Resistance: Interrogating Collaboration

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2016 Resistance: Interrogating Collaboration

Wade, James

Wade, J. (2016). Resistance: Interrogating Collaboration (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27644 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/3130 master thesis

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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Resistance: Interrogating Collaboration

James Wade

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN DRAMA

CALGARY, ALBERTA

JUNE 2016

Abstract

RESISTANCE: INTERROGATING COLLABORATION

By James Wade

The following manuscript and accompanying artist’s statement are the complete academic materials pertaining the writing of the full-length play Resistance. The artist’s statement will describe the process of adapting elements of the life and work of film director Jean-Pierre Melville. I will discuss issues related to Melville’s biography, his singular style, the development of the character of Dominique and the script’s treatment of “truth”.

Acknowledgments

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my supervisor, Clem Martini, for his guidance and continued support in the writing of this play. The work is much stronger for it, as am I. I would also like to thank my professors during my time at the University of

Calgary, namely Penny Farfan, Patrick Finn and Pil Hansen. I would also like to thank

Anna MacAlpine, my fearless playwriting colleague. Finally, I would like to recognize the cast and crew of the staged reading of my thesis work as well as those involved in my pre-thesis work. These individuals are: Clem Martini, Geneviève Paré, Bryson Wiese,

Mike Czuba, Myah Martinson, Kristi Max, Ryan Sheedy, Logan Teske and the late Tim

Sutherland.

iii

Table of Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………………………...………...ii Acknowledgments……………………….………………………………………………iii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………..iv 1 INTRODUCTION AND FINDING “MELVILLE”..………………………..…....1 1.1 Introduction……………………...………………………………………………...1 1.2 Finding “Melville”……………………………...…………………………………6 2 WEARING A RAINCOAT……………………..……………………………….13 3 DOMINIQUE………………………………………..…………………………..22 4 HISTORY AND “TRUTH”……………….……………………...……………...30 5 REWRITING AND REVISING………….……………………..……………….38 6 CONCLUSION………………………………….……………………………….42 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………..45 APPENDIX: RESISTANCE….……………...………………………………………….47

iv 1

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION AND FINDING “MELVILLE”

1.1 Introduction

“I considered it quite possible that Melville identified himself with Captain Ahab as well as with his creator, and asked if he too was searching for a white whale. He thought for a moment then answered that indeed he was, and for him it was the United States. “When

I’m in a rented car, driving along a highway in the West or South, I’m a happy man. I don’t need anything else. My emotions are contained. I’ve found my white whale.” I didn’t recognize it then, but I do now – the terrible sadness of a man who feels himself most complete when he is absolutely alone.”

Eric Breitbart, “Call Me Melville”

There is a scene at the end of Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Le Samouraï in which the main character, a hit man named Jef Costello, goes to a nightclub to kill a piano player. He enters the nightclub to shoot this woman, as he has been paid to do, even though he is inexorably drawn to her. When he approaches her and she sees the gun, she asks “Why, Jef?” to which he responds, “Because I was paid to.” At that moment, Jef is shot from off-screen by the police detective who had been tracking him for most of the film. As the police inspect Costello’s body they discover that his gun had not been loaded: the piano player had never been in danger. This strange, unrealistic and subtly fantastical ending mystified me, as it seemed as though the entire film was changed by this one choice. As I watched more films by Melville I found that in many ways they were all poems about male loneliness. For a Melville protagonist, human connection is impossible, but unavoidably desirable. This contradiction is usually reconciled through

2 violence or death. I could not help but wonder at the person who made these films. Did

Melville, a very influential film artist, have a similar loneliness? After doing some preliminary research into the man and finding him to be a wildly intelligent, pompous and singularly styled iconoclast I became fascinated by him. Upon learning of his not-to- be-discussed involvement in the French Resistance and that “Melville” originated as his code name I was hopelessly intent on writing the play that would eventually become

Resistance.

Characters negotiating with the external narratives that impact their lives have always occupied my plays. Pop culture, religious and national narratives influence our lives in fundamental ways. These can be empowering or destructive but I believe they are powerful and omnipresent. What drew me most to Melville was the idea of a man who found the American archetype of the lone gangster to be a salvation during the war, but would later find it also alienated him to human connection as his life went on.

The discovery, writing, re-discovery and re-writing of Resistance has been a long journey fraught with frustration and self-reflection. This play went through more drafts

1 Wade, James. Resistance Reading 1. 2016. Calgary.

3 than I had previously written for a finished play and the current draft is unrecognizable from the initial one. In this thesis I will delve into the initial spark of the play and discuss some of the various iterations of the script as it moved towards (and sometimes away from) a narrative with intellectual and emotional substance.

In my first chapter I will elaborate on how Melville’s biography and filmography inspired some of the themes and concepts explored in the finished play. To give the reader a fuller idea of the foundation from which this work grew, I will situate Melville solidly within the framework of history, the French New Wave and touch upon his lasting influence on filmmaking. Both in the play and in my accompanying statements I hope to make a compelling case for his relevance and further the critical re-appraisal of his body of work that has occurred in the last twenty years.

In my second chapter I aim to highlight the importance of Melville’s signature style and the importance of American culture on his personal journey in the play and how popular and political narratives become hopelessly inseparable from one’s personal identity for a figure such as Melville. Is there an “essence” to a man whose persona, right down to his name, has been carefully authored?

Chapter Three will delve into the genesis of the character “Dominique” and her loose relationship with actual history as opposed to Melville’s origin being based in fact.

While it is certainly possible to view Dominique as a feminist character, diametrically opposed to Melville’s sexist worldview, I want to challenge this simplistic dichotomy of

‘feminist vs. sexist’. I mean to suggest that the power struggle that occurs between them is much deeper than gendered concerns: that their conflict over gender perhaps masks a deeper discomfort at their similarities. I will touch upon my own subjective view of, and

4 relationship with, Melville’s art and difficult worldview as well as Dominique’s evolution from interviewer to protagonist and why this change occurred. This section will also touch on the play’s ambivalent commentary on authorship. What is collaboration? What is an author? Can two people with disparate worldviews make a compelling piece of art together? I will explain my attempt to honestly apprehend the virtues and folly of

Melville’s fiercely individualistic view on art.

Chapter Four is concerned with how “history” and “truth” are represented within the play and how one may be reconciled with the other. I will discuss these concepts in terms of how Melville treated them in his own work and what inspiration I have taken from his work in my calculated speculation of Melville’s life.

Chapter Five will briefly discuss the development of the script itself. Namely, I will talk about what major changes occurred through the process and how becoming more aware of the importance (or irrelevance) of certain characters or plot points led to the current draft of the play and how I feel my revisions compare against my overall vision for the piece.

Finally, I want to outline my original goals for this script and discuss what criterions I used to measure the various successes or failures I feel I’ve met with in the development of Resistance. This will involve talking about the process of engaging in dramaturgy, of working with actors, staging a reading at Taking Flight and receiving criticisms at each stage.

Ultimately, in formulating this script, I became fascinated by the concept of a man, as stated at the beginning of this statement, “who feels himself most complete when he is absolutely alone.” (10) Of course, there is melancholy in Melville’s calculated

5 isolation and I hope the play has succeeded in conveying some of that feeling. However, difficult questions arise when considering Melville. I have assumed that there is a humanistic logic that triggers his isolation. What I meant to do, whether successfully or unsuccessfully, was to construct a dramatically compelling and personally satisfying answer to the enigma of Melville. When Dominique pierces his isolation, what does she find out about the way he became who is he? It is my belief that despite the clear folly of such a fiercely individualistic worldview, there must also be a great value as well, as perhaps Melville’s life and work are a testament to. To borrow the rhetoric of the fable employed in the play; we know the tragedy of being a scorpion. Do we know the value?

1.2 Finding “Melville”

“You’re on the wrong track again. You mustn’t try to interweave what I do in my films with what I am in life.”

–Jean-Pierre Melville, “Jean-Pierre Melville: An American In Paris”

I must begin with some background on Melville himself. Born in Paris on October

20th 1917, his birth name was Jean-Pierre Grumbach. Raised in a wealthy Jewish family,

Grumbach had the means to learn about and appreciate cinema from a very young age.

Tim Palmer describes him receiving a formative gift as a child:

“In January 1924, as a precocious six-year-old, Grumbach received from his

family a hand-cranked 9.5 mm Pathé Baby Camera; he was soon capturing

images and short scenes from his neighborhood.” (Palmer 7-8)

In addition to the possession of his own moviemaking tools at a very young age,

Grumbach regularly procured films reels from a local film archive and played them on his bedroom wall using his family’s projector. These were mostly silent films by Buster

Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harry Langdon. These experiences began a lifelong obsession with the medium and provided the foundation of a staggeringly deep filmic vocabulary. To quote Melville himself, “ I believe you must be madly in love with the cinema to create films…you simply have to have an enormous cinematic baggage to know what you’re doing in this field.” (8)

In 1937 Grumbach joined the French colonial army and was eventually conscripted by the national armed forces when he was twenty-two. Palmer notes, “The first change was to his name, which became Melville – a reflection, it has been argued by many mythologizing critics, of his new identity, a badge of pro-American sensibility.”

(Palmer 8) After the fall of France in 1940, Melville would join the Resistance as an active agent, working with the groups Combat and Liberation. Little-to-nothing is known about this period of Melville’s life. In large part, this blank space in Melville’s biography, coupled with his reticence to speak about it, is at the core of what inspired the play.

Melville eventually re-joined with the military and fought in Allied campaigns in Italy and North Africa. He returned to Paris “a decorated veteran, in 1945, after his home country had been liberated.” (Palmer 8)

Melville returned to Paris and began making films, starting with the short film 24 heures de la vie d’un clown (24 Hours in the Life of a Clown) in 1946, followed by an adaptation of Jean Bruller’s then-iconic Resistance novel Le Silence de la Mer (The

Silence of the Sea) in 1949, about a small family dealing with a German officer staying in their home during the occupation. It wasn’t until 1956 that Melville began flirting with the crime genre in Bob le Flambeur (Bob The Gambler). Even in this early film, his main character already looks like the iconic Melville gangster: a big, cumbersome raincoat, a fedora and a cigarette hanging out of the character’s mouth. Ginette Vincendeau remarks,

“The Americanness of Bob, like Melville’s own Ray Bans and hats, is a mask, an identity to be adopted or discarded, rather than an essence.” (112) With his iconic style rapidly developing, it was during this period Melville established himself as a “right wing anarchist” (Phillips March 10) and pitted himself against the highly bureaucratic, state- controlled film industry. Melville prided himself on not accepting grant money like many of his New Wave contemporaries and was fiercely capitalistic. In 1967 Melville made what many critics consider to be his crowning achievement. Le Samouraï is a film about a seemingly emotionless hit man in Paris. This film was my first exposure to Melville and

8 acts, in the play, as a central metaphor, so I feel it is essential to discuss some elements of its story, style and influence here.

Melville described parts of Le Samouraï as “a sort of meticulous, almost clinical, description of the behavior of a hired killer, who is by definition a schizophrenic.”

