Leos Carax Regis Dialogue with Kent Jones, 2000
Kent Jones: I’m here at the Walker Art Center for a Regis Dialogue with Leos Carax, the acclaimed French director whose work includes Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang or Bad Blood, Lovers on the Bridge and Pola X, his new film.
Kent Jones: My name is Kent Jones, I'm the Associate Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York and a film critic, and I'll be talking with Leos about his work tonight. So please join us for this Regis Dialogue.
Kent Jones: Hi Leos. I guess that the best place to start is to just talk a little bit about Sans Titre and well, how you came to make the choices that you did for the film, to assemble those particular clips.
Leos Carax: I was supposed to shoot my last film, Pola X, and we didn't have the money. So we had to wait. In the meanwhile the Cannes Festival proposed that. And I thought it could be a way to get money to start the film. So we shot two sequences that would be included in the film that we started to shoot that summer, a few months after Cannes Festival.
Leos Carax: It was improvised short, since it had to be addressed to the Festival, and I started with the steps. And that brought me to this image, one of my favorite film is The Crowd by King Vidor. And this image of this child going up the stairs and finding out he lost his...
Kent Jones: That his father's dead.
Leos Carax: That his father's dead. And it was all improvised after that. I shot, I was an actor in a film in Lithuania. I had taken the camera there and to shoot some little piece of things that are included too.
Kent Jones: And the film in Lithuania is to have Sarunas Bartas who appears in Pola X.
Leos Carax: Yes.
Kent Jones: Yeah.
Leos Carax:
Jun 29, 2000 1 So it was in a ways, it's kind of a prologue to Pola X.
Kent Jones: But it also seems, even though it's meant as a commemoration of Cannes that it also seems to express, maybe I'm wrong, but a lot of your, maybe not your feelings about the cinema but your feelings about the emotion that the cinema can contain.
Leos Carax: Maybe because I hadn't seen a camera for seven years. It was maybe the only good experience of filmmaking was this little film.
Kent Jones: The only good experience of filming...
Leos Carax: I had.
Kent Jones: That you've had. Yeah.
Leos Carax: Yeah, it was abstract. There was no pressure on me, much pressure. It was pretty much editing, which is the only part I like the best about the work.
Leos Carax: So it was trying to go back to why, why do I need cinema, why am I so grateful that cinema exists? I was very grateful when I discovered cinema at 17. It was like waking up one day and finding there was a land for me. But then I got angry at cinema, or disgusted with it, or my home cinema. And I start making films. And by coming back, I making this little film. I wanted to find that beauty again of cinema, of being an orphan in the dark and watching someone's images.
Kent Jones: And then Night Of The Hunter, which is another film that's in your clips from the film, Night Of The Hunter by Charles Laughton that are included in Sans Titre, I know has been a very important film to you in the past too.
Leos Carax: Yeah, most filmmakers would say it's an important film to them, probably because of this orphan feeling about it, either these two, this brother and this sister. And I was going to make a film about, in a way, a brother and a sister who are orphans in the night. So that was almost a primitive scene of the film, of cinema.
Kent Jones: Which is a kind of a feeling that's directly connected to cinema for you, the feeling of being an orphan, of being lost and finding...
Jun 29, 2000 2 Leos Carax: Yes, it's not... Sometimes it's terrifying to be an orphan but it's also freedom. It's a heavy freedom. I mean, I wished I was an orphan when I was younger, many times, and many children do. And where Pola X is about that, it's about power. Originally it's about we think we come from a man and a woman. But then we grow up, we find out we come from much more history than that, much darker things in a way. So it was trying to put all that in eight minutes.
Kent Jones: And when you said that when you were 17, you found cinema. What was cinema to you before that? You must have gone to the movies when you were a child?
Leos Carax: Before that, mostly cinema was mostly actresses and Charles Bronson. I never really thought that someone made films.
Kent Jones: And when did you first have the experience of understanding that a film was something that was made? Was there a particular movie that you remember seeing?
Leos Carax: Yeah. Tokyo. Maybe it started when I was 12 or 13, I remembered there was a fighting match, a boxing in America between Cassius Clay, Mohammed Ali and Frazier.
Kent Jones: Joe Frazier.
Leos Carax: Frazier. And for the first time it was going to be live on French TV, but because of the time difference it was at 3:00 in the morning. So I took my mother's television in my room and put the clock and watched it. And after that I kept this television for a week and I saw a film by Robert Bresson late one night-
Kent Jones: Which one?
Leos Carax: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. And that obviously was made by someone. Starting there, that's the first time I remember that feeling of there's a man behind the camera.
Kent Jones: And you picked up a camera for the first time a couple of years later, when you were 19?
Leos Carax: 17, I bought a camera, a 16mm camera and started to try to make a short film, yeah.
Jun 29, 2000 3 Kent Jones: Which was aborted?
Leos Carax: Yeah.
Kent Jones: Yeah, with a fire in a Chinese restaurant? Is that... ?
Leos Carax: Yeah, I had a few mistakes. And then I made another short one or two years later that I finished.
Kent Jones: And you wrote a little bit of film criticism in between time, before your first feature?
Leos Carax: Yeah, very little. Yeah, it was a way to see more movies and to go to festivals.
Kent Jones: And when did Boy Meets Girl begin to take shape?
