Alain Resnais, 1922-2014

With John Gielgud on the set of Providence, 1977. 

It was beau­ti­ful, for a while, to glory in the fact that one of the greats, not just of French cinema, or of “New Wave” cinema but of Cinema, peri­od, still walked among us and was still mak­ing films—his Life of Riley, in fact, just premiered at the Berlinale last month!—but this state could not last forever. On the oth­er hand, the fact that Resnais still was act­ive and engaged and pro­duct­ive gives the news of his death a “too soon” stab that, let’s be frank, one rarely feels so sharply when it’s about someone who’s been for­tu­nate enough to reach ninety-one years of age. But a sharp stab it is. 

I have loved Resnais’ films since, I think, I was old enough to know they exis­ted. As a young movie junkie eager to do noth­ing but immerse myself in exot­ic screen environments—any world that I’m wel­come to, as the say­ing goes—the very IDEA of Last Year At Marienbad intox­ic­ated and ter­ri­fied me. The real­ity of the film still does the same thing to this day. As an indir­ect, or maybe not so indir­ect, res­ult, my defenses of the man’s films could range toward the intem­per­ate, as this com­plaint about cer­tain aspects of the New York Film Festival recep­tion of You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, which harps on the per­spect­ive of a crit­ic with whom I’ve since become friendly. My sep­ar­ate account of Nothin’ is more on the rap­tur­ous side, as are my notes on the delight­ful Wild Grass, which played the NYFF a couple of years pri­or. The Eureka!/Masters of Cinema video release of the amaz­ing Muriel occa­sioned some aspect-ratio mus­ings, and more, for MUBI, or as it was known then, The Auteurs. I examined Marienbad’s debt to Gilda here, and took a brief whack at examin­ing Groundhog Day’s affin­ity with Marienbad here.  The inter­view I wrote up for the blog I had at Première, back in 2007, has gone down the Hachette rab­bit hole; that it exists so vividly in my memory as both a pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al high­light is some­thing I ima­gine Resnais would have appre­ci­ated on a num­ber of levels. 

UPDATE: A very kind read­er, Fabian Wolff, loc­ated the April 2007 inter­view that I thought lost. I repro­duce it below, with the illus­tra­tion I used for the post. 

April 12, 2007

“Hello, Glenn. I am Alain.”

The inter­view was sup­posed to take place in per­son, in New York, dur­ing last fall’s New York Film Festival, which would be screen­ing his latest fea­ture Private Fears in Public Places. But the 84-year-old dir­ect­or Alain Resnais, the con­stantly invent­ive cre­at­or of such cine­mat­ic land­marks as Night and Fog, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel, and many oth­ers (the great Dave Kehr’s piece on Resnais in April 8’s New York Times is a superb primer/update on the master’s career), found him­self unable to travel. And so the inter­view became a phoner.

And as it hap­pens, while Resnais’ English was once such that he was able to col­lab­or­ate with Marvel com­ics legend Stan Lee on a never-produced screen­play, and dir­ect English-language films writ­ten by David Mercer (1977’s Providence, with John Gielgud, Ellen Burstyn, David Warner) and Jules Feiffer (1989’s I Want to Go Home, which co-starred song­writer Adolph Green, whose own last words 13 years later were that movie’s title), he now con­siders it a bit rusty. So he was going to be using an interpreter. 

I had seen Marienbad and Hiroshima and many more in crappy prints all through my cinephil­ic teens, and I had read and re-read James Monaco’s 1978 book on Resnais too many times to men­tion. Anyone who knows me even a little will tell you that I’m one of those pecu­li­ar sorts who is only star­struck by dir­ect­ors. I leave it to you to ima­gine my ela­tion when, before turn­ing things over to his inter­pret­er (whose name now escapes me—many apo­lo­gies), Resnais took the receiv­er in Paris and said, in English, “Hello, Glenn. I am Alain.”

I returned the greet­ing, with a lot of “sirs.” He went on in English: “I am try­ing to be ready to answer to your ques­tions. But I have to tell you that it’s first time in my life that I will do that kind of inter­view, so be indul­gent and patient.” I believe he meant phone inter­view. I respon­ded, “Absolutely. Thank you, sir.” He said: “Thank you, sir, too.” 

He turned the phone over to his inter­pret­er, who put it on speak­er. How it went from there was this: I would ask a ques­tion, word­i­er than it should have been more often than not, giv­en my nervous state; the inter­pret­er would pose the ques­tion to Resnais in French; he would answer in French; and the inter­pret­er would trans­late the answer into English. She would also put the answer in the third per­son, all the way through. A lot of processing.

