Marcel Ophuls Regis Dialogue with Philip Lopate, 1992
Phillip Lopate: It's both an honor and a bit daunting for me to be here questioning the great questioner, the great interrogator himself, Marcel Ophuls. Just to establish something of your background and the special circumstances that I think made for your unique perspective, I thought we would go through some of the basic biographical information of your childhood and upbringing. You don't have to lie down. You can sit up. It's fine.
Marcel Ophuls: No, no. I can go through the Harpo Marx thing in The Night at the Opera, drinking water while you speak.
Phillip Lopate: Poisoning. You were born in 1927 and born in Germany in fact, and I think of you as somebody who is a citizen of at least three countries, Germany, France, and the United States. Having spent your first six years in Germany and then your family left when Hitler took over and went to France and then stayed there for about seven years till 1940 and then moved to-
Marcel Ophuls: 41.
Phillip Lopate: 41, and then moved to the United States.
Marcel Ophuls: It's important because if we'd come over in 40 my father would have been a draft dodger in France, which he wasn't. We didn't come over before the war. We came after the defeat.
Phillip Lopate: After the defeat.
Marcel Ophuls: So, that's politically important.
Phillip Lopate: Oh, Okay. You, of course, your father was a great director. Max Ophuls.
Marcel Ophuls: We may disagree on some things tonight, but we agree on that.
Phillip Lopate: We agree on that. No, to me is one of the 10 greatest directors whoever lived.
Nov 6, 1992 1
Marcel Ophuls: Right all.
Phillip Lopate: And made movies such as Liebelei and The Earrings of Madame Dee and La Ronde and Letter from an Unknown Woman, another favorite of mine, and has become identified with a certain kind of romantic obsession or involvement. Someone who had a very worldly wise, gently pessimistic, you could say, take on the world. Famous also for the formal beauty of his movies, the wonderful tracking shots, the sense of fluidity. Things are always moving, but even if they're moving in a direction of sadness, they're always moving.
Marcel Ophuls: You use the word pessimist a minute ago and just before that you talked about romantic. Well first of all I'd like to say, I think that my father was able to make what in his time were known as women's pictures. Men were not supposed to see them, because he was not a romantic because he always had the saying that if you're going to talk about it, that if you're going to show passion, and if you're going to show feeling, which is really what art is supposed to be about, you have to be like a captain on a sailing boat, sentiment being the wind. And you have to sail as close to the wind as you can, and if you go into sentimentality, then the sailboat capsizes.
Phillip Lopate: Capsizes.
Marcel Ophuls: Right.
Phillip Lopate: Well he was one of those directors for whom women were at the center of his vision. You think of other directors like Mizoguchi and maybe Ingmar Bergman.
Marcel Ophuls: More Mizoguchi then Bergman because Bergman I think is a conscious feminist. He is like Antonioni, they are militant feminists.
Phillip Lopate: Right.
Marcel Ophuls: My father was not a militant feminist, as a matter of fact he profited from women, and he saw his own times, I think he was very much a realist, like Chekov or Schnitzler. Anyway, you were saying something about pessimism. One of the things he said is that he couldn't possibly imagine, he couldn't find any example in literature, in great literature, of any writer he admired who had ever been an optimist.
Phillip Lopate: We were talking about this earlier in the evening and I maintained that on some level, he was an optimist because at least his characters finally were touched by love even if they died in the process. So you could say in that sense it clashes, but did you have any of this sense when you were growing up that your childhood Nov 6, 1992 2 or your life was at all like a Max Ophuls movie? Did it feel, did it have any of this gaety, this gravity, this sense of Viennese elegance?
Marcel Ophuls: Sure. He was manic depressive.
Phillip Lopate: He was?
Marcel Ophuls: Yes. Of course. He didn't talk for days and then when he would start talking then we would start having fun. What I miss most since he died, many, many years ago, is the laughter. When he was able to. Having tears streaming down my face, other people's faces, because he was so funny, and in several languages. It was very, very funny.
Phillip Lopate: Well, we want to look at a clip from one of his movies, but before we get to that, just you spent those years in France when you were I think between the ages of, oh I don't know, six and 12 or 13 right. And then you came to the United States where your father sought work in Hollywood and not always successfully, I gather.
Marcel Ophuls: There's that Burt Bryce, how does it go, about going to the marketplace in Hollywood. His famous poem about, yes. He was out of work for four years because we did come in 41 and not when the war started. And by that time the Jewish, the German Jewish quota and the French Jewish quota and the refugee quota was filled at the major studios.
Marcel Ophuls: So, in spite of the great solidarity, which you know about because I think you're writing about it, between the refugees who tried to help each other including bringing the groceries over the weekend, we were sort of a golden welfare deadbeats.
Phillip Lopate: Well, he had to learn the American way, just as you did.
Marcel Ophuls: No, it wasn't that, I don't think so. No more than the others. No more than Billy Wilder, and the ones who came over earlier, we all had to learn the American way, but we also Middle European people, people whose inspiration came from Berlin and the Weimar republic, in fact, as we know from examples like Billy Wilder and Lubitsch adapted extremely well. That was a very good mix. It was a very rich mix for American culture in the 20th century. And it was usually work pretty fast.
Marcel Ophuls: No, it was just that we came in the middle of a war, there were a lot of other refugees and my father at that time did not have the same kind of reputation that Fritz Lang or Jean Renoir had. And so he had to wait his turn.
Nov 6, 1992 3
Speaker 1: What was it like for you when you first-
Marcel Ophuls: Lonely. Because Los Angeles, as you know, is a town, first of all, you have to wait til you're 16 to get a driver's license and you can't really see any friends because everything's very far apart. And also I was very, I loved Paris and Paris was occupied and then the war was on and so I was a wallflower and I didn't play football so I decided to become a French snob.
Marcel Ophuls: I decided that Hollywood high school was the dumps, which in many ways it was, and I decided to despise it all.
Phillip Lopate: The idea of you as a graduate of Hollywood high school boggles the mind.
Marcel Ophuls: Well, I don't, no, well later when I got into the American Army, then I started latching on to popular culture and jazz and Fats Waller because my best friend was Hal Greenberg, who was from Brooklyn and who was a piano player and who was playing piano with Art Tatum and in Tokyo we played in nightclubs and we had a wonderful time doing occupation duty in Japan, and then I became, not a militarist, but I was very happy in the American Army. I think I discovered this country and the American army was a much more interesting mix than Hollywood high school, Hollywood high school was repressive.
Phillip Lopate: Did you have any famous classmates?
Marcel Ophuls: Oh, you want any about Marilyn Monroe? Yes.
Phillip Lopate: Wait, no, I heard that Ricky Nelson was going there the time you were.
Marcel Ophuls: Yeah, no, well Norma Jean Baker supposed to have been there, but I've looked through a lot of old annuals and I couldn't find her, it was a very big place anyway. And as I say, I had a bad attendance record and so did she.
Speaker 1: So after you got out of Hollywood high, you went directly into the army then, or you went to college right then?
Marcel Ophuls: No, I went into the army and it was already the peacetime army, but legally speaking it was the wartime so that I had the privilege of studying for four years on the GI bill of rights, which was lucky because my father certainly wouldn't have paid for my studies. He didn't think that college was worth anything, unless you were
Nov 6, 1992 4 going to study medicine or engineering or something like that. He didn't believe that, he felt that that philosophy was like dancing. You should pick it up on your own.
Phillip Lopate: He didn't believe in a liberal arts education.
Marcel Ophuls: No he didn't.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: He was very Prussian.
Phillip Lopate: And did you have any ambition at that time?
Marcel Ophuls: Yeah, sure, sure. I wanted to get into films.
Phillip Lopate: Really?
Marcel Ophuls: Oh yes, as soon as. I had two ambitions, I wanted to get back to Paris soon as I could and I wanted to get into films. And my father made me become an American citizen because he said Europe is a very uncertain proposition, one day you may have antisemitism again and then you'll be happy, also by the time you retire you might get some social security from the United States. So, in order to go back to France, and he's paying my way back to France, I became an American citizen and I took the oath of allegiance so now I have those two passports. We were talking about my nationality, I am not, even though I'm born in Germany, I do not consider myself a German citizen. I have nothing against them but I'm not.
Phillip Lopate: You have dual citizenship now?
Marcel Ophuls: Can't throw us off twice.
Phillip Lopate: You have dual citizenship now?
Marcel Ophuls: Yes.
Phillip Lopate: So then you got out of the Army and you had studied what in college? Nov 6, 1992 5
Marcel Ophuls: Philosophy.
Phillip Lopate: Philosophy.
Marcel Ophuls: John Dewey and William James, pragmatism.
Phillip Lopate: Pragmatism. Yeah. And then did you want to get into movies right then? Did you try to get into movies then?
Marcel Ophuls: Yes. As a matter of fact, there was the director was working at MGM, who was a great friend of my father, you know because you're a movie buff, a man called Curtis Bernhardt.
Phillip Lopate: Oh yes.
Marcel Ophuls: Quite a good, quite a good-
Phillip Lopate: Very good. You look at his movies now and they're very stylish.
Marcel Ophuls: And he said, what do you want to go to college for? He had the same attitude my father did. He said I'll take you on the MGM lot tomorrow you can be, nepotism, you can be my assistant, Jewish nepotism. And I've always regretted not doing it because MGM is really much better than documentary filmmaking.
Phillip Lopate: Well wait, did you go on, I'm afraid, did you go onto the set and did you work for him or no? You turned them down.
Marcel Ophuls: Curtis Bernhardt? Well turned him down is a very hard word for it. No, my mother was very German house frau, and respectable and so on. She thought I should be doing some studying, and at that time I wanted to do that too, but I sort of regretted it.
Phillip Lopate: So then what happened?
Marcel Ophuls: Well, I went back to study at the Sorbonne. Found out I didn't really enjoy what passed for French philosophy at that time, at all. And I really was influenced by my American education, by American pragmatism, and Anglo-Saxon attitudes and dropped out and went to the Champs-élysées and started working as an assistant director for people like Duvivier and John Huston and Moulin Rouge and some less talented directors too. Nov 6, 1992 6
Phillip Lopate: You went to-
Marcel Ophuls: One of them, the nicest one, one of the reasons I had difficulties finding a job, by that time my father was considered a great Maestro, and was in France. And one of the younger directors who actually was talked into taking me on as an assistant, one evening when we were both getting rather drunk after work, and he was more or less my own generation. He said, you know why no one wants to take you Marcel it's because when we make mistakes we're afraid that that night you go home to your father and you tell him about it.
Phillip Lopate: What was it like working under John Houston and Moulin Rouge.
Marcel Ophuls: Oh, I was the assistant, I didn't do any serious work. I was the assistant in charge of his practical jokes and he had a very cruel sense of humor, but a very great sense of humor, and was a great personality. And that was the stage when he'd gone completely over the edge and was very megalomaniac and then we were constantly taking overtime and our paychecks at the end of the week was always about four times what it was supposed to be because we were going into silver overtime and golden overtime because he'd start working at three o'clock in the morning with 150 extras on the set and he would go off and sleep behind a bush.