Leos Carax: I had written a script. I stopped school at 16 and then I had a whole year where my sisters and my mother were not home, so I had the house to myself and I was working about this little camera, and I wrote a script. It was called Deja Vu, but they wouldn't give me the money. In France there's a thing called [French] where you get money from the state for first films or for different films, films that aren't too commercial. But I was too young. So they didn't give me the money, and they said, "We will give you money for a short film." So I made a short film and that... I meet the actress of the first film, Boy Meets Girl, and I decided to rewrite this delivery story for her, so I rewrote it and it changed pretty much, and then that was Boy Meets Girl.
Kent Jones: And it's Mireille Perrier. That was her first film?
Leos Carax: Her first film?
Kent Jones: Yeah.
Leos Carax: No, second. She had had this small thing before.
Jun 29, 2000 4 Kent Jones: And how did you meet Denis Lavant?
Leos Carax: So I was looking for the main part for Boy Meets Girl, and I saw a lot of boys, musicians and actors and just young boys. And I was in an employment agency and he was in the files. And I saw, I chose the picture and I met him.
Kent Jones: Why don't we go to the first clip now from Boy Meets Girl, which is Leos' first film.
Kent Jones: When I watch Boy Meets Girl now I wonder if maybe it's incorrect to say that it's the film of yours where I feel like you're really trying to recreate personal sensations that you experienced when you were younger, of being alone, of walking. It's been Denis Lavant's relationship to people, the way that he's listening to the David Bowie song on the headphones.
Leos Carax: A first film is probably the only film that you prepare for 20 years or more. As I said, discovering that there was a way of living and earning money, like making films, was a miracle. And at the time, I think it was... The camera would be a way, an instrument to relate first to girls and then to the world. So I don't really remember. That was 18 years ago I started this film, that it was pretty much made for Mireille. And at the same time, probably too much to do to show how grateful I was to cinema and to the people who had made cinema who are dead by now, but most filmmakers, I used to go see a lot of silent films. So it was a mixture of that and of my experience as a young man and I had just arrived in Paris, and my experience of the city.
Kent Jones: But when you say too much indebted to the filmmakers of the past, what do you mean?
Leos Carax: I think most filmmakers discover film, then go to school and make work on other peoples' films and then make a film. But I discovered film at the same time I made films, which is... I don't know if it's good or bad but I didn't have any distance.
Leos Carax: So these two first films, this short film before that, this film and the next film, Mauvais Sang, Bad Blood, were very much like a debt. A debt?
Kent Jones: A debt, yeah.
Leos Carax: A debt I felt I owed to these mostly dead filmmakers from the past and a few live ones too.
Jun 29, 2000 5 Kent Jones: Who were the filmmakers that you're thinking of, I can ask?
Leos Carax: Oh so many, you know?
Leos Carax: Because if you look at film history there are so many beautiful films and incredible filmmakers, maybe not so much today but at least in the 60 first years.
Kent Jones: I know that we were talking before about how important King Vidor is to you.
Leos Carax: Yeah, well, because he's both a great filmmaker and for some intimate reasons, I feel that I would have liked to make a few of his films. I would have, or like I would say they were made for me. If you read a book sometimes once or twice in your life you feel this book is my brother or my sister. It was written for me even if it was written 300 years ago. I felt that with King Vidor's films, mostly The Crowd.
Kent Jones: Yeah, which is the film that we just saw, in the clip in Sans Titre, shot of the boy going up the staircase to find out that his father's died.
Kent Jones: And the film that... There's something about actually the imagery in this particular scene that seems very linked to silent film in the way that it relates back and forth between Denis Lavant and Mireille Perrier as she's dancing.
Kent Jones: I know there's another element in the scene. David Bowie was very important to you when you were younger too.
Leos Carax: Well, the thing is I start listening to music when I started to get interested in films mostly, and first years. So when I wanted a song I went back to what I would listen to when I was 12 or 13. And that was, yeah, I liked David Bowie, so he's there in the two or three first songs.
Kent Jones: And you, I think, once said that you don't really enjoy going back and looking at your older films.
Leos Carax: I've never done it.
Kent Jones:
Jun 29, 2000 6 Is it difficult?
Leos Carax: When you finish a film, there's something strange which is, I mean for me, there's both a huge disappointment of yourself and almost a kind of disgust for the process and for filmmaking and for your own film, but also I tend to not like films after I make a film. I don't go to the movies for a while.
Leos Carax: And at the same time there's something pretentious, like an intuition that the film exists, that it's not any film or it's not something... It has importance.
Kent Jones: It doesn't need you anymore? Or it exists separately from you?
Leos Carax: Yeah, but when it happens that I see an image or something for some reason I see. And then I go back to the disappointment and everything. So I'd rather keep an abstract idea that these are beautiful films.
Kent Jones: I just wanted to draw a little bit of attention to, I know that you had one living filmmaker with whom you had a friendship or at least a kinship was Philippe Garrell and I wonder if I see traces of his work, maybe of his presence a little bit in this film, in Boy Meets Girl?
Leos Carax: It was not a friendship. He's one of the two or three directors I met in my life, you know?
Kent Jones: Mm-hmm.
Leos Carax: And I acted in one of his films, and he wanted me to be an actor in a few others. And he made great films. He started making films at 15 years old in the sixties. So probably, yeah.
Kent Jones: Most people, Philippe Garrell's not that well known in the United States but he's a genuinely great filmmaker; his most recent film is with Catherine Deneuve and Xavier Beauvois call Night Wind or Le Vent de La Nuit, but his work isn't that well known here, but he's really pretty extraordinary.
