A Conversation with Jacques Tati*

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A Conversation with Jacques Tati* Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

Cahiers: The first question we have is: How do you come up with a film like Play Time? How do you write it? Jacques Tati: You have to distinguish between a visual film and one that is thought out and written. Play Time is completely unlike a literary film; it is written in images, more like a ballet. I actually draw the pictures, although my drawings are not really very good, and so I tell my story in images. The dramatic structure comes from this vision. I know my films by heart, and when I am on the set, I never look at the script. Cahiers: Seeing the film, it is hard to imagine what the script might look like . . . Tati: Well, technically speaking, the preparation is no different than what you have with any other film. The camera crew and the assistants all have to know the shots and their numbers. Once this initial work is done, they handle the technical work. Naturally, I check the angles of the shots myself. Then it is up to me to make sure that everyone gets the feeling that we are not on a film set. I have to create a certain ambiance, so we joke around a lot. I do a fair bit of shouting. I might grab a guy who hasn’t closed a door properly, and the actors (and there are, after all, quite a few of them in the film) often say to me at the end of the day, “We don’t feel as if we have done any work.” That’s why you sense this naturalness with the people in Play Time; it’s not exactly that anything goes, but certainly it is more natural. They are not act- ing. In order to achieve this effect, I don’t look as much for actors as for natural “types.” If some very thin fellow comes into the office, and he talks really fast, then I think he might get angry easily. On the other hand, if I see someone who casually slumps down in his chair, then I think I shall have him wait in the office. Do you see what I mean? It means that I have to do a lot of character research at the beginning. I don’t have what you might call a filing system, but I do walk around a lot. If I see a couple of real street kids, then I ask them to be in the film. I don’t ask them to make anything up; they just have to be themselves. Actually, I did that rather more in Les Vacances de

* Appearing in Cahiers du Cinéma 199 (March 1968), the conversation “Le champs large” (The wide field) was conducted by Jean-André Fieschi and Jean Narboni.

Monsieur Hulot than in Mon Oncle, which was more of a comedy in the traditional sense, and that is why I think it has aged less well than Les Vacances. In Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, for that reason, the people really felt like they were on vacation. I saw the film again, a few months ago, with some students, and I was very happy, not so much with myself, but with the fact that the actors behaved just as people might today at the beach. That is very impor- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 tant; time lets you see things as they are, and you can see what is natural and what is overdone. Cahiers: To get back to the script, it seems to us that the structure of a film like Play Time could very well be shown on paper with highly complex graphic designs . . . Tati: Unfortunately, I think you must have seen the film with the intermission. I am upset with the Empire about that, and I am doing everything I can to get it changed. The structure is much clearer without the intermission. When you see the film straight through, you can see much better that everything that looks serious and a bit stiff in the first part becomes funny in the second part. For example, look at the German businessman—the guy with the soundproofed door—and how he changes his behavior at the Royal Garden; he went along with it, and he is not at all a funny guy himself. This is true of all of the characters. Take the American women who see the same lampposts, the same roads, and the same airport as they did when they arrived, and yet they are freer because the party is still going on (as it often is). Just because you build a modern building doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it; all you need is for something somewhere to go a little wrong to bring things back to normal. That is why my dramatic composition is important. The characters are not just picked out at random. If all you see is a series of sequences: Orly, the offices, the display stands . . . then you are not seeing the film. Now, I can’t deny that, when you see Hulot looking for the office manager in the maze of offices, there is a certain length to that, but the length is necessary. The prefect of police complained that it took him a week to get used to the new police station because it was too modern, and because the corridors were too long. If it takes the prefect of police a week to find his way around, then can’t we give Hulot a few minutes to get used to the building? So this is my understanding of the evolution of film comedy (Play Time is, after all, a film that is supposed to be a comedy). A fellow they called Little Titch made the first funny film. It was a music-hall act called “Big Booth,” and it was a really remarkable act. All they did was film it. You can find it in London, at the British Film Institute, and everyone should see it. Everything that has been done in film comedy starts from that. Afterward, everything came from the music hall—I mean the great school of Keaton, Chaplin, Max Linder, etc. But film comedy has evolved. At first, we see a character before us with a label that says: “I am the funny man for tonight, I know how to jug- gle, fall in love, be a musician, a gagman, etc.” After that, we get Laurel and A Conversation with Jacques Tati 111

