Louis Malle

Interviews

Christopher Beach

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781496839626
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

A filmmaker whose work exhibits a wide range of styles and approaches, Louis Malle (1932–1995) was the only French director of his generation to enjoy a significant career in both France and the United States. Although Malle began his career alongside members of the French New Wave like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol, he never associated himself with that group. Malle is perhaps best known for his willingness to take on such difficult or controversial topics as suicide, incest, child prostitution, and collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. His filmography includes narrative films like Zazie dans le Métro, Murmur of the Heart, Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre, and Au revoir les enfants, as well as several major documentaries. In the late 1970s, Malle moved to the United States, where he worked primarily outside of the Hollywood studio system. The films of his American period display his keen outsider's eye, which allowed him to observe diverse aspects of American life in settings that ranged from turn-of-the-century New Orleans to present-day Atlantic City and the Texas Gulf Coast. Louis Malle: Interviews covers the entirety of Malle's career and features seventeen interviews, the majority of which are translated into English here for the first time. As the collection demonstrates, Malle was an extremely intelligent and articulate filmmaker who thought deeply about his own choices as a director, the ideological implications of those choices, and the often-controversial themes treated in his films. The interviews address such topics as Malle's approach to casting and directing actors, his attitude toward provocative subject matter and censorship, his understanding of the relationship between documentary and fiction film, and the differences between the film industries in France and the US. Malle also discusses his sometimes-challenging work with such actors as Brigitte Bardot, Pierre Blaise, and Brooke Shields, and sheds new light on the making of his films.

Malle on Malle, Part I

Richard Macksey / 1982

From Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 2, no. 1 (Fall 1982): 2–12. Reprinted by permission.

The following exchange took place in Baltimore, Maryland on March 20, 1982, after a screening of Pretty Baby and Lacombe, Lucien. The questions were from members of the audience, and the conversation was moderated by Richard Macksey of Johns Hopkins University.

Question: How did you first become interested in films?

Louis Malle: I was taken out of school when I was twelve. I had a heart murmur, so I worked at home for two years. That is when I started going to a lot of film societies and seeing lots of films. For some reason, I got interested in films at a very early age. It’s almost a cliché example of an early vocation. I was sort of a whiz kid. I passed my baccalaureate, the French equivalent of high school, when I was fifteen, just because I was working faster at home. I went to see my mother when I was thirteen and I said, “I have something to tell you: I want to be a film director.” She was so surprised and so shocked that she slapped me, which was great. It was great because it decided my vocation for good.

I suppose that’s why I’m very much against permissive education. I think you really need to be hit on the head sometimes. I must say my parents are wonderful people. I started using an 8mm camera. I don’t think it was even Super 8. It was just straight 8mm. Then, through a succession of compromises, I convinced them to let me go to the French state film school, provided I passed the entrance examinations, which were very difficult. Three hundred people would show up, and the school would take ten. But by a miracle I got in, and then I started studying films. Of course, the language of film or the practice of filmmaking is certainly not something that you can learn in school. When young people ask me what they should do to get into filmmaking, I always tell them first, “Don’t go to film school.” That’s the ABCs. Of course, it’s difficult to find other ways to enter the film industry. What I used to do instead of attending courses was seeing a lot of films with friends. We would just leave the school and go see films. Then at some point Jacques Cousteau came to the director of the school and asked if one of the students would like to join his crew on the Calypso, Cousteau’s oceanographic ship. The only requirement was that the student had to be a good swimmer, and I was an excellent swimmer. I got the job and was supposed to stay three months, and I stayed four years. I never went back to that school. Of course, I was not supposed to get a diploma, but when I became a full-time director a few years later, they sort of forced me to take it, because it was good for the prestige of the school to put me down as an ex-student. They gave me my diploma, which I certainly didn’t deserve. I started working with Cousteau when I was nineteen. I worked for four years with him, and it was a complete one-man show. I remember, for instance, that in the Persian Gulf I had to do a short documentary about what Cousteau was doing at the time with his divers, which was a very boring thing like taking geological samples at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. I filmed under the water and above the water and I directed myself doing it. I took the sound myself, then I went back to Paris, and I had to cut it. This was a film which was entirely shot by one person, completely a oneman operation. That was a great education, because in a matter of a few years I learned everything about the technique, which is something that of course has helped me tremendously because I can discuss microphones with the sound man or I can discuss lighting. I’ve really done all of that. Especially editing. A lot of the editing that I did for Cousteau was very helpful. Then we ended up with a feature documentary which was called The Silent World. I was twenty-three and Cousteau was really a gentleman: since I had worked so hard on it, he gave me credit as co-directing it with him. It was a “film de Jacques Cousteau et Louis Malle,” which was wonderful for him to do. This documentary was extraordinarily successful. It won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, a real surprise. It went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary. I wanted to keep working with Cousteau, but I broke my two eardrums diving, and it’s the kind of thing that you don’t want to happen twice because it’s dangerous. I decided I should stop diving, so I came back to solid earth and went to Paris. One year later, I directed my first feature film, which was called in this country Elevator to the Gallows. Then, a few months later, I did The Lovers, which was also very successful, and that was the beginning of the New Wave in France. That was it. Then I kept making films once in a while, not very many over the last twenty-five years.