Kent Jones: Why don't we go to the next clip which is also from Boy Meets Girl, which is the party scene.
Kent Jones:
Jun 29, 2000 7 Was the decision to shoot Boy Meets Girl in black and white another way of paying tribute to an older form of cinema or to older filmmakers?
Leos Carax: Yeah, probably. I think when you start to make films there's a little, it's good and bad, but you want to make something different. And black and white at the time, I mean, it's worse now but black and white was hard to do and it was more expensive than doing color because the labs didn't do it anymore. But probably it was that, and it was too because I had never made a film. I thought that if I made it in black and white there would be less... People wouldn't see the mistakes, you know? I was afraid of color.
Kent Jones: Why? Why would people not be able to see the mistakes in black and white?
Leos Carax: Because they were not used to black and white anymore. And that's always... I have a tendency to shoot in sets rather than real décor.
Kent Jones: Yes.
Leos Carax: And I'd rather shoot at night than in the daytime too, because at night, night is like a studio in itself. You light what you want. You don't have all that reality that jumps at you, you know? If they have cars that are going by and you don't want to see them you just don't lit them. So I knew that by doing it in black and white I could really... Since it was really a low-budget film too and I wanted to give my sense of Paris, I knew that by doing it in black and white I could shape the city and the faces much more with less money, I mean less money while we were shooting.
Kent Jones: And when you say that you prefer to shoot on sets, is that because of the aspect of privacy? It allows you a little bit of distance to think?
Leos Carax: Yeah, maybe, I'm not very good with reality. I try to go back to reality but it's already there, I feel I have nothing. It's second one, an employment, it doesn't need me. It doesn't need a camera to be there.
Leos Carax: And I like... I think cinema is a question of choice, it's always choosing something, always, all the time. It's like, you know, by doing it in studio you have no choice. You have to choose the color of everything and the shape of everything, and it becomes much more... I don't know.
Kent Jones: And how did you work with on the visual scheme of the film with your cinematographer, Jean-Yves Escoffier. I just want to say that this was... Leos' first three films were made with the same cinematographer and the same actor,
Jun 29, 2000 8 Denis Lavant. Also, in the nature of these three films, he has the same name, his character has the same name. Alex Oscar, right?
Leos Carax: Alex.
Kent Jones: Oh, Alex. Okay.
Leos Carax: I met, I find Escoffier for his... I mean, I was looking for a director of photography and he was young. He had just made one feature film, I think. So I was very lucky to meet him. I mean, actually I was very lucky when I was 20, 23 years old, to meet all these people with whom I work for 10 years. Jean-Yves Escoffier, [French], Denis Lavant. And my producer who made these three first films with me. And Jean-Yves became like a brother. We spent 10 years almost seeing each other every day and making these three films. And we would work one or two years ahead of each film, simply seeing each other, taking pictures and looking at pictures, looking at paintings and looking at films and talking.
Kent Jones: Do you look at paintings a lot before when you're planning a film?
Leos Carax: Because I know nothing about painting I don't need to see... I mean, I should probably see more but I don't need to see. Like one painting can be enough for one film, or one painter, that someone... I don't go to museums so someone who offers me a book or I find a book some place. Me, it helps in an obscure way.
Kent Jones: How did Mauvais Sang, or Bad Blood, take shape?
Leos Carax: I knew I wanted to work again with the same actor because I felt in this film, in Boy Meets Girl, I thought it didn't move well the film, and I thought he was both like a sculpture and at the same time like a dancer. So I wanted a film in which he could run and dance and move.
Leos Carax: Each one of these three films in the eighties I made for a woman, either to meet a woman or someone I was with. So that was... In the second film was Juliette Binoche and Denis. And I needed a... I don't like to write scripts. I don't write scripts actually. I wait, I have vague ideas and I wait until at one point I think, "Okay, I know how the film is going to move," and I had to put it on paper to get a budget, to get money. But actually these first films, I didn't write them. I taped myself saying something and I gave it to someone who would write it. I mean, I would write all the dialogue and everything but just what I mean is the script itself, to get the money, I didn't write.
Leos Carax:
Jun 29, 2000 9 And this, I stole the idea of the second film from an American film but that nobody's seen. It was a Raoul Walsh film, which already has a very young boy and an older couple. And the older man needs the young boy to save his life, and the young boy falls in love with the woman that was already that triangle.
Kent Jones: Which film is that?
Leos Carax: It's call Salty O'Rourke.
Kent Jones: Oh, Salty O'Rourke? Oh, with Alan Ladd, yeah.
Leos Carax: You saw it?
Kent Jones: Yeah, yeah. It's hard to see.
Leos Carax: I hope.
Kent Jones: It's still hard to see, don't worry.
Kent Jones: So then, why don't we go to the first clip from Mauvais Sang or Bad Blood.
Kent Jones: There's a way that Juliette Binoche is filmed in this scene and that Mireille Perrier is filmed in Boy Meets Girl that seems so close to silent cinema, to the way that Lillian Gish or Mae Marsh or Pola Negri was filmed. And is it something that you... And do they have faces that specifically remind you of silent cinema?
Leos Carax: Probably both ways, I probably... I loved Lillian Gish very much. As I say, I mean, it's hard. That's what I meant by saying these films are maybe too close from my discovering them. But that's the way it happened.
Kent Jones: But it's an unusual, it's noteworthy because it's not something that one sees in films very much anymore. There's a different relationship with the human face, I think, and with bodies in most films. It's something that's past, that used to be in silent films, but you do see it. And I think maybe not just in these two films but in your other two films also. Maybe you think I'm...
