From Enthusiasm Magazine
On Bresson
The below clippings are taken from ENTHUSIASM, Issue 2, Summer 2000 (UK), pp 36–37.
©2000–2004 Artificial Eye Film Company Ltd.
Transcript
Working with Bresson
'Bresson opposes all (even vague impulses of) initiative or opinion through an unshining stubborness, a discreet obstinacy, an unalterable tenacity, and an unfailing patience. He knows where he is going and nothing can distract him from what he wants to realise. Day after day he brings into it the same ardour and the same enthusiasm. The result makes your complaints ridiculous, your revolt unjustified, your criticism redundant.'
'It is true that you can only understand it when the film is finished. It is difficult to trust blindly, especially when what is demanded from you is a quasi-total abandonment of your personality. When one is detached from the overall plan, which only becomes clear afterwards, then the perfectionism when pushed to such precision can seem to be the product of dementia, and the meticulousness merely a fad.
When you understand how deep everything has been thought, weighed, prepared, premeditated, your only regret is not to have been docile enough. But it is obviously too late.'
François Leterrier
Transcript
EVERY MOVEMENT in "A Man Escaped" was played by Bresson, one of his actors has said. Above he shows François Leterrier how to scrawl on the wall of his cell; at right, how to walk in the corridor of the prison. Opposite (from the film), Leterrier tensely watches the prison guard before making his escape. A fanatical perfectionist, Bresson writes his own films and carefully supervises the cutting. He not only dictates every move to his actors but even their tones of voice (in one scene, Leterrier had to repeat forty times "Lie down and sleep" before Bresson was satisfied). Bresson's attention to detail is no mere mania. Although he has made only four films in fourteen years, they have enabled him to perfect a new and powerful style of film-making.
This photo [bottom right; click to enlarge] was taken in 1956 at the Montluc prison near Lyon. It shows Bresson, then nearly fifty, Charles Le Clainche and François Leterrier during the shoot of Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut to give it its beautiful full title. Not knowing that, you could easily think it was taken in 1943 when André Devigny, the resistance fighter was incarcerated there. (I adore how B. holds his cigarette). Bresson thought that the soul is in the hands. Now both Devigny, and Bresson, who made the film about him, are dead. Dying within a few months of each other. But the two young men in the photo, just under and over twenty at the time, should still be around, in their 60s and 70s. I do not know if either of them appeared in another film, but they live with the conviction that they helped to make one of the truly great films about man's spiritual and physical triumph over the forces of terror.
Photo by Jean-Louis Castelli
Transcript
Meeting Bresson
I only met Robert Bresson once, in the mid 80s. Jean-Marc Henchoz, the producer of L'Argent, invited me to have lunch with Bresson in a small restaurant on the Ile Saint-Louis, where Bresson owned a house on the quai. Bresson had written a script based on a novel by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, which he called La Grande Vie. It is summer. Two girls in Paris have no money, but want to go on holiday none the less. It ends badly. Henchoz was to produce and I was to handle world sales. The lunch went well, B. was relaxed, and later in the street, walking him back to his house, a slight breeze made his hair stand up and with the sun shining through it, it was a ravishing spring day, I said to him: "Now you look like Abel Gance." He was pleased.
What happened then, was like something out of a dream: I raised my share in one afternoon, between Heinz Ungureit of ZDF and Jeremy Isaacs of Channel 4. Henchoz, too, secured his (much bigger) share. Once the money was in place, everything changed. Bresson now felt, that he did not really want to do La Grande Vie: to shoot in the summer among all those holiday makers on the seaside worried him. And peu à peu, it turned out that what he really wanted to do was his old project La Genèse. We were in a fix. Our agreements were for La Grande Vie and not for La Genèse, a much more complex and expensive production. Finally, after several months, we reluctantly pulled out. And this why L'Argent is Robert Bresson's last film; and he never made La Grande Vie or La Genèse.
Andi Engel