(Nogueira 18) This removed-but-amplified version of the classic gangster archetype of the thirties and forties cemented Melville in the pop culture landscape and is often referred to either directly or by homage by acclaimed filmmakers such as Quentin

Tarantino, John Woo, Walter Hill, Jim Jarmusch and Nicolas Winding-Refn. It has been noted by many critics, including Roger Ebert, that Refn’s now-iconic 2011 thriller Drive was likely directly inspired by Le Samouraï and Alain Delon’s portrayal of the main character, Jef Costello. Roger Ebert, on the parallels between Drive, Le Samouraï and

Sergio Leone’s ‘Man With No Name’ films:

He has no family, no history and seemingly few emotions. Whatever happened to

him drove any personality deep beneath the surface. He is an existential hero, I

suppose, defined entirely by his behavior. (Roger Ebert March 8 2016)

It is in the final scene that I discussed in my introduction that Le Samouraï transitions from a clinical behavioural study of Costello and leans towards fantasy. This somewhat fantastical ending may shed some light on Melville’s choice of title for the film. Ginette Vincendeau, in Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris speculates on the possible motivation for title “Le Samouraï”:

“…The myth of the samurai/ronin has a social function in Japan: to resolve –

through death – conflicts that arise from the contradictory pulls between

overbearing duty and personal inclination or feeling.” (182)

Soon after Le Samouraï was finished shooting, Melville’s studios on Rue Jenner partially burned down in an electrical fire. Melville frequently refers to this event in interviews. He even chose to be interviewed on camera inside the burned walls of Rue

Jenner studios on at least one occasion.

In 1969 Melville made another one of his most famous films: L’Armee Des

Ombres (Army of Shadows), this time either shooting on location or renting studio space.

Ostensibly based on Joseph Kessel’s famous novel about the French Resistance, film critics have commented that the film strays significantly from the narrative of the text, causing speculation on whether or not the events of the film may have more to do with

Melville’s Resistance experiences than Kessel’s. The narrative of Army of Shadows is altered from the book in a myriad of different ways. According to Vincendeau, “two

[alterations] must be singled out: Kessel’s Gerbier survives, Melville’s hero dies; in the film, unlike in the novel, brother Jean François and Luc Jardie never realize that they are both in the Resistance. These and other aspects of the film point to a radically different vision, characterized by pessimism and abstraction.” (Vincendeau 81) Melville would also say of the film, as it differed from the novel more in its latter half, “As the story proceeds, my personal recollections are mingled with Kessel’s, because we lived the same war.” (Vincendeau 79)

Upon the film’s release, Army of Shadows was roundly dismissed by critics, especially for its supposed reverence for Charles DeGaulle who was an unpopular political figure at the time. Rui Nogueira, interviewing Melville:

N: In France, some critics accused you of portraying the Resistance members as

characters from a gangster film.

M: That is absolutely idiotic. I was even accused of having made a Gaullist film!

It is even more absurd that people still try to reduce to its lowest common

denominator a film that was not supposed to be, but that is, nevertheless abstract.

Well, hell! I wanted to make the film for twenty-five years, and I have every

reason to be satisfied with the result. (Nogueira, 31)

As a result of its cold reception, the film did not find distribution outside of

France until thirty-seven years later, after a critical re-appraisal of Melville’s work had sprung up from critics. The film was released in North America in 2006 in a limited number of theatres and was, ironically, the best-reviewed film of that year, earning a score of 99 on Metacritic and 97 on Rotten Tomatoes, the two major websites that rank films by an aggregate of critical scores.

Melville returned to form in 1970 with Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle), a heist thriller starring Alain Delon and Yves Montand. Critical reception was lukewarm but audiences celebrated it. In 1972 Melville would make what would turn out to be his last film, Un Flic (A Cop), another heist film. This one though, was both a failure commercially and critically and caused the publication Positif to write of the film’s author, “it is about time “Inspector” Melville was made redundant.” (Vincendeau 201).

Modern critics have described Melville’s worldview as becoming “even more cynical”

(Phillips March 12) in the years before his death. In one of his more incendiary moments, he remarked to an interviewer, “You do not put people in a cinema to teach them something, but to amuse them, to tell them a story as best you can, and deliver the kind of music-hall that, in the end, cinema is.” (Phillips March 12)

On August 2nd, 1973, Melville collapsed due to heart attack while having lunch with journalist Phillipe Labro at the PLM St. Jacques restaurant in Paris. He died in the arms of Labro. (Vincendeau 8) He was fifty-five, the same age his father and grandfather died due to heart attack as well.

For someone who remains a relatively minor figure in cinema history, Melville’s ubiquity of influence on modern filmmakers is striking. Jim Jarmusch’s 1999 film Ghost

Dog, The Way of the Samurai, pays significant homage to Melville’s work and Neil

Jordan’s 2003 film The Good Thief is a remake of Bob Le Flambeur. Quentin Tarantino, when asked whether his film Reservoir Dogs is “like” any other films, had this to say:

It's like the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, "BOB THE GAMBLER," "LE

DOULOS," which is my favorite screenplay of all time, with Jean-Paul

Belmondo; it's fantastic. He did "LE SAMURAI" with Alain Delon. He made,

like, the coolest gangster films ever. They're, like, fantastic. His films were like he

took the Bogart, Cagney, the Warner Brothers gangster films, all right, he loved

those, and a lot of times he just took the stories from them and did them with

Belmondo or Delon or Jean Gabin and just gave them a different style, a different

coolness, you know, they had this French Gallic thing going through it, yet they

were still trying to be like their American counterparts, but they had a different

rhythm all their own. (Becker April 24 2016)

The facts of Melville’s sudden death, his mastery of film language, his fiercely individualistic worldview, his American style and involvement with the French

Resistance are all interesting elements on their own. However, all of the information about Melville’s life adds up to a troublingly contradictory and incomplete portrait of a

12 person. I have always believed that making art is, inexorably, an act of empathy: of seeking to understand or seeking to be understood. How is it possible to make great art, yet remain secretive, non-collaborative, misogynistic and closed off from human connection as much of Melville’s biography suggests he was? My intuition was that there must be a deeply personal reason for this: that his defenses were not intellectual, but emotional and that such defenses must serve a real purpose in Melville’s life. My aim was not simply to criticize the repellent aspects of his personality or ignore them in order to valorize his work, but to truly reconcile one with the other. We, as a culture, hold up great artists for making compelling, passionate and difficult work and tear them down when their personal lives are problematic. I want people to consider that what we applaud an artist for may actually be inseparable from what we attack them for. Melville, to me, embodies this difficult dichotomy and his near-absent war biography posed a compelling avenue through which to solve the mystery of how he became such a contradiction.

Chapter 2

THE IMPORTANCE OF WEARING A RAINCOAT

2. The Importance of Wearing a Raincoat

“…in 1970 [critics] Serge Daney and Jean-Pierre Oudart [talked] of his late gangster films as ‘pseudo-films’, inspired by, but actually inferior to, the aesthetics of advertising.

For Daney and Oudart, memorably, [film director] Claude Lelouch should be ‘singing the praises of a brand in denims’ and Melville doing the same for ‘a style in raincoats’.”

-Ginette Vincendeau, “Jean-Pierre Melville, An American in Paris”

There may no better personification of the title “iconoclast” than Jean-Pierre

Melville. His presence was huge, distinct and unapologetically obsessed with the styles and art of the United States. Melville proudly wore his influences on his sleeve and even had a reputation for his ability to rattle off his official pantheon of sixty-four great

American pre-war directors, which included legendary figures such as Cecille B.

DeMille, Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler. As for his own personal style,

Melville is best remembered wearing a suit and trench coat with a few signature accessories. Eric Breitbart elaborates:

“…incorporating an American artistic identity was also a central element in his

creation of a new persona. In the 60’s, this meant wearing sunglasses and a white

Stetson, and driving around Paris in a Ford convertible, savoring the pleasure of

cursing out anyone who made snide comments to him, mistakenly assuming that

he didn’t know how to speak French.” (Breitbart 10)

While Melville’s ostentatiousness certainly drew me towards writing a portrayal of him, it is how this style seems to spring from personal ideology and turbulent history

14 that most intrigued me. As noted in the introduction, Jean-Pierre Melville was born Jean-

Pierre Grumbach. “Melville” was an assumed moniker that Grumbach first employed as his codename during the French Resistance. This was in homage to the great American writer Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick (though works like The Confidence-Man were likely more Grumbach’s style). Grumbach assumed several names during the

Resistance but he considered Herman Melville the greatest of American authors and, unsurprisingly, the name “Melville” is the one that sustained him throughout the majority of the war years. What is surprising and adds significantly to Melville’s somewhat mythic persona was his decision to keep his codename after the war. It is worth noting that, at that point, Melville distinctly separated from his Jewish identity and, while never denying that he is Jewish, it is not a part of his identity that he is ever vocal about in public. One might think that a Jewish man who fought the Nazis in occupied France and lived through the Holocaust might use this fact to speak out against anti-Semitism or explore

Jewish themes in his films. However, neither these themes, nor the presence of visibly

Jewish characters, seem to be present in Melville’s films. Additionally, in all my research, the only comment Melville ever made on his own Judaism is this one: “being in the Resistance if you’re a Jew is infinitely less heroic than if you’re not’.” (Vincendeau 8)

I think what Melville means is that involvement in the Resistance for a Jewish person was, in a way, mandatory. For a non-Jewish person, there may have been a choice to fight, but there wasn’t one for Melville as participation in the Resistance was an act of survival above anything altruistic.

In the context of the play I was fascinated by the persona of a man who wanted to accentuate the parts of him that he chose for himself, rather than owe anything to facts

15 that were part of his birth. Melville is, quite literally, the vision of the “self-made man”: his very clothing curated to convey a set of values and influences.

The influence of pre-war American cinema on the French New Wave is well documented. In the fifties and sixties young French filmmakers, often film critics themselves, railed against the so-called “Cinema of Quality” that was standard in French cinema at the time. This tradition often found film studios adapting classics of French literature and remaining formally unambitious. In 1957, a number of critics working for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinema gathered around a tape recorder to muse on the state of film in France. Critic and director Jacques Rivette was one of the most radical in his criticism:

I think that French cinema at the moment is unwittingly another version of British

cinema, or to put it another way, it’s British cinema not recognized as such,

because it’s the work of people who are nonetheless talented. But the films seem

no more ambitious and of no more real value than what is exemplified in British

cinema… British cinema is a genre cinema, but one where the genres have no

genuine roots… It’s a cinema that limps along, caught between two stools, a

cinema based on supply and demand, and on the false notions on supply and

demand at that. They believe that that’s the kind of thing the public wants and so

that’s what they get, but in trying to play by all the rules of that game they do it

badly, without either honesty or talent. (Coates, 6 April 2016)

This attitude, in some degree or another, was shared by all the New Wave filmmakers, most notable among them: Jean-Paul Godard, Francois Truffaut and Claude

Chabrol. Melville differed from the New Wave in a lot of his core values, but was

16 concretely among their ranks when it comes to their shared affection for early American cinema and their weariness at the popular aesthetics of French cinema. When it came to the codified production rules of French cinema, Melville made no secret of his disdain and remained decidedly outside the system. Ginette Vincendeau on Melville’s status as an outsider:

Barred by the communist-backed Film Technicians’ Union from obtaining the

essential professional card in 1945, he was ‘forced to become a producer to give

myself the task of making my film’. Not that this was very advantageous in the

immediate post-war since he ‘had no right to coupons for film stock’. Problems

did not stop there. Melville was fined FF 50,000 by the CNC [National Centre of

Cinematography]. […] He produced or co-produced his own films for the rest of

his career.” (Vincendeau 10)

While New Wave filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard worked within the existing state-controlled film industry, Melville was openly defiant of it. He was both incredibly capitalistic while at the same time stubbornly recalcitrant towards the established film industry. In his own words, Melville was “an extreme individualist, and to tell you the truth I don’t wish to be either Right or Left. But I certainly live as a man of the Right. I’m a Right-wing anarchist.” (Vincendeau 16) Was his fascination with the United States possibly driven, in part, by his status as an outsider in France? Certainly his career has more in common with the archetype of the capitalist

American businessman than that of the socialist French artist that many of his contemporaries embodied. Melville flaunted his ability to make films without relying on grant money from the government and was well known for being the only French director

17 to own his own studio. His love of American style already established by this point, it is not hard to imagine that Melville adopted his signature style and name for several tangible reasons. The first was to display his fondness for American traditions, specifically the archetype of the American gangster and the influence of Herman

Melville. I imagine that another reason was to have his style act as a deliberate counterpoint to France’s outmoded obsession with the ‘Cinema of Quality’, the film industry’s status quo that the New Wave directors and Cahiers du Cinema critics would definitively reject. Finally, I think he wanted to rebuke the state-run, closed-off film industry systems that had denied Melville entry when attempting to produce his first film.