Jun 29, 2000 10 Leos Carax: Maybe. Something changed after this film, which was after this film I was... These first two films I made without really knowing that I was doing. And after that film, there was a disappointment, quite big, so I started to wonder what it was, whether I could go on making films. And I didn't feel... In this film, I think I felt cinema was getting too comfortable. Or the camera was getting to be something, not a challenge enough and I wasn't taking risks anymore. Because I knew, because the film had a kind of beauty, and I was very much in love with this face of Juliette. So it took time before I moved on from this.
Leos Carax: And after this film, I think I've always put myself... I haven't made many films but I always try to put myself in a kind of chaos world, I wouldn't know what's happening. And I wouldn't have the comfort of cinema, like being a nice father over my shoulder and helping me.
Kent Jones: It's a way of trying to rediscover cinema or your relationship to cinema?
Leos Carax: Well, it's happened is that way, it wasn't very conscious move, but it happens that I cannot, since that I haven't been able to make a film if I think I know what I can do. I have to be in a situation where there's only one way I can go and I have no choice. You know, it's not like saying this would be better here, and this was very choreographed. Choreographed?
Kent Jones: Mm-hmm, choreographed, yeah.
Leos Carax: Film in terms of light, angles, colors, direction of actors. The lenses, long. Oh my god, she had long lenses. I mean, it means that...
Kent Jones: Lenses of long focal length?
Leos Carax: Yeah, the focus had to be very precise. So everything was, I think, too controlled. I think control, very few people can control what they... After we call it master, the people who can control, you know Hitchcock could control a film from A to Z. But if you're not Hitchcock, or if you're not Trier, or if you're not Chaplin, you've got to find a way to put yourself in a position, an interested position if possible, where you don't have the choice anymore. You do what you can and not what you want because, as I said, I think it's like painters. You know some painters can work on every detail of a painting and it's going to be great, but if less good painters try to be that conscious and that controlled it's going to be very boring.
Kent Jones:
Jun 29, 2000 11 Do you think that maybe that control is too much of a goal in movies now, for young filmmakers who are just starting?
Leos Carax: Now people... I mean, any, we don't need filmmakers anymore to make films. I mean, everybody knows. A crew can make a film by itself, and actually most films are made like that.
Kent Jones: Yeah. It's true.
Leos Carax: And people have... Today, I've seen so much more images than even me or so much more images than my father or that my grandfather. And these images are not only films, of course. They're TV, things, the news, the commercials, the video clips. So all you need to make a film is to see one film in your life and you know if it's a good one, you kind of have a good lesson. If it's a bad one, you'll have a bad lesson. So everybody can make film, and a lot of people do.
Leos Carax: Yeah, I mean, I don't... You very rarely see a film today which is badly done. That can be shit, but it's well done anyway.
Kent Jones: Yeah. But I think you've said once before that mastery is not something to aspire to in itself.
Leos Carax: Yeah.
Kent Jones: Yeah?
Leos Carax: If you're lucky to be a master, one of the few master, you are. And then if you're not, you do what you can.
Kent Jones: Yep. So then, let's go to this sequence and we can decide if it's masterful or not; also from Mauvais Sang, or Bad Blood.
Kent Jones: That's a very joyful sequence and it looks like it was joy to film.
Leos Carax: Yeah. I usually don't, how you say, [French]?
Kent Jones: Plan.
Jun 29, 2000 12 Leos Carax: [French].
Leos Carax: No, [French].
Kent Jones: [French], plan, to storyboard or plan?
Leos Carax: No. I usually don't hold the camera.
Kent Jones: Oh, hold the camera.
Leos Carax: I don't know the...
Kent Jones: You mean to move it?
Leos Carax: I don't. It's Jean-Yves who would...
Kent Jones: He operates the camera, you don't operate the camera yourself?
Leos Carax: Yeah, I don't operate it. But on one, we couldn't do many because he would get tired but on one of the takes I operated the camera. And I like... There's two way to move the camera. There's one way which is with a stick, you move it. Or there's one way which [French]?
Kent Jones: Manipulate?
Leos Carax: [French]?
Kent Jones: Yeah, to turn it on the dolly.
Leos Carax:
Jun 29, 2000 13 You have two, you have one-
Kent Jones: To dolly.
Leos Carax: ... to go up and down, and one to go left and right.
Kent Jones: Yeah, to pan or to... Yeah.
Leos Carax: Mm-hmm. And I'd never done it, of course. And it needs coordination because... I'm not coordinated. So I decided I would try but I didn't tell the actor because he would be upset if someone who didn't...
Leos Carax: So this, the take I kept and I like it because at one point I almost lose him and then I catch him back. And it was a good night.
Leos Carax: But these films are all about, I made three films that are all about boy meets girl, and it's all about a young man who is kind of closed...
Kent Jones: Introverted?
Leos Carax: Yeah.
Kent Jones: Yeah.
Leos Carax: And then he meets a girl and sometimes he only meets an image of a girl or the voice of a girl. But he opens up, or he's hoping through the relation he's going to open up to the world. And each time he tries to escape gravity. Escape gravity?
Kent Jones: Mm-hmm.
Leos Carax: Like dancing, or in this film there's a parachute scene. And the thing is always too heavy. He never really is able to escape gravity.
Jun 29, 2000 14 Kent Jones: But then at the end of the film Juliette Binoche almost is, right?