Marcel Ophuls: And he was a wonderful man, and very kind and very warmhearted. But he always had one sufferer in the movie, and he was the one that the practical, I remember putting the dwarf who was doing the double fall for Toulouse-Lautrec in the long shots. You know, José Ferrer, on his knees would walk behind a cart and then on the other side the dwarf would come out and the panning shot and disappear into the distance. And this fellow, and then Houston, who was very interested in people wanted to know what this fellow did in civilian life, I mean aside from being a dwarf, and then he found out that he was a gorilla man in the circus. So I had to get the gorilla suit and put him in a cage at the circus where we went shooting and then the gorilla escaped.
Marcel Ophuls: And Elliot Elisofon, who was a great life photographer, who was supposed to be and who was his, what do you call it, who was the man who was the butt of the practical jokes, of course didn't know about it and then the gorilla, was running behind, well, it's a long anecdote.
Phillip Lopate: All right, well we get the idea, well why don't we look at our first clip, which is the only clip that is not from a Marcel Ophuls film, it's from his father Max's last film, Lola Montez, on which Marcel Ophuls actually worked. And I think we'll set the stage.
Marcel Ophuls: You mean, I didn't actually work on the other ones.
Phillip Lopate: No, you worked on them as well.
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Marcel Ophuls: I was just goofing off.
Phillip Lopate: You worked on them as well.
Marcel Ophuls: No, my father didn't want me to work with him. He used to say go and do your apprenticeship, all the foolishness all the amateurism, do it with the others, don't do it on my time. Do it on your own time.
Phillip Lopate: Well, why did he want you to work on this film particularly then?
Marcel Ophuls: He didn't.
Phillip Lopate: He didn't, but-
Marcel Ophuls: No, I mean this was the fourth or fifth opportunity of doing, and he just got tired of saying no I guess.
Phillip Lopate: Yes. Okay. Are we ready?
Phillip Lopate: So there we have an example of Max Ophuls sense of spectacle, of color, of camera movement and the-
Marcel Ophuls: And pessimism.
Phillip Lopate: And pessimism. And the woman being at the center. The typical way of viewing this phenomenon of two great directors, your father and yourself, that in a way you’re opposites, that there was a break, that he did a certain kind of thing and you did something that's very different. But I wonder if that's really true. I mean we see the sequence with all the questions, ask your questions, and then you go on and have a whole career asking questions. And in reviewing some of Max Ophuls; films, I see that they're invariably about deception and self-deception and there's also quite a bit of cruelty underneath the tenderness. The famous tenderness. Very often people do absolutely terrible things to each other. So I wonder, Mr. Ophuls, of course here's a quarter, would you answer this? What do you see as the continuity between your father's work and your own?
Marcel Ophuls: I'll give it to you for free.
Phillip Lopate: Okay. Nov 6, 1992 8
Marcel Ophuls: Incidentally, when you did tell me that you were going to pull this on me and I thought you meant the last part of the film where Peter Ustinov raffles off her kisses for a dollar. So I thought-
Phillip Lopate: This is just a quarter.
Marcel Ophuls: So I thought maybe you wanted me to kiss you, so.
Phillip Lopate: That too. That will come later.
Marcel Ophuls: Anyway, no, I think you've already indicated what the line is. There's several things and most of it was unconscious obviously, and probably still is, but when you get older you start reflecting about resentments as to between fathers and son. It was much more intuitive at the beginning. He had a great deal of influence on me, obviously not in his style because when you do talking heads and interviews you can't dolly around an awful lot, it's not possible if you're doing it. And it was just a series of accidents that brought me into documentaries. It's not my favorite form of filmmaking, far from it. And certainly it wasn't my father, my father used to say, oh yeah, right, documentaries. Yes, they also exist.
Marcel Ophuls: So, it wasn't really a choice on my part, nor was it an attempt to differentiate myself from his work. But I think your question is legitimate. I think one of the great things about this last film of his, he died two years later. As a matter of fact, he died partly because of the film, because it was such a terrible crisis film and it was the greatest, it was the greatest flop in French motion picture history, I think.
Phillip Lopate: And it was taken away from him.
Marcel Ophuls: Along with La Règle du jeu, The Rules of the Game, and Lola Montez were the two greatest flops in French film history. Because for one thing, and of course he knew this, so there was something a little bit masochistic about the whole thing, show business people know that the public will take a great many things and will cooperate in a great many ways, but they do not like being denounced. The public does not like being denounced. Yes. And whenever you're do it, and the temptation for doing it is, for people who have been in show business all their life, is very great.
Marcel Ophuls: You have to take into account that you're probably going to be destroyed by it. And Lola Montez is, in that way, a very prophetic film, a very pessimistic film, a very destructive film. And yes, it is about voyerism, it is about la société spectaculaire, it is prophetic about Geraldo and Phil Donahue and asking indecent questions and prying into people's lives and transforming people into merchandise. Transforming women into merchandise, transforming their lives and their mythology then into consumer goods. It's a prophetic film about the consumer society. And yes, my father did believe that movies were dying and it's the real reason, since he did love me very much, it's the real reason why he didn't want me to get into it. He said it's like a Nov 6, 1992 9 jockey on a thoroughbred horse who knows that he can still make it to the finish line, but who knows that the horse is going is old and is going to be tired and if another jockey comes along he won't be able to make it all the way, he sometimes spoke in metaphors.
Marcel Ophuls: Anyway, and then I think this is true. I think the two great popular art forms of the 20th century, we were talking about this earlier, are motion pictures and jazz and they both of them very American, both of them killed by what came afterwards, television and rock. And for very similar reasons because of our vulgarity, because of voyerism, because of narcissism. Because of the cultural narcissim,
Marcel Ophuls: Now this business about asking questions. Yes, I ask questions because I didn't want to use voice of God commentary and once I was forced into the ghetto of making documentary films, there aren't really 55 ways of doing them, you either use direct cinema techniques, the way my friend Wiseman does, one of the few documentary-
Phillip Lopate: With no commentary, yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: With no commentary. Or you do the TV documentary, the traditional TV documentary, with what John Grissom called voice of God commentary, which I despise because it's a way of wasting moviemaking. It's a way of selling it cheap. And yes, I tried to tell stories by using real characters and the way to get them to live on the screen is to establish a dialogue with them. And I think that's why I ask questions.
Speaker 1: Well what kind of work did you do on Lola Montez? Just curious.
Marcel Ophuls: Oh, I think it never became quite clear whether I was the second, the third, or the fourth assistant. I certainly wasn't the first.
Speaker 1: Wasn't there something prophetic also in that the film had so many problems with its producers, the producer recut it, and considering some of the problems you've had with producers there was-
Marcel Ophuls: Final cut, sure.
Speaker 1: It was like a preparation for-
Marcel Ophuls: One man, one film, sure. Frank Capra.
Marcel Ophuls: The name above the title, moral rights, you name it. Sure, again this has to do with being the heir to my father Nov 6, 1992 10 that I'm a militant for author's rights, and for the idea that film, which in many ways is a collective enterprise but financers and the consumer society, like to use this this concept of teamwork as an alibi for merchandising and for anonymity and for taking. It's very easy to become arrogant and pompous on these issues and one should try to avoid it.
Marcel Ophuls: But I think the idea that it is an artistic form and therefore it should correspond to the subjectivity of individuals. Sometimes the individual is the director, sometimes there is some other stronger personality. But no, I don't believe that Selznick is a filmmaker, I think Hitchcock is.
Phillip Lopate: Hitchcock was a filmmaker.
Phillip Lopate: I remember seeing a short film that you made in Lover 20, the compilation film. And this was during the period of the new wave and Truffaut had one of the episodes and you had another and Andre Vida, the Polish director, and Renzo Rossellinni who was Rossellini's son or brother?
Marcel Ophuls: Son.
Phillip Lopate: Son. So, there's a little bit of, kind of-
Marcel Ophuls: Nepotism,
Phillip Lopate: Nepotism opportunity for, and I think it-
Marcel Ophuls: Well it was Truffaut. Truffaut was obsessed about fathers and sons because he didn't have a father, as you know, if you've seen the 400 Blows. Like -and he had a stepfather and he didn't know his father, like Chaplain, and it's something that seems to occur in our business quite often. And therefore he had a strange kind of, since he was self-educated and since he came out of the Paris slums, like Chaplin came out of London slums, he had this great reverence and respect for people who actually were sons, who had great fathers. And this was what our friendship was based on.
Phillip Lopate: Ah. So you-
Marcel Ophuls: And then this was what our friendship was based on.
Phillip Lopate: Ah, so you both had this friendship with Truffaut and you also in a way when I saw that film it seemed as
Nov 6, 1992 11 though you were positioned to become a new wave director. The film, what I mostly remember is a long car scene or something like that, right? But I haven't-
Marcel Ophuls: I haven't seen it for 25 years.
Phillip Lopate: For 30 years. I'd love to see it again. We were unable to track down a print in the United States, there doesn't seem to be one. But anyway you made that short and you made a short on Matisse also.
Marcel Ophuls: Yes.
Phillip Lopate: It's a documentary?
Marcel Ophuls: Yes. The Matisse thing I think came first yes. It was a producer who again was a Romanian Jewish French producer, real very fat man great producer, caricature of a producer. He always smoked a cigar and, this was when television was starting up and as we want to do a pilot film on painters for American television, 20 minute films. And it was always telling about the man in Texas. He said, this has to be made for the man in Texas, and so we can't show any paintings because the only thing that the man in Texas is interested in-
Marcel Ophuls: Is artists who suffer. And I said, well Mr. Deutsche I must say if we can't film the paintings what about actors? Then we have to get actors. And he said, no, we can't afford actors. So I said, well what are we going to put on the screen if we put the paintings on, and we can't put actors on? He said, that's what I'm paying you for, that's what you should come up with. And then he wanted artists who suffered. So I went across the street and went to see Francois Truffaut and said, Francois who do you think aside from Renoir who's already been done. Who was the happiest of all the French painters in your opinion? And he said Matisse.
Marcel Ophuls: So I said well then let's-
Phillip Lopate: Let's do Matisse, that was the reverse of it.
Marcel Ophuls: Artists who doesn't suffer. So you can see I was already against, I was already a resistance-
Phillip Lopate: A troublemaker.
Marcel Ophuls: A troublemaker from the very beginning.
Nov 6, 1992 12
Phillip Lopate: But did you film Matisse while he was... no he wasn't-
Marcel Ophuls: No he was dead.
Phillip Lopate: Dead yes.
Marcel Ophuls: No, And what happened on this, if I may just add something, because again, it has to do with authors' rights. You know that there's a big exhibition now in New York.
Phillip Lopate: Which I've seen.
Marcel Ophuls: Which is the biggest one, where they've got the Ermitage stuff together and then the Bonds' collection. And it's as big as a Picasso thing. And about four or five years ago when the Matisse family was preparing the exhibition, they wrote me a very nice letter, Pierre and Jean Matisse. They were very nice people they used to when we were late during the filming, they would wrap some of the paintings up in brown paper bags and say, well, why don't you just take it home and bring it back when you're through with it?
Marcel Ophuls: It scared the hell out of me you know? I had this small car and the thing in the brown paper bag and take the Matisse home and put it up next to the television set. And it was quite an experience. Anyway, so they wrote a letter saying that having seen about 10 or 12 Matisse films, they like decided that including ones who where Matisse was still alive they had decided that mine was the fun and the best one. And they wanted to have it to run in the loop with it outside the museum with the exhibition. So I wrote the fucking, excuse me distributors.
Phillip Lopate: I think I've heard of that distributor.
