Interview with Bertrand Tavernier - Cine Lumiere, 17th March, 2011

This interview originally appeared on ViewLondon (RIP).

What attracted you the project and how did it come about?

The producer showed me the short story and what attracted me was I saw the roots of a wonderful romantic and complex love story. Not only between one man and a woman but with a woman and four men. And I felt that each of the men could be completely different. Each one of them was complex, a different way of loving her and she was – I saw in her the roots of a passionate young woman who is trying to survive, trying to learn how to keep her pride, her dignity, her freedom, trying to educate herself at at time when women had no rights. And I thought that all those themes were very relevant today and there was a modern way of filming that, not filming that as if it was something historical, but as if it was something, now, that was happening in front of the camera. So that was very important, the feeling of being contemporary with those characters.

You mentioned that you felt the themes were relevant today – can you elaborate on that?

I think that a lot of period films have a way of looking at history as if it was historical, but there was a time when what was happening was not historical, it was just the present. It became historical years later and I don't want to film when it became historical. So my film is not about the period, it's not about the Rennaissance. It's a period which the audience knows very little about. It's about a moment of history as it is felt, perceived, seen, by a young girl who understands only twenty per cent of that. So that way I can incorporate the ignorance of the public today in the screenplay and I can have the audience discovering these things at the same time as the heroine. In fact, one of my great influences – it will be surprising for you – was Hitchcock. Because Hitchcock made a rule of never being ahead of his characters, never knowing more than his characters. I mean, when Cary Grant is confronted in North By Northwest, we never know more than Cary Grant.

Although, in Vertigo, we know more than James Stewart's character...

No. That one, no. But not in Psycho, not in Strangers on a Train, not in Rear Window. In Rear Window we know exactly what James Stewart is feeling. And I think it's totally different from what most of the people were doing in similar films, where because of the intrigue, to increase the suspense, they always want to show something that the characters are not knowing in order to increase the tension, but Hitchcock tried to have the same tension without that and this is something that I decided to apply, especially in the period film. Never be ahead of the audience.

Gaspard was telling me that you didn't use blocking in the fight scenes. Can you talk me through how you directed the battle scenes without using blocking?

I remember a wonderful discussion I had with Raoul Walsh, one of the directors I admire most in the world. Somebody was asking how he shot the action scenes in Objective Burma, in The Naked and the Dead and he said that he never rehearsed them. He gave instruction to the actors and immediately filmed them. If nothing was good, well. But if there was anything good, usually at the beginning, the first 30 seconds, well, we use that and we start, after... So, like that, actors are never repeating the scene. Nothing becomes mechanical. Everything is looking fresh, you can incorporate accident. And I did all the war scenes that way. And all the battles. We knew, of course, more or less the staging but we never rehearsed and we shot the first rehearsal. And that was adventurous but I had a wonderful camera operator, an American, Chris Squires. Great! He was ready to work without marks, without knowing where the people would stop. He would suddenly run in the mud to get Gregoire falling from his horse and that was giving life, a wonderful life, a sense of urgency to this battle. We had a few rules: no doubles, long takes, no CGI. Everything has to be found on the set and not in the lab. I'll always remember the discussion I had with [British director] Michael Powell. He said, when he was telling me, 'The special effects, we are creating them on the set. The Red Shoes – everything was created on the set, nothing was done in the lab. It was a tremendous pressure but it was more exciting and we were controlling everything. And it was forcing everybody to be inventive.' And that's a good way. And anyway, we decided that from the beginning and that was a rule, so I told the actors, 'I will do long takes, so you'd better learn how to ride, to fight and to fall' and they did. They learned in two months and they didn't want it to look ridiculous, so they behaved extremely bravely. That was great. And so, a wonderful director, Joe Dante, after seeing the film, sent me an email and said, 'Bertrand, the battle scene was stunning – it was like Chimes at Midnight with longer takes!' So he said, 'Your film expresses such a love of cinema that we all have to be thankful for it'. That was wonderful.

Speaking as an audience member, I much prefer to see a swordfight in one take, with the actors fighting, rather than multiple cuts and fast editing.

I hate that way! I was raised on the swordfights of Scaramouche, where you see that it's Mel Ferrer and Stewart Granger – except one or two moments – but mostly, you see them and you see – you get the feeling of danger, the feeling of anger. I understand nothing in some of the battle scenes of today. I don't have any more emotion. I mean, let's say the stunt work, the explosions take over any filming of where the characters are, what they are feeling, if they are lost, far away, close to each other. And everybody in America was saying, 'Thank you for giving us at last a scene where we follow the lead, we know where they are'. I mean, I've grown up loving films where the directors incorporated the topography, the sense of place, in the emotion of the film. In the westerns of Anthony Mann, you knew where James Stewart was in the rocks and you knew where the guy he was fighting against was. And you knew that he had to cross one hundred yards and the space was important and the rocks were important and the shots were lasting enough to give you that importance.