Hardy, two characters, and one of them is the straight man just like in the circus. Hardy is the whiteface clown, and Laurel is Auguste. As I see it, they are the ones who brought about the critical change in comic cinema, and that change came about not just because there was a straight man in the act, but because they both became, each one of them and at the same time, straight man and Auguste. After a time, Auguste would take over from the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 straight man, and vice versa. Then this pattern evolved a bit more, and you have the Ritz Brothers, and there were three of them. They passed the cracks and gags around between them like you pass a rugby ball. One would open a door, the other would go through it into the room, and the third would have the joke. Then you have the Marx Brothers, and after that Hellzapoppin’, where everyone is in the gag and adds to it. In my own work, I have followed this evolution, and so, instead of having it be Hulot, as in Les Vacances, who takes on all, or almost all, of the gags in the film, I have tried to give the gags to other characters according to which character is best suited to carry it off. So it isn’t Hulot who presses a button to see how it might sound when it announces a character in an office. Instead, I choose the character best suited for the job, and in this case, it’s a little old guy, who was actually retired, and he does it much better than Hulot could. Of course, Hulot would do it differently and with other comic possibilities; he might hit the wrong button, for example. But this little guy, he has to try hard because he is afraid of buttons, and so he is bothered by it. This is one of those points, in this evolution that I am talking about, where I think many critics have not properly seen what I have been doing. For a

Jacques Tati. Play Time. 1967. 112 OCTOBER

maître d’hôtel, the right gag, the truest gag, is to have it done by a real maître d’hôtel. If the fish dish does not fit on the shelf of the kitchen opening, then you have to find the person responsible for that; and the one who’s responsible is the carpenter who put in a 25cm wooden shelf when the dish was actually 50cm long. As a character in Play Time, Hulot is not any more important than the other characters. He fits in with them to some extent. I Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 did not want people to say, “Tati did this,” or “Tati did that . . .” No, it’s not Tati; it’s Play Time. As for Hulot, what does he do? He lends his character to the others. There is the English Hulot, the Hulot on the display stand who is about to get in an argument with the German, and the working-class Hulot, etc. Hulot is no longer a star; he is not the star of the show. There is no star of the show. We have to stand against this myth that a film must have a star. Mack Sennett, our forefather, had this lesson for us, and I have not forgotten it. So, I think I have given something to the young filmmakers. (There again there is a difference with Mon Oncle, where it was always “mon oncle” who did the gags.) One of my dreams was that Hulot might appear in other people’s films. We might see him, say, at a bus stop, or waiting on a train, or running for a taxi. So we would say, “Hey, we know him, what is he doing there?” But everything else would remain the same; the film would carry on as if it hadn’t happened. I would have really liked that. But you know how nasty people are; they would immediately think I was just trying to get a bit of publicity for myself, or something like that, and all I wanted really was to see Hulot lost in other films. I can see him easily, for example, in a restaurant scene, waiting to be served . . . When the day comes when we can laugh at this sort of gag, we shall have trouble laughing at a single character for an hour and a half. This is not about defending my own film, but no actor can be as good as some of the real characters in it. There isn’t any comic actor who would be as good as the waiter who stands there as a human coatrack and suit supply. This fellow is really fantastic. We can see that he is really uncomfortable. Because there is a tear in his trousers, he is made to stand all evening outside behind a col- umn, and, every time he exchanges his jacket or bow tie with another waiter, we can tell that his night has been totally ruined. He doesn’t have to say anything. You know, a comic actor just can’t do as well as a real porter, a factory worker, or the very important person who doesn’t get the right table at a restaurant. In the film, we actually have the commercial director of Volkswagen, as well as several big industrialists, and so on. In the Royal Garden scene, the comic actors wanted to do it for me, but you have to understand that it’s about more than just an intellectual sense of the thing. We can see people here who really know how to dig around in their pockets to get out their wallet, and we have these real, snobbish ladies who can do things that anyone else would be unable to do without falling into caricature. It is the same with the American ladies. There are twenty-five of them, and A Conversation with Jacques Tati 113

they are the wives of the officers of SHAPE [Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe]. They turned up with hats. I had not asked for flowered hats, I had just said that it had to be cheerful because it was springtime. They were very relaxed, and they chatted a lot, and they even came out with some very good expressions (unfortunately, rather hard to translate). They really got into it. I didn’t have to ask them to look this way or that; they just did it. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Cahiers: What makes the film funny is not so much the gags coming one after the other, it’s more the multiple relations between the gags themselves within a single sequence. This is, no doubt, one of the major effects of having the wide screen. Tati: Yes, of course. Look, I always start from something that I myself find funny. So, for example, I don’t laugh the hardest if I am just sitting next to a restaurant waiter who is making faces and I can see his expression. I find it much more funny if I am actually on a café terrace, and I have this window open wide onto the street. Hence the wide screen; it’s the same window. Financially, this was rather difficult, but I had to have it and there was no way to get around it. I had to have this window and not a tiny skylight; it had to be a proper big window. I get the biggest laugh when I imagine for myself what a policeman might be saying to a driver over there who has just run a red light. It is not the dialogue between them that makes me laugh; it’s the very fact that I cannot hear anything at all. I can tell from their gestures that it’s all very serious at the beginning, then things calm down a bit, and then it gets heated again. This movement, hot and then cold, etc., gets me interested, and so I might add various other comings and goings with people stop- ping, looking, listening, and all with different reactions, or perhaps having to cross to the other side of the street to avoid the group; all of these relation- ships are what will make me laugh. There is a woman who has just been shopping; she’s left her dog at home, and she’s in a hurry. She makes a slight movement showing impatience. On the other hand, next to her, there’s a driver, and he’s very calm. This situation suits him very well because he can take the time to look around and check out a young girl. This is how I work. It is even clearer in the Royal Garden scene where there is no cut at all; everything follows on just like in a ballet. A waiter uncorks a bottle, and this leads inevitably into something else; there is no cut to a shot showing a fish, and then a box of matches, and there is no shot showing that they will light the fish with the matches. All you have is what you might see in a restaurant. A moviegoer once said something to me that pleased me very much. He said that after a time you really wanted to go into the Royal Garden. But if you don’t pay attention to what is going on in the film, then you’ll get bored. That’s obvious. If you spend your time waiting for something that’s not in the film, then you will miss what is there. There is nothing in the film that is there just to create an effect. Just because a door opens, it doesn’t mean there is going to be a holdup! 114 OCTOBER