Leos Carax: Yeah, well, the girl can, yeah.
Kent Jones: When she's running, yeah.
Leos Carax: But I've always wanted to make a dance film. I mean, I'd like to make an all-dance film.
Kent Jones: Didn't you once have an idea of shooting a film in zero gravity?
Leos Carax: Yes. It was a remake. I wanted to... This film, the script, done by Leo McCarey called, in English it's called-
Kent Jones: Love Affair?
Leos Carax: ... A Love Affair to Remember.
Kent Jones: It's Love Affair. Yeah, there are two films, Love Affair and-
Leos Carax: The second one.
Kent Jones: An Affair to Remember.
Leos Carax: An Affair to Remember.
Kent Jones: Yeah.
Leos Carax: It's Cary Grant, Irene...
Jun 29, 2000 15 Kent Jones: No, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.
Leos Carax: Deborah Kerr. So I wanted to do the same film, where there were two, how do you say, astronauts?
Kent Jones: Astronauts, yeah.
Leos Carax: Going to the moon, a woman and a man. And they were both married, and they go there and they get on the moon and they fall in love. And of course on the trip back they're supposed to go back to their lovers, to their husband and wife. So it was like the film, if you've seen the film, they say, "We'll meet in six months at the Empire State Building," et cetera.
Leos Carax: But anyway there was no producer to pay for...
Kent Jones: For the trip to the moon?
Leos Carax: For the trip to the moon, or for the location. So scouting...
Kent Jones: And then, after Mauvais Sang, you said that you took some time to rethink things.
Leos Carax: Oh, it's not actually to rethink. It's just, it happened that as much as Mauvais Sang had been controlled, and it was all made in sets, then I said I would make it from outdoor about people who didn't have, you know, telephones and doors and faxes and beds. And you should be able to feel the skin and the fatigue of the people, the hunger, the air. But mostly about people who had nothing and to try to have a relationship.
Kent Jones: And was it again, was it a long writing process, or a long thinking process?
Leos Carax: No. I thought of it since I had gotten to Paris because the first thing when you get to a big city is, especially a big rich city like Paris or New York, maybe here, I don't know, is you have homeless people. And since I get into the city when I was 17, at the time I didn't talk to people, I didn't relate to people and I didn't know anybody anyway in the city, so the only exchanges I had, not verbal but sometimes through the eyes, were with homeless people. And I knew I could not make a real film about homeless people because I'm not one, and it would take me a lot of time to...
Jun 29, 2000 16 That's why I could never make a documentary even though I'm interested in that, because it would take me 20 years before I could do any documentary, just to experience this stuff.
Leos Carax: So I could not make that, but I could talk about all misery, not just the lack of money but the misery of man. I felt I could do that so that was the next film.
Kent Jones: But you decided to make it outdoors but you did make it on a set?
Leos Carax: Yes, because it's called Les Amant du Pont-Neuf and Pont-Neuf is a central bridge in Paris, it's the oldest bridge. It's called the new bridge but it's the oldest. And same thing, I mean, it's not the moon but they wouldn't let us have that bridge for the few months I needed it. So we had to rebuild the whole bridge and neighborhood in the country, in the south of France.
Kent Jones: It was a long shoot, it was a lengthy shoot.
Leos Carax: Yeah, it was a catastrophe. It took three years to make it, and a few producers.
Kent Jones: But well worth it, I think. Let's go to the first clip from Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, or as it's known here Lovers on the Bridge.
Kent Jones: There's something that you were saying before about when you made Les Amants du Pont-Neuf that you wanted to feel the skin of the actors. I think it's a film you really feel the weight of the actors and the weight of things on the screen, the texture of the bridge and water.
Leos Carax: I've had problems because my shootings always long, this one is of course the longest. And sometimes the actor comes in sequence. And when he comes out he's three years older, you know?
Kent Jones: Yeah.
Leos Carax: And I think the film before, sometimes he comes in and when he comes out he's 30 pounds heavier because he... But sometimes it's because of production problems. But at the same time, if you want life to get into a film, it takes time because actors prepare a film so much, like fighters and like athletes. And for the two first months they know too
Jun 29, 2000 17 much what they're doing and stuff. I think the two first months should be thrown away. You should only go on working after that.
Kent Jones: Use them for rehearsal or so that the actors can get their habits out of their system?
Leos Carax: Yes, because they... I mean, I tend to choose the actors where you had they cannot know what film to do unless they know for who, with who. And I try, the only work I do with actors is choosing them and then trying to put them in a kind of corridor where they can't escape the film when the film shooting starts. But they have ways in the beginning because of fear, and same for me. I secure the beginning of a shooting. So it takes... I think if you shoot longer than you can't control that much. Life gets into it.
Leos Carax: People think I should learn to control things better. But no, I say the contrary.
Kent Jones: And with this particular film, I'm wondering if... There must have been a very organic kind of growth in the relationship with the actors as the shooting progressed. It feels, particularly with Denis Lavant, I always think the character seems to be really at one with his character in the movie.
Leos Carax: Yeah, that's right. In that sense, it was very hard because we did not... It's not that we shot for three years of course.
Kent Jones: Right.
Leos Carax: We shoot mostly a summer then no more money. Then a summer and no more money, and then a summer until the end of the shoot. And the stops were very bad for both actors. I mean, for everyone but mainly for both of them.
