Meeting Laszlo Szabo

First things first: you should check out the offi­cial ver­sion of this story, at the fab­ulous Auteurs website. 

The offi­cial ver­sion is format­ted so as to leave myself out of it. To let Mr. Szabo, whose body, mind, and soul con­tain a com­plete secret his­tory of French cinema from the late ’50s until…now, and prob­ably bey­ond, speak for him­self, as best as I could repro­duce that speech. The lived real­ity of encoun­ter­ing Mr. Szabo is, for this cor­res­pond­ent, some­thing rather dif­fer­ent than what I put togeth­er for the Auteurs. Not to say that what I put togeth­er for the Auteurs is inac­cur­ate. No, I think it’s a good rep­res­ent­a­tion and I hope it’s illu­min­at­ing and enjoy­able for every­one. But. Here’s the deal.

I’m not someone you could call star-struck. I’ve had tea with Scarlett Johansson and interi­orly bemoaned, while speak­ing with her, the fact that she was just so much less inter­est­ing than I’d hoped. Cinephile I may be, but the num­ber of times I’ve felt rel­at­ively Cowed In The Presence can be coun­ted on the fin­gers of one of my hands. Yep, I was gobsmacked in 1987, before I was a film crit­ic or any such thing, on glimpsing Jean-Luc Godard pacing in the lobby of Manhattan’s Parker-Meridian Hotel one morn­ing. And when Martin Scorsese strode into his office a few minutes pri­or to a dual inter­view with him and Spike Lee that I had put togeth­er for Première, and said, “Good to see you again, Glenn,” I have to admit my heart flipped. And inter­view­ing Miss Olivia de Havilland…forget it.

Laszlo Szabo is a guy who’s been in my film con­scious­ness for so long…well, for example, when I was a kid, and was almost fatally curi­ous about Godard’s Alphaville, hav­ing read about it in Carlos Clarens’ his­tory of sci-fi and hor­ror films, I’d scour TV Guide, and when the film would turn up at two a.m. on Channel Seven I’d beg my par­ents to let me take their 13-inch Sony up to my room to tune the thing in after hours. And Alphaville is just one of the sev­er­al Godard pic­tures of the ’60s in which Mr. Szabo, always an intriguing, shift­ing, enig­mat­ic pres­ence, appeared in. He was­n’t a lead play­er, like Belmondo or Brialy, or a star anom­aly like Constantine or, later, Leaud. But he was there, and he was inter­est­ing, and you always thought, “What’s his deal?”

And then he’d turn up in a Truffaut, and a Rohmer, and a Rivette, and you’d look back­wards and find him in early Chabrol, and he seemed almost myth­ic, a Zelig of the French cinema. But—he actu­ally exis­ted. Exists! And one day, when the smart guys at Rialto Pictures got hold of Godard’s Made In USA for U.S. exhib­i­tion, you get the press release that says Laszlo Szabo is avail­able for interviews…and you think, “Well isn’t that a kick in the head?”

And of course you’re going to raise your hand and say, “May I?”

Well. What a mar­velous after­noon. Szabo is a born storyteller and a dyed-in-the-wool cinephile, and as he recol­lec­ted friend­ships and dis­crete encoun­ters he would every now and again suc­cumb to very sin­cere emo­tion. But he still had the bear­ing of a cre­at­or who looked ahead to doing more; in his mind the past was not gone but rather just a por­tion of his own cre­at­ive and spir­itu­al con­tinuüm. An inspir­ing fel­low. I wish I had brought a video cam­era of sorts, because his way of telling stor­ies was delight­fully visu­al; he fre­quently acted things out, draw­ing out num­bers on the fab­ric of his couch, look­ing at his watch when describ­ing fig­ures who were con­cerned about time, mak­ing ges­tures that took the place of what could have been whole para­graphs. In writ­ing the inter­view up for The Auteurs, I left out one very good anec­dote, because it would have needed prose inter­pol­a­tions along the lines of stage dir­ec­tions to get across prop­erly, and that would go against the format I decided on for the piece. I’ll present it here, with my own clumsy prose interpolations/stage directions. 

SZABO:  (In the course of describ­ing Godard’s dir­ect­ing meth­ods, he hooks on to a memory of work­ing on Alphaville.)

I remem­ber in ’65, Godard was mak­ing Alphaville, with Eddie Constantine. An act­or born in America, here in France play­ing this hard­boiled hero Lemmy Caution. I liked him very much. But, you know…he drank a little. And one day he came to the set, he was, you see, an hour late. And he was a little ashamed for being late. And Jean-Luc did­n’t say any­thing, he did­n’t shout. But…he was not going to shoot what had been sched­uled for the day. Instead…

(Szabo’s shoulders sink.)

…he had Eddie in a hotel room, with one of the girls play­ing the pros­ti­tutes of Alphaville, and he dir­ec­ted Eddie to slap the girl. It was just a small scene, and Jean-Luc said to him, “This girl, Eddie, here, just slap her.” And Eddie went up to her, and he went…

(Szabo mimes a very soft slap, not even a slap, really, just a tap on the cheek. He smiles, a little rue­fully.)

And then, Godard comes up to Eddie, and says, “No, you don’t slap her lightly, you slap her for good, like this!”

(Szabo mimes a real wal­lop.)

And Jean-Luc slaps Eddie for real, like that.

GK: He was aim­ing for a very dir­ect provocation. 

SZABO: (shrugs) Yes.