested in,
but it's a much more, difficult film
to make
much longer,
and therefore more expensive.
I've got one final question
and I'd like an honest answer.
It's rumoured you've been
to see James Bond.
- Is that true?
- Yes.
I forgot to say, but that was
something very important.
I went to see "For your eyes Only"
by John Glen,
because my nieces asked me
to take them to the cinema.
I wanted to see James Bond.
It filled me with wonder
because of its
cinematographic writing.
That's all that interests me just now
because I never see it anywhere.
It was wonderful. If I could
have seen it twice in a row
and again the next day,
I would have done.