Kent Jones: But did it force them into a different kind of rhythm that they wouldn't have had? Did it make the film-
Leos Carax: Well, actually I almost redid all the film at the last shooting. I mean, what we had done first was too fabricated. It was not very good. I kept some things but it's only at the last shooting they were so lost, we all so lost, that something happened that made it maybe better.
Kent Jones: Let's go now to the second clip from Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Lovers on the Bridge.
Kent Jones:
Jun 29, 2000 18 I've always found that a really powerful sequence and a very mysterious one too. And I was just wondering if you could talk about it a little bit and where it came from?
Leos Carax: The actress, Juliette Binoche, before she started to be an actress painted a lot. But when I met her she was already a young actress. She had stopped painting. After Bad Blood, when I thought I would make another film with both of them, I thought I wanted her to go back to painting so I thought I had to write a part where she paints. And she did go, at least for three, four years she went before and during the film she went back to painting.
Leos Carax: And actually for the first time I went to a museum. She took me to the Louvre. And we looked at these Rembrandt self-portraits. And I thought it was quite amazing that this young girl, centuries after, would look at this old man, what he saw of himself. And she knows them well, she knows them.
Leos Carax: So when I saw her look at these paintings I thought... It's always like from the beginning when I was younger, when I made my first film, I tried to show people all ages. In all my films there are babies, there are old people. And the characters sometimes act like babies or like old people. And in the same way, I thought it was kind of beautiful that a young woman today could stay in front of a painting with an old man that was meant... And it could tell something about life and about aging and about one's own image. It happens in the film that she's losing her sight, so it has another meaning too but that's how it started.
Kent Jones: So the painting would speak to her and tell her a story with the old man.
Kent Jones: I think that right now what we'll do is we'll go directly into a clip from Leos' latest film, which is Pola X.
Kent Jones: Just to give a little bit of background, Pola X is based on a Herman Melville novel that's somewhat known in America, called the Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. And Leos says, you've referred to it as your first film alone so to speak, and I believe you've also referred to it as your first narrative film. I was wondering if you could clarify that?
Leos Carax: By alone, I didn't mean... Of course, I made it with a crew and with actors. They were good. But as I said, I was lucky when I was young, when I started to meet all these people with whom I would work for 10 years. After Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Lovers on the Bridge, I stopped making films. I mean, these people, it was a difficult film to make, so it was pretty bad. And then people separated. My assistant died. The producer of my three film died after the filming. And I stopped making films for a few years.
Leos Carax:
Jun 29, 2000 19 And when I thought I could maybe go back to making a film, I had to find new people. I didn't want to go back. And I did meet new people, but of course it was not the same experience. And in a way, it was good. I mean, what I mean by being alone is not doing the film for someone, and not sharing so much of the experience with other people.
Leos Carax: And my first narrative film, actually I saw that each time I make a film. It's just that I don't think I'm a storyteller. But I am interesting in storytelling. And because I had the book by Melville, and I think he had an interesting problem too with storytelling, which I don't call a problem but it's a problem. I mean, he sold 200 copies of this book, you know?
Kent Jones: Yeah.
Leos Carax: But I always try, I mean, I think I do tell a story. It's just most people don't see it. Oh well.
Kent Jones: I know that before you made Pola X, during that time when you weren't making films, you had made several trips to Bosnia during the war, and I wonder if that had an effect on the film, if that played a part in the film?
Leos Carax: Well, in every project, every project starts with a coincidence, at least one coincidence. The thing that I had written... No, I had read this book when I was 19 and it's probably the most important book I've read, most important for me. I reread it a few times. But I thought it was taboo to try to adapt a good book, I mean, a great book actually. That if you wanted to adapt a book, you just pick a minor book or a lousy book.
Leos Carax: But since I'd stopped making films and I didn't know if I would go back to it, when I found the strength to come back to filmmaking I thought that I had no more taboo. I mean, there was nothing I could do. Not what I wanted but there was nothing I should not do. And after this is maybe time to do this book. In a way, I don't adapt the book. I try to adapt the sensations and the questions that I was left with after reading the book.
Leos Carax: But then I thought, "I cannot make it because I will never find Pierre and Isabelle," the two main characters, the brother and the sister. And the first time I thought I could maybe do it is when I saw the face of this Russian actress. I saw her face on a screen in Germany for 10 seconds.
Kent Jones: Yekaterina Golubeva.
Leos Carax: Yes. And... What was the question? I don't remember the question.
Kent Jones:
Jun 29, 2000 20 Oh. About your trips to Bosnia.
Leos Carax: So then I did research to know who was this face, where did it come from? It came from a Lithuanian film. I got a print in Paris, I saw the film. I actually liked the film and the actress. Met her, and I thought I had Isabelle. But Isabelle, she's Russian, I mean. It wasn't meant to be.
Leos Carax: But then there was this war going on in Bosnia, and I had to go there. I had been invited in the beginning of the war to show my films, and I was sick, I couldn't go. So when I could go I went. And I went actually for just to talk with film students and theater students. I think is was in '93, '94, during the war. And I went for five days but I stayed for two months. And then I went back and back. And I thought I have this actress who's from the East, and there's this war going on. I thought this is how the film should start. Even if you don't see the war, you...Coming back from one of these trips that you see in the beginning that you saw-
Kent Jones: In Sans Titre?
Leos Carax: In the short film, yes.
Kent Jones: And it's the opening of Pola X also.
Leos Carax: Which is... Because these wars today are both modern wars and both medieval wars. There's so much hate that it's not enough to kill people, they try to kill the dead. And actually the first things they do in these wars is to bomb the memory, bomb museums, bomb archives you say?