Marcel Ophuls: Yes, have you? And said, well the Matisse family send them a photostat of the letter. And since they were the people who had bought some of my father's films, and I'd given them my lawyer and I'd given them some trouble on this. They were very hostile and they pretended that the film no longer existed, and that they hadn't bought it from the original producer. And then there was retrospective of my films at the Institute Lumiere in Lyon y'all some months ago. And the man who was doing it said well let's have Matisse in it. I said, well it isn't, doesn't exist anymore, the negative's gone.
Phillip Lopate: And they found them.
Marcel Ophuls: And they went to Bois d'Arcy where they have the archives. They found six prints. It wasn't negligence, with Nov 6, 1992 13 just hostility. And the interesting thing about, and this is what's important about it and why we do have to be resistance fighters, is that they would have made a lot of money. Because the exhibition is going around the world for the next 10 years. They would have cleaned up on it.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: Just vengeance, hostility.
Speaker 2: Okay. I'm trying to move this ever so gently this narrative forward of your life and after making Love at 20 you made a few fiction feature films, which I've not seen. One is Banana Peel and the other one is Feu à Volonté however you pronounce it.
Marcel Ophuls: Fire at Will.
Speaker 2: Fire at Will. Banana Peel was with Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau. And so you were starting out in some pretty heavy company and starting out as making what I understand was it was a popular comedy so...
Marcel Ophuls: I wish I could have stayed with that. It was a very successful film. It wasn't fashionable at the time because the Cahiers du Cinema at that time were going in another direction. So again, I wanted to do an American style, Cary Grant, Irene Dunne sort of thing. And it was a good movie, very successful, good box office. But after that I made very bad film. So of course everybody said, well the first thing was just a fluke because it had great stars and he was covering his ass and playing it safe. So then I had to go for the groceries and I went into television. I'm moving ahead.
Phillip Lopate: Yes please.
Marcel Ophuls: I went into television and, and started doing 15 minute reportaje things. Having A lot of fun for very little pay in the French monopoly at the time. And that's how I started on them. Then when the producers of French television suddenly had a whole evening thrust at them to do contemporary history, since I was the only one with feature experience since I was their senior director at the time because I had come from the Champs- Elysees it just threw it my way.
Marcel Ophuls: And the way it happened was that one of the two producers were in the office, it was a very small office and there were 15 of us every day. And one of them said to me, Marcel, we've got three hours to do contemporary history, archival footage. How would you like to do Munich? And I said, well, the city or the conference? They said, well naturally the conference. So 1938 you know?
Nov 6, 1992 14
Phillip Lopate: The appeasement conference.
Marcel Ophuls: Then appeasement thing. And The Sorrow and the Pity was actually just a follow up of that. And, then I got stuck in documentaries because both of these films were extremely successful.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah let me just say something about that. You know, I've read so often in statements about you that this biting the hand that feeds you attitude toward documentaries. I mean there's something to me a little disingenuous about it. It's like the burglar who makes his living as a burglar of time. He says, I get stuck being a burglar. You know, if all you do is rob people's houses then you are indeed a burglar. So if what you do is make documentaries all your life, you are a documentarian.
Marcel Ophuls: I don't deny that. But you haven't seen Banana Peel.
Phillip Lopate: I haven't, no. But, I think there's something I think that I mean let's face it, you are arguably not just a documentarian, but the greatest documentarian, the one that's-
Marcel Ophuls: Well I don't know if I am.
Phillip Lopate: No, that's for me to say. But, you don't have to agree.
Marcel Ophuls: Well I almost agree.
Phillip Lopate: You almost agree.
Marcel Ophuls: I think Fred Wiseman is at least as good as I am.
Phillip Lopate: He's very great, yes.
Marcel Ophuls: And Lanzmann has probably done the greatest historical documentary of all times.
Phillip Lopate: Well we're talking about whole careers.
Nov 6, 1992 15
Marcel Ophuls: All right well on a whole career thing I'm not inclined to disagree with you.
Phillip Lopate: One of the-
Marcel Ophuls: But one of the reasons I offer this in all honesty and without an access of false modesty. I think that if I am good, it's also because I'm entertaining. It's because of that thing hold the distance on three or four hour films where other documentarians would let the audience get bored,-
Phillip Lopate: So it's partly because you came in-
Marcel Ophuls: And it's partly because I don't like them.
Marcel Ophuls: Documentaries, I put so much effort into making them entertaining.
Phillip Lopate: Well, there is something to be said for the idea that you came in from fiction films, into documentaries. But, I'm reminded of Michael Moore saying the same thing about Roger and Me. He kept going around saying how much he hated documentaries.
Marcel Ophuls: Well he's a fan of mine.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah, he said he hated documentaries. Well, I mean to some from degree-
Marcel Ophuls: He got that from me.
Phillip Lopate: To some degree because it's like a supposedly box office poison or something like that.
Marcel Ophuls: Well that's, sure. But, there's a reason for it to be.
Phillip Lopate: The great documentarians say feh! I don't like documentaries.
Marcel Ophuls: No, listen, there's a reason for it being box office poison. Most of them are terribly though. It's one of the reasons that I did not only tend to despise documentaries, but more than that documentarians is because Nov 6, 1992 16 they make my life so difficult. Because obviously people like you tonight were kind enough to come here. You, you are of course aware that you are a tiny minority of the audience and there is something respectable about making documentaries as opposed to real show business. There's something dreadfully respectable and it's people will say, Oh, the only thing I watch on television is documentaries and PBS. And it's not true. They're lying. Because, if they weren't lying I'd be a rich man. And I'm not.
Marcel Ophuls: This is the voice of experience. So no, I'm not apologetic about it. It's just that, yes, I do feel like a prisoner and yes incidentally, on German television once in a while, these things don't get around. But I see that you have it on your list here of the four. I did Sacha Guitry. The French Noel Coward.
Phillip Lopate: Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: And I did a German adaptation on television on Sacha Guitry. And yeah, I think it was good. And I certainly enjoyed myself more than going around interviewing old Nazis who wouldn't rather make a film with Catherine Deneuve than going around asking questions of old Nazis.
Phillip Lopate: But yet you do.
Marcel Ophuls: It's not disingenuous. It's sincere.
Phillip Lopate: Okay. All right, We'll come back to that. Well you, from my understanding is that you were working at French TV and then you had a falling out with them before or during the time you were making Sorrow and the Pity having to do with the events of 1968 and the strike.
Marcel Ophuls: Well there were 15,000 of us that had a falling out.
Speaker 2: Yes, with French TV.
Marcel Ophuls: I wasn't the only one, there were 15,000 of us. But, I was one of the strike leaders. That's why afterwards, because we lost that strike. It was the only strike in 1968, which was of course part of the student uprising and Danny Cohn-Bendit. And some of you may remember this although most of you weren't born. But the night of the barricades and all of that very romantic, glamorous stuff. And people would open their window and look out and they would see the cops beating up on the students. Some of them were their kids you know? On the left bank of Paris you could open the window at night on the balcony and you could see it happening.
Marcel Ophuls: But we weren't allowed to show it on TV because it was, the Gaullist French monopoly. It was like Franco's Nov 6, 1992 17
Spain, you know. So we went on strike. It was a very normal strike. It wasn't to get the higher salary, it was for freedom of information. We wanted to have the same privilege as the BBC. And obviously we didn't get it. I didn't even wait to be fired. During the strike, which lasted for six weeks, I sent my German wife to Switzerland with a family because this was the old Jewish refugee syndrome. I thought it's the fascists of the commies came in big letter to have the family elsewhere.
Marcel Ophuls: And then she formed in Hamburg, two friends of mine in Hamburg. And so by the time the strike was over, I already had another job in Germany where I then made The Sorrow and the Pity, which was originally supposed to be made for French television.
Phillip Lopate: For French television. The Sorrow and the Pity was a revelation when it first came out, it wasn't shown on French TV, but it was shown in a theater in Paris and it quickly caught on when it came to America, it was I think such a landmark documentary that we could talk about documentary up to The Sorrow and the Pity, and documentaries after The Sorrow and the Pity. And of course it was about a chronicle of a French town during the occupation and about the larger question of France's collaboration with the Nazis and those who were heroic, those who were cowardly and those who are just ordinary.
Speaker 2: It seems to me a very happy idea that you hit upon focusing it on a French town instead of trying to do all of France. How did you, how did you come up with that idea of focusing on Clermont-Ferrand?
Marcel Ophuls: Well, I think you've answered your own question. Well this I think is an important and then exceptionally perhaps not a frivolous, can be frivolous all evening. This is a serious point about documentaries. I don't think they should ever be scripted because if you script the documentary, you're a whore. Most TV executives nowadays demand that documentaries be scripted and this is basically a treason to the form because obviously I admire Hitchcock and I admire the great filmmakers who put everything on paper and are very precise. But if I know in advance what the old Nazi or the old anti-Nazi or the young one are going to tell me or what the people, what the statesman, or the ordinary people are going to tell me. Or even if I know in advance exactly what kind of sampling of the population I'm going to have. This is already very, very dull.
Phillip Lopate: It's dead.
Marcel Ophuls: It's dead before it's born.
Phillip Lopate: Because you can't be surprised.
Marcel Ophuls: That's right, you can't be surprised. The filmmaker has to be surprised first and then hand on the surprise to the audience. I think this is the whole point of documentary filmmaking. It's also the only thing that's fun about, so it's, the only thing that makes it come alive. When you say, why did you pick a town? Well, because reality is infinite, but, a screen is like this, you have to put it in a framework. So like all, all forms of art, novels, Nov 6, 1992 18 painting in any, it's always business of content and form, which means you have to put it in a frame. And so the only thing that I am always extremely stubborn about at the beginning and a great very often the people I work with and the producers, but also the cameramen don't understand that when I'm insistent, when I say, well to do a Hollywood power plays, which I want did 40 hours for ABC news to do the Hollywood power play called Company Town about, about who has the power in Hollywood. I need the Oscar footage. If I don't have the Oscar, I can't cut from the interviews when they run out of steam, go from one interview to the other, from one producer to the other, from Deal beach and back.
Marcel Ophuls: If I don't have this self-celebration as a punctuation or if you talk about November Days, the whole idea in November Days. If the BBC asked me to do something about Germany in the year when the Berlin wall falls, it's Tolstoy couldn't do it.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah. So you need-
Marcel Ophuls: It's silly.
Phillip Lopate: So you need some focus.
Marcel Ophuls: So yeah, you need a focus. And this is what I call my coat hanger idea.
Phillip Lopate: And you had all of these ideas that you-
Marcel Ophuls: The coat hanger idea.
Phillip Lopate: The coat hanger, this is the town.
Marcel Ophuls: And then in the case of it's very banal, but it's in my opinion, was the only way of handling four years of war. And it's 35 individuals where I am to live in the town. And then of course we cheated because a lot of people who appear in the film never were in Clermont-Ferrand in their life, but mostly it's based on Clermont-Ferrand.
Phillip Lopate: And there were a few things that you didn't-
Marcel Ophuls: You could have put a pin on the map and then-
Phillip Lopate: It could have been anywhere. Nov 6, 1992 19
Marcel Ophuls: Any other place, yes. But it did have to be a place. Let me just finish very quickly on November Days, I guess you want a show a clip from it?
Phillip Lopate: I want to show a clip and I don't want to get too much into November Days because that's at the end.