Q: Would you say something about your most recent film?

LM: My Dinner with Andre is a very special experience. The one thing I’m really pleased with is that 90 percent of the spectators believe that it’s been shot in one afternoon with two cameras and the two actors improvising their lines. Actually, it took them two years to write the screenplay. We rehearsed for months. There’s not one period that wasn’t discussed. For instance, it took Andre Gregory six months to learn his lines, because this is easily the longest part in the history of movies. There’s never been and there will never be as many lines said by the same actor. I hope not. It was a very elaborate process. For instance, for weird reasons, we ended up shooting it in Richmond, Virginia, and in the ballroom of this great Victorian Hotel called the Jefferson Hotel, which had just closed down, so we took it over. It was a perfect soundstage, and we put up our little pillars and mirrors and panels and made that set the restaurant. Then we started rehearsing, then shooting; we were there for three weeks. The first week we just rehearsed, and I tried to figure out how to film it. I realized very quickly that the one thing that I was not allowed to do was to fool around with the camera, which, of course, was a natural temptation, because when you’re stuck with two people seated at the table without even moving for an hour and forty-five minutes, you would like to have a crane and dance around them. I realized very quickly that that was exactly the wrong approach, because the moment the spectator felt the camera, the spell would be broken. A lot of people have told me, “I felt like the third person at the table,” which is exactly what I had hoped. Also, you never feel the camera, so that you completely forget that it’s even a film. I think a lot of people don’t even look at it as a film. They look at it as something weird between theater and I don’t know what. For every moment, for every segment of this picture, I had the choice between fifteen possibilities. I shot a lot. For instance, we shot the first week. Then the next Sunday I started at six in the morning and I ran all my rushes, just myself at the editing machine. I realized that I didn’t like what we had shot. It didn’t feel right, but I realized that some of the angles and some moments really worked, so I came on the set the next day, the next Monday, and I said, “Well, we are going to start all over again.” We reshot the entire piece in the next five days, the last five days. The editing was very difficult and pretty long, because again that conversation was meant to seem like an uninterrupted flow. You should not feel the camera, but actually, when you think of it, there are a lot of cuts. Of course, there’s a little manipulation of the audience in the way I’ve used, for instance, Wally Shawn’s reaction shots, because one of my points was to make audiences aware that they were not absolutely required to take seriously what was being said. I wanted, actually, to make it clear that they were perfectly allowed to make fun of Andre Gregory, for instance, because he says a lot of funny stuff. It ended up being a lot funnier, and it’s one of my great rewards that when I drop in to the theater in New York two blocks from where I live, the theater that’s been showing it now for I think twenty-three weeks or something like that, I can hear how much people laugh and participate and really react.