I began by ask­ing the standard-issue ques­tion of how Private Fears came into being. The answer was stand­ard issue, at least at first; Resnais had been work­ing on anoth­er pro­ject, and the fin­an­cing fell through, even though the cast was in place. “And they had to make the changes very quickly in order to keep the act­ors that he was work­ing with. So he was look­ing for a film that could be shot imme­di­ately in order to keep these act­ors.” Resnais turned to Alan Ayckbourn, the British play­wright whose play Intimate Exchanges Resnais had adap­ted as Smoking/No Smoking in 1993. Ayckbourn had a new play, Private Fears in Public Places. “As is the case with all 44 plays that Alan Ayckbourn has writ­ten, none of their titles wrote, trans­lates lit­er­ally into a French title, so they all need to be trans­posed,” Resnais’ inter­pret­er explained as Resnais paused after a sub­stan­tial dis­cur­sion. “So Alain sug­ges­ted 104 altern­ate titles to his pro­du­cer for a French title. And Coeurs, which means hearts, plur­al, was the one that was chosen.”

Ayckbourn is a very dif­fer­ent writer from the putat­ively dif­fi­cult French litterateurs—Raymond Queneau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras—that Resnais worked with earli­er in his career. The fact is Resnais has turned to all sorts of writers for inspir­a­tion (his 1980 film Mon Oncle d’Amerique, fea­tur­ing some start­ling people-as-lab-rats imagery, was based on the work of physician/philosopher Henri Laborit), Mouse_dameriquebut I was curi­ous about how he got involved with Ayckbourn.

“He star­ted to see Ackbourn’s plays in London in the 70’s. Then he read an inter­view in a magazine in which Ayckbourn said that he pre­ferred dir­ect­ing his own plays in Scarborough where there was a square theater.”

At this point Resnais switched to English: “So I was intrigued by this.” 

“And decided,” his inter­pret­er soon con­tin­ued, “that he wanted to go see how things were played there in Scarborough. [fur­ther response] So he says that he was com­pletely con­vinced when he saw the skill and the clev­erness of Alan Ayckbourn, how he could dir­ect in a theat­er with 4 sides to it.” As it hap­pens, the Scarborough theat­er is a square, and the theat­er is in the round, with the audi­ence on all four sides look­ing in—the same scheme as New York’s Circle in the Square Theater. Resnais was so knocked out by what Ayckbourn did there that he made a pil­grim­age there every sea­son for ten years before ask­ing Ayckbourn if he could make a movie of Intimate Exchanges. “Which had,” the inter­pret­er explained, “the par­tic­u­lar­ity of hav­ing 9 char­ac­ters but only 2 actors.”

Here Resnais broke into English again. “Alan said, ‘I am mad, and I think you are even mad­der, but do you think you will find pro­du­cers that are even mad­der than us to pro­duce this movie? 

“So we became good friends.”

The struc­ture of Ayckbourn’s piece sees six inter­linked char­ac­ters in a series of “two-handed” exchanges, and Resnais films the piece in a decidedly studio-bound but hardly the­at­ric­al fash­ion. “He wanted to con­serve the…what he calls the unity of what was being said and it needed to be done in sort of a plastic way…what he calls a plastic way, which would mean on screen. And if he had tried to do it out­side in [real] exter­i­ors, he feels that the scenes and the feelings…would not have been linked togeth­er prop­erly. In order for things to con­tin­ue, or to be opposed, from one scene to the next, he needed to have that plastic unity of the interior.”

Moving on from Private Fears/Couers, I men­tioned that dur­ing an inter­view with con­tem­por­ary wun­der­kind Michel Gondry, Gondry had acknow­ledged Resnais’ 1968 time-travel/tragedy/romance Je t’aime, je t’aime as a dir­ect influ­ence on his ter­rif­ic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Resnais said he had not seen the film, but was “flattered that [Gondry] knows even the title” of the pic­ture, which is appallingly dif­fi­cult to see today. He was sim­il­arly dip­lo­mat­ic when I brought up how, in his more recent films, he’s less pre­oc­cu­pied in the manip­u­la­tion of time than he was in earli­er works. “He says that the manip­u­la­tion of time in films today has been so well explored by so many tal­en­ted dir­ect­ors that he’s less pre­oc­cu­pied to put that for­ward.” Would he care to name some examples? “He says if you name one per­son, then you have 100 enemies.” He owned up to being a DVD boost­er: “It’s a dif­fer­ent way to con­sume films and it’s also a way to voy­age through 100 years of film mak­ing and for him it’s a great pleas­ure, it’s intoxicating.”

