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.