The new cinema did not start last week. The new cinema has existed as long as cinema has existed. We filmed Jour de fête with a technical crew of eight, in natural settings, and we rented a carousel, etc. That was no different to the nouvelle vague, because it was also going against big commercial cinema. I agree completely with the nouvelle vague on that. I am not going to cast Sophia Loren as a young foreigner who comes to visit Paris. I film in order to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 film what I want to film. So, I don’t feel as if I am part of the old school since I am actually doing the opposite of what normally happens with a film comedy. If I had copied others, then I would have just made a few changes to the established way of doing things, but I am not interested in that. That sort of thing does not do much of anything. I think—and this might be a bit pretentious of me—that with Play Time I have made a contribution to the young cinema. Of course, I don’t mean that the young filmmakers should film in 70mm, I’m just saying that I think I have opened a few doors and done some things that have not been done before, and these things are doable. This is what shocked me the most about some of the critics’ reactions to the film. If they saw the film’s weaknesses, then that is fine, and it will help me with the next one (if I stopped making mistakes, then I would stop straightaway), but they missed the reason the film was made, and I just cannot understand that. There are people who are much less sophisticated who have gotten it. Then again, they try to trip me up. If I had really wanted to attack modern architecture, then I would have chosen something really ugly, and there you have lots of choices. I could have used any number of jerry-rigged buildings with ill-fitting doors. But what would I be doing? Becoming a judge of architects? That’s not my place at all. In fact, I went to a great deal of trouble to make sure that no architect could criticize my set. I went for the most beautiful lines, and I looked at Germany; I looked everywhere. The Royal Garden is built just as well, better even, than the Lido! These are fine buildings with very beautiful lines; you only have to look at the photographs. My job is not to criticize, it’s to bring a little smile and to say, “If you want Monsieur Marcel, at Orly, it’s the door on the left!” Recently, I was in Portugal, in the most chic hotel in Lisbon. I had the most sumptuous room with a huge bathroom and a television that didn’t work; it was a real miniature Play Time. I got a little bored, and I thought I’d take a bath. The tile floor was immaculate, and the chrome fittings gleaming . . . so I turn on the faucet and . . . splat and splash! The water does not go into the bathtub; it goes off to the side. I phone the reception and tell them that the water is not going into the bathtub, and they send up this boy. He duti- fully notes that the water is not going into the bathtub, and they call the manager. Now we are all in the hallway. The manager is rather embarrassed, and he asks me if I would like a drink. I say yes. So we all have a drink, the cleaning ladies turn up, and before long it’s the party of the century in A Conversation with Jacques Tati 115 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

Tati. Play Time. 1967.

Lisbon. Really, they could have told me to go ahead and take my bath—“Go ahead, it won’t bother us!” Before all that happened, the place was just god- forsaken. That’s what I wanted to get across with Play Time, and that is the reason why the intermission is such a big problem. It comes just at the point where things are about to get a bit out of control. And it’s at that point that you want to send the moviegoers off to the bar for a drink? No, that just messes up the whole dramatic effect. The intermission turns it into a film with two acts. It’s not Dumas; it’s not The Three Musketeers or Twenty Years After! No, it’s all one piece! Cahiers: In the classic gag, with Sennett for example, you have one man strug- gling with one object, or you have a hundred people in the frame, but they are all going in the same direction. In Keaton’s Cops, you see him pursued by five hundred policemen. In Play Time, on the other hand, there often are a hundred people in the frame, but each one is doing their own thing. This is very novel. Tati: In Hulot it was already a bit like that. Except here, of course, you have more people. But what you say is true. Still, five hundred cops running after Keaton couldn’t be done today. Why? Because people would see it as too exaggerated. Today (and I am speaking for myself), you have to do just the opposite. A guy runs a red light, a cop blows his whistle, and another cop comes along; they start to gesticulate . . . At least, that is what you have in Play Time. In a nightclub, you have those who do the waiting on tables, you have those who do not wait on tables, those who spend their time chatting, the 116 OCTOBER