Concurrently, he may have also wanted to show an embrace of a more right-wing practice, the success of which would surely incense the established order.

Creatively, there was another avenue by which Melville may have gained his singular identity that most fascinated me: as a personal defense against the harsh experiences of war and Resistance combat and maybe even as a personal therapy for dealing with past actions or traumas. Perhaps we can even view “Melville” as a more authentic articulation of his identity than “Grumbach” was. It is not much of a leap to imagine Melville operating secretly (and possibly violently) within occupied France and grew to style himself as a kind of gangster, eventually creating an “American persona, donned in the theatre of war” (Fay/Nieland 204). While this line of thinking is transparently speculative, so is much of the action in the play that exists during the

Resistance. This has been a useful speculation, and been a key creative tool in the formation of this play and its underlying themes. The concept that Melville adopted the hallmarks of American crime cinema as a real identity during the Resistance provided the

18 germ of the idea that would lead to the scenes in the play between Dreyfus and Édith. In these scenes we are introduced to Dreyfus who, in a way, is my speculative proxy for a pre-Melville Grumbach:

ÉDITH: Do you have a problem with that?

DREYFUS: No, ma’am-I mean…! No.

ÉDITH: Good.

DREYFUS: You’re my wife. And I’m your…?

ÉDITH: Yes.

DREYFUS: Right. And we're...?

ÉDITH: Having a good time.

DREYFUS: Right. A good time.

He is anxious, apologetic, naïve and without his advanced filmic lexicon. Simply, he is the polar opposite of Melville. In certain scenes there is also reference made to the fact that Dreyfus considers his Resistance activity to be “fun”. In Scene IV, Dreyfus expands on his view of the genre he believes to be inherent in the conflict:

ÉDITH: Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was talking to Jimmy fucking Cagney.

DREYFUS: You like Jimmy Cagney?

ÉDITH: You’re not in a damned gangster movie!

DREYFUS: We are, though. Didn’t you call us a gang of thieves and killers?

Everything we do is like a gangster movie. Think about it: we’re being

chased by thugs in trench coats, we’re having secret meetings,

avoiding arrest…

ÉDITH: What is the point in seeing it that way?

DREYFUS: It’s just…easier.

ÉDITH: It's not supposed to be easy. Maybe for them, but not for us.

DREYFUS: Yeah, and we're losing.

While I do not think that Dreyfus’ concept of his activities is inaccurate to his feelings, I hope the play suggests that there is more to his invocation of American crime tropes than simply a boyhood fantasy of cops and robbers. Even if he is not conscious of any deeper meaning, Dreyfus’ enthusiasm for gangster and noir tropes is not frivolous, it is a suit of armour: a way of dealing with the things the Resistance are asked to do and a way of keeping his fear at a distance. Thinking of the Resistance as the setting of a James

Cagney film makes the situation more palatable, or as Dreyfus says, somewhat unwittingly, “easier”. Under the guise of a hardened criminal, the attendant human emotion that goes into killing can be managed or lessened. In subsequent scenes it’s the childish embrace of fictional archetypes along with the hardening of him through violence that defines his journey and eventually morphs him into the character of

Melville that we see in 1973.

The stylistic choices I have chosen to underline this change are elements of

Melville’s physical presence, namely his Ray-Ban sunglasses, white Stetson and his raincoat. These items constitute the stylistic armour that Dreyfus (Grumbach) chooses to cloak himself in to become Melville. Ideally, this shift from Dreyfus to Melville should read as no less stark a shift to an alter-ego than James Gatz becoming Jay Gatsby in The

Great Gatsby or Dick Whitman becoming Don Draper in Mad Men. Similar to those

20 characters I mean to suggest that, in a way, they are different people. Dreyfus is young, naïve, foolhardy and in love with American crime tropes. Melville is old, cynical and uses those same tropes as a means to close himself off from human connection. The story involving Édith functions as the tragic device through which “Melville” becomes a necessary means of coping.

At the same time, the three items (hat, glasses and raincoat) also work as a visual reference to Melville’s best-known body of work: the raincoat, in particular, is used by

Melville’s protagonists in all of his gangster pictures.

At the conclusion of the play, Melville must decide what his relationship with his defining items is going to be. Though his motives are left deliberately ambiguous, it is important to note that Melville leaves behind his coat, hat and glasses in the final moments of the play. Is it because Dominique has pierced the exterior of Melville and he no longer needs to hide behind these symbols? Is it because he will not need them “across the water”, where he says he is going? Maybe he is leaving the raincoat for Dominique: as he drew strength from these symbols, she might as well. Is it a final statement in their ongoing argument of authorship versus the value of collaboration? It would be useless to definitively answer that question, as I feel the strength of the final moments of the play are in their ambiguity: that all those questions can be present in the minds of the audience at the play’s conclusion, but leave them with the tension of questions purposefully un- answered.

Moreover, what I hope to have exposed in this chapter is how, in the play and possibly in his life, Melville’s style is inseparable from the substance of the man himself

21 and why I have paid so much attention to these costume pieces in the text of the play. In short, Melville’s final advice to Dominique, “wear a raincoat”, is not about the weather.

Chapter 3

DOMINIQUE

3. Dominique

“I think that a film artist must be a gentleman – this is true, because there are no lady film artists.”

–Jean-Pierre Melville, “Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris”

When Melville and Jean-Luc Godard were still friends, Godard cast Melville in a small, but significant part in his film À bout de souffle (Breathless) as the pretentious author Parvulesco, whom Godard based on Melville, especially in regards to how

Melville spoke about women. At one point Godard mentioned of Melville, “With him I could talk about women, in a feeble way, but still he found me girls if I needed them, it was not taboo for him, and that influenced me.” (Vincendeau 21) Melville’s casual sexism and the extreme lack of substantive female representation in his films are well established and film scholars still regularly debate the perceived misogyny present in his films.

When I began writing Resistance, Melville’s sexism seemed to be a potent facet to his general obtuseness and, as such, I believed that a fierce female character would be a strong counterpoint to Melville’s brash male ego. Her specific inspiration came from a passage in Ginette Vincendeau’s book Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris, which happens to be the only English language book about Melville currently in print.

Vincendeau summarizes a story from a former student of Melville’s:

Former IDHEC student Dominique Crèvecoeur (now a producer) reports a classic

tale of 1960s sexism. Melville had assigned a class an exercise on L’Armee des

ombres [Army of Shadows]. Giving the assessed work back, ‘He called the

authors of the most interesting essays. He named me in third position. I stood up.

He said “Where is Dominique Crèvecoeur?” I answered “here” putting my hand

up. When he saw I was a woman [the name can be masculine or feminine in

French] he put the file straight back and moved on to the next person. A murmur

went through the room […] I understood a) that my work was among the best and

b) that nobody called Béatrice or Jacqueline would have been deemed worthy of

attention.’ (Vincendeau 20)

This short passage transparently inspired the name “Dominique” as well as initial iterations of her character. I had thought that a character that was obstinate in her feminist ideology would be the ideal catalyst by which Melville would be drawn into conflict and, eventually, into autobiography. While this is certainly still present in the current draft of the play, the discussion of feminism has gradually morphed into one that is more personal and nuanced. Rather than Melville steadfastly arguing against women as film artists from a carefully reasoned worldview, the emotional dimensions of his past relationships and current status as pariah complicate his persona. I believe this change to be effective.

Misogyny, after all, is not an intellectually defensible position to take, even in 1973. In short, Melville is too smart to believe his own sexist rhetoric. In my conception of this story, Melville’s sexism is not intelligent: it is emotional. Like his name and choice in clothing, it is a shield: something to cover up his own insecurities and regrets. Early in the play, Dominique’s debate about her abilities is an intellectual one. To a contemporary audience, her feminist objections to Melville’s dismissal of her talent will doubtless ring true, but these tactics have only middling success in her quest to understand his story. I

24 thought it was important to acknowledge how difficult Dominique’s ambitions would be to achieve in the cultural context of Paris in the 1970s and that she embody something of a rebuttal to Melville’s views on women, which were not far outside the mainstream.

However, this is only a starting place for Dominique.

What I mean to underline in the play is that the things that divide Melville and

Dominique in early scenes (gender, age) are surface-level. The two characters are, in fact, very similar in their stubborn belief in themselves and their status as outsiders. Carefully,

I have sought to replace the initial intellectual tension between the two with an emotional tension relating to Melville’s time with Édith, Dominique’s connection to her mother and an artistic battle of wills between the two. This conflict, however, took a long time to take shape, as I hadn’t yet fully grasped the final form or significance of Dominique’s character.

In many early drafts of Resistance, Dominique is a journalist, trying to write a piece on Melville and his time in the Resistance. Though there was palpable tension in the early scenes, Dominique’s quest to get the real story about Melville’s past lost a lot of momentum later in the play and became an intellectual exercise rather than a human narrative. I realized that, in many ways, the play was becoming a biographical study of

Melville, complete with monologues about his childhood (a trope I am generally exhausted by). I decided that Dominique must have a personal reason to be there: that they both must require something tangible from their exchange. Dominique went from a journalist to a producer, whom Melville had to convince to make his film. This approach, too, was folly, as Melville’s character is too defensive, too proud and has too high of a social status to struggle to convince someone else of his film’s merit. With each

25 subsequent draft, Dominique’s back-story got richer and her desires more active. Finally, she became a young filmmaker and aspiring producer eager to collaborate with Melville.

With Dominique occupying the role that Melville did in previous drafts, her desire to prove her worth became activated, especially when burdened with the overwhelming task of convincing Melville to collaborate with her. Also key to Dominique’s growth in the play was the decision to have Melville and Dominique occupy the “roles” of Dreyfus and

Édith. Since these characters are, essentially, Dominique’s argument for her vision of the film and her investigation into Melville’s own history, it makes sense that these two people should be their own active agents in this story. I believe it also adds poignancy to the reveal that Melville is, in fact, playing himself: the muddying of the convention in the final ‘film’ scene works thematically to pierce Melville’s persona and show the tortured young man who needed the moniker in the first place.