Kent Jones: Archives.
Leos Carax: Yeah, so people won't have papers anymore, no identities. And bomb cemeteries. And I thought, I had that dream with all these planes would bomb cemeteries, and I thought Isabelle could, since she's a creature in the film, you don't know is she's a real person or if she could come out of one of these graves and move towards the camera like in an Abel Gance film, you know, with the phantom, the ghosts of the war living come living again.
Kent Jones: Like in the film, J'Accuse?
Leos Carax: Yeah.
Jun 29, 2000 21 Kent Jones: Yeah. Abel Gance.
Leos Carax: So there was the beginning of the idea of the film.
Kent Jones: Maybe at this point, this would be a good time to open up for questions from the audience. Anybody out there have any... ?
Kent Jones: Yes?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm just curious actually how you got Scott Walker to score Pola X. I was surprised and I heard a little bit from The Cockfighter beginning to recognize that. I thought it was really appropriate and he's somebody that I like quite a bit, that I saw... I mean, I see similarities maybe between his music and, you know... At least on a kind of an emotional level for me. Did you approach him in other words? Or did he... ?
Leos Carax: I-
Leos Carax: ... I faxed him and he answered.
Kent Jones: Not that reclusive.
Leos Carax: Yeah. I had never worked with a composer before. I always wanted to. But each film I would meet composers and I was terrified at the idea of they would make music and it would be so expensive, I could not... If I did not like it, what would I do with all this music? So I finally put music from records in my three first films.
Leos Carax: And then I heard his last record Tilt. And when he had seen my films, and when I met him I could see that it would no problem to say, "I don't like this," or to try to make the music together even though I wish I was a composer, but I'm not.
Leos Carax: And so, same thing, I worked with him a year and a half before. And slowly we went towards the film and totally... And while I was editing we were still working, so it was a very good experience.
Jun 29, 2000 22 Kent Jones: You had ideas for musical themes before you started shooting?
Leos Carax: Yes.
Kent Jones: Next?
Kent Jones: Yes?
Speaker 5: I guess I'm curious about how you go about conceptualizing a film if it's not a story and it's not a script. I know it comes from an image, an idea, but how do work mapping out this film kind of in your mind? How does it progress, that form?
Leos Carax: It's always a hardest question because there's never a good time to talk about that. It's while you do it, you don't want to talk about it. While you shoot it, it's too late and after the film, you forgot how it started.
Leos Carax: But what I meant by not being a storyteller is I don't go from A to Z. I'm incapable of that. As I said, let's say about what I just said about Isabelle, finding this actress Katia Golubeva. And this war in Bosnia is like through the experiences you have not so many are important. So you work with these feelings or experiences, maybe in a way like a composer, like a [French], a musical score. You know that there you want this feeling, and there you want this. It's not always a precise feeling; it's sometimes quite musical. And you write a kind of score that is maybe vague but you know how. And then of course it's got to move between these different feelings, and that's a bit more like constructing a story.
Leos Carax: But frankly, I don't remember more than that.
Kent Jones: Anyway else?
Kent Jones: Yes?
Speaker 6: I was really interested in what you said about dance, and I was wondering if part of the reason in picking Denis Lavant for the character was his movement, that seems to be a characteristic of him that [inaudible] around. And I
Jun 29, 2000 23 was wondering if that was something that you choreographed with him, and if your other characters, especially in Bad Blood, or if that is something that came from themselves?
Kent Jones: I'm going to repeat that question, it's about Leos' relationship to dance and specifically with the films that he made with Denis Lavant, who's the lead actor in his first three films, whether he chose him because of his ability to move the way that he does, which is extraordinary, and whether he choreographs those movements himself or whether he works it out with Leos.
Leos Carax: When I met Denis Lavant, no, I didn't know how, his possibility, I mean, his capacities. In the first film actually that he's not very physical. Then for the second film he trained a lot and it was... I mean, I used a choreographer but it's more someone who's going to work with the actors to train them physically and to give me lots of possibilities when I'm shooting; if I want them to do something they know how to move and they're in good shape, let's say. After that, it's pretty much done together. We try things and it's pretty simple. I've never done something very sophisticated in terms of that.
Leos Carax: So now, I would like to make a film with a woman dancer, too. I mean, it seems that all the film that have dance in them, and there aren't so many, but don't use anything from the last three years of the art of choreography, you know? It's like old Broadway shows. It would be interesting to see someone move the way dancers can move today.
Leos Carax: But yeah, I'm interested in dance. I hope I make this film.
Kent Jones: You have a question? Yes?
Speaker 7: I just wanted to say that I really like Pola X, and that I think the story that it does tell is really a very contemporary story, but also really hard to tell. And I think I know it, I mean, to my own self and things that I've read but I've never really seen... I mean, I've never seen anybody do it actually. So, I just wanted to... I didn't really have a question but I wanted to say thank you because I think... And I thank the Walker too because I just think that it really is an amazing, you know, dealing with power? I mean, and the ability to try and do that on film and to just tell the other story about what it is to live in the contemporary world.
Speaker 7: So I don't know, I mean, I just sort of went on but I think that was really great. I mean, I think that is in contemporary literature, that story. But I just have never seen in visually done like that, at all, anybody attempt to do it.
Leos Carax: Thank you.
Jun 29, 2000 24 Kent Jones: You have questions? Yes?