He became, not quite sus­pi­cious, but a little, per­haps, con­cerned, when I brought up his abort­ive col­lab­or­a­tion with Stan Lee on the script The Monster Maker and with his own once-professed admir­a­tion for what used to be called com­ic books. I can’t really blame him, giv­en that what united com­ic books and cinema in the ‘60s, when the likes of Resnais and Fellini were cit­ing com­ics’ influ­ence on visu­al storytelling, is an entirely dif­fer­ent thing than what unites them today (e.g.: $).

“He says he’s not an expert on com­ic strips or graph­ic nov­els. But he’s always taken this genre very ser­i­ously. And writers such as Jules Feiffer and Stan Lee are important…He says that if theat­er is close to cinema, then com­ic strips are also close to cinema.” He waxed enthu­si­ast­ic for a bit on com­ic books’ influ­ences on cut­ting tech­niques, ways of “manip­u­lat­ing space in Milton Caniff’s work” and a bit more…and backed off. “I’m afraid of speak­ing too much about that,” he said, sheep­ishly, in English. In a bit the inter­pret­er picked up again: “He wants to make one thing clear, OK, he wants to make clear that the two pro­jects that he was work­ing on with Stan Lee, the two screen­plays…” I didn’t know there were two… “…had no char­ac­ters like Marvel Comic char­ac­ters. There were no Spider-Man kind of people, it was tak­ing a new dir­ec­tion.” I felt chas­tised, for some reas­on, and decided not to fol­low up on that “two” thing.

I wondered if, at age 84, he still feels the same about film­mak­ing as he did at the begin­ning of his career (he made his first short as an adult in 1947). “Yes, he has the same pleas­ure mak­ing films today,” his inter­pret­er hap­pily averred, “and it’s also his way of mak­ing a liv­ing. It’s the only way he can make a liv­ing. And by the way…all of his films were requests by pro­du­cers and the tricky thing was find­ing requests that were inter­est­ing for him to work on. Or that he had the artist­ic and phys­ic­al capa­city to dir­ect. For example, he had a pro­pos­al to make a movie on a meet­ing of Americans and Eskimos that needed to be shot either in the North or the South Pole and of course that was some­thing that he could­n’t do.” But Resnais reflects that pleas­ure and dif­fi­culty go hand in hand with film­mak­ing, and that there’s nev­er been a short­age of the lat­ter either. “They’re as dif­fi­cult today to make as they were from day one, the first film, second film, and today’s films, not much has changed in that respect.” But the mas­ter does not choose to dwell on that aspect. For his past few films he’s relied on a group of act­ors who’ve become a sort-of rep com­pany, includ­ing the act­ress Sabine Azema, who’s also Resnais’ real-world com­pan­ion. “It’s a great joy to make a film with friends and be reunited with them in the hec­tic Paris life where it’s dif­fi­cult to see people and it’s a pleas­ure to have din­ner with them and maybe that all of this attracts him uncon­sciously, this pleas­ure of being with friends.” 

I asked him about the humor in his films, par­tic­u­larly the cardboard-cutout of Alfred Hitchcock that makes a cameo early on in Marienbad, which is still mis­in­ter­preted by many as one of the most lugubri­ous, delib­er­ately humor­less films ever.

“Without com­par­ing him­self to Samuel Beckett—and [Marienbad writer] Alain Robbe-Grillet, who has also made sim­il­ar complaints—Becket com­plained that people did­n’t laugh enough in their plays. And yes, there are some very funny jokes in Marienbad. But that he hopes it does­n’t take away from the tragedy and some of the oth­er pas­sages. And he hopes that in Coeurs this mix­ing of tra­gic and humor will also be found.”

Having been brought back to Coeurs, I recalled a par­tic­u­larly mov­ing image near the end, of a pair of hands hold­ing onto each oth­er at a kit­chen table lit by a single spot.

“First,” the inter­pret­er said after a spell, “he’s very touched by the fact that you keep this souven­ir, this pre­cise souven­ir of this moment of the film. And the first time he read through it with the act­ors, there was no con­scious idea to do it that way. But Alain says he has always he was very impressed by the 30’s move­ments, such as surrealism–[further response] and some­thing of his approach has las­ted from that, stemmed from that. He says ima­gin­a­tion is so import­ant in our daily life that if it can be trans­posed into a film, it’s almost nat­ur­al, it’s almost like a documentary!”

With that, it was time to wrap up. The maes­tro got back on the line and thanked me, in English, for my patience. I told him it had been an abso­lute pleasure…for it had.