I realized that through Dominique I was attempting to work through a particular idea about art that has always troubled me. There is an assumption (some would say a stereotype) in art that the most brilliant artists are those who are demanding, mean and borderline obsessive: that general obtuseness is a byproduct of genius. Especially when it comes to film Western culture tends to mythologize directors who are difficult to work with. Terrence Malick, Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick are just a few directors on a long list of great filmmakers who have accrued lengthy lists of horror stories about them from the sets of their films. On the set of Apocalypse Now,

Francis director Ford Coppola remarked, “A film director is kinda, truly, one of the last dictatorial posts left in a world getting more and more democratic.” (Hearts of Darkness:

A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse)

Recently, Alejandro González Iñárritu, a newly-minted member of the “difficult genius directors” club has received a lot of press for his treatment of the cast and crew of the critically acclaimed film The Revenant, while shooting in punishing conditions in

Alberta. Rather than condemning his insistence that his actors perform scenes in freezing cold water or shooting for only one hour of an extensive day on set due to light, there is a tendency for people to praise his quest for authentic performances and his artistic mission to get the perfect natural light. Personally, I am curious whether there is a connection between the talent of an artist and dictatorial behaviour or if this attitude formed around the “difficult auteur” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps certain artists become demanding and difficult to work with precisely because it is excused: it is accepted fact that this is the price of genius. On the other hand, is it possible that this behavior actually is the price of genius? Melville has said that he stayed overnight in Rue Jenner studios on many occasions to inspect props and work on screenplays. One could make the argument that Melville’s fastidious attention to detail more fully fills out the worlds he created on screen. It is certainly hard to imagine someone less stubborn and audacious than Melville being able to shut down the infamously crowded Arc du Triophe de l'Étoile to shoot a single shot in which men in Nazi uniforms march past the iconic landmark. This one shot alone cost 250,000 francs and Melville often remarked it was the most expensive French film shot in history. It is difficult to dismiss the shocking nature of this image of

Melville’s Resistance masterpiece, Army of Shadows, as we watch a parade of German soldiers slowly overtake the frame, swallowing up one of the most iconic symbols of

France.

These revelations about the true nature of her character eventually made me realize that Dominique Peyroux was, in fact, the protagonist of Resistance. Now, the play is less a biographical investigation of a great artist and rather a question of how a young artist forges their own path and to what extent they will allow others to define it. As

Dominique became more defined as a character it became apparent that she was something of a surrogate for my own subject position too, voicing my own anxiety about a future working as an artist and trying to make an impact as well as struggling to determine what kind of artist I want to be. Young artists are constantly doing battle with the artists that came before them. There is always a desire to rebel against old structures, just as the New Wave directors rebelled against the “Cinema of Quality” that came before them. Though, inescapably, we are building upon their work even when working against it. This tension is central to Dominique: she is inspired by Melville’s work even as she is repelled by his worldview. The question that I hope lingers beyond the play, is the question of how much of Melville she will take with her. Though I don’t define exactly what sort of a filmmaker Dominique will be after this interaction, I hope it is clear that she will not emulate Melville, nor will she throw out the lessons from this conversation.

Melville and Dominique both have similar journeys in the play as both are reconciling with their past and how it relates to their future. For Melville, it is his memories of Édith and how will they will or will not define him in his final days. For Dominique, her journey is to reconcile Melville’s difficult persona with her idea of what a good artist should be and whom she will choose to be when she leaves the studio.

Dominique’s interrogation of Melville via her screenplay is not only about proving her worth as a filmmaker and finding out the truth of Melville’s past. She is also trying to determine whether or not she is cut out to be a filmmaker: whether her compassion and eagerness to collaborate will be liabilities to her future career. Is there a lesson that Dominique can learn from Melville about the value of resistance? Does being strong mean being inflexible? Does collaboration mean weakness? These became some of the central questions of the play as it progressed to its final draft.

As I move forward as an artist I hear a lot of stories from my playwriting peers about having to compromise their work in ways they regretted: whether it be accepting poor dramaturgical advice, compromising on who they work with or allowing a bad production of their play. With these stories in mind I have begun to wonder if my empathy and general desire to please those around me is a liability to an artist. As

2 Wade, James. Resistance Reading 2. 2016. Calgary.

29 mentioned before, this concern is manifest in Dominique and her ambivalent relationship to Melville. She dislikes the man and admires the artist, but are the two really divisible?

Through the action of the play Dominique (somewhat) successfully deduces the origins of Melville’s name and artistic temperament, but is ultimately unsuccessful in her efforts to persuade him to collaborate with her. Ironically, by the final scene of the play, Melville is convinced that Dominique should be the sole author of the film, not him. The question of what kind of artist and person Dominique is going to be is not answered; we are simply left with the question. I mean to suggest that what makes Melville a great artist may also be what makes him an insufferable egotist who refuses genuine connection. Is it any wonder that the “the poet of male solitude and melancholy” (Vincendeau 217) is also a tragically lonely figure? Ultimately, I’m hoping the ending of Resistance works as both a repudiation of Melville’s individualistic worldview and a concession that it may have a great deal of value.

Chapter 4

HISTORY AND “TRUTH”

4. History and “Truth”

Nogueira: ‘The line from The Book of Bushido with which you open the film – “There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless perhaps it be that of the tiger in the jungle” – might apply equally to your situation as an independent filmmaker outside the industry.”

Melville: “Absolutely! Do you know that the film was shown in Japan complete with that opening title, which I attribute to The Book of Bushido? What they don’t know is that I wrote the “quotation.”

-Rui Nogueira, “Melville on Le Samouraï”

The action of Resistance is pure fiction. While all of the biographical information that is presented in the 1973 storyline is true, everything else is invented as speculation about Melville’s character. While it can be verified that Melville (Grumbach) was a soldier and later an active agent in the Resistance, only a few specific details are known about his overall involvement. Melville joined the colonial cavalry at the age of twenty and was still a conscript when war broke out. He fought in Belgium before being evacuated to England and eventually returned to France to join the Resistance networks

‘Combat’ and ‘Libération’. He was active for two years before being sent to England because of his activities in France. From there, he joined the First Regiment of Colonial

Artillery in Tunisia and took part in French and Italian liberation campaigns. While it can be confirmed that Melville was an active agent in several networks and militaries during

World War II, information on his time in the Resistance is scant and information about his time in London obscured. Ginette Vincendeau comments, about Melville’s time in

London, “dates are hazy and testimonies contradictory.” (8) Though accounts of his involvement may be muddy, Melville’s artistic output after the war was significantly influenced by his time in the war. With films like Le Silence de la Mer (1949) Léon

Morin, Priest (1960) and Army of Shadows (1969) Melville explored different aspects of the conflict, often in subtle, psychologically rich ways. His films on the subject are undoubtedly several of his best.

I do not offer these facts about Melville’s involvement just as historical trivia, but to provide some context while discussing the “truth” and “untruth” of Resistance. As noted before, nothing in the action of the play is based on actual incidents. However, everything in the narrative conceivably could have happened and would still fit in with all the documented data about Melville’s life. Also, while everything in the Resistance plotline is speculative, there is some basis for this creative speculation, however small.

Primary among this basis is much of the action of Melville’s Resistance epic Army of

Shadows. As mentioned in Chapter One, Melville made large alterations to the narrative of the book that the film is based on. While the novel L’Armee des Ombres is no longer in print, it is apparent that the second half of the novel is occupied mostly by what are called “Gerbier’s Notes”: a loosely assembled set of anecdotes which Melville

“drastically edited and redistributed” (Vincendeau 81). The film’s climax is chosen to be the killing of Mathilde, the member of the team whom the others have surmised has surrendered information. The importance and focus that is given to this moment, and was possibly not as seminal a moment in the original text, was intriguing to me. Even though,

32 through a series of tragic title cards, we discover how each remaining member met their fate during the conflict, I began to wonder how these men (Gerbier, Jardie and Felix) would adapt after the war, if they did survive. It was irresistible to see Melville as one of these men and that their actions in Army of Shadows somehow related to Melville.

The other inspiring aspect of Melville’s biographical information is the extreme lack of it.

Melville’s silence on the topic of his Resistance involvement combined with the seemingly personal tone of Army of Shadows created a mystery that I needed to solve.

The interactions between Dreyfus and Édith are my attempt to solve the problem of

Melville: how does a twenty-year-old soldier fighting to free France become a stubborn, difficult, American-styled gangster-film-maker once the war ends? The assumption that the persona of “Melville” was born under the circumstances of romantic war trauma is a pretty brazen assumption to make. How can a writer, in good conscience, take wild guesses about the life of a real person? My inspiration for doing this also came from

Melville. Melville called the book L’Armee des Ombres,

“the most comprehensive of all the documents about this tragic period in the

history of humanity. Nevertheless, I had no intention of making a film about the

Resistance. So with one exception – the German occupation – I excluded all

realism.” (Vincendeau 80)

At first, this strikes me as a strange thing to say about a film that is very much

“about” the Resistance in every tangible way. What I believe Melville means here is that the film is abstract in its intentions: that it is not intended as an authentic depiction of life as a Resistance operative as much as a stylized fantasy that explored existential and national themes against the background of the German occupation. Some critics accused

Melville “of portraying the Resistance members as characters from a gangster film”

(Noguiera 34) but is it really any wonder that he did? Melville seems to be well aware that a faithful document of life as a Resistance member in film would be impossible:

“I’m not interested in realism. All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a

documentarian; a film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in

an attempt to produce an exact re-creation of it. Transposition is more or less a

reflex with me: I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever

noticing.” (Thomson 6)

Melville showed incredible subtlety when it comes to transposition in his own work. Ironically, his films do, initially, feel as though they are an act of documenting.

They often involve the camera following and observing his characters with a clinical, almost scientific coldness. This makes the trick of his moving into the realm of genre and fantasy all the more jarring as we are led to believe we are dealing with stark realism for the majority of a film’s running time. Le Samouraï is a potent example of this as; mostly we follow and study the pathology of Jef Costello for most of the film. In the end, when

Jef performs a kind of ritualistic sacrifice, it is startling to recognize it as such based on the tone of realism that has permeated most of the film.

The idea that “film is first and foremost a dream” was a guiding principle for how

I treated the idea of “truth” in Resistance. Even if I did attempt to be utterly faithful to

Melville’s own biography, transposition is inevitable. My choice to write a play about

Melville is itself a personal choice based on my own worldview, as are the parts of his life that I have chosen to focus on. Indeed, there is likely material for entire other dramas in his relationships with his family or with Jean-Luc Godard. Editing these out, or only

34 mentioning them, is a personal act on the part of the author. However I choose to present

Melville’s life, it is really my own views, fears and desires I am articulating. The stuff of

Melville’s biography is the raw material that inspired the work and also the battleground on which these characters test their own conviction.