snobbish woman who meets another snobbish woman, the distraught, rather frantic manager, etc. It’s not Hulot who leads all of them along, like Keaton led the five hundred cops. The main idea is not a single action; it’s simply (at least in the second part) the opening of a new nightclub with all that goes along with it. That’s all it is. In the maze of offices or in the display stands, it’s the same idea. You have to go into all that along with Hulot, but not expect- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 ing that it is going to lead to anything spectacular. A guy emerging out of an 80m corridor is something you can see anywhere. In the Esso building, the corridors are even longer, and people almost have to pack a lunch because it’s so long! The idea I am after is that each person has his or her own little problem to solve. There is the guy who is quite happy to live in his modern little apartment, and so he does what people do in the Parly 2 [shopping cen- ter]; he says, “Look at this view,” and you look, and you see another building that is exactly the same as the one you are in. In Play Time, when Hulot’s friend gestures to show what’s there on the other side, if you don’t think that there is going to be exactly the same thing, then it’s not going to be funny. Cahiers: These general principles that you are talking about here, they are not just true for film comedy. In Play Time, there is a whole rethinking of traditional editing. We could produce some very complicated examples, but let’s stick to something simple. When Hulot looks at the American businessman who is sitting in the chair next to him, the viewer’s eye goes from one to the other without being able to take in both at once. The comic effect comes from this imposed movement on the eye . . . Tati: Yes, because at that point the important thing is that Hulot is almost more surprised than the audience. It’s as if Hulot is in the audience himself, and he is saying to himself as he looks at the American, “I shall never be able to pull off a stunt like that!” But you’re right in that I do think that the principles behind Play Time are equally valid for dramatic cinema. I’ll try to give you an example. Imagine a scene in which a woman who has lost her husband comes home after the ceremony in the cemetery, and she is sad, and let’s imagine this is the end of the film. We have two ways to edit this scene. The camera is positioned in front of the door. The woman opens the door (we have followed her up to this point with a tracking shot), then we pan to show that coat rack where her husband used to hang his coat. She hangs her scarf on it, and we pan back a bit, and then we focus on her expression. She is sad. Then we cut, and we use a reverse shot to show the desk where her husband used to work in the evenings. We go back to her, focusing in on her as she collapses into a big armchair. Since we have picked a very fine actress for this role, she carries the weight of the world in her expression. That is one technique. But if I were to film this scene, I would use a second technique. (I would not use the first technique because it is an academic language that has been thoroughly worked through.) A Conversation with Jacques Tati 117

The camera is inside the room, and it shows the whole room. Right away, you have the difficulty of the establishing shot. You have to find the right angle from which to film all of the events in the scene. So in the establishing shot, you have to have first the sound of the door opening. The woman enters the room in which she has lived with her husband. She goes forward, and she is going to hang her shawl on the coatrack, but here we are Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 not going to cheat, it has to be the coatrack that is in the room. Another difficulty arises with the desk; for the establishing shot, the desk has to be at the right spot in order for her not to miss it as she looks. She looks at it quickly, and then she moves to the armchair, and then, from behind, we see her legs collapse and she falls into the armchair. We feel her sadness all the more if we see this from behind her and in front of all of these objects that are now bereft of their owner, her husband. I would end the story there. Naturally, I am making my own case here, but it is up to the director to make this choice. The difference is that my method demands a bit more attention and a bit more imagination from the viewer. The shot that I have just briefly described takes about a minute. If, during that minute, the viewer does not pay attention, then he will no doubt wonder what the woman is doing and why it could not all have happened more quickly. This is the main problem in Play Time. In the nightclub, it would have been much easier to edit the scene in the usual way. As it is, you do not sense the few camera movements that there are (these movements are there, but you do not notice them; as, for example, when the camera moves in on the fish). The difficult part is getting it right that the fish is a fish, and that the model airplane that melts is an airplane. If I had done a close-up shot of the airplane, then everyone could see it clearly, but this is not just a gag for the sake of it. It’s a model plane that melts because people are hot, and so, at the same time, you have to show them sweating profusely at the bar; it’s all part of the whole. That way you have both cause and effect in the same frame. If you show a mean guy throwing a cream pie, and then you cut to a second shot that shows another guy getting hit with it, then that’s not going to work for a young audience today. You only have to listen to what they say in front of the television. They say it all the time: “Oh, we can see how that’s done,” and they turn it off. Techniques like that are useless today. In Play Time, we could have shown the door breaking by having a series of shots showing the handle, and then a shot of the glass breaking, and then a shot of the doorman’s face, and so on. But what we have is the doorman looking at his reflection in the glass, and the handle is right there in front of him; so, we are not cheating in any way, there is no cut, and the door breaks in the same shot. It’s more beautiful that way, don’t you think? Cahiers: This is a rather banal question, but where do you get your ideas for gags? Is it from observation, imagination, or a mixture of both? 118 OCTOBER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

Tati. Play Time. 1967.