Usually I originate my own stuff. I receive ten scripts a week, but it never happens that you find a script and you decide, “This is it, I want to do it.” Well, it happened to me with My Dinner with Andre. They came to me with a great script. Also, I felt I was very much on the same wavelength with them. The two of them were friends of mine anyway, so I felt very close to what was going on. I thought I should do it, but, of course, we had a tough time raising the money, which was almost nothing compared to Reds. It took like $400,000 to make it, but raising that $400,000 was probably more difficult then raising the $55 million for Reds. People would read it and say, “Are you going to make a film about that? This is not a film.” And the only thing I could say was, “If I film it, it is a film. What is your definition of a film?” Films in the past have had similar long dialogue scenes, but, of course, there has never been a film like this. People would ask me, for instance, “Are you going to use flashbacks?” And I said, “Of course not. I’m not going to use flashbacks. It’s for every spectator to make his own flashbacks.” It’s a very visual conversation; there are a lot of great images evoked in that script, and if it works people should fly away to the Sahara Desert with Andre Gregory. The thing I’m proud of is that I think I made it work, which was not so probable. I must say I was fighting the odds. But I was always confident. My one obsession was to get the two actors to be as good as possible. Wally Shawn is actually a very experienced actor, but Andre Gregory had never acted before. I mean, a little stage acting, but he’s never been on the screen; so when I worked with them I would use a videotape machine, and I would keep filming them and showing them, just like a football coach.

Q: How biographical is the relationship between the actors and the characters they portray?

LM: The film is meant to be like a slice of life, right? It’s meant to be about these two guys getting together and talking a lot. It’s actually a little more fictional. But there is more to it than that. You have the two originals, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory; they turn elements of their lives into a screenplay in which they become characters. Then actors play these characters, but the actors happen to be Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory! It was very incestuous and difficult, and I really encouraged them to look at it as actors doing a job and not as this very difficult thing of playing themselves. What happened at the beginning is that they used to be very close friends, Wally and Andre, and it is true that Andre staged Wally’s first play. Then Andre dropped out and went to all these places; actually, he spent most of his time in Long Island. Wally went his way and he started having plays staged; all of them since have been staged at Joe Papp’s Public Theater. They got together again a little more than two years ago—now it’s almost three years— and they wanted to do something again together. They started discussing, and Andre is such an irrepressible raconteur that I had heard most of these stories just having dinner with him. You know, he would never stop. So they ended up with something like 7,000 pages of transcripts. That’s what Wally did by himself, which I think was remarkable. He disappeared for one year and came back with a script which was 180 pages. Then we started working on it, and I said, “Yes, I’ll work. I’ll do it with you; I would love to do it with you.” We started rehearsing every day, and we trimmed it down to about 130 pages. In the process of which, I encouraged them to go more and more into fictionalization, because I felt it would be easier. Of course, obviously there are some very intimate moments when, for instance, Andre Gregory talks about his mother; all of this is true. Everything that’s told is true, but it’s dramatized in the sense that lots of other things were dropped, and Wally has made his character into this little playwright trying to make a living, when actually he is a very adventurous person. He’s spent years in India. He’s traveled a lot. In the film he pretends that he never leaves the cigar store in his neighborhood, but it’s not quite true. He pretends to be the Cartesian one, the rational one, but about halfway through the film you realize that he’s even crazier than Andre. Essentially, the film’s something that they decided to do. I know for some time they considered having it take place not in a restaurant, but in a train, going, let’s say, from Paris to Zagreb or something like that. But that was not a very good idea. That was too fancy.

Q: Has the script of My Dinner with Andre been published?

LM: People keep asking me about it. It’s been published by Grove Press, but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere in bookstores, and I really don’t know why, because the picture is doing very well. I even get letters asking me, “Can we have a transcript of the screenplay?” and I have a ready-made answer Xeroxed, telling people to ask their bookstore and order it. It was published last October.

Q: After coming right off a play, after a sequence of films, do you want to say anything about the experience of directing?

LM: I’m always reluctant to direct a play because I’m a little spoiled as a film director. It’s generally accepted now that films are the director’s medium. God knows I’ve worked very closely with, for instance, John Guare on Atlantic City, and a lot of what people like about Atlantic City he must get the credit for. His brilliance and imagination have done, for me, wonders for that script. But I still very much think of a film of mine as a film of mine; I always take complete responsibility, and I’m the one who makes the final decisions, so it’s my show. Now things are quite different when you direct a play, unless you’re an egomaniac director—and, of course, I’ve seen quite a few of those—but I’m not one. I just believe that when you are directing a play, your job is to serve the play and the playwright as well as possible. I did convince John to change a few things in Lydie Breeze, especially dealing with the visual aspects and setting and the rhythm, and to make some cuts. The casting was very interesting, and I think one of the best qualities of this production was that we had a remarkable ensemble of actors. Still, I would always feel that this was John Guare’s play. Also, there’s something very frustrating for a film director, because we started previewing and at the beginning it didn’t work too well, but I kept working with them every afternoon and little by little it got better and at some point, scene by scene, they seemed to come exactly right. My instinct was always to say, “Print, print, and put it in the can. This one we’ve got. Let’s get to the next one.” And, of course, the next night it would be a little different. I must say this is also the very powerful pleasure and the danger and the excitement of the theater—that anything can happen anytime. It’s always a working process and by definition it is live, alive. It was, for me, quite odd. I had not worked on stage for more than fifteen years, and I must say I found it such an interesting experience that I might possibly do it again. I’m considering doing it again one of these days.