Marcel Ophuls: Okay into November Days okay, well then.
Phillip Lopate: But I wanted to just say that you developed a lot of what became your trademarks. It was a mixture of interviews and newsreels. In fact some of the Nazi newsreels in The Sorrow and the Pity are just incredible stuff. And there's also this emphasis on daily life.
Phillip Lopate: It's not just total big history with a capital H. It's how they had a nylon shortage, so they painted nylons with ink or something like that. And there's this whole range of humanity from heroism to cowardice. And there's this kind of-
Marcel Ophuls: If I may say one thing, because it's been very often misunderstand. It's not a film and even less is it a judgment about the behavior of the French.
Phillip Lopate: Right.
Marcel Ophuls: Were the French this? Were the French that? It's the story of 35 individuals remember particular time in their life, which was a time of humiliation and crisis. And what they did or didn't do. It's a juxtaposition of their fate together with a collective fate of a nation. And I think this is the only way to make that sort of thing because who the hell can presume to judge how a nation behaves?
Phillip Lopate: This is what Anthony Eden says that at one point, the ex-prime minister of England. He says, "you know, a country, which has not been invaded, which has not been occupied has no right to judge a country which has."
Marcel Ophuls: And that goes for generations.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: Doesn't just go to countries. I mean young people when The Sorrow and the Pity came out in the States. And that was one of the things what I was happy about at the time and still am happy about it was the reason it Nov 6, 1992 20 was successful in the States is not because people thought haha the French and then the French did this, or the French did that. They took it as a metaphor for their own problems about Vietnam. You remember, it was taken as a film about what position should we, the young people take about all problems about this war that that Clinton and the others felt were unjust.
Phillip Lopate: Right? No, yes. I think of the movie above all as an amazing collection of portraits of human beings. Who I really came to know when I was watching the film and there are wonderful portraits of Pierre Mendes France, and Anthony Eden. And the resistance fighter, and Gaspar, and English boy Dennis Rake. But the clip that we're going to show is one of the most fascinating of all the portraits, which is a portrait of a man named Christian de la Mazière who was in fact a right winger, a fascist during this period. And now you're coming back to interview him and he's reflecting on why he chose that path. In fact, he enlisted in the Charlemagne brigade, which was a group of right-wing French who went and fought on the Eastern front even as the war was coming to an end, and as he fought with the Nazis.
Marcel Ophuls: May I just add one footnote to this. I didn't interview him.
Phillip Lopate: No, your partner.
Marcel Ophuls: My partner Andre Harris was on screen going through this chateau with him, interviewed him, and the reason I didn't interview him, one of the reasons is that he refused to be interviewed by a Jew. He was scared or he didn't want to. It was very hard at that time. It was still very hard. Nowadays it'd be very easy, but at that time it was very hard to get hold of a man who was willing to admit that he fought on the German side and that he was a fascist. And when we got ahold of this man who was in real life was a press attache in the film business, he was a, what do you call it? Public relations man and a playboy. And very nice and intelligent fellow. But he did make a condition that I would not interview him, so I don't always ask the question.
Phillip Lopate: All right, let's run it now. When I went through the clips of your films, I realized this is about a 10 minute clip. We had to do 10 minute clips. I realized that you don't really work in 10 minute blocks. You work much more in 20 and 25 minute blocks. This sequence I should explain continues with this very same person and works around this very moving moment where he, talks all about what it was like being a soldier in this German army and he says that he's basically very skeptical of ideology now. It fascinates me for a few reasons. Formally it's rather different from a lot of your work in that...
Marcel Ophuls: They walk.
Phillip Lopate: They walk. There's an equivalent of a tracking shot an Ophulsian tracking shot. It has a real mise-en-scene. There's a sense of the surroundings that's very important to character, which I think you do often, but more less ostentatiously, you know? Here-
Nov 6, 1992 21
Marcel Ophuls: Well I tried to avoid mise-en-scene because it's documentaries again, if you ask the characters to do things then you're not letting them come to you. You're putting them in some sort of straight jacket. The reason it's done here this is the castle that's Celine.
Phillip Lopate: Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: The famous Celine Castle-
Phillip Lopate: In Castle to Castle.
Marcel Ophuls: Yes, it's Sigmaringen. And the reason this was done that way is because by the time Christian finally made his mind up in spite of his lawyers to actually say yes, we were out of money and already shooted in the last days of filming in Germany, they couldn't afford to take the film crew back to Paris. And so he had to come to us. And so we had to figure out some way of, but this is what documentaries are made up. I had to figure out some way of tying in Germany with him. And so Sigmaringen seemed to be the natural thing. And once we had Sigmaringen, since it was a castle, I thought, well, we'll have a guide to juxtapose a German guide. And then we'll let those two the word to Parisian since Andre Harris was doing the interview. And they were both in a foreign country. I thought they should walk.
Marcel Ophuls: But yes, this is exceptional. I think mostly talking heads should be sitting where they want to sit in their own Archie Bunker chair.
Phillip Lopate: The other thing that I think about the sequences that again and again you're going to people and asking them about events that happened 30, 40 years ago and you're, you're probing to see how much have they digested the meaning of these experiences. How much are they lying to themselves? How much are they rationalizing, how much have they grown to, to integrate what happened to them? And, and this particular person seems with a certain amount of dignity to actually to come out on the good side let's say, by the good side I don't just mean politically, I mean he's digested it, and he's taken responsibility for his actions.
Marcel Ophuls: He's conned you Phillip.
Phillip Lopate: He conned me?
Marcel Ophuls: Yes, he certainly that. And he's conned a great many people.
Phillip Lopate: Say more. Nov 6, 1992 22
Marcel Ophuls: This business where you refer to at the end it plays well, it's good show business. At the end of the interview he says, well I've lost my illusions. And then the very next scene is the Liberation of Paris and you get all these people shouting hooray, et cetera. So it's this sort of melancholy. But I must tell you that at the time he was sincere, he thought he become a liberal and, Andre Harris was interviewing him, who at that time was a left wing socialist, thought that being liberal meant humanist, et cetera. I must say that right now I've heard that he thinks that Le Pen is to moderate.
Phillip Lopate: Okay, this is really interesting.
Marcel Ophuls: Gone back to his real roots.
Phillip Lopate: You've conned us also, because in the context of the movie at this moment it Phillip Lopate seems as though he's digested and assimilated the expense and taken responsibility for it.
Marcel Ophuls: Well he's intelligent. I think the thing that seduced a lot of people, including you I guess about de la Maziere, I was never quite taken in by him. He was quite right and not wanting me to interview him because I wouldn't have let him off that easy. But because I happen been know that he also arrested people and he was also in the militia and so forth. But he was not as glamorous as it makes himself out to be. What was I going to say? I think the reason why he's so appealing is that at that time people didn't expect Nazi's and fascists to be quite human. And, at that time it was an important in the life and the political life of France and the way of dealing with history in France, at that time it was very, very important to show that an SS man can be intelligent.
Marcel Ophuls: So was Bobby. Bobby was a good family father, and it was a very bright soul. It's, very restrictive. It's a very restrictive view of history to think that our opponents and our adversaries-
Phillip Lopate: Are fools.
Marcel Ophuls: And the people who made the 20th century into the living hell that it was, and that it still is. That all of these people are pinheads. They're not.
Phillip Lopate: No, But also he fit in a way to what seems like a class analysis in the film, which is that many people, it seems like the film seems to be taking a position that the working class acquitted themselves much better than the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy and here he seems to be like high bourgeois character.
Marcel Ophuls: I think this is true. Generally, it's a generalization, but I think it's true that by and large the French bourgeoisie did not behave well during the occupation and that most of the resistance came from the communist party Nov 6, 1992 23 and came from the working class. And I think this is made clear in the film, but I must also add very quickly then because I guess we do have to move on.
Phillip Lopate: No, we can do this 4 and a half hours if you...
Marcel Ophuls: That I was more left of center then, than I am now.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah. It does seem like the film is trying more to, you were more eager to push-
Marcel Ophuls: It's and anti-Gaullist film too. It was a film that at that time the people made this film and I wanted to overcome the restrictive Gaullist myth about all of France having been heroic. Which was in fact a very reactionary way of keeping French society in its place. So, in that way, it is a film of the 68' period. That is, we were very much influenced by the political ideas of the 68' period. We wanted to bring De Gaulle and Gaullism down. Sure we did.
Phillip Lopate: No, and you have-
Marcel Ophuls: We were Social Democrats.
Phillip Lopate: One of the key, one of the figures you interview says, well the rich had more to lose and so they collaborated more with the Nazis. I still want to pin you down a little bit on this whole question of development of self. Your movies have been compared to psychoanalysis, to a kind of psychoanalytical process and psychoanalysis is all about taking responsibility, and adjusting and finally understanding and not just blaming other people for one's experiences. Do you accept this comparison?
Marcel Ophuls: Yes, I think so-
Phillip Lopate: Especially-
Marcel Ophuls: We're talking about my father was so very much against my going into show business because of his theory about jockeys. He did think that I should make good psychoanalyst.
Phillip Lopate: Really?
Marcel Ophuls: Probably because I gave him a hard time on some of this. Nov 6, 1992 24
Phillip Lopate: Also, you know, psychoanalysis very involved with the notion of resistance and resistance is such a loaded word in not just French resistance, but the terms of an analysis where you talk about the resistance to the therapy and working with resistance as an act of force.
Marcel Ophuls: And there's another psychoanalytical notion, which I find that I become very much aware of in my work is the Freudian notion of.
Marcel Ophuls: My work, it's the Freudian notion of ... What's it called in English? Mourning.
Phillip Lopate: Mourning work.
Marcel Ophuls: Mourning work. Working out your mourning.
Phillip Lopate: Working through grief. Did you-
Marcel Ophuls: Yes, working, a similar [crosstalk 01:06:23].
Phillip Lopate: Were you ever in psychoanalysis?
Marcel Ophuls: No.
Phillip Lopate: No?
Marcel Ophuls: No.
Phillip Lopate: I can ask him anything up here. Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: No. Partly because of that. No, no. Partly because of that. No, I certainly needed it. I probably still do. It seems too late now. As Woody Allen tells us, it takes 15 years and I haven't got 15 years. Also, it's very expensive. But, no, there's another reason. Because of what you just pointed out, psychoanalysts, like doctors generally, have a great business about celebrity cult, and they're very movie crazy usually.
Nov 6, 1992 25
Phillip Lopate: Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: I've been the guest in Chicago for instance, of the Bettelheim group and so on and if they give up their authority and their prestige because they think that I'm the psychoanalyst, then I cannot really run to them when I'm in trouble.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah. That's a rationalization if I ever heard one. Okay, we'll move on.
Marcel Ophuls: Yes.
Phillip Lopate: This movie is shot in black and white and there's a kind of a harmonic match between the newsreel footage and the archival footage and the interviews. But it was the last of your films, I think, that was made in black and white. Do you miss being able to do that because of the old newsreels, the way it moves from black and white palette, to black and white palette?
Marcel Ophuls: Truffaut said something, I think rather significant about that. He said when Sorrow and Pity was revived, I think, in May '79 and then in '81 he said, "Well, it's all become history now." And the interviews are now also history. It tells us about the '60s and aboutFrance and about Gaullism and so forth and the fact that it's all rather grainy and black and white now, makes it more integrated. It is indeed the difference between interviews in color and archival footage in black and white, is a sort of an uneasy, cheap way of showing the distance historically. I agree with you. I think it's probably more ... But then, on the other hand, you can't really afford to be an aesthete on documentary films, because you can't sell them to television and they're not easy to sell, as everyone knows. You're not going to go into a lot of aesthetic considerations.