Speaker 8: It seems in some of your films or perhaps all of your films that the sound design is very interesting to me because it seems, in some cases, to have a very visceral almost like expressionistic quality to it. And it seems to me that the sound design, maybe the sound effects or the foley work almost functions in a musical sense, and sort of reinforces or has some kind of narrative qualities to it.
Speaker 8: Would you agree with that, or is that something that you consciously designed in your films?
Leos Carax: I think I have a few talents, I found out when I started to make films because I didn't know anything. There are a few things that are organic, I can do that; which are sound, music. I love to work with it and it doesn't seem to labor...
Kent Jones: Laborious.
Leos Carax: Laborious. Editing is another one that's pretty close to music too. And there are maybe one to two other talents. It's nice to find out you have a talent when you don't know you have it.
Kent Jones: Would you agree that one of your talents is for rendering speed?
Leos Carax: For what?
Kent Jones: Speed, just sheer velocity on screen. It's hard for me to think of other films that do it so forcefully.
Leos Carax: It comes from the opposite, the feeling of being so heavy. And when I was start, at the same time I discovered films I discovered... I started to read Celine, this French writer. And when he was old he was asked what would he say before he died. Nice question. And he said, in French he said, "[French]." Which I don't know how...
Leos Carax: [French].
Speaker 3: The men were heavy.
Jun 29, 2000 25 Leos Carax: Yeah, he would say-
Speaker 3: Men are heavy.
Leos Carax: And I do feel it's true, how heavy we are in every sense. I mean, I talk about the beautiful lightness, not the superficial lightness. And I feel my films are much too heavy. And I guess the characters feel heavy too, and they're always trying to find speed or [French].
Leos Carax: [French].
Speaker 3: To fly.
Leos Carax: To what?
Speaker 3: To fly.
Leos Carax: [French] is let's say when someone, an athlete, when they do these athletes who-
Speaker 3: Catapult?
Leos Carax: ... who-
Kent Jones: Pole vault?
Kent Jones: Pole vault, or...
Leos Carax: I mean, anything to take speed. When the time, not to go fast, but the time when you start from zero-
Kent Jones:
Jun 29, 2000 26 To build up.
Leos Carax: ... to build speed.
Kent Jones: Accelerate.
Leos Carax: Accelerate, yes. But it's a nice word in French. Yeah. And this is what's so hard to do in life, and I feel that you've got to do it again and again because you can't take speed and then go on, going faster and faster. That when you fall and then you have to believe and try again, at every age. And start again.
Leos Carax: So there is an incredible joy in real speed, not speed like you see it like click-clack or...in most films. But to find a real sensation of movement, yes.
Kent Jones: Another question, yes?
Speaker 9: Could you talk a little bit about the factory set situation in Pola X, and the musicians and just that situation, and how it evolved?
Leos Carax: In the Melville book the two characters end up in kind of a religious community, just like a cult. But again, it's not a book I ever really understood, this book. I think if I had understood it I wouldn't have done the film. And one aspect which is important in the book, I guess, is that Pierre is considered sort of like a Jesus Christ, like an immature hero who wants to do well and who's ready to sacrifice himself. But of course he's too small, so he falls.
Leos Carax: And I didn't, I felt I was unable to show a religious community. I just don't know anything about religion. But I thought what I could maybe show is that even though Pierre escapes his castle, his mother and more than that, to follow Isabelle or to save Isabelle, we don't really know, he's still a young, immature man who needs kind of the figure of a father or something and he...
Leos Carax: So they go to this place which is, we don't really know it seems. Maybe it's a fascist community or terrorist. And though we don't know what happens, what's important is that he's kind of fascinated by the chief and he's, we imagine, influenced by this character.
Kent Jones: We probably have time for one more question. Yes?
Jun 29, 2000 27 Speaker 10: In Lovers on the Bridge, Michelle makes this movement from sort of a very comfortable class, right, or leisure life to what she sees, I guess, as the hardest life physically that she could imagine. And Pierre makes the same sort of movement I guess at a different speed. But I'm wondering how you see that movement, why you see that movement as important, that direction? Why are you curious about that jump?
Leos Carax: I think for many reasons. One is it's what you put into films, as I said, are never answered, it's more questions. And it's questions and fears. I mean, personally, most of my nightmares are falling apart, not being able to walk anymore, being like these homeless people who are on the sidewalk and are completely confused and have nothing left, nobody, nothing.
Leos Carax: The other thing is the relation you have with your origin, for a rich person or someone who comes from a comfortable background, or for a poor person, whatever, there's both at one point in life hate for this origin and there's a need to destroy this and to rebuild something or your own. All that, it's pretty naïve. It usually happens to younger people. As I say, you found out that your origin is not only your father and your mother. There's much more to it.
Leos Carax: But since I'm telling stories about young people in all these films, even though this film is the first film I've made with the main character is younger than me. Pierre is probably 10 years younger than me. So there is some kind of, it's not irony. There's much more irony in the book. I'm not good with irony. But there is a look at a younger man and at his immaturity.
Leos Carax: I think it's both brave and I'd rather people who do that, who escape whatever they were given to find something of their own, even if there's something naïve in it that doesn't work. I mean, they usually come home very fast. He's a young bourgeois and he tries to do well but he's not ready to support himself and the family.
Kent Jones: Well, I want to thank you all for coming.
Kent Jones: Leos, I'd like to thank you for coming.
Leos Carax: Thank you.
Kent Jones: And thank you for your films.
Leos Carax:
Jun 29, 2000 28 Thank you very much.
Jun 29, 2000 29