Tati: I’ll give you an example. This is something that happened to me when I was out in the country. Madame Tati had an uncle called Michou who had a little maison de campagne out near Dreux. This house was surrounded by a big yard, and there was a chicken coop and a woodshed. So I’ll show you how a natural gag gets put together. It was after dinner, and we were all downstairs. There were about six or seven of us, and they wanted to play cards. I am not much for cards, so I took out a book and I sat down in an armchair. One of the guests, who was really very ordinary and quite a nice man, got up and said, “Please excuse me. I cannot stay. I have to get up early tomorrow.” So he went out. We could hear it raining really hard outside—it was quite a storm. The house was about two hundred feet from the garden gate, and naturally it was pitch black outside. Anyway, he went out, and everyone went back to the card game. Then about half an hour later (I am not making this up—you don’t make these sorts of things up), there’s a knock at the door. Everyone wonders rather nervously who it might be at such a time of night, and we go to open the door. It’s the charming little man, utterly soaked, and he says very politely and calmly, “Do excuse me, please, I don’t seem to be able to find the gate.” Now, this is where imagination comes in. Since I knew the yard quite well, I tried to imagine where he had gone. Where on earth could he have gone? He must have bumped into the chicken coop, and I did seem to remember hearing a bump from that direction, but I had given it no mind at the time. He must have tried to go out through the woodshed. Well, I must have imagined this attempted exit and this run around in the garden in A Conversation with Jacques Tati 119

a way that was really funnier than it was in reality. Knowing all of the possible pitfalls that were there for him, I could easily imagine an extraordinary story for myself. I laugh every time I think about it, and I wonder where he could have gone and what he got up to during that half an hour. Since there were some cows there too, it’s a story that became quite fantastic in my mind, while in actual fact perhaps nothing really happened at all. So, I was able to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 come up with a completely novel comic composition, and the others in the room noticed nothing at all and found it all very ordinary. So to answer your question, I think that this example shows very well how imagination can help out observation. Cahiers: Play Time also has many characters who disappear for half an hour, and the viewer wonders where they have gone . . . Tati: Life is like that. Someone turns up, parks his car, and disappears; you forget him, and then he comes back an hour later. I was interested in basing an entire comic composition on that, taking into account these natural patterns. Obviously, here again, this requires quite a different sort of attention on the part of the viewer. This is an idea that I have had since the very first films I did, since the short films I made even before Jour de fête. It’s not about change for the sake of change. I am not interested in that. This is an important idea that I take very seriously. If it seems that I am just defending myself in a systematic way, it’s not just me being pretentious. I would be very suspi- cious of a director who did not like his own films, or of a painter who did not like his own paintings. It’s precisely because you like your films that you want to work on them, even if other people don’t want to watch them. A painter has to love his own paintings even if other people will not have them in their homes. As you know, the Impressionists couldn’t sell their work at first. As for me, when I look at my films, my trajectory is really quite simple. I got a bit lost with Mon Oncle, and then, with Play Time, I got back to what I really enjoy. Play Time is much closer to Les Vacances than it is to Mon Oncle. I felt more comfortable filming Play Time than I did filming Mon Oncle. I was, you know, a bit afraid of color in Mon Oncle, and I went too far with the tones. Arpel’s house is much too unpleasant. Of course, pink gravel like that really does exist, but I didn’t have to put it in there. Still, having said that, it was still not fair to say that, there again, I was attacking modern architecture. It’s only because Arpel wants to impress people that he put in those curvy paths and those fish fountains, and that’s what makes it all so unlivable. If the house had gone to people who were more sure of themselves and more intel- ligent, then it would have been a different story. Obviously, I am no expert, but I can’t imagine myself saying to an architect, “Don’t just build me a school with good exposure to light. Build me a really shitty school with tiny windows with old wooden frames painted dark brown so it will be just as sad as it used to be with the schoolchildren all wear- 120 OCTOBER

