Resnais Reels 'Em In! - filmmaker Alain Resnais - Interview

Interview, Nov, 1999 by Joan Dupont

Alain Resnais's famous films - Night and Fog, Last Year at Marienbad, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour - wowed a generation of intellectuals. His latest works, especially the recently released Same Old Song, are appealing much more to the masses

Distinguished by his crown of white hair, Alain Resnais enters the room In his white tennis shoes and sits with his back to the light because of his fragile light-blue eyes. The seventy-seven-year-old director, a towering original in French cinema, seems to situate himself at a courteous distance from his work. Yet his recent films - surprisingly buoyant and fresh - ring out the news that he is, once again, on the edge of the avant-garde while at the same time newly popular. The latest, Same Old Song (On Connait la Chanson), Inspired by Dennis Potter's dramatic device of having actors lip-synch the lyrics to pop tunes, Is a musical comedy about brittle Parisians whose passions and depressions surface In song. Sabine Azema, Andre Dussollier, and Pierre Arditi, who heed the cast, have worked with Resnais since La vie est un roman (1983, Life Is a Bed of Roses); Azema Is his partner offscreen.

The director sips black coffee and keeps his napkin folded, gingerbread untouched, although he says he likes gingerbreed very much. No crumbs, no fuss, a meticulous artist who started as a film editor, he says, "I never was an auteur, I never wrote my own films, and on the set, I often feel that everybody else Is Important; they work and I'm useless."

JOAN DUPONT: Were you surprised by the box-office success of Same Old Song In France?

ALAIN RESNAIS: Oh, yes, that never happened to me in my life before. It was a risky film, and I warned the producer. The songs aren't well-known and we didn't put them in just because we liked them. It had to be an association of ideas between the intrigue and the song fragment. I'd even say it's a realistic film because that's the way it happens in our heads; that was the idea.

JD: What drove you to make the film?

AR: I am never driven. Every film I've made has been an assignment.

JD: When did you first hear about Dennis Potter?

AR: I saw part of The Singing Detective on TV in New York. I said, Something is going on here. I got a cassette of it, and then I watched the others [referring to Potter's two other miniseries with lip-synched songs, Pennies From Heaven and Lipstick on Your Collar] and was very moved by them. I had worked with [writer-actors] Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri on Smoking and No Smoking [both 1993], and I told them we had to think about how to make this film without imitating Potter; it excited me. They got the idea. In life, we rarely remember a whole song; in Potter, there's often a violent contrast between the situation and the song.

JD: Psychoanalysts love this film, as if the unconscious is singing out every time someone lip-synchs.

AR: Yes. When I saw The Singing Detective, I didn't know most of the songs, but I reacted to their vibrancy. I have only one criteria in art: it's alive or it's dead, that's all. [Anton von] Webern, for me, is alive; Berlioz is often dead. Cole Porter is alive. . . .

JD: What made you think of becoming a director?

AR: I never thought of becoming a director. When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me - I still watch silent films. I don't think that there is any such thing as an old film; you don't say, "I read an old book by Flaubert," or "I saw an old play by Moliere."

JD: What was your relation to the French New Wave?

AR: I wasn't part of the New Wave, but thanks to [the impact made by its directors], I made movies. Truffaut and the others proved that it wasn't watching a writer write or a painter paint that makes you progress, but going to the Louvre. Before, you had to be an assistant on nine films, and you couldn't just go from making a short to a feature. Finally, a producer asked me to make a feature, and I made three in a row, but after Muriel [1963], which wasn't a success, I stopped for a while. But Delphine Seyrig was magical in that film - what a voice, what diction!

JD: The way you mixed black-and-white documentary footage with contemporary color shots in Night and Fog [1955; his film about Auschwitz] had an enormous impact on the postwar generation,

AR: Since we had little money and few documents, we had nothing. So I used formal techniques to make the film more perceptive emotionally. For the first time, I used a mix of black and white with colon In the editing room, I asked myself, What are you doing manipulating corpses this way? It was repugnant, but it was the only way to communicate.

JD: What nourished Last Year in Marienbad [1961]? Proust?

AR: I never thought of Proust; I thought of Andre Breton. [The film's screenwriter] Alain Robbe-Grillet and I were very impressed by surrealism: There's the pictorial impact of Magritte and Delvaux. And Hitchcock. Most of what happens is in the characters' imaginations, so the memory of silent film was a big influence.

JD: And Hiroshima, Men Amour [1959]?