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 struc- ture 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 nat- ural “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 some- one 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. OCTOBER 160, Spring 2017, pp. 109–126. © 1968 Cahiers du Cinéma SARL for French original. 110 OCTOBER Monsieur Hulot than in Mon Oncle, which was more of a comedy in the tradi- tional 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 pre- fect 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 hav- ing 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 open- ing, 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.