ing black overalls!” And that would be so fine, and then everyone would say, “Bravo! It’s terrific!” Or, if I were to say, “Don’t ever build a new hospital, because the old one was so charming. You know, we passed around the basin, and if someone spit and missed, then we passed back it again.” Look, I am not for that at all. Take Dubuisson [the architect], for example, he lives on the top floor Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 of the building that he has built himself, at the Pont de Neuilly. In the evening, he can see the whole of Paris lit up before him. I don’t see any reason why he would want to go live in a basement. I’m not criticizing that; I just want to bring a little humor to it. It’s as if people are all a bit dazzled by the set, and they just can’t get used to it. They get all out of sorts and bad-tem- pered because someone has given them a car! The problem is, what gets made is fine for those at the top of the class, but there are forty pupils in a class. The other night, I had dinner with two of the engineers who are working on the Concorde. They have a fantastic life; they go twice the speed of sound, and they think they might go four times the speed of sound. A 75mm shell would never hit the Concorde because the Concorde flies faster than a 75mm shell! But what about those who are not top-of-the-class engineers? What about them? Someone who simply uses a fridge might be happy with it for a week, but then if a manufacturer comes out with a new fridge with the only difference that it has a new handle where you have to push instead of pull, or pull instead of push, then he will want that fridge. It’s the same with cars. They make automatic cars now where you don’t have to change gears, even though the real joy of driving was always to know just how many seconds to stay in first before brrr . . . brrr . . . brrroum . . . chang- ing to second. That was the best part. So what happens now? In America, everybody gets bored, and the snobbish thing to do is to go get a 4 CV so that you have to change the gears yourself. So, once again, you can see people trying to actually participate a bit in what they are doing. This is precisely what I was looking for when I made Play Time. I wanted to get people to participate more, to let them change the gears for themselves, not to have me do all the work for them. All the risks I took with the film were for that. If, as a director, you always have to dot all of the i’s, then life isn’t worth living; you are just one of the crowd. Cahiers: Looking at the test chart on the wall over there, it seems that you hesitated for a moment about which format to use. It’s hard to imagine Play Time in CinemaScope, for example. Tati: I did hesitate a bit, and in fact the film that you now see is not really in 70mm. I cheated a bit by cropping the image on the left and right, and I slipped in some small strips of negative here and there. So I was able to get closer to VistaVision; the screen is actually slightly squarer than what you get with 70mm. A Conversation with Jacques Tati 121

These questions do not seem to bother the people around here much, but the Americans are very surprised by the quality of the 70mm that we got. I think this is because in the States, a very large part of the bud- get in these big productions goes to the actors, and here it all went to technical production. Cahiers: You certainly get the feeling that each decision you made led logically to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the next: wide screen, almost monochrome color in the first part, static shots, etc. Tati: I did want the set to be quite cold at the beginning of the film. I wanted to get across the feeling of being a prisoner and of not being at home. You were talking about photography. Well, what does it mean for a director of photography to film in color? It means that you have to film the colors that the director chooses. If you give him a living room with mauve chairs and violet curtains, then of course he is going to have to film these violet curtains. The quality of the cinematography comes from the tones used to bring off the set. I did not want the viewers to be distracted or bothered by the colors. Before starting the film, I ran a few tests. I had a very large photo taken of Orly, in black and white, and I showed it to various people who knew the airport well, and I asked them to color in the photo from memory. I did this with about a dozen people, and not one of them, not a single one, put the same colors on the chairs or the walls. That convinced me, therefore, that the colors should not be allowed to distract the viewers’ attention and draw it away from the characters. If you want to see a character in an office, then it has to be the character that carries the color and not the set. If you have a number of characters, and they are all wearing ties, then you have to put the red tie on the one that you want to stand out. If your main character is wearing a black tie, and then an extra walks by with a red tie, then it’s the extra that you will look at, and you lose the effect. Color is not really part of the set; for me, it’s more a fundamental part of the narrative. Color has a greater tendency to distract the eye, and so, for that reason, it’s much harder to work with. All I did was to have the NOENTRY sign be red because if it were black then no one would believe it. It’s the same with a level crossing; it has to be red and white, and you can’t change that. So the buses are green, and the flags are red, white, and blue. I only used colors where it was a case of being certain. Going back to my little test with the Orly airport, if I ask people to color in a NO ENTRY sign, then everyone will color it red. That’s the principle I followed. This way you can follow the action better, and color does not get in the way; quite the opposite, it can be a support to the action. But I’m not trying to put forward a thesis on color here. Of course, if you want to show a woman whose apartment is in bad taste, then you can put stripes everywhere. Cahiers: Yes, but even here you do not take the easy road. The inside of Hulot’s army buddy’s apartment is surely in bad taste, but you have to figure that out. It’s not there on the surface. 122 OCTOBER