For me, it is not dishonest to guess at what events shaped Melville, as long as there is transparency that I am doing so from my own perspective. I will speak more on this shortly. To me, what is perhaps more dishonest are biographical works that attempt to act as definitive documents of their subjects. These plays, films and novels are endlessly popular, but suffer from their lack of self-awareness. By attempting to act as documents of the exploits of real people and not acknowledging the inescapably personal nature of telling stories, artists will often end up passing off their own worldviews as the de facto “lessons” we can glean from the lives of real people. To be fully aware of one’s own subjective view of a historical figure is a great asset in crafting a compelling narrative. With this in mind, artists need not be beholden to depicting their main characters as children in early scenes or touching upon every well-known milestone.

They can instead be freely inspired by the events of a person’s life and choose to focus on what they believe to be important to them, which is inevitably what they are doing anyway. Showing the entire lives of historical figures is problematic for several reasons: it assumes that the essence of a life can be distilled into a dramatic narrative and forces the storyteller to focus on certain elements out of faithfulness to its source instead of inspiration. This vice grip of the classic biographical work has rarely seen success

(possible successes are films like Raging Bull or Walk the Line) and is responsible for a great deal of forgettable films aimed at winning Academy Awards (J. Edgar, Alexander,

Amelia, Miss Potter, W.). It is a relief to see this trend gradually changing. Some of the more interesting biographical plays and films have chosen to focus on a significant moment in a historical figure’s life (Selma, Frost/Nixon) or tell the story from a more fluid perspective (Salieri in Amadeus, Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James).

With little reverence for the popular mechanics of art based on historical figures I needed to find some structure by which to adhere to in telling this story. While I believe that biographical plays have more to do with the storyteller than subject, obviously I cannot disregard Melville’s history or that of the French Resistance either. Rather, I needed some way to negotiate the interplay between truth and fiction inside the story. It was important to me that I not present the Resistance scenes as a historical record or even my interpretation of historical record, but as fiction even within the narrative. There are two dramatic works that inspired the form of Resistance. The first is Mieko Ouchi’s The

Blue Light, a play about the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and her relationship with the

National Socialist Party in Germany. The play is about an infamous and controversial historical figure, but instead of viewing her story from some objective lens, it is Leni’s subjective memories we are privy to. These memory scenes are brought about by her interactions with “WOMAN”, a Hollywood producer, whom Leni is pitching her new film to. This fictional character brings the question of an artist’s responsibility and culpability into a modern day setting as well as offering Ouchi a way to wrestle with

Riefenstahl’s legacy while being transparent about her position as an outsider to the story.

Similarly, in Jon Logan’s RED, a play about abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko,

Logan invents the character of Ken, a young assistant keen to prove himself to Rothko.

Through their interactions, the two challenge each other in unexpected ways and we are

36 able to understand Rothko’s worldview and outlandish personality without ever having to leave his studio. In RED, it is not important we learn every fact about his significance to the art world or show his life’s milestones but to truly understand why we he is interesting as a character. Logan puts Ken and Rothko in complex, engaging opposition inside one room and it elevates the drama instead of stifling it with trivia or indulgent direct address monologues.

Along with my rule of “no Melville as a child”, my aim was to create a structure for Resistance with a similar transparency and distillation of conflict to those of the works that inspired it. Consequently, the Resistance narrative I am presenting within the play is fictional. Dominique presents “fictional” scenes to Melville from the script she is pitching that are later revealed to be her best guesses at Melville’s activities in the

Resistance. This is, quite obviously, an approximation of my own speculation. The nature of this act is quite presumptive, but I found some wonderful tension in being self- reflexive about this apparatus. When Melville asks why Dominique thinks she can simply

“invent things about my life” I am, in a way, imagining Melville’s criticism of the very play he is in. Personally, this level of presumption was acceptable to me as long as I could be upfront with the audience about the act of doing so. Dominique’s argument that he is himself lying to the audience in his original draft of the (fictional) script, I am commenting that I believe there is more biography in Melville’s films than he has ever admitted to and that he obfuscates that truth by basing some films on other texts and adding in thick layers of stylization. I realize my assumption that Melville’s persona may have sprung from an ill-fated wartime affair is a romantic fantasy, but then so is

Costello’s reconciliation of love and duty at the end of Le Samouraï. The Resistance

37 story is more than likely untrue, but I wanted it to be possible that it could be true. It was important to me to have a framing device to cast doubt or suspicion upon the truth of the scene we are being presented with.

I come closest to breaking this rule with Melville’s emotional reckoning in the final “scene”. Indeed, his emotions seem to betray that this is likely the closest version to what really happened, but it is not definitive. Dominique asks for, and is presented with, a

“fictional” scene, showing Dreyfus’ execution of Édith. My hope is that a small bit of doubt still remains as to what truly did transpire. This maintains the integrity of the unreliability of our storytellers within the play and keeps our attention focused on the power struggle between Dominique and Melville as opposed to an audience feeling like they are “learning” truths about some important figure.

Ultimately, it is the characters of Melville and Dominique that I mean to focus on.

Similar to Melville in regards to Army of Shadows, I am not interested in making a documentary of the Resistance or even a documentary of Melville. All the biographical material of Melville’s life serves as inspiration for a conflict about value and danger of art, compassion and collaboration.

Chapter 5

REWRITING AND REVISING

5. Rewriting and Revising

“In my opinion cinema isn’t an art form because you can’t reread things, scratch them out and do them over again in the hope of approaching perfection. What makes film different from a painting, a symphony or a book is the fact that a release print is only a sketch.”

Jean-Pierre Melville, “Call Me Melville”

Similar to the narrative of the play itself, the process of writing Resistance has been one rife with it’s own difficult process of discovery and collaboration. I sought to create a narrative around Jean-Pierre Melville that was not merely an intellectual exercise. I wanted the emotional arcs of Melville and Dominique to have equal depth as the battle of intellects between them. I aimed to be transparent about my speculation of

Melville’s Resistance involvement and not pass off the story as absolute truth. Finally, I hoped to shed some light on a figure who has significantly inspired me and whom I consider to be much more than a “minor but intriguing figure” (Phillips 1) in the history of cinema.

The process of developing the key narrative elements of Resistance can be broken up into two major categories: developing Melville and developing Dominique. The play began as a memory play, with a cliché style that will be all too familiar to theatregoers.

This style was not working for the tension of the script and this fact was painfully obvious after soliciting the advice of a close friend. The next several drafts omitted direct address, indulgent childhood monologues and much of the previous sentimentality. I

39 opted to cut just about everything from the Resistance narrative that did not involve Édith and chose to deepen these scenes instead of attempting an all-inclusive biography. Once the major work was done to establish the form of the Resistance scenes, the major criticism that consistently came out of dramaturgy was the issue of Dominique: that she always seemed more important than she eventually was to the plot. Initial attempts to address this found Édith being Dominique’s mother and her drive to get to the truth was more of a vendetta than a personal reckoning with her decisions, as it is now. As discussed in Chapter Three I eventually realized that Dominique was my protagonist and from there I added much more personal context about her reason for being in the room, turning from a journalist to a producer and eventually to an aspiring artist. The guidance of my supervisor Clem Martini, and my director, Mike Czuba was instrumental in the final leg of development before getting into the rehearsal room. Moments of characters speaking the themes of the play were cut down, as was sentimentality. I understood more and more that my characters often obfuscate their true intentions and any displays of emotion needed to be wrenched from them rather than offered freely. This “wrenching” of truths became the driving force for the last major shifts in the play, mostly in its last third. When I was finally in the rehearsal space with actors, the major obstacles became getting every line of actor dialogue to match up with their character and plot mechanics.

My actors Clem Martini and Geneviève Paré were very adept at this task and I feel that the script presented at the Taking Flight Festival of Student Work was the tightest and most compelling version my script had experienced.

I will attempt to assess what aspects of the script are successful and what aspects fell short of my expectations. I am very pleased by the development of the emotional

40 inner lives of both Dominique and Melville. It is only in very recent drafts that Melville’s final “scene” occurs, when he shows Dominique his version of events and has an emotional reckoning with his decision. I now consider this the climax of the play, along with Dominique’s confession about her mother and why making the film is so important to her. What I’m not sure is so effective is the timing of the emotions of the characters.

While I consider these moments to be strong, defining parts of the play, I still wonder whether or not they come into play too late and whether the characters are too withholding of their own truths in the first few scenes to really engage an audience early on. Both actors in the reading have commented that the play is strongest in its second half which has started me wondering if there’s more I can do (beyond cutting and condensing) to ignite the audience in the scenes previous to the reveal that Dominique’s pitch is an attempt to apprehend Melville’s biography.

In discussing the reading with those who attended there is little confusion as to the overall fiction of the piece, so I feel I was quite clear in my transparency of the fictitious nature of most of the narrative. The most common question has been whether or not

Melville himself is real, as he is still not a very recognizable name. As touched on previously, I also have apprehension about stretching my own rules of adaptation in the scene in which Dreyfus/Melville kills Édith.

Finally, I believe I have succeeded in shedding some light on the work of Jean-

Pierre Melville. In a class with playwright Colleen Murphy I work-shopped this script in its early stages and she stated that I must teach the audience more about Melville. What makes him a great artist? In the current draft of Resistance I believe I have made a strong case for the value of his aesthetic. The discussions of Le Samouraï in the play are meant

41 to have palpable metaphor with Melville’s own persona but I believe they also work as an introduction to Melvillian cinema. Though audiences unfamiliar with Melville aren’t going to feel as though they have a full appreciation of his films simply by watching this play I feel there is enough information and appreciation of his work interwoven into the narrative that one might be curious enough to seek out one of his films based on a viewing of the play. In this regard, I feel as though I have met my goal.

Chapter 6

CONCLUSION

6. Conclusion

“Unhappy memories! Yet I welcome you…for you are my long-lost youth.”

-Georges Courteline, “Army of Shadows”

I began writing this play, as is the case with most of my plays, to scratch an itch that would not leave me alone. This became the most complex of my plays about narrative since the battleground upon which Melville and Dominique challenge each other is the idea of story itself. The fact that the fictional story they are fighting over intermingles hopelessly with the past is its own commentary. The past makes us who we are, but is perhaps just another story we tell ourselves.

The process of writing this play has taken me deeper into research than I had ventured before. It has made me a more patient writer as the length of Resistance’s development far exceeds that of my other work. I have also gained a new appreciation for the creative potential of working with designers in the process of playwriting. While it can certainly be crippling to focus on a hypothetical production I found exciting creative avenues by working with mental images of what the playing space could potentially look like and even to have design-centric conversations with Mike Czuba and Myah

Martinson, my director and designer, respectively. I was fortunate to have some of this design inspiration present in the staged reading.

Some of the best advice I received about playwriting was from playwright Daniel

MacIvor, who told me that the play I want to write isn’t going to get written, but the play that wants to get written might get written. I attempted to write a play about the film director Jean-Pierre Melville. The process of writing required me to pay closer, more intuitive attention to the script so it could eventually tell me that the story was not in the question of Melville’s legacy, but the question of Dominque’s future, and mine.

The final image of the play, which I had envisioned to be Melville dying with his hat and glasses on, became that of Dominique looking towards a film and a future we cannot see. The growth I have experienced because of this play is difficult to measure,

3 Wade, James. Resistance Set. 2016. Calgary.

44 other than to say I do not feel like the same person who began scribbling notes about

Melville several years ago.

WORKS CITED:

Army of Shadows. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville. Perf. Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-

Pierre Cassel and Simone Signoret. The Criterion Collection, 2007. DVD.