Do you have a favourite scene in the film?

Most of the scenes between Lambert and Melanie, I think. And the last scene between Gregoire and Melanie when he brings the letter. I was moved to tears by the acting by both of the actors in that scene. But I love the battle scene – I'm very proud of the battle scene. And I love what Philippe Sarde, the music, mostly percussion and very strange sound effects on it, very modern, with some moments with, I think a baroque instrument. Suddenly in the middle of the battle it sounds a bit like free jazz! And I think the work of the American camera operator, Chris Squires, who I discovered during In the Electric Mist was absolutely stunning. Great operator, wonderful guy.

Tell me about the casting process. How did you come to cast Gaspard, Melanie, Lambert and Gregoire?

Gaspard and Gregoire were immediately cast when I was writing the screenplay or when I had just finished the screenplay. I never saw any other actors – I had them in mind and I thought they could be terrific. Melanie, we did some tests and she happened to be the best and to me, to have all the colours of the character from a kind of playful teenager, to a flirting schoolgirl, to a passionate lover, to the aristocrat, very condescending and class conscious, to a very frail young girl or the wounded woman. I mean, she had all those colours - and very different colours – and sometimes in the same shot. For me, she is a director's dream, Melanie. And Lambert, when I met him, rather late, I was angry at myself not to have immediately gone to him, because I thought he was – he was my producer's idea and I should have had this idea, because after five minutes of discussion with him, I knew that he was Chabannes. He had the stature, the grace, the beauty, the emotion. He was a splendid horseman – he was the only one of the cast who knew how to ride. He knew perfectly how to ride.

I thought he was amazing in Of Gods and Men.

I think he became with the age. He was a very good actor. And I've seen him on stage and he has that professional training where he's good in a play by Racine, by Marievault(?) but he can be wonderful in Stephen Sondheim, in Little Night Music, he will be wonderful. And that makes him one of the best choices for a period film, because he has no problem with the language, no problem with the costume, no problem with anything which is physical. And with the age – when he was young he was nearly too beautiful, too handsome. Now there is something deeper in him, he has learned how to hide his emotions. When he was young he was sometimes over-expressive with his emotions, now he can have it, it reveals more subtlety. I would say, very selfishly, but I think he's even better in my film than in Of Gods and Men.

What was it about Gaspard that made you cast him?

Gaspard, I saw that he had the stature and the charm. And there was also – I knew he could be the macho warrior, I mean the killer that Guise was. You don't have to show him fighting all the time just to give you this idea. I mean immediately, if he says, 'I'm going to kill you', you know that you are in danger with Gaspard. It's something that some actors cannot give. And I knew that I could get something out of him which has not been revealed. I don't know how I knew that, but I knew that he had something nearly feminine, which was allowing me to make his character – which was the most simplistic in the short story – to make him more complex, to give him some sincerity. I always told him, 'When you say to Melanie, 'I love you', the audience must believe you. You must be sincere. Even if after – I don't want to know if you aren't totally sincere, if you only want to fuck her, but oh, maybe in one month later you are not feeling the same way, but in the moment you must be...' - I was always thinking what [theatre director] Peter Brook said of Shakespeare, he said, 'When the characters speak in Shakespeare, the moment they are speaking, for Shakespeare, they are right. Even when they're the worst scoundrels, even when Macbeth is trying to explain why he did what he did, but during the moment he says it, you are with him'. And I said to Gaspard, 'We must be like that with you.' Even if at the end, in the last scene, Marie must overcome you, she must be the one who has the most dignity, the most pride. But Gaspard was terrific and I always remember when my granddaughter, Olivia, was ten, she came on the set, she looked at him and she said, 'Papou, he looks like Errol Flynn!' So she grew up on films like Robin Hood, like Sea Hawk, like Captain Blood and she absolutely is in love with Errol Flynn. So I said to Gaspard, 'This is the biggest compliment you can have from her'. And she immediately saw that the way – when she came one day to the mixing and she saw the scene where the people are putting the cross on them and she immediately said – she's between ten and eleven – and she immediately said, 'But it's like what they did to the Jews during the war'. She immediately connected. It proved that you educate the children that way, they can suddenly learn something in the image that some adults do not. She immediately said, 'It's like the round-up, they are doing the same thing', so she saw that as something very modern.

END