Tati: That came about because of a little difficulty we had. The office manager, the one that Hulot runs after throughout the first part, lives in the adjoining apartment. So I had to simplify the set a great deal so as to give the impres- sion that it is an identical apartment. I had to avoid putting in anything out of the ordinary. As it is, for me, this evening in front of the television is one of the most horrible and uncivilized evenings you could imagine. People are Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 drinking in secret, picking their noses, and no one is looking, etc. Since the shot is done in such a way that you can’t see the adjoining wall, people pass- ing by in the street could have stopped and said, “What sort of relaxing evening is this?” I should perhaps have done that, you know, have a passerby figure in the shot. Cahiers: We don’t see it that way. For us, the remarkable thing about this scene is really that these people are pretty much living in the street, and yet no one sees them. Tati: I find it rather too long. For the new version, this is one of the scenes that we shall change. Cahiers: The problem of length is hard to figure out because it is often a very sub- jective thing. We have seen the film three times, and each time it seems shorter. Tati: Look, you can’t deny that the film is full of repetitions. I like them very much myself. For example, I like it when a fellow tries to open a door, and he can’t do it, and then he tries again, and again he can’t do it. Most moviegoers don’t like that. For most people, the gag with the neon arrow at the Royal Garden is there two times too many. Cahiers: There again we do not see it that way. Take the demonstration of the broom with headlights. The second time, we see all of the steps involved in the demonstration, and it is that much more effective because Hulot is looking the other way. Tati: You add fuel to my fire there, and I’m so glad to hear it because you have really seen what I was trying to do. But, to be honest, you seem to be the only ones who do see this sort of thing. There aren’t many people who know and love the cinema as Bazin did. In most cases like this, I get a lot of rough criti- cism because, unfortunately, people make no attempt to understand why I do things the way I do, and they say that I repeat things because I don’t have many ideas and I just want to make the most of the few jokes that I do have. But I have to admit that there are some useless repetitions such as the halo over the priest’s head. We could certainly have used that only once. So it is a little weakness of mine, and you can see it also with the plumber who uses his length of drainpipe to steal a drink. Cahiers: Not at all, that works very well too. We can see that it’s a habit of his. Tati: Well, then you will catch me out when you see the next version! But I can’t help it. As you know, it’s the distributors who make these decisions. I don’t have the money to make a film like Play Time just as I please. Still, I can’t let A Conversation with Jacques Tati 123

it bother me. I have always had to make cuts to my films, but I always keep the negative, and I shall soon release the complete version of Mon Oncle, which, believe me, is ten times better than the one you have seen. In that film, the long passages were really necessary, and, paradoxical as it might seem, the film feels longer without them! They made me cut the scenes where the kid gets bored in Arpel’s house. He goes by the terrace three Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 times, and they made me cut two of them. So now what? He is not bored. By cutting a contrast effect, they destroy the meaning of the whole scene. I was also criticized for the scene where Hulot goes up three flights in his house at night. They said, “You keep starting it all over.” But this was actually a different thing because I was using the same principle for day and for night with the only difference being that he was using the timer switch. He pressed the button to light up the second floor, and then, when he got to the second floor and he was about to press the button that lights up the third, the light on the second floor goes out (since the apartments are so spread out in the building). Finally, we see the place in complete darkness, and Hulot is once again at the bottom because the timer never gave him the time to get to the third floor. They also made me make cuts to Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot, and that was absolutely catastrophic because the producer had the bright idea to throw away the negatives, so I can’t recreate a complete version. There were things in the original that you would have liked, I’m sure. In the cemetery scene, for example, you can see the gag with the wreath, but it’s not enough. In the original version, we see them going off to a café afterward for a drink, and then, the next day, we see the four friends from the funeral, and they are at the beach. You get the feeling that they had needed Hulot in order for the funeral to end in such a convivial way. There is one of them on the beach still dressed in his mourning black! You have to fight every step of the way. At my age, it gets extremely tir- ing. Here’s another thing: I had wanted to do Les vacances in color, but the producer didn’t have the money, and I have always regretted that. I had this idea of showing everyone at the start with very white skin, and then, as the holiday went on, they would get more tanned. But they would not all tan the same; some would not get much of a tan, others would turn red, etc. You can see how color would help there. Then, suddenly, a new person would turn up and he or she would be completely white. So there were interesting things I could have done with that. Did you know that Jour de fête was filmed entirely in color? The film you see now is just a black-and-white print of a color film. Cahiers: For some directors, color is part of the set. For you, however, from what you have been saying, color is really a means of indication. All of the examples you have given show that. It is certainly true of Play Time if we think of the rosettes of the Légion d’honneur on the portraits of the important public 124 OCTOBER

figures. It is also a sign of association. The tourists manage to all find each other because of the color of their catalogues. Tati: Nowadays I have to do remixes because of the cuts they ask me to make, and when I do this I work with black-and-white reels. Working that way, there is no longer any film at all, it’s meaningless. Play Time in black and white is incon- ceivable. All the time you would be asking, What’s going on? You don’t see Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the buttons light up; you don’t see the rosettes of the Légion d’honneur; you can’t pick out the office manager because he’s lost in the crowd. The drug- store scene is all held together by the green neon light. It loses all its meaning without it. Cahiers: There is another aspect that is just as important and just as meaningful as color, and that’s the sound, with its remarkable interplay between audible and inaudible utterances. Tati: For the most part, you hear just bits and pieces, and these are very stereo- typed. You hear things like “Vendeur!” or “Table for two . . . ,” “Est-ce que vous avez la carte?” “Court-circuit” (when there is a short circuit!). You can hear names, “Madame Devancier!” (we don’t know why she is called Madame Devancier!), and then “Table 24, bordure de piste,” “Ah! L’attraction!” . . . There too I get a lot of flack because people say they can’t hear anything. But if you have to get rid of all of the repetitions, and if you have to make it so that everyone can hear absolutely everything, then it would no longer be Play Time. I should have just made a short film, and then everyone would have been happy. Cahiers: Did you ever expect that the film would take so long to make, that you would need a number of years? Tati: It wasn’t the filming that took so long. The overriding problem was the con- struction of the set. At the start, we were going to film in natural settings, and I thought there would be enough modern buildings available for us to use. However, as we asked for permits to do the filming, we slowly realized that we could do a few shots at Orly (at huge expense, mind you), but there was no way that we could film a whole sequence of shots. You can’t just stop the air traffic for weeks because Tati has turned up to film. So we couldn’t film at Orly. After that, we said, “Let’s go film the maze of offices at B.P. because that’s an ultra-modern building. It’s perfect.” But we had the same problem with that, and then the same thing happened with the supermarket; everywhere we wanted to go, they couldn’t just stop working and let us film. So we were in a panic because we had all this money to make the film but we had nowhere to film it. As you all know, we settled for the set at Joinville that everyone knows about. We got permits from the city of Paris, and then, of course, it was what you get with any apartment-building project: “Almost done. Just a couple of coats of paint . . . ,” and it takes ages. We had to bring in the bulldozers, level off the ground, and then, one piece after another, we built a city. All the excess time went into that because A Conversation with Jacques Tati 125