Phillip Lopate: It can't just be black and white.
Marcel Ophuls: No, it can't.
Phillip Lopate: What about the voiceover? Sometimes subtitled, sometimes voiceover. Was that your choice-
Marcel Ophuls: Yes.
Phillip Lopate: ... or was it the distributors?
Nov 6, 1992 26
Marcel Ophuls: No, no. It was not only my choice, I made it. I mean, I directed the voiceovers-
Phillip Lopate: You mean the soundtrack, the American version.
Marcel Ophuls: Yes. I put my own questions in English and then the principle is very simple. When it's documents or when it's the guy, for instance, that we saw just now, he's subtitled because he's not in a major interview. I believe that it's very hard to do a four-and-a-half-hour film, that is supposed to be seen by as many people as possible and ask them to read subtitles, especially on interviews. Because it's not like dialogue in a Western, where Gary Cooper only speaks every five minutes. On talking heads, you really, if you subtitle them-
Phillip Lopate: It's constant.
Marcel Ophuls: ... They'll go up until they grow up into your rise. So that's the reason why you have voiceover and of course you can't have lip-sync. Because if you'll have lip sync, then the authenticity goes down.
Phillip Lopate: No, you can't.
Marcel Ophuls: So there's a whole technique that has to be developed-
Phillip Lopate: You hear the language.
Marcel Ophuls: ... Whether you hear the confirmation of, somebody says, "Revolution-
Phillip Lopate: la violence, violence.
Marcel Ophuls: ... révolution, and then yeah, la violence, violence and so forth.
Phillip Lopate: Exactly.
Marcel Ophuls: All right.
Phillip Lopate: One more question about, Sorrow and The Pity, it was held as a masterpiece. Was this a problem, having Nov 6, 1992 27 made a masterpiece so early in your efforts to make documentaries, in the sense that did it become for you an albatross of expectations?
Marcel Ophuls: I'm a very slow starter, probably a slow learner too. But certainly a late starter. Banana Peel on the Champs- Élysées, the big panel for Banana Peel ... Excuse me for doing a flashback ... Went up on my 35th birthday.
Phillip Lopate: Yes and you have-
Marcel Ophuls: I'd taken an oath long before that. If I couldn't have a first feature film by the time I was 35, then I would quit and it went up on November 1st, at midnight on a Wednesday.
Phillip Lopate: And you were 43 when The Sorrow and the Pity came out.
Marcel Ophuls: Yeah I was. I was a great deal older. So I certainly was no neophyte.
Phillip Lopate: Oh, I don't mean that. I just mean in terms of people are expecting you to do The Sorrow and Pity over and over again.
Marcel Ophuls: Yeah. Well, that's what I was complaining about early in the evening.
Phillip Lopate: Yes. Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: You thought I was being disingenuous.
Phillip Lopate: No, no. You won't let me get away from that. I just meant, the complaint I took from the heart. I just meant that when you said you were a documentarian in spite of yourself. I think that there also was a certain volition involved and a certain-
Marcel Ophuls: ... Very little.
Marcel Ophuls: Yeah. Well it's certainly, I mean filmmaking in general, you learn by trial and error. I mean you don't pick up all that much in film schools, even if you go to film schools, I don't think. You learn by trial and error whether that's documentaries or anything else.
Nov 6, 1992 28
Phillip Lopate: So then you made a sense of loss, which is a film about the Irish troubles and this is a very different in feeling from Sorrow and the Pity, very, very interesting and moving film. In fact, it's called-
Marcel Ophuls: So guess what the coat hanger is, that sense of loss, since you've just seen the film. I'm turning the tables around. I'm interviewing you.
Phillip Lopate: What -
Marcel Ophuls: Incidentally, one of the most interesting thing about interrogation and asking questions ... This is the only thing I really enjoyed in the Bobby film, was the possibility of turning the tables on professional interrogators.
Phillip Lopate: ... Interrogators. In fact-
Marcel Ophuls: Spooks, you know?
Phillip Lopate: Absolutely.
Marcel Ophuls: Counterspies.
Phillip Lopate: Absolutely.
Marcel Ophuls: And real, real nasty guys too.
Phillip Lopate: In November Days, you interview Marcus Wolf, the head of the Stasis.
Marcel Ophuls: Yes and here you are with a camera and all of a sudden, here these guys have to sit still, people who probably tortured people and here you are-
Phillip Lopate: But have a heart Marcel, I never was a counterspy-
Marcel Ophuls: No, no. You're not [crosstalk 01:13:33].
Nov 6, 1992 29
Phillip Lopate: ... Or has worked for Stasi, any of them.
Marcel Ophuls: I'm not turning the tables on you. What do think the coat hanger idea in Sense of Loss is? The funerals.
Phillip Lopate: The funerals. Yes. Because you keep returning again and again to the people.
Marcel Ophuls: Sure.
Phillip Lopate: The constant is-
Marcel Ophuls: ... It's death.
Phillip Lopate: ... Is people who have lost someone, there was all the victims.
Marcel Ophuls: Hence the title. Hence, the title. Yes.
Phillip Lopate: ... All the victims. Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: And since I couldn't, you see, I was expected to take sides. Because I was sent over there. These are usually assignments. It was a New York Jewish outfit, a man called Donald Rugoff, who had Irish Patriots working in his office, young women who were Irish, whose idea was, well send Ophuls to Ireland, to do what he did for the French Resistance, with the Irish patriots.
Marcel Ophuls: Well, I couldn't identify with the IRA. No matter how hard I tried, I really didn't think that there was any similarity between French resistance fighters and bomb throwers. So I still can't. So I mean, I like the Irish. I think they're great, wonderful people. But, so it was a film about the ... Which is really unsatisfying. Because I think a really good film of that kind, should be very subjective. It should not be propaganda, but it should be able to take a side. And if the only thing you can sympathize with, are the oppressed, then this is the traditional documentary-
Phillip Lopate: Bleeding heart documentary.
Nov 6, 1992 30
Marcel Ophuls: Bleeding heart documentary and then to overcome that and I think Sense of Loss does overcome it to some extent, is I had to find a coat hanger and again, it's the funerals.
Phillip Lopate: You do seem to sympathize more with the Catholics then the Protestants. But that again, seems to be more for class reasons than anything else. Because you-
Marcel Ophuls: And because they were taking the shit. But in fact, when I was in Belfast, I thought that in the evening when we weren't filming, the Protestants were a lot more fun. They drank more, they were funnier. The Catholics in Belfast were clammy.
Phillip Lopate: Very clammy.
Marcel Ophuls: Sometimes it's Catholic thing, where there are all these big families and they didn't wash every day.
Phillip Lopate: T hat's what the Protestants said.
Marcel Ophuls: Yes, I know, I know. I'm joking. I'm joking.
Phillip Lopate: All right. The other difference, this is much more, film made in the moment, rather than reflecting back historically. One of the things that is so eerie about Sorrow and the Pity, when you see it now and I think even when it first came out, was that it's about these tragic events. But it has a certain serenity, a certain calm.
Marcel Ophuls: Sorrow and the Pity is actually rather, it's a Western and it is indeed. We were talking about optimism and pessimism. It is in a way, a rather naive and optimistic film. At that time, I still thought that any person who was in the resistance, was a great hero and people who were collaborationists, were obviously in some way, villains. So you started working subtleties with Christian de la Mazière. But the basic thing was like a John Wayne movie. It wasn't subtle at all. There were the bad guys and the good guys, the white hats and the black hats and I've lost some of that naivete. Because doing Bobby, I found out that not all resistance people were heroes.
Phillip Lopate: I think that what you say is obviously true. But I'm not sure I agree completely. I don't think that it's just a question of you're being able to identify who the heroes and villains were in Sorrow and the Pity, it's also that there is the tone, the pace, is rather calm and unfurls in a certain unmeasured way. For instance, the Christian dilemma is episode is intact practically 20 minutes, like a short story. In later films, you would never do 20 minutes on one person. You'd always have it much more interwoven, and it was more and you develop more of a kind of rough texture, more abrasive texture I think. So it's almost like ... The way I interpret it is that Sorrow and the Pity was a kind of maturity achieved too early and then you had to back away from it. Nov 6, 1992 31
Marcel Ophuls: I'm sorry, maturity achieved to early-
Phillip Lopate: ... Achieved to early and you backed away from it. You said, "Well no. This is a little too compassionate, accepting, wise. I'm being too humane in a way. Because later on you are much more-
Marcel Ophuls: ... Abrasive and I meant sarcastic.
Phillip Lopate: ... Abrasive.
Marcel Ophuls: But this does have to do with a subject matter. I don't think it's the case in Sense of Loss. But certainly later on it becomes the case and this has to do with, I think with one I was talking about, that sarcasm and irony is also refuge. It's also a way of making statements and it's also, I mean, perhaps in the early days, I was closer to Capra and then the later days and nowadays, I'm closer to Billy Wilder. I don't think this means that ... Oh, let me say one thing.
Phillip Lopate: Only one?
Marcel Ophuls: Yeah, well just one. Cynicism. Cynicism, because we're talking about Billy Wilder. Nowadays, when I go on lecture things and students come up, young students come up and say, "Oh well." And then they make a compliment and they say, "Oh well, I really enjoyed this film, November Days. It's really cynical." Well if I ever get around to writing my memoirs, one of the titles ought to be, “Against Cynicism”. I've worked against cynicism all my life. Whether you think I was more mature before-
Phillip Lopate: No, no.
Marcel Ophuls: ... Or more quiet or more humane.
Phillip Lopate: I think it has to do with-
Marcel Ophuls: But it was always against cynicism and the idea that the word cynicism can now be used as a compliment, seems very frightening to me and one of the nice things about talking here on November ... What is it? November six. I think there was an editorial in the New York Times this morning, The End of Cynicism.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's right. The End of Cynicism. Nov 6, 1992 32
Marcel Ophuls: I think that I'm very happy about the way this election came up-
Speaker 3: Yes. Me too.
Marcel Ophuls: Because those 12 years or were they 16?
Speaker 3: Both.
Marcel Ophuls: Of Reagan faction Bush, the trickle down cynicism. We've had trickle down cynicism and this is one of the reasons why I've had trouble working. I take this very personally.
Phillip Lopate: Right.
Marcel Ophuls: Because how can you look at documentaries about good guys, bad guys, subtleties, moral dimensions, moral decision making, when you are constantly bucking the fact that the leaders of the society tell you that there is no such thing, that there's family values, but no other values, no real values and all this hypocrisy, all this cynicism. You can't buck these things even if you do try to repeat a resistance fighting in film-
Phillip Lopate: The rooftops for instance, of Japan. Was it a different experience for you to be doing so much on the spot filming as almost like a war correspondent or something? What was that like?
Marcel Ophuls: Well, more interesting in a way. Not as comfortable for one thing, and it was a rather dangerous time in Belfast. The Europa Hotel where we would watch BBC in the evening and play poker and bomb alerts every couple of days. So yes, it was more of a mild war corresponding situation. But the real difficulty wasn't so much danger. It was the fact that I think people, if you try to construct films on what people tell you about themselves and about their surroundings, it's, they are more reflective and more interesting if they're not in a crisis situation. A crisis situation, that kind of ethnic conflict as we are now having in-
Phillip Lopate: ... In Yugoslavia.