Becker, Josh. Quentin Tarantino Interview: On the set of “Reservoir Dogs” Josh Becker

DGA: Directing From The Edge, 2003. Web. 16 April 2016.

http://www.beckerfilms.com/reserve.html/›.

Breitbart, Eric. “Call Me Melville” New England Review Vol. 27, No. 3 (2006) Print.

Coates, Kristen. French New Wave: The Influencing of the Influencers. The Film Stage.

28 May 2010. Web. 17 April 2016. http://thefilmstage.com/features/the-

classroom-french-new-wave-the-influencing-of-the-influencers/›.

Fay, Jennifer/Nieland, Justus. “Gestures, Hats and Contract Killers: Noir Fashion In

France”. Routledge Film Guidebooks, Film Noir. Routledge: New York, NY.

2010. Print.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Dir. Eleanor Coppola. Perf. Dennis

Hopper, Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount, 1991.

DVD.

Melville, Jean-Pierre. Interview with Rui Nogueira. “Melville on Melville” Army of

Shadows. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville. 1969 Rialto/Janus Films. 2007 The Criterion

Collection. DVD.

Nogueira, Rui. Melville on Melville. New York: The Viking Press, 1971; translation

revised and annotated by Bruce Goldstein (2005) Web. 17 April 2016.

Palmer, Tim. “An Amateur of Quality: Postwar French Cinema and Jean-Pierre

Melville's Le Silence de la mer” Journal of Film and Video Vol. 59, No. 4

(WINTER 2007) Print.

Phillips, Richard. Jean-Pierre Melville—a minor but intriguing figure. World Socialist

Web Site. 15 August 2006. Web. 17 April 2016.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/08/sff8-a15.html

Taubin, Amy “Out of the Shadows” Army of Shadows. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville. 1969

Rialto/Janus Films. 2007 The Criterion Collection. DVD.

Thomson, David “Death in White Gloves”. Le Samouraï. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville. 1967

Rialto/Janus Films. 2005 The Criterion Collection. DVD.

Vincendeau, Ginette “Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris”. London: British Film

Institute, 2003. Print.

Woo, John “The Melville Style” Le Samouraï. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville. 1967

Rialto/Janus Films. 2005 The Criterion Collection. DVD.

APPENDIX:

Resistance By James Wade

Characters

DOMINIQUE PEYROUX, 28, female, aspiring filmmaker, receptionist at Bianca Film JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE, 55, male, bald, an established French filmmaker

DIRECTOR’S NOTE: DOMINIQUE and MELVILLE enact the scenes between “EDITH” and “DREYFUS”. Also, the “/” indicates when characters are speaking over one another.

Scene I

Paris, 1973. An office which is now outdoors due to fire. There is a desk and some metal chairs. Everything is burned. Scraps of paper and bits of rubble are everywhere. JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE enters, wearing a beige raincoat, a white Stetson and sunglasses. He kicks around some rubble. After a moment, he notices something. He takes off his coat, hat and glasses and puts them on the desk. He digs around in the rubble for a moment before finding what he’s looking for: an ancient- looking projector. He fiddles with it. DOMINIQUE PEYROUX enters, holding some bound papers. She wears simple Parisian style. Pants. She sneaks up to MELVILLE trying to get a better look at the object he is touching.

DOM What is that?

MELVILLE Ah!

MELVILLE bolts upright, startled, and grabs his chest.

DOM Oh no. Jesus. Are you okay?

Breathing heavily, MELVILLE leans hard against a chair. After a moment he stands up, regaining his composure.

MELVILLE I’m fine.

DOM composes herself and walks over to him with her hand outstretched.

DOM Hello, Mr. Melville.

MELVILLE does not reciprocate.

Yes, um. My name is Dominique Peyroux. Certain persons passed along the script for your newest film and I’m intrigued. I thought we could discuss the prospect of working together on this project.

Beat. She holds up a tattered script.

This is your script, is it not?

MELVILLE It is.

DOM Right. I have some questions and some recommendations regarding-

MELVILLE Regarding what?

DOM Well, a couple of things. If you have some time right now I would be glad to/take you through-

MELVILLE /What did you say your name was?

DOM Dominique Peyroux.

MELVILLE And what studio did you say you represent?

DOM I…didn’t. Um…that is to say…if we could just-

MELVILLE Peyroux.

DOM Yes, sir?

MELVILLE You are related to Leon Peyroux? The producer?

DOM Well…yes. My father.

MELVILLE What do you want?

DOM I want to talk to you about producing this film.

MELVILLE I sat down with Leon not four days ago and he told me in no uncertain terms that he wanted nothing to do with my film. And you’ve come here to what? Rub it in?

DOM N-no! My father doesn’t know that I’m here.

MELVILLE I’m sorry?

DOM I’m not here on behalf of my father. I wanted to talk to you about /possibly working-

MELVILLE /But you’re a producer?

DOM Yes! No! Not yet. I mean…I will be…

MELVILLE What exactly is your job title at Bianca Film, Miss Peyroux?

DOM Okay. Well, it’s/complicated to explain.

MELVILLE /Surely you’re not some secretary who’s come here with a bunch of wild ideas about being a film producer.

DOM No!

Beat.

I mean, technically I am a /secretary-

MELVILLE /Oh Jesus…

DOM But if you’ll just hear me out I think you’ll find-

MELVILLE You’re trespassing.

DOM I beg your pardon?

MELVILLE This is private property.

DOM This is a pile of rubble.

MELVILLE You-…someone can still own a pile of rubble, Miss Peyroux.

DOM Dominique.

She extends her hand again, to no avail.

MELVILLE You are not supposed to be here. This is my studio.

DOM Was your studio.

MELVILLE Wait. How exactly did you know to find me here today?

DOM I…took a guess.

MELVILLE You followed me.

DOM No!

Beat.

I mean I drove behind you in a car when you left your apartment, but…there’s nothing sinister about it.

MELVILLE Of course not.

DOM I’m…ambitious.

MELVILLE That’s one word for it.

DOM What did my father say? When you pitched your movie to him?

MELVILLE He called it a “boring, turgid mess”.

Beat.

Do you want to know why I still come here? To this “pile of rubble”? When I had this studio, when it had walls and a…(looks up) roof…I could spit in the face of men like your father. Now I have to lick their boots just to get a meeting. And now he sends his daughter - to what? Humiliate me further? He didn’t do a thorough enough job?

DOM I told you, my father doesn’t know I’m here!

MELVILLE What is this, then? A mugging?

DOM Look. Mr. Melville…

MELVILLE Ah! That’s a comfort: someone still knows who I am.

DOM Of course I know who you are. You’re Jean-Pierre Melville. You’re one of the most popular…

MELVILLE -No.

DOM Critically acclaimed-

MELVILLE -Not even close.

DOM Beloved-

MELVILLE Ha!

DOM You’ve made some of the best French films in history. You do suspense better than Alfred Hitchcock and you are probably the smartest director working today. Wouldn’t you agree with that?

MELVILLE No. I’m not working.

Beat.

You know what a critic said about me a few months ago? That my films are essentially an advertisement for “a style in raincoats”. The entire establishment has turned on me. Instead, it’s all about the “New Wave”. Chabrol, Truffaut, the great fucking Godard. He edits his movies like a psychopath and everyone applauds him for it. “Oh, a terribly-made film! How avant-garde!” Meanwhile Army of Shadows will probably never be seen outside of France. People cannot appreciate my films if they cannot see them.

DOM Army of Shadows is a great film.

MELVILLE I don’t need some secretary telling me what a great film is.

Beat.

Look, it’s nice to meet a fan, but/I’ve really had enough-

DOM /I found your script. It was in a waste paper basket in the reception area. I saw you storm out of the office and throw it away.

MELVILLE And?

DOM You shouldn’t have thrown it away.

MELVILLE Why?

DOM It’s good.

MELVILLE Wonderful. Thank you.

DOM Yes, you’re welcome.

MELVILLE I was being sarcastic.

DOM I don’t really register sarcasm. I made some changes to the script I’d like to discuss.

MELVILLE laughs at her, before realizing she’s serious.

MELVILLE What?

DOM Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s some classic Melville stuff in here and it’s all very potent. Shadowy rendezvous’ in secret places, long stretches with no dialogue. The train scene may pose a technical challenge, but I’m sure we can sort that out.

MELVILLE “We”?

DOM What I really want to focus on are these scenes with Édith. Here…

DOM digs in her purse and gives MELVILLE another copy of the script.

I made a photocopy for you.

MELVILLE That’s illegal.

DOM (Laughs) Right. So if you just take a look at page seven,/you can see-

MELVILLE For the love of God what is happening here?

DOM We’re discussing our script.

MELVILLE “Our”-…listen: there is no “our” script, alright? This film was a mistake, so I threw it away, making it garbage. However, this happens to be my garbage, so you should stop this little…performance I’m witnessing. I will keep making films, but this one is past saving.

DOM If you’ll just take a look…

MELVILLE You’ve clearly done your homework, so you must already know that I’m a colossal prick.

DOM I wouldn’t have to do any homework to realize that.

MELVILLE Surely, you also know my opinions about women working as film artists.

DOM You’re against it.

MELVILLE Correct. Women aren’t capable of being film artists. It’s nothing personal of course; it’s just what I know to be true. Unless you can name me some great female directors.

DOM Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, Germaine Dulac-

MELVILLE Never heard of them.

DOM Because they’re women, not because their films weren’t great. What about Ida Lupino, Leni Riefenstahl-

MELVILLE The Nazi propagandist. You’re going to say “Leni Riefenstahl” to a French Jew?

DOM She might be the greatest filmmaker alive.

MELVILLE But she’s not making films is she?

DOM Neither are you.

Beat.

So let’s talk about the project.

MELVILLE Excuse me, what project? You want me to read your script…my script and then…?

DOM And then we make the film. Together.

MELVILLE That’s very cute. Will you please leave me alone?

DOM So you can…sulk?

Beat.

That is what you’re doing, right? I’m sure that’s very fruitful for you, but consider this: instead of sulking that your career is over…we could save it!

MELVILLE My career is not over.

DOM Well, I phoned around to several friends at other studios and they tell me that you’ve had unsuccessful meetings at every place in town.

MELVILLE They’re incompetent fools. I just need to find the right film.

DOM This is the right film. And since I’m the only one who thinks so, you might as well have a conversation with me.

MELVILLE (To himself) I can’t believe this. (To DOM) Out of sheer morbid curiosity about your deteriorating mental state, let me ask you something. If I just said “Yes, deranged young woman, let’s make a film” what would happen?

DOM Well-

MELVILLE Nothing. Nothing would happen. Your father is the head of a powerful film studio. Not you. What is your plan? To coo into daddy’s ear to get him to finance my film?

DOM He would never produce a film like this. I’m surprised he even sat down with you.

Beat.

MELVILLE Not as surprised as me. What is Bianca Film producing next anyways? Another literary adaptation?

DOM Victor Hugo.

MELVILLE Victor Hugo. Of course. Who cares? People don’t like movies based on French classics anymore. They like-

DOM American movies.

MELVILLE Who could possibly care about Victor Hugo when the Americans have directors like John Ford?

DOM Howard Hawkes.

MELVILLE Douglas Sirk.

DOM William Wyler.

MELVILLE Wyler! Yes. Now there is a great director.