when I film, I do it as fast as anyone else. Then we did have some interrup- tions. Financial difficulties caused us to stop for a month here, two months there; that’s how it was with Play Time. What bothered me most was that people came from all over the world to look at our set—they came from Russia, Germany, America, but nobody came from Paris; that was the only place they didn’t come from. The young filmmakers could have filmed there. Look, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 there was everything: plumbing, traffic lights, and since the buildings were on casters, you could change the set as you liked. The thing that really set us back was that you couldn’t start until everything was finished, and that was because of the importance of the establishing shot. I couldn’t go in there and do a few close-ups beforehand. And everything is in glass; you can see the inside and the outside simultaneously. You have the people walking about inside the building and the cars going by on the outside in the street. So it was all tied up together. I get journalists asking me how much it all cost, and I find that a bit off. When you are invited to dinner, the hostess doesn’t say to you, “Why don’t you sit over here, my husband bought this chair last year for 40,000 old francs. Would you like another piece of pie? It comes from the very best pâtissier, the most expensive in St-Germain-en-Laye.” I have no time for that. The film cost what it cost, and the public shouldn’t be interested in that. This is the thing with journalism: You only interest people if there are prob- lems. “So you have mortgaged your house, how did that come about? Will your wife go along with it, is she going to divorce you?” These are things that are nobody else’s business. Suffice it to say that I am happy that I made Play Time, even if some people are not happy about it. Cahiers: You always talk about your film as a funny film, but there is great sadness in it too. Tati: I had a grandfather who was Russian, and I look a lot like him. So this sadness that you mention, it comes a bit from my Slavic side; it’s this odd sense of being happy to hear sad news because we need the sad news as well. But this sadness also has its share of generosity and warmth, in the carousel scene at the end, for example. Let me say again what I said a few moments ago: People are not obser- vant enough. I’m not going to give you a lesson in observation, but when you observe things, they all look different. Everything should arouse curiosity, a leaf from a tree or a doorknob. The doorknob at the Royal Garden is there to make you laugh at your own doorknob. I walk around a lot by myself, and I look at things. One of the places I really like is the tobacconist’s across from the L.T.C. laboratories in Saint-Cloud. You can tell that all those guys there in their caps, they don’t have to broadcast what they want to say to each other, “Hey, my usual, right, otherwise . . .” “Sure, sure . . .” It’s a wonderful dialogue, and it’s completely real because they don’t just ask for a coffee and brandy, they give reasons: “Ooh, it’s chilly out . . . brr . . .” as they rub their 126 OCTOBER

hands. So you have to give a reason for having a little pick-me-up: “Well, since it’s cold out, give me a shot of cognac!” And then another guy turns up and says, “Oh dear, I’m beat, what a job, I’m sweating all over, let me have a coffee, and then why not give me a brandy, I could do with it . . .” So it works just as well whether it’s cold out or hot! I’m a great believer in the people’s language. I go to soccer matches, anywhere where there are people, and I listen. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00294/1754012/octo_a_00294.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Cahiers: What do you think of the reactions to Play Time? Tati: They have been mixed and quite contradictory. But I feel apart from all of that. You young people, you can talk among yourselves, but really, with me? Truffaut wrote me a letter that moved me very much. He says, and he is not being nasty when he says it, “Who can Tati talk with about his film?” And it’s true. Who can I talk with about my film? Tell me a director I can talk with. There is, of course, Fellini—he’s an old friend, but he lives far away, he’s in Rome. As for the French state, they don’t take cinema seriously. For them, it’s a minor art. Perhaps they are right, but since I have started, I shall contin- ue. It’s a bit late for me to become a sculptor.

—Translated from the French by Nicholas Huckle