Marcel Ophuls: ... In Yugoslavia-
Phillip Lopate: It used to be.
Nov 6, 1992 33
Marcel Ophuls: ... Where I'm going to try to spend Christmas, this Christmas again. Message from the Queen, Santa Claus. It's more people are more likely to talk in cliches. This one fellow we saw ... Also, the Northern Irish have this very interesting lilt. It's a very pleasant lilt.
Phillip Lopate: Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: But it's like a lullaby. It tends to put you to sleep and this fellow, who is very interesting, who gave a very good interview. I was very tired that day, it was rather strenuous and it's the only interview in my life, the only filmed interview that I actually slept through.
Marcel Ophuls: I only found out what he'd actually said, when I was back in Paris in the editing thing. I didn't know what Patrick McCardell had said, because he had this lullaby. Well it turned out to be good interview. So you see, we don't really need-
Phillip Lopate: You don't need to be awake when you're doing your job.
Marcel Ophuls: That's right.
Phillip Lopate: But well, it must've been a stretch for you in a way because this is the one film that does not tap into your German, French-American roots. You're actually on different territory. Did it feel like-
Marcel Ophuls: I guess it is the only one. Yes.
Phillip Lopate: Did it feel like a kind of a stretch for you to be involved with the Irish? Obviously, the Irish are famous for being great talkers an the faces seem very craggy and raw in this film. It's based on the-
Marcel Ophuls: Well, they're very likable. I think as I said, I mentioned this earlier, I wasn't terribly comfortable about being so neutral. It's a contradiction. Because I detest propaganda and I certainly would hate people to think that my films are propaganda. But at the same time they're very subjective and they're very involved and this fine thin line of trying to be subjective and personal and involved in the subject matter, but not doing propaganda. This film was constantly in danger of being too bland because we are not bleeding heart liberal, feeling for the oppressed.
Phillip Lopate: Not having enough of a personal point of view you mean.
Nov 6, 1992 34
Marcel Ophuls: That's right.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah. You do have a fascinating interview with Bernadette Devlin. It's actually the first time that you start a question and going after your own kind of left-wing assumptions and saying to her, "How can you ask people to make sacrifices, when you're so far ... For some pie in the sky socialism that's so far away, the way you put it as, "How can you ask people to make sacrifices in the middle of the tunnel when the light is so far away?"
Phillip Lopate: And of course she being a good doctrinaire socialist says, "We can and we must," or something like that.
Marcel Ophuls: Yeah that's right.
Phillip Lopate: But it's the same question that you later ask again and again, in November Days when you asked the people who wanted East Germany to remain socialists, you say, "Well, how can you ask them to live for this ideal, when it's so far away?" So I think this was the beginning of that sort of questioning of those assumptions.
Marcel Ophuls: Well, yes. But I wouldn't, I mean when you're implying that like Clemmons said, "When you get older, you become reactionary anyway." I mean it's a well known thing and it's probably cliche and it's not necessarily true.
Phillip Lopate: I don't think it's a question of age, but of subtlety, when you start to think against yourself.
Marcel Ophuls: Perhaps, but I was never Marxist. I'm a lifelong social Democrat, which is a European term, which means that I'm a lifelong New Dealer. I'm a Roosevelt and [foreign language 00:21:03] man. So I haven't really evolved from that.
Phillip Lopate: That's very clear actually. Yeah, that's very clear.
Marcel Ophuls: And therefore it's not ... I mean, yes. I'm not as left-wing as I used to be.
Marcel Ophuls: But I've never been a Marxist. So I've never had to deal with that particular problem within myself. Because I don't like totalitarian ideologies. It's as simple as that.
Phillip Lopate: Okay. What about the Fats Waller? What's Fats Waller doing in Ireland? Nov 6, 1992 35
Marcel Ophuls: What's Fats Waller doing in Ireland? Well, first of all, I love Fats Waller and when you edit a film for six months, it's terrible to use music that you don't like. Because you have to hear it over and over again, back and forth, back and forth.
Phillip Lopate: If it's something you can live with, yes.
Marcel Ophuls: Yes. So also there's a stage in the structuring of the films and so I don't script beforehand. I script afterwards and I do mean script. I do it in long hand. I take the transcripts and I re-copy sentence by sentence and comma by comma in hesitation, to see where I can cut and where it will cut and then I take it back to the editing room.
Phillip Lopate: That's interesting.
Marcel Ophuls: And this is very slow work and while I do it, I put records on and Fitzgerald records and the kind of music I like and I was in a hotel on Fifth Avenue, when I was doing that work and there was this one Fats Waller record that kept coming back, while I was writing out this stuff and it occurred to me that it fitted with the rooftops and with the bricks, and I don't know why it fits.
Marcel Ophuls: It's an Irving Berlin actually, Waiting at the End of the Road, it's called and it has a tinny, melancholy ... Well, I think Fats Waller has great melancholy, great. It also has this business of being black and being oppressed and a sadness, which has to do with being cheerful and oppressed at the same time. I think this is part of the greatness of Fats Waller. It's Mozart quality that he has.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah. I certainly agree with that. What about your whole use of popular music in general and popular culture for ironic effect or is it ironic effect?
Marcel Ophuls: No, it usually is not it and I think this is one of the things where it's misinterpreted. For instance-
Phillip Lopate: Like the Maurice Chevalier at the end.
Marcel Ophuls: Maurice Chevalier. Very often people thought that in The Sorrow and the Pity, the fact that Maurice ... Well excuse me for interrupting myself here on this.
Phillip Lopate: Go ahead.
Nov 6, 1992 36
Marcel Ophuls: You know that in Annie Hall-
Phillip Lopate: Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: ... At the beginning of Annie Hall, after they've gone and stood in line and seen The Sorrow and the Pity, I think it was the second or third time, they lie on the bed and ... This is going to turn into an anti-producer story again ... And they lie on the bed and the first thing that Alvy Singer says to Diane Keaton, to Annie Hall is, before they make love, the first thing he says is, "Boy, it must have really been heroic to be in the resistance. Imagine having to the march all day." And when I saw this, when I discovered the film, I thought it was very funny. Of course, I laughed a great deal. But I also love Maurice Chevalier. So does Woody Allen. But then I immediately thought, "Boy, isn't it wonderful to be Woody Allen?"
Marcel Ophuls: Because surely, surely the producers must've come to him and said, "Look, this film is to be seen by millions and how many people know who Maurice Chevalier is and how many people have seen The Sorrow and the Pity. So how many people will understand this particular gag? And it must've been that kind of thing and-
Phillip Lopate: ... And he kept it in.
Marcel Ophuls: And he kept it in. Well, this is not elitism. This is the whole name of the game. You understand through context, whether it's gags or interviews, you create a context and the whole idea ... But producers never understand that. They always think you have to explain things. Through the context, people, because people are not idiots, they see that and they immediately understand that this must be somebody who is singing in the film that they have just seen and that takes care of it.
Marcel Ophuls: Now, excuse me for bringing that up. But yes, indeed. One of the reasons nowadays that we have difficulties in securing popular music, to use in films is that, very often other documentary colleagues do use it for sarcastic effect and Irving Berlin, for instance, was very much against his music being used in documentaries. Because, Peter Davis was a good friend of mine, use This is the Army to do Hearts and Minds about Vietnam and this made Irving Berlin very unhappy. He thought his office rights were being violated, which I think is more or less true. I don't do that, usually.
Phillip Lopate: No actually, after I saw The Sorrow and the Pity, I went out and bought a Maurice Chevalier record. So it had the right effect.
Marcel Ophuls: Yeah he's great. Maurice Chevalier one of the great entertainers of the 20th century and also I should add, I don't think ... Again, I'm very much like my father ... I don't think that he worked with Danielle [inaudible 01:32:48] after the war. He worked with a lot of people who had gone on making films during the occupation. Nov 6, 1992 37
It was never a problem to him. It was not a problem to me. Because I think that entertainers like engineers or soda jerks, just go on and doing their job. They don't have to take a political stand. If they collaborate, it's something else. If they go to Germany and shake [inaudible 01:33:14] and it's something else. Maurice Chevalier as far I know, never did that.
Phillip Lopate: Okay.
Marcel Ophuls: He just kept on singing.
Phillip Lopate: All right.
Marcel Ophuls: All right.
Phillip Lopate: We're going to move on to The Memory of Justice, which is a one of your longest and most ambitious movies and I think we will just start out with the clip. Because it's the beginning of the film and I wanted to show how sometimes you set out symphonically, the different strands that you're going to pursue over the course of a film. So if we could get the clip of Memory of Justice.
Phillip Lopate: Tell us what you're doing there, where you lay out all these different strands.
Marcel Ophuls: On this film?
Phillip Lopate: Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: Well you used the word ambitious a while ago. I think in many ways The Memory of Justice, which was not a successful film. Of course, you always have to be very suspicious of filmmakers when they start plugging their unsuccessful films. But I do think it's a better film than The Sorrow and the Pity, a more interesting, more complex film. But yes, I probably bit off more than I could chew. Because The Sorrow and the Pity is, at the core of it, is very simple. It's about courage and courage is very sexy. It's a simple thing. It's emotional. People latch on to it very quickly. This is about justice. Justice is very abstract. It's very difficult to be abstract with film and it's almost a desperate enterprise.
Marcel Ophuls: And also the idea of comparing Nazi crimes to other crimes, perpetrated since Nuremberg, was to my mind at that time, unavoidable. You couldn't make the film about Nuremberg, without doing that. Because it would have been a dishonest and benal not to do it. But at the same time, the idea that you then might be in danger of equating-
Nov 6, 1992 38
Phillip Lopate: Making it too easy. Right?
Marcel Ophuls: Yes, providing the Germans with an alibi and also again, abstraction. Not only the danger of abstraction, but the danger of generalization, of saying, "Well, yes. What after all, is the difference between a B-52 pilot dropping bombs and an SS guard gassing children at Auschwitz. It's all criminal and it's all ... This is of course was very fashionable in the 60s and 70s-
Phillip Lopate: Yes. Relativism.
Marcel Ophuls: ... This kind of radical chic relativism. So the whole film was an effort to deal with the subject and at the same time not to fall into these traps. This then led to, as you probably know, to hiring and firing and getting in a debt, having the control of the film taken away from me and then fighting through law courts to get back into control and burglarizing the film and bringing it-
Phillip Lopate: Yes the film was a heroic burglarizing actually, by a friend of yours, who brought it back to you.
Marcel Ophuls: Yes. Anna Kerrigan, the Irish girl I was talking about earlier, who thought I should do films about the Irish Resistance and who then became my friend and assisted on this and she actually went and took a slash print and brought it to New York, so that I could eventually two years later, through the help of Paramount and Ham Fish and Max Palevsky and other benefactors get back into control. We are running on late. Aren't we?
Phillip Lopate: Well, I just wanted to well ... I was joking that if since you make four and a half hour movies, maybe we'll have a four and a half hour interview. But I wanted to go on-
Marcel Ophuls: Well may I just say one thing about again, about final cut and control and why I lost it. You see, there was a co-production between British private producers and the BBC and the British private producers, a man who has become extremely famous.
Phillip Lopate: Yes. David Puttnam.