Beat.

DOM I’m going to start my own company, Mr. Melville.

MELVILLE I wouldn’t advise it.

DOM Haven’t you thought about it? Having your own studio again? Didn’t you love it?

MELVILLE Didn’t I love it? Miss Peyroux, I slept in this office more than I slept at home for the years this building was standing. I would get up in the middle of the night to write scripts and inspect props. This building is as much a part of me as my right arm. In fact, if I hadn’t gone home the night of the fire…

DOM You’d be dead.

MELVILLE Or my studio would be alive.

MELVILLE shifts some of the rubble with his foot.

I’m not interested in your big dreams, Miss Peyroux. I have work to do on my own. I have to write a new script, find new financing…

MELVILLE gathers his coat and begins to move toward the exit.

DOM Money, then. Let’s talk about it.

MELVILLE You’re a rich man’s daughter. Nothing more.

DOM My mother died a long time ago and she left me some shares…a lot of shares…in Bianca Film. My father will never, ever make me a film producer. But if I sell my shares…I can make myself one.

MELVILLE turns around.

And I can make a movie. This one. If you’ll work with me.

MELVILLE You’re going to lose every penny you have. And you’re not going to make my film.

MELVILLE turns again, but DOM throws herself in front of the door.

DOM Why not?

MELVILLE You’re a woman.

DOM Why else?

MELVILLE I don’t like you.

DOM You don’t have to like me. I don’t especially like you. Why else?

MELVILLE You don’t understand this story.

DOM I do. I’ll show you.

MELVILLE I don’t collaborate.

DOM Then…get over it. Do you actually think you still stand a chance of being a filmmaker without anyone’s help?

Beat.

MELVILLE I will always be a filmmaker.

DOM One that can’t actually make films? That’s a bit strange, don’t you think? To do something, usually people must…do something.

MELVILLE And what have you done? Nothing.

DOM I’m simply curious when the gangster godfather of French cinema decided he would rather cling to his stupid pride then do what he loves. Don’t kid yourself. You’re done as of right now.

Pause. MELVILLE smiles.

MELVILLE And what about you, Dominique Peyroux? What’s in this for you? Throwing your parents’ money at a washed-up filmmaker? Working with the nastiest director in France? All for what? The glitz and glamour of the film industry? Trust me, it’s not worth it.

DOM You don’t know the first thing about me. Tell me something: what happened when little Jean-Pierre told his mommy and daddy that he wanted to make movies?

MELVILLE smiles.

MELVILLE They bought me a Pathé Baby Camera. I used it every day to document the comings and goings of our dog. The point is: I worked from day one.

DOM You know what I got when I told my dad the same thing? Dance lessons.

Beat.

Turns out this was actually a pretty good gift because every Saturday when he dropped me off I would go inside the conservatory, wait two minutes and then walk to the Kino and see a double feature instead. My teachers became Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder and eventually…you.

MELVILLE Now you’re a secretary.

DOM I’m closer to the film industry than you currently are.

Beat.

You think you can discourage me by not taking me seriously, but no one does, Mr. Melville. Not a single person who works in my building.

Beat.

You should take me seriously if for no other reason than that we’re the same. I followed your career; I know the things they say about you. You’ve done this before. You built this studio from nothing. You spat in the face of the studio system and you won. I want to do this with you because I found a script in the trash and I could see that it was a story that its author needs to tell.

MELVILLE And you? Why is this story so important to you?

DOM Tell me the truth, Melville. This isn’t another existential gangster movie, is it? This one is different.

Beat.

MELVILLE The trick to being hated, Miss Peyroux, is not minding that you are hated. Tell me something. When the all-powerful suits shut you out, what do you do?

DOM What do you mean?

MELVILLE You try to be like them, don’t you? Act older, more masculine maybe? That’s what you tried to do when you walked in here, wasn’t it?

Beat.

It won’t work. They’ll never believe you. They’ll never let you in. The film industry is the mafia. When I got into the business, I refused to play by their rules: go to film school, get licensed through the Technician’s Union. You think I’m rich in grant money? Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol? They all rolled over and showed their bellies, but I showed those bastards I didn’t need them. I invested every penny I had to build my studio and they hated me for it but I was free.

DOM And you still wonder what I want?

MELVILLE throws his coat and accessories back onto the desk.

MELVILLE Tell me. Specifically.

DOM A new film. Produced, written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville…and Dominique Peyroux.

Pause.

MELVILLE You’ve got a set of balls on you.

DOM No, I don’t.

MELVILLE smiles.

MELVILLE Fine.

DOM “Fine”? You…you want to work together?

MELVILLE Far from it. I want you to take me through the first scene in my film that you saw fit to change and I will convince you that this plan of yours is ill-advised.

DOM And if you fail?

MELVILLE Then I suppose we can have a conversation about your ridiculous idea. But don’t get your hopes up. I’m going to be very unpleasant towards you.

DOM I don’t care.

MELVILLE Good. One more thing: if you cannot convince me that this Frankenstein you’ve created is worth making, then you must promise me you’ll give up.

DOM What?

MELVILLE You’re a little girl digging around in the trash of real artists, pretending she can do what they can. It would be public service to stop your little delusion.

DOM I feel sorry for you.

MELVILLE Don’t. Do you agree to the terms?

DOM Fine.

Beat.

Open your script and turn to page seven. Like I said, it’s the scenes between Dreyfus and Édith that just weren’t working for me, so I thought we would start with/ this one in the café.

MELVILLE What the hell is this?

DOM What? No, I said turn to page seven…

MELVILLE But you’ve changed page one!

DOM Yes, but-

MELVILLE What exactly is wrong with my opening sequence?

DOM Nothing, it’s fine.

MELVILLE “Fine.”

Beat.

DOM Look, it’s the same thing you did with Army of Shadows when the Gestapo marched past the Arc du Triomphe. It’s huge, it’s audacious, and it’ll cost lots of money. This time they’re inspecting the Louvre. It’s a lovely idea, but it’s too big, it’s…dispassionate.

MELVILLE It’s supposed to be!

DOM Dispassion is not what this movie needs. This is about how the big is small, how the hugeness of this conflict is present in intimate moments, so I needed something big that translated to something small.

MELVILLE So what do we see?

DOM It’s right there in the script, you /can just-

MELVILLE /What do we see?

Beat.

DOM (Thens CUT) It starts inside a giant warehouse in England. We see a static shot of an empty crate, with credits overtop. Quickly, we see the crate loaded with items: rifles, cases, of ammunition, grenades and finally one pack of cyanide capsules. The crate is closed and hammered shut and we watch it get loaded onto a plane. We cut to the same crate at night, over France and we see a pair of soldiers push it out the back of a plane. We see the same crate parachute gently into a farmer’s field in the middle of the night. The contents are unloaded and put into a truck, but covered in boxes of cabbage. Finally we cut to a back alley in Paris where the truck stops and a young woman helps the farmer unload the weapons and smuggle them into her shop.

MELVILLE Édith.

DOM Yes! This is how she gets the weapons. You see, she /receives the shipment-

MELVILLE /I get it, Miss Peyroux.

DOM And…what? It’s good, right?

MELVILLE sighs.

MELVILLE It’s cute.

DOM What do mean “cute”? This is great and you know it.

MELVILLE Let’s move on, shall we? You can show me how wrong I am about my own screenplay.

DOM I will.

MELVILLE So what now?

DOM Let me show you what I see.

MELVILLE exits.

Scene II

MELVILLE’s burned out office is now The Corona café in Paris, 1942. DOM and MELVILLE play ÉDITH and DREYFUS, respectively. ÉDITH retrieves two cups of coffee from inside the desk. After a moment DREYFUS enters the room, nervous. He looks around, not finding what he's looking for. ÉDITH gets up and rushes to DREYFUS and hugs him.

ÉDITH Are you blind? I’m sitting right here.

Beat.

(A hint) Darling…?

DREYFUS Right! Yes. “Darling”.

DREYFUS sits down.

ÉDITH You’re going to get us killed, aren’t you?

DREYFUS I don’t…think so.

ÉDITH I’m going to be a bloody corpse by the end of the night because you can’t follow instructions.

DREYFUS glances around and immediately becomes paranoid.

DREYFUS Shit. Did they notice? Are we/in danger-

ÉDITH Calm down.

DREYFUS But-

ÉDITH Calm…the hell…down.

DREYFUS You picked a place with a lot of Germans.

ÉDITH It’s occupied France. There are a lot of Germans everywhere.

DREYFUS Still…

ÉDITH I can't control where a Nazi goes on a Thursday night.

DREYFUS I’ll never get over how…regular…they seem. Just drinking beer.

ÉDITH You think they spend their evenings roaming the streets, stomping on kittens?

DREYFUS Something like that.

ÉDITH It’s early. There’s a long night with plenty of kittens.

DREYFUS I don’t want to get stomped on.

ÉDITH Then behave less like a kitten.

DREYFUS Yes, ma’am.

ÉDITH Jesus Christ, don’t call me “ma’am”. Let's start over. You are out for a drink with your lovely, beautiful, patient wife and you are calm and having a good time.

DREYFUS Right. You’re my wife.

ÉDITH Do you have a problem with that?

DREYFUS No, ma’am-I mean…! No.

ÉDITH Good.

DREYFUS You’re my wife. And I’m your…?

ÉDITH Yes.

DREYFUS Right. And we're...?

ÉDITH Having a good time.

DREYFUS Right. A good time.

ÉDITH You can call me Édith.

DREYFUS Dreyfus.

ÉDITH I thought you were going to wear a black hat.

DREYFUS I couldn't find one.

ÉDITH Next time? Find one.

DREYFUS Okay.

ÉDITH Kid, get a hold of yourself. You're shaking.

DREYFUS I'm not a kid.

ÉDITH (Unimpressed) Really.

DREYFUS I'm a soldier. I fought in Dunkirk.

ÉDITH Of course. You are a brave hero of the Resistance, your belt proudly notched with your personal Nazi death count. I've met a lot of men like you.

DREYFUS I'm not like them.

ÉDITH No, you're just sitting in the same chair, saying the same words with that same dumb look on your face.

Beat.

Look, this isn't the front line. This is the gutter. No soldiers here, only criminals. We’re a gang of thieves and killers. You had better get used to that.

DREYFUS I understand.

ÉDITH No…but you'll get it eventually. Relax.

Beat.

How old are you?

DREYFUS Twenty-seven.

Pause. ÉDITH is unconvinced.

Twenty-two.

ÉDITH There it is.

DREYFUS Look, I'm not fresh out of grade school. You can trust me.

ÉDITH I don't.

DREYFUS Why not?

ÉDITH I can’t afford to.

DREYFUS I’m a nice guy.

She points to an unseen Nazi.

ÉDITH So is that Gestapo officer, probably. Should I go over there and tell him all my secrets?

DREYFUS No, I’m just/saying…

ÉDITH /I’m serious. I bet…“Wilhelm”…is a wonderful father. He’s got a little boy named Maximilian and they go fishing together. He works very hard at his job, he is courteous to wait staff, keeps up on current events and can always spare some change for those who are down on their luck.

Beat.

Nice is cheap. I don’t care if you’re “nice”.

DREYFUS I’m just saying that marriages are built on trust…

MELVILLE puts his hand on hers to try and assure her. She leaves it there and attempts to apprehend his intentions. She casually pulls her hand away.