Q: What are you working on currently?

LM: A while ago we came up with what we thought was a funny idea, starting from the ABSCAM affair and the FBI arresting a crook, a swindler, and convincing him to work for them and to help them frame politicians with the help of a fake Arab sheik. We started from that, but we moved very quickly to something else. What it ended up being was sort of a political farce. It has a lot to do with the FBI. It’s a very funny script. I was very interested in working with Danny Aykroyd and John Belushi, so actually the script was written for them. Now we’re a little bit in the middle of nowhere.¹ We are going to recast it, but in recasting it we’re probably going to also have to rewrite it, because Belushi was supposed to play this fairly ugly crook, a very wild character. I very much admired Belushi for his invention and his craziness and the fact that he would really push situations to the extreme. I liked him a lot, and I must say it has put us in a weird situation now; so we’re probably going to proceed with it, but now we’ve almost got to start from scratch.

Note

• 1. John Belushi, who had been cast in the lead role in the film, died on March 5, just two weeks before the interview was conducted.

Interview with Louis Malle: Au revoir les enfants

Françoise Audé and Jean-Pierre Jeancolas / 1987

From Positif, no. 320 (1987): 32–39. Reprinted by permission. Translated from the French by CB.

Question: In the last interview with you that was published in Positif (issue 157), the 1974 interview with Gilles Jacob, you talked about the exact subject that would become Au revoir les enfants.

Louis Malle: Really?

Q: Yes. You said that you had thought about making it as a prologue to Lacombe, Lucien, and that you had given up the idea because you didn’t feel ready to do it.

LM: That’s very funny…. In fact, I’ve told this story a certain number of times, since it seems that it is the most dramatic memory of my childhood. It appeared in a book called Histoire de la Résistance, which was published by the Communist Party and written by a guy named Alain Guérin, in five volumes. I met him when I was preparing Lacombe, Lucien, I told him the story, and it takes up two pages in his book. I also told it for another book that appeared in 1979, which is called Louis Malle par Louis Malle, a book that went unnoticed because the little publishing house that brought it out went bankrupt a week later. Now that I have made the film, people are essentially saying to me, “You’ve already talked about that … ” It’s true: for years, it would come to the surface. But in the course of the years—I don’t know how to explain it, it’s very mysterious—it seems that the memory has changed. It has become enriched. I don’t believe that memory is static: as one moves forward in life, one sees things differently. Now that the film is finished, I realize that the story I’m telling doesn’t really resemble what actually happened all that much. When I finished the first draft of the screenplay, I verified certain elements of the film which I was persuaded were authentic memories, and I realized that they didn’t correspond at all with the reality of what happened in 1944. For example, my brother, who was with me in this school, saw things very differently. In the end, I held on to what I believed to be my memory, knowing very well that it is a bit reinvented. Let’s say, in order to simplify things, that in the film it is a bit like how I would have liked it to have happened. It’s more interesting than what actually happened. My relationship with Bonnet, in the film, is mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Filmography
• Do You Know Zazie? An Interview with Louis Malle
• Interview with Louis Malle
• Malle from India
• Interview with Louis Malle
• Interview with Louis Malle
• Interview with Louis Malle
• Interview with Louis Malle
• A Seminar with Louis Malle
• Louis Malle, An Interview: From The Lovers to Pretty Baby
• “Creating a Reality that Doesn’t Exist”: An Interview with Louis Malle
• Interview with Louis Malle
• Malle on Malle, Part I
• Interview with Louis Malle: Au revoir les enfants
• Interview with Louis Malle
• A Seminar with Louis Malle
• My Discussion with Louis: An Interview with Louis Malle
• Interview with Louis Malle
• Selected Resources
• Index