Marcel Ophuls: David Puttnam.
Phillip Lopate: He's one of the most famous producers.
Nov 6, 1992 39
Marcel Ophuls: And a very famous producer, he was still a young man then and we started out being on extremely good terms. He's a very bright fellow and we got along extremely well and in Germany, German television, and the Germans really thought, and I suppose sometimes you have to be ambiguous if you want to make films and not tell everything that you think you're going to be doing.
Marcel Ophuls: They really thought that looking at the Nurnberg Principle, the way I've just explained would indeed let their audience off the hook and would be appealing to the grandmothers and grandfathers, and the people who had been in the Nazi years and cheered for Hitler and so forth and we thought that the Nuremberg Trial was the victim over the vanquish and de-nazification and all that stuff. So they thought they thought this relativistic thing would be to their advantage and David and his partners thought that they would appeal to the radical chic market. So they were both on the same side and this is the reason why a lost control of the film and that they fired me on the evening before the final doc and then when I got back into control and I came back to London ... I'm trying to tell the story very fast. But it's an important story ... And I came back and somebody, again, some burglar
Marcel Ophuls: Had made available to me the transcript of the film that they had recut for the Germans and for the radical chic and I discovered at two o'clock in the morning while working on my own film, I discovered this character you just saw, and who was just brought out ... An extremely interesting book I understand ... On his experiences in Nuremberg, Professor Telford Taylor, who was the General Telford Taylor. I used to call him our Gary Cooper. Mr.-
Phillip Lopate: He's like a-
Marcel Ophuls: He's very handsome man, very handsome man.
Phillip Lopate: Very handsome.
Marcel Ophuls: Mr. Smith goes to the Nuremberg and Mr. Deeds goes to Nuremberg.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: A wonderful man, wonderful man. He was the first man to talk against McCarthy and so forth. Well, okay, he's just popular. I'm plugging his book because he's done his memoirs about Nuremberg. They just came out. Okay. On this transcript of the film, where they used my material in their own way, I suddenly find on page three, I suddenly find the following sentence and I will quote it verbatim. I'm sorry if this takes a little time. But I think it's important when you talk about documentary filmmaking and propaganda. I had found Telford who had become a friend of mine, saying on page three of this other fellow's film, "The GIs in Vietnam had committed the same crimes and to the same degree as the Nazis we condemned in Nuremberg." Nov 6, 1992 40
Phillip Lopate: Which was very different from-
Marcel Ophuls: Then it went on to show burned hatches and had the napalm and so forth and the whole film started with that. I said, "But Telford has never said that. They must have used an actor." I did the interview, it was a six or seven-hour interview. They couldn't have done it. So I went home to the hotel and I started looking at the original transcript and it took me an hour or so to find the place.
Marcel Ophuls: Indeed, they had not used an actor. They had used the place very early in the interview where I talked about the pocket book edition of his book Nuremberg and Vietnam, an American Tragedy, which in some ways the film is based on and very early when I was still addressing him as professor and not as Telford and I was trying to break the ice, as one does in this kind of interview, I said, "Well, Professor, I've noticed that on the first edition of the pocketbook, there's a swastika superimposed on the American flag and in later editions the swastika disappears. Now why is that?" I anticipated what the answer would be. I wanted him to admit that he was the one had interfered with the publisher so that the swastika would be removed and being a lawyer ... So for another two, three pages of transcript, he danced around the thing and finally he said, "Well, yes. I guess I was the one to remove." I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because it did seem to imply that."
Phillip Lopate: And then came the -
Marcel Ophuls: "GIs in Vietnam, were guilty of the same crimes and to the same degree as the Nazis we condemned in Nuremberg," and I don't agree with that.
Phillip Lopate: Right. Well that's blurb thinking. They took the one part of the blurb that they wanted and they threw away the rest.
Marcel Ophuls: And make the whole construction on that and this is, and I tell this story as much as I can. Because if we are not paranoid and we're not necessarily megalomaniac if we want final cut on our work. Because this was a gross betrayal of not only, of documentary filmmaking, but of politics of Telford Taylor. It was a betrayal of his ... As a matter of fact, he sued. One of the reasons that I was able to get back into control is because I told him, "Telford." I called him on the telephone the next morning. I said, "Telford. I want you to call my lawyer and send me the power of attorney, so that he can sue." So David Putnam. Yeah, sure. David Putnam, the Head of Columbia Pictures.
Phillip Lopate: You said that this was a film about the idea of justice. Why are you so preoccupied with justice? What are your personal roots that make you so preoccupied with justice?
Marcel Ophuls: [foreign language 01:43:34]. Jewish. Being Jewish, I think Jews in this century have to be preoccupied with Nov 6, 1992 41 justice. Because only institutional justice in free countries and in democracies can keep minorities from being oppressed. It's the only way to react to the law of the jungle and then therefore to fascism.
Phillip Lopate: Guilty.
Marcel Ophuls: But it's difficult. Sure.
Phillip Lopate: But you mentioned being Jewish, and this is something that barely comes up in Sorrow and the Pity, comes up in Memory of Justice, comes up even more in Hotel Terminus and in November Days, where you emerge much more as a character in the movies and where you tell many of the people you're interviewing, "I am Jewish." You confront them and say, especially this neo-Nazi character, you say "I'm Jewish."
Marcel Ophuls: I hope I haven't been overdoing it.
Phillip Lopate: No.
Marcel Ophuls: I think I did it once in November Days yet. But did I do it in other times?
Phillip Lopate: But it's definitely in Hotel Terminus. It seems as though there's much more of an interest in your part in asserting that fact.
Marcel Ophuls: Again, documentary film making is nonfiction film making. You have to deal with reality and you have to deal with changing reality and at the time of The Sorrow and the Pity, we thought we had won the war. "We," I don't mean the Jews. The people were: Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill and Roosevelt, and the Anglo- Saxon and the Normandy landing and the GIs and we thought we had won the war and that includes the Jews. But we didn't. Did we? It's still being fought.
Phillip Lopate: Because of the rise of antisemitism?
Marcel Ophuls: Racism in general and ethnic cleansing and people seeking there to find their identity in collectivism, in all forms of collectivism and throwing out whatever is strange to them because they're scared and all the things that we thought we had settled in that great, big anti-Hitler war and The Sorrow and the Pity still works. When I said it's a Western, I meant that the good guys and the bad guys were clearly defined on those lines, at that time and now because the antisemites are no longer on the defensive, because they're quite open, therefore, if you have to deal with these problems and it's then at some point, you simply have to assert yourself. Because what would be the alternative? The alternative would be to kiss ass in some way, to give into them
Nov 6, 1992 42 or to compromise with my ... I refuse to compromise with antisemitism, or any other form. I don't want to compromise with it anymore. I've been in this game too long.
Phillip Lopate: Can I probe this a moment longer?
Marcel Ophuls: Sure.
Phillip Lopate: Your mother was not Jewish. So you actually, according to the Grand Rabbi of Israel, are not Jewish.
Marcel Ophuls: No. I am not.
Phillip Lopate: But you feel yourself as a Jew and does this include religious observance or is it more identification on another level?
Marcel Ophuls: No. No it's the century we live in. You remember about Charlie Chaplin who didn't really know who his father was and was always thought of as Jewish. Because again, he was left wing and because he was libertarian and then because at one time he was asked, "Well, why don't you say, when you're being asked, why don't you say that you're not a Jew." And he said, because, "This would be antisemitism."
Phillip Lopate: Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: The times we live in, also show very clearly. Also, we are now becoming aware, I don't know if this is the case so much in the United States. It certainly is the case in Europe, that antisemitism is the most profound and the most mysterious and the most incurable and stubborn form of racism. Because as compared for instance, to being anti-Arab or anti-black ... Because there's so much envy involved. Most racism is based on intolerance and contempt and in the case of antisemitism, at least this is the case I think in Europe, where it's growing again, it does have to do, a lot with anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, and just plain envy. This whole idea that there's a Jewish conspiracy because we take all the ... We control the media and the Jewish lobby and all of these things that, in the Weimar Republic, the Nazis worked on, they're working on it again. So you better say, "Yes, I am the Jewish lobby. You're talking to the Jewish lobby. Now, what are you going to do about it?"
Phillip Lopate: Okay, just good to know. You mentioned that this movie is not as simple as an idea, as in The Sorrow and the Pity and it makes me think of the difficulty of thinking via cinematic images in general. How one thinks, in the sense that an essayist does. But not writing, but using a movie camera. How does thought work for a movie? This must be both something that you've tried very often to do. You were mentioning in the Sense of Loss, how you felt you didn't quite impose enough of a point of view on it.
Nov 6, 1992 43
Marcel Ophuls: That's a rather abstract question. I don't know if I can address it directly. What it does make me think of is, and then perhaps this is an alibi. Because they're certainly talking heads pictures and they're very talkative pictures. But it reminds me of always Orson Wells, who is rightly considered to be one of the most visual directors in screen history, aside from being one of the greatest, he is certainly one of the most visual and whenever he was asked about what comes first, he always said the word. He was very stubborn about that. He always said, "We are part of the verbal literary tradition, literary theater tradition and once once you leave that, then you go into the area of video clips." And I switch off or I go to straight to the cemetery. I have nothing to do with that. I don't want it.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: I don't know if it's an answer.
Phillip Lopate: Well, he is someone actually, toward the end of his life who started making films that were like personal essays. He made a film about the making of Othello-
Marcel Ophuls: Oh, sure.
Phillip Lopate: ... And he said he read Montaigne every day and he was very interested in this idea of how do you get your thoughts across and I think for most documentarians, this is a big question." Do you want to get your thoughts across? How do you get your thoughts across?" This very same David Puttnam accused you of, one time, of The Memory of Justice, he said was a personal essay, which I think is-
Marcel Ophuls: I didn't know that.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah. He says-
Marcel Ophuls: He was that mild about it?
Phillip Lopate: He said it was a personal essay and which I consider-
Marcel Ophuls: Usually he said I was crazy and totally incoherent.
Phillip Lopate: He complained that it was a personal essay and, which I think is a great compliment- Nov 6, 1992 44
Marcel Ophuls: Yeah. It is.
Phillip Lopate: ... And you said that's like telling a tap dancer he should take the metal edges off his shoes-
Marcel Ophuls: Oh right. I remember.
Phillip Lopate: ... Because they make an unpleasant noise, implying that you can't not make a personal film in a certain way or that's what you do.
Marcel Ophuls: Right.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: Right.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah. So, this whole question of how does one think and how does one make a personal vision in food documentary I think is ... I just wanted to introduce-
Marcel Ophuls: Well, the only discipline that I have and I mentioned this early and we don't want to, because this is getting already too long, is that it is a discipline to wait for things to come to you and not force them. Because the safe way of doing it, as to try to apprehend it in advance and so what people often think is just, excuse me, fucking off on my part, the fact that I'm rather passive and wait for things to ... And therefore people think, "Well. He's just using an alibi to sleep late in the morning." Well it isn't. It is a discipline and it does impose its own rules and I think that if you work that out by trial and error, then the problem of what is visual and what is not visual will settle itself. Because what after all is more visual than somebody in close up, who hesitates because he's about to start lying his head off and you can see it on the screen.
Phillip Lopate: Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: That's very visual.
