A conversation with Catherine Breillat about her controversial film.
Breillat has said about her film; "This film is about female desire, not male fantasy.", which if you think about it is exactly why it is controversial to American audiences who are born and bred to hold puritanical values close to their hearts and only accept women’s sexuality if it is passive and forgiving. To Breillat this film isn’t controversial it’s what common people deal with everyday and as a filmmaker, an artist and a feminist she is letting us see the sexual world of a young woman with all it’s erotic beauty, sexual discovery, as well as the pain and defiance of romantic love.
CB: The thing was like a flying saucer. Nobody was ready for it. But it has been well received everywhere. I hope it will play as well here but you can’t really predict because it is a very strange film and nobody can be prepared for seeing it. Myself included. When I saw the film for the first time I was very surprised. I think it will depend not so much on the American audience but on the American media because they are the ones who prepare the audience to receive the film.
Q: Do you storyboard everything out in advance or do you have improvisation?
CB: I never storyboard I always say you make a movie at the moment of shooting. It’s really exhilarating because you try to make a movie that goes beyond yourself. So if you draw a storyboard then, after that, everything is merely a formality. I’m not a bureaucrat I’m not into doing that. I think it’s a ridiculous way of shooting. It’s limiting. I think you have more surprises if you try to surprise yourself than if you try to master everything at a conscious level. I think the unconscious is much stronger and much more beautiful than the conscious. In order to produce a work of art you have to succeed in letting your unconscious display itself. But I don’t call this improvising.
Q: Can you explain working with the cinematographer and how your vision worked with his and how you achieved the look of the film.
CB: We speak very little. We do things. Yorgos [Arvanitis] had to face a set with colors that were very hostile to the work of the D.P. They were very active colors; we used black and red [which] absolve the light. While white reflects the light. At the moment of shooting Yorgos kind of collapsed. He is not a technician he is an artist. Yorgos is a man who has shot 77 movies. It’s funny because at the beginning he doesn’t [seem to] know how to do anything he doesn’t have a technique to fall back on to do the light...he doesn’t think the light will be perfect. At the beginning it’s astonishing [that] he doesn’t know how to do anything. He is lost like a child. And suddenly everything falls into place as if by miracle. Yorgos is somebody you have to protect from the pure technicians who at the beginning of a shoot tell him: "What do you want to do with this shot?" and "How long will it take you to reach that result?" [Laughs] You have to leave him in the dark until everything is triggered into motion and then everything is done at an incredible speed. I think at this point, on that level, we are totally in-sync because I’m like him - when I arrive on the set I know how to do absolutely nothing. My actors for me are like putty. I put them onto the set and when we start moving I start knowing what I want to do with them.
Q: You have a bit part in Last Tango in Paris right?
CB: I had a very small scene but I was on the set for 15 days. Because the film is very long there was a whole part of the screenplay that I was in that ended up on the cutting room floor.
Q: Would you say that Bertolucci is an influence both in the subject and the style that you’ve developed?
CB: No I don’t think I’ve been influenced by Bertolucci. If there are any first influences it would be [Ingmar] Bergman. Because the first film I saw when I was a little girl was a movie by Bergman called Sawdust and Tinsel. When I saw that movie I knew that I wanted to be a filmmaker and the second was Bunuel’s Viridiana which is a movie very much like Romance a movie about the temptation of good and infamy. Sawdust and Tinsel and other Bergman films have that too. It’s an obsession for me. I’m also influenced by Asian movies - in particular Japanese movies. Directors such as Oshima, Imamura, Mizoguchi [they make] movies in which there is no psychology. The ending comes very violently without warning. This is the way the Japanese do films.
Q: As well as an emphasis on the cinematography and framing.
CB: I think the Japanese framing are the most beautiful in the world. Of course, they have an advantage on ours because the architecture really lends itself to this type framing. Also because they live with lines just above the ground while we have furniture with feet and Baroque-type curves. This type of furniture (she points to a piece of furniture in the room) is really bad for framing.
"No writer will ever accept being deprived of certain letters or of certain words in the dictionary. And filmmakers -- with the exception of Oshima -- do accept that. Directors seem to conform to a moralist position and that is exactly the opposite of what an artist should do. Filmmakers should have more courage."
Q: How did you find the actress and how did you work with her on the set?
CB: I found her by miracle. [Laughs]. Through research and casting and after I’d seen 200 women. She was almost the last I saw.
Q: Is it true that the first scene you shot with her was the scene where she is tied up by the school principle?
CB: Yes. In that scene, because of the dark background, this is where Yorgos said he didn’t know how to do anything. When he saw the rushes he was very panicky because the light had a lot of contrast. His way of doing light is very soft. He was afraid I would hate it. But I said, ‘Don’t worry because in my movies the actors get light from within themselves’. After that he understood what I wanted and he found a way to put light on Caroline that would benefit her own light. We had a code and I would tell him ‘beautiful, beautiful, beautiful’ and he understood what I meant.
Q: The film has a glossy but darkly lit look. Can you talk about that?
CB: All the times when her face is radiant with light she is very beautiful. The actress must give the cinematographer the desire to light her. Cinema is a question of desire. The director must give the actors the desire to act and go beyond themselves. And I must give the cinematographer the desire to light the film well. To make a movie you have to enter into the film and you basically enter a film the way you enter a religious sect. There is a moment when nothing else exists. The external wall does not exist which is why it is difficult to direct love scenes. But shooting is a state of exhilaration. [It’s sort of] like walking on burning charcoals. Is it hot? No, it’s not. It’s either very easy or impossible.
Q: I’m interested in director's intent versus audience perception. When you come to the end of the film I’m curious about the choices the main character makes. Are the choices yours - as the screenwriter - or the heroines?
CB: I don’t see the difference between the choice the heroine makes and the choice I make as the director.
Q: From my own perspective as I watched the film I felt I knew where it was going so the ending came as a surprise. In fact, I was more surprised by the ending than I was by anything sexual in the film.
CB: The ending has a very different rhythm and it amused me to do that...to completely change the speed of the film at the end. And also I feel it was important to spit the spectator out. The spectator has to be spit out of the film because it’s a long hypnotic journey and you have to get out of it. It’s true that because the film is a hypnotic journey the spectator believes he knows everything about the film. So if you miss the last 15 minutes you miss a lot because the last 15 minutes is chock full of more events than are in the first hour-and-a-half.
Q: When I saw the movie at a press screening there were some who left because they were shocked by what they saw. But I thought if they had read all this sexual stuff in a book they wouldn’t have been offended at all.
CB: Were they journalists who left?
Q: I’m not sure.
CB: Because if journalists leave they should resign from their job. I think what you say is quite correct because writers have explored the relationship between sex and metaphysics in literature in there more secret and difficult corners. I am appalled to realize that filmmakers have accepted censorship. They have accepted censorship in a way that negates them as filmmakers. Because it is accepting the falsity that the images are the power in themselves when what’s important is the gaze that you cast onto the images. No writer will ever accept being deprived of certain letters or of certain words in the dictionary and filmmakers with the exception of Oshima do accept that. Directors seem to conform to a moralist position and that is exactly the opposite of what an artist should do. Filmmakers should have more courage.
- Matt Langdon
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