Phillip Lopate: I think one of the ways that you think through things is, and your movies is by setting up a prism of characters, all of whom reflect against each other, Telford Taylor, everyone's always trying to nominate the hero of each
Nov 6, 1992 45 of your film. Some people say Pierre Mendez-Francis, they go, "Oh. The Sorrow and the Pity". In this case, Telford Taylor certainly is-
Marcel Ophuls: He is a hero.
Phillip Lopate: Is he-
Marcel Ophuls: He's the -
Phillip Lopate: ... The leading man.
Marcel Ophuls: Yes. He's the wasp who stands up for justice in the century of the final solution.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: He is, to me, the epitome ... Yes. Gary Cooper. The people, the white male, American, Protestant who saved the world.
Phillip Lopate: Right.
Marcel Ophuls: We should still continue to be grateful.
Phillip Lopate: To be grateful. Well, yes. In addition, there were these other people who went away, bang up against him. There's Daniel Ellsberg, there's Albert Spear, there's Lord Shawcross, to name a few and somebody who wrote an article about this film, Collin Westerbeck, said that you were using these people as ... He said this very flattering. He said you're using them as doppelgangers or doubles for Telford Taylor, that they're are like ... It's almost like the way a dramatist takes parts of his personality and distributes it to different characters. In the case of Ellsberg, for instance, who was much more part of the radical chic, to me, he comes across as a schmuck basically. Because he's pushing too hard and he can't see Telford Taylor's point of view at all. He's much more rigid than Telford Taylor in a sense. Do you think that's unfair to characterize him that way?
Marcel Ophuls: Oh. He would consider it unfair anyway. But I remember when the film was shown at the New York Film Festival. He was sitting next to me at the panel after the New York Film Festival and I was scared shit. Because I thought he would have the same reaction that you just mentioned and that he would say that he was being badly ... That he came off badly in the film and what he actually said and I remember this, because I thought it was rather flattering. He said, "Well, Ophuls." He was sitting right next to me. "Ophuls only used Nov 6, 1992 46 about 1/15 of what I actually said in the film." And I know that we don't agree and certainly the film shows that we don't agree. But I must say that what he did use, exactly reflects my views. They are my views and even in that very shortened form, he did not betray my fault.” This is what he said and so I like him, naturally.
Phillip Lopate: Do you think of all the people in a film like The Memory of Justice as somehow having a family connection to each other, that they have certain overlapping sides to them and that they're all made of a kind of-
Marcel Ophuls: The different films?
Phillip Lopate: Let's say just within one film. The different characters within one film, that in a way, you use-
Marcel Ophuls: Do they relate to each other, even though they never meet each other?
Phillip Lopate: Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: Well I think this is certainly something that I tried to achieve in the editing room, is the illusion of they being connected to each other through whatever they lived through or whatever conflicts they were involved in, which makes them relate to each other. So they become characters and of course the whole business of what theater is all about, is characters relating to each other and in this case, they are very often people who don't know each other and they were not on the stage at the same time. So you create the illusion and this is what the editing tries to do and sometimes succeeds.
Phillip Lopate: What about this idea that your Menuhin the violinist says that, "We're all guilty. If you're human, you're guilty."
Marcel Ophuls: No. I don't believe that.
Phillip Lopate: You don't believe that?
Marcel Ophuls: No. No. Again, I think it's a hint. Well, Menuhin is very much influenced by Hindu philosophy and I go straight for the 10 commandments. I'm a Judaeo-Christian.
Phillip Lopate: I see.
Marcel Ophuls: But I think he's a great guy. I think he says some very interesting things. Also, he's in the film. Because he
Nov 6, 1992 47 was the first Jewish artist to go to Germany after the war, which was a very gutsy thing to do at that time. Because Jascha Heifetz and some of the others, have never forgiven him for it.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: Even now-
Phillip Lopate: It's a point-
Marcel Ophuls: ... And I thought it was a very nice and very good thing to do.
Phillip Lopate: It's a point that's made in the film by someone else, that your father was one of the few Jewish artists who continued to love German culture and to speak out for German culture. The fact that the Nazis didn't take-
Marcel Ophuls: He did not like the Bombing of Dresden. He did not think that this was a good way to win the war.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah. That's one of the best, for me, one of the most moving sequences in The Memory of Justice is a sequence about the Bombing of Dresden. Because it raises all these complicated questions of, "How far can we extend the Nuremberg and what conclusion did you come to about the-
Marcel Ophuls: War crime?
Phillip Lopate: The applicability of the Nuremberg-
Marcel Ophuls: Oh. Well, there is no conclusion. But it's obviously, I think the film ... As a matter of fact, I sent a fax today to the new President of Paramount, who's Sherry Lansing. Because she's just come in. Because it's in the vault of Paramount that print should never be shown anymore. Because it's ragged and it's horrible and they've got the negative at Paramount. It's very topical again, because obviously the Serbs are committing more crimes and Saddam Hussein and there's lot of people who should ... If the Cold War hadn't interfered, and this is what Telford Taylor explains in the film.
Marcel Ophuls: If the Cold War hadn't made the United Nations into a hapless, piece of machinery and a useless, useless, talking, debating thing. If the Cold War hadn't taken the teeth out of the United Nations, having an international court to bring those to judgment or who commit crimes against the peace and crimes against humanity is certainly a very civilized idea. I don't know how society can go on living without it. I think we should revive Nuremberg. Nov 6, 1992 48
Phillip Lopate: I'm going to move on to the next film which is Hotel Terminus. We have two more films to discuss. But while they're queuing that up, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned to me that you might go to Sarajevo and make a film there. This would be a bit, I guess, like the Irish film. You'd be again in the firing line or something like that.
Marcel Ophuls: Yes. But only for a couple of days. It's a film I have been wanting to do for a long time. Because for one thing, it would be a valedictory film. Because it would be about my own profession. I want to make a film about the connection between what is now known as the media and used to be known just as journalism and in other words, the witnesses to history, the professional witnesses to history and history in the making. In other words, I want to do a film about war correspondence. The history of war correspondence in the 20th century and the coat hanger, obviously has to be a situation where they stay at the Holiday Inn and try to find a Jeep and-
Phillip Lopate: Right.
Marcel Ophuls: ... Go out on that job and play poker at night and the bombs falling and so forth and then you flash back to David Halberstam and the Five O'clock Follies at Vietnam and General Schwarzkopf and the Gulf War and so forth and right back to the Charge of the Light Brigade in the 19th century, which was the first great action of a war correspondent denouncing the folly of military action. So it's this whole business about censorship, self-censorship, La société du spectacle.
Phillip Lopate: Good. I-
Marcel Ophuls: The fakery of-
Phillip Lopate: I was worried that you are going to go on the front lines and-
Marcel Ophuls: Oh. I will. If they let me go, I haven't found anybody who paid my way yet. But partly, not because of political censorship, but because I think that nowadays the people who control the media are very conscious and very vulnerable about criticism and they criticize others. But they-
Phillip Lopate: Very defensive, maybe.
Marcel Ophuls: They're very defensive. They don't like being criticized at all-
Nov 6, 1992 49
Phillip Lopate: Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: ... And obviously this is a subject matter where they would come in for some very, very heavy criticism.
Phillip Lopate: This is an episode that is all about how our own troops ... How the American government used so many ex- Nazis, used some of the Nazis rather and hired them as for spy duty and completely implicates the American government in that activity. This episode is like an X-ray of a marriage of every time he's going to say something, his wife comes in and says something that he knows is not really subtle enough to deal with a question of like-
Marcel Ophuls: And not in his favor.
Phillip Lopate: .... And not in his favor and so he's dying and there's a whole body language that comes across in that episode in which I think of as something that often happens in your movies where somebody just, in this case, he just sinks deeper and deeper into the chair and all through that part of the movie, you have this interaction between body language and decor. You have a lot of Christmas trees and everything like that. So this isn't really a question. But just a statement about the body language and the use of decor as things that enrich the interview. Why did you come out with that memory picture stunt? This is so different from the earlier, Marcel Ophuls.
Marcel Ophuls: Well, yeah. It was a-
Phillip Lopate: It's very playful.
Marcel Ophuls: Yeah. It's black humor. It's sarcasm. It's because the toughest part of the film was, what we call the German Iceberg. It was obviously easy to get victims and resistance people talking and it wasn't all that difficult to get the Americans talking. Because by that time, what was known as the Ryan Report had already come out and it was already public knowledge and these poor people were fed to the camera and had to talk. They probably had orders. They probably had orders from the CIA in Washington to open up that time.
Phillip Lopate: If you call that opening up. Yeah.
Marcel Ophuls: Because Bobby was already arrested and so they had to try to justify their actions. But the Germans were awfully difficult to get, for the reasons that I act out and as a matter of fact, the way this happened, again, it's total improvisation. I had no way of knowing that Taylor's German wife would be sitting there and ending his
Nov 6, 1992 50 stories for him and doing his alibiing for him and interrupting him and is sinking into his chair and getting more and more uncomfortable.
Marcel Ophuls: This is not mise-en-scene. This is what documentaries are about and you have to have the room to let it happen. That's all, which means that you have to shoot a lot. Now the other thing is just frustration and it's actually anger. Because it was very cold and we'd come from Paris and at that time the production had very little money and my German assistant, who was a great friend of mine and waxed out the scene with me, had not lined up the interviews that he was supposed to line up and I was angry at him. I was angry at the crew. I was angry at the production and I said, "Okay. Well if that's all we came to Germany to do is to film that goddamn house there, where Bobby has supposed to have had his office, then get the camera ready, I have a statement to make.
Phillip Lopate: Oh. I see.
Marcel Ophuls: And then I didn't tell him about it and just said, "Well, what were you doing yesterday when you were at the airport trying to reach that woman? What did she say to you?" And that's how we got into it and it's a way of doing what a film called All The President's Men does, at one point. Where you do doorbell ringing and then people close the door in your face. It's part of the game playing of investigative journalism, that you tried to show to the audience, that you don't bring home the bacon on the first try-
Phillip Lopate: Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: ... That it becomes part of the action, trying to bring home the bacon. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford-
Phillip Lopate: Are you becoming-
Marcel Ophuls: . .. Ringing the doorbells before they get to the Republican Committee.
Phillip Lopate: But you become a character in your own film much more. You become a character.
Marcel Ophuls: Well, because of that.
Phillip Lopate: Yeah. But over the course of the different films, you're seeing more in the foreground interviewing, in fact, I think you have the most famous bald head in film since Yule Brenner. You put yourself more into the frame I think, and that's an interesting development. Because I think you actually succeeded in making a good character out yourself. Somebody who isn't always patient. In losing your patience, you humanize the
Nov 6, 1992 51 documentary a great deal, I think. We're going to cue up the next film. Hotel Terminus is really a masterpiece and I wished that we had just two hours to talk about it alone. But we've got to-
Marcel Ophuls: You notice people are snickering now.
Phillip Lopate: Yes. Yes.
Marcel Ophuls: We want to go home.
Phillip Lopate: Okay. So we're going to show the last episode, which is from November Days, and recommend highly that you'd go see Hotel Terminus. I'm afraid-
Marcel Ophuls: It's very nasty, very nasty.
Phillip Lopate: Very nasty. I'm afraid we've passed silver time and we're into gold time now. So, I'd like to thank you for being so generous in submitting to this interrogation and I'd like to thank the audience for so generously staying with us all this time, those of you who did stay with us. Thank you very much.
Nov 6, 1992 52