ÉDITH Alright, that’s enough marital bliss. Are you ready?

DREYFUS Sure.

Beat.

(More official) Yes.

He takes out a piece of paper and a pen. She snatches it away from him.

ÉDITH If you ever write anything down in front of me, the people sitting at those tables will be the least of your problems. Okay, little boy?

DREYFUS But how do I…?

ÉDITH Just repeat after each item, okay? Forty rifles.

DREYFUS Forty rifles.

ÉDITH Twelve cases of ammunition.

DREYFUS Twelve cases of ammunition.

ÉDITH Twenty grenades.

DREYFUS Twenty grenades.

ÉDITH Ten smoke grenades.

DREYFUS Ten smoke grenades.

ÉDITH One pack of cyanide capsules.

DREYFUS One pack of cyanide capsules.

ÉDITH Repeat it to me.

DREYFUS Forty rifles. Twelve cases of ammunition. Twenty grenades. Ten smoke grenades. Um…

ÉDITH One pack of cyanide capsules.

DREYFUS One pack of cyanide capsules.

ÉDITH Good.

DREYFUS They didn't send very much.

ÉDITH They sent everything they could.

DREYFUS To do what we’re going to do?

ÉDITH I don’t know what we’re going to do.

DREYFUS Really? We’re going/to blow up-

ÉDITH When I said not to trust me I meant that you shouldn't drop hints about what we are or are not going to blow up. Imagine yourself in an interrogation room. Is it better that you deny something you know, or just not know it at all? We-…

Beat. ÉDITH is distracted by something.

DREYFUS What?

ÉDITH There’s a man outside the front door.

DREYFUS What…kind of man?

ÉDITH The bad kind. I think.

DREYFUS looks.

Hey!

He snaps back to her.

Try looking without looking, okay?

He attempts to look more subtly.

What do you think?

DREYFUS I don’t know. He looks like a guy.

ÉDITH Try harder.

DREYFUS He’s…shifting his weight a lot.

Beat.

ÉDITH It’s a raid. We won’t be able to leave that way.

DREYFUS What do we do?

ÉDITH Through the kitchen. Come with me.

They exit, appearing moments later on a train platform out of breath and we hear a train pulling away.

ÉDITH Goddamn it!

DREYFUS There'll be another train soon. Did anyone see us leave?

ÉDITH No.

DREYFUS Are you sure?

ÉDITH No.

DREYFUS There'll be another train soon.

ÉDITH Take one of these.

ÉDITH digs out a wrapped pill and puts it in DREYFUS’ hand.

DREYFUS What are these?

ÉDITH gives him a look.

No. No, it can’t be that bad.

ÉDITH I’m just saying…if it gets to that point. Okay?

DREYFUS Okay.

ÉDITH Trust me.

DREYFUS Okay.

Pause. DREYFUS is terrified.

We hear the sound of jackboots. DREYFUS quickly shoves the pills inside his coat pocket. ÉDITH slides her hands inside DREYFUS’ coat and presses her head into his chest and closes her eyes. A Gestapo officer steps onto the platform and walks over to them slowly. DREYFUS looks up from ÉDITH. The Gestapo officer takes out a cigarette and motions for a light. DREYFUS digs in his pocket and pulls out a pack of matches. He lights the man's cigarette. The man nods his thanks and continues walking. ÉDITH, still inside DREYFUS’ coat, looks at him. He kisses her.

Beat.

DREYFUS I’m just a kid, right?

ÉDITH For now.

Scene III

We are back at Rue Jenner Studios with MELVILLE and DOM.

MELVILLE Is this a joke? Are you turning my resistance drama into a comedy?

DOM What do you mean?

MELVILLE I get it. The original version was a bit dark for your tastes so you decide to lighten things up with a love story. Very cute, Miss Peyroux. And you question why I think men are better filmmakers…

DOM This…this is not a love story. I mean…it’s complex…

MELVILLE It seems quite simple to me.

DOM It isn’t!

MELVILLE So these two don’t fall in love, escape danger and tumble into each other’s arms?

DOM No! Well…there’s danger and stuff-

MELVILLE Oh, “danger and stuff!” Sounds riveting. We can put that on the poster. Or better yet: the title!

DOM Mr. Melville…

MELVILLE Hang on. This relationship is supposed to be a professional one. Édith receives the shipments and brings the weapons manifest to Dreyfus. She’s part of the team; the film isn’t about these two. Why am I wasting my time here to begin with? To think you could understand-

DOM It doesn’t make sense!

Beat.

The movie doesn’t make sense, Melville. She has all these scenes in the film and nothing happens in them. And then we don’t even see her again!

MELVILLE So what?

DOM So why was she there in the first place? What was the purpose of her? And don’t pretend there wasn’t one!

MELVILLE This is my script.

DOM You’re still wrong!

MELVILLE This isn’t a love story, Miss Peyroux.

DOM No! But it’s not what you wrote, either.

MELVILLE Why are you so sure you have some brilliant insight?

Beat.

DOM You recognized me earlier.

MELVILLE From the studio. You work for your father.

DOM Is that really where you remember me from?

Beat.

MELVILLE (Trying to remember) No. I recognized you then too. How do I know you?

DOM paces.

DOM You taught a brief course at IDHEC a few years ago. “Modern Mise- En-Scene”.

MELVILLE You were a student?

DOM Yes.

MELVILLE I don’t remember many students.

DOM You had us write essays on the cinematography in your film, Le Samuraï. There were over a hundred people in the class and just as many essays.

DOM goes over to MELVILLE’s desk and picks up some singed papers, imitating MELVILLE in her memory.

When you had graded them you stood at the head of the class and announced the names of the three students with the best essays: Andre Giroux, Jacques Nolande and Dominique Peyroux. As each student came up to take their paper you told the class about how good each paper was. Then I came up to the front and you realized that the name “Dominique” didn’t belong to a boy like you’d assumed. And then you didn’t say a word.

MELVILLE I see.

DOM You were humiliated.

MELVILLE Not as bad as you.

DOM Don’t be too proud. I’m humiliated daily for being good at my job.

MELVILLE You’re looking to prove something.

DOM Only that you underestimated me then, too.

MELVILLE Fine. Allow me to make a more accurate estimation of you. Have you ever actually made a film?

DOM Yes.

MELVILLE You have?

DOM Yes, since you’re asking. I wrote and directed several short films while I was a student. One even got into the Festival at Cannes in 1970.

MELVILLE I was at Cannes in 1970. What was it called?

DOM “Bootlegger”.

Beat.

MELVILLE I saw that film.

DOM You did?

MELVILLE Yes.

Beat.

You ruined the best part of it.

DOM Which part?

MELVILLE So, if I recall, the bootleggers are transporting the car full of whiskey across the frozen ice, but they’re pushing the car because it would be too heavy if they got behind the wheel.

DOM That’s right.

MELVILLE These three or four men, escorting a jalopy across a frozen river. And all the while, the main character starts delivering a monologue

in his head through voiceover. Completely killed the tension. You need to stop watching Godard films.

DOM Yes? And how would you do it?

MELVILLE Silence. We have all the information we need. Total silence punctuated only by the creaks and moans of the ice under their feet. What is that monologue about? That he’s scared? Do we need to “understand” that?

Beat.

DOM Shit. You’re right. That is better.

MELVILLE Still. Not a terrible film.

DOM Really?

MELVILLE Just because you’re not incompetent doesn’t mean you’re good at this.

DOM What’s so bad about my version of your script?

MELVILLE It’s intimate.

DOM So?

MELVILLE I don’t do “intimate”, Miss Peyroux. My-

DOM Right! That’s why/ you need-

MELVILLE Quiet. My characters are cyphers. We observe them. Any sentiment, any affection, and any “feelings” they may have we judge from the sum of their actions. They are not people who say, “I love you”.

DOM But that’s your whole problem, Melville. That may have worked for Le Samuraï, but it won’t work here. It needs a different perspective.

MELVILLE Yours, you mean.

Beat.

Let me tell you something about Le Samuraï, my so-called “best film”: I cast Alain because I knew he would be perfect to play Costello. And, truly, we did great work. However, on our final day of shooting he said to me: “When Costelo dies, he should die smiling.”

DOM But he doesn’t.

MELVILLE It was a great idea though.

DOM Then why didn’t you use it?

MELVILLE Because he came up with it. Because I do not collaborate. So continue if you must, but-

DOM Let’s continue then.

Scene IV

The café again. ÉDITH rises as DREYFUS enters. He walks up and kisses her and she cuts it short, leading him over to the table.

ÉDITH Alright, enough of that.

DREYFUS Whatever is the matter, my darling wife?

ÉDITH Very cute.

DREYFUS I am?

ÉDITH You’re insufferable.

DREYFUS I don’t know why we can’t have a little fun.

ÉDITH I walked past three swastikas on the way here. “Fun” isn’t in my vocabulary anymore.

DREYFUS What’s wrong?

ÉDITH My country’s been invaded by a maniac. And how are you?

DREYFUS You know what I mean.

Beat.

ÉDITH I saw a woman gunned down in the street today. She had a basket of groceries. A car pulled up behind her, shot her in the back and sped away. One of her apples tumbled into a sewer grate.

DREYFUS They’re awful.

ÉDITH It wasn’t them. They don’t have to act like criminals.

Pause.

DREYFUS Well…we don't know the story there. There was probably a good reason.

ÉDITH Moments ago, you thought this was awful, but when you find out it was us, suddenly there was a “good reason”?

DREYFUS This woman could have done any number of things.

ÉDITH What kind of thing justifies that?

DREYFUS Obviously something did.

ÉDITH Listen to yourself.

DREYFUS Listen to yourself. This is what we signed up for.

ÉDITH Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was talking to Jimmy fucking Cagney.

DREYFUS You like Jimmy Cagney?

ÉDITH You’re not in a damned gangster movie!

DREYFUS We are, though. Didn’t you call us a gang of thieves and killers? Everything we do is like a gangster movie. Think about it: we’re being chased by thugs in trench coats, we’re having secret meetings, avoiding arrest…

ÉDITH What is the point in seeing it that way?

DREYFUS It’s just…easier.

ÉDITH It's not supposed to be easy. Maybe for them, but not for us.

DREYFUS Yeah, and we're losing.

ÉDITH You don’t know what you’re talking about.

DREYFUS It's true. Like you said, they don’t have to act like criminals. We do. I laced one of my cigarettes with cyanide this afternoon in case one of them ever asks me for one.

Beat. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and shows her.

See, I put it in upside-down. Pretty neat, right? You remember the one on the train platform? If that happened again, I’d just give him this cigarette and he’d be dead in minutes.

Beat.

What?

ÉDITH Yeah, that’s real…“neat”.

DREYFUS You don’t like that I’m enjoying this.

ÉDITH Enjoying-...you’re having the time of your life.

DREYFUS So what? I could die tomorrow.

ÉDITH And what if you survive?

DREYFUS What do you mean?

ÉDITH Is it enough just to get through it? What if we have to deserve survival?

DREYFUS Nobody “deserves” anything.

ÉDITH I don’t know if that’s true.

DREYFUS What do you want me to say?

ÉDITH Maybe you could just enjoy it a little less. That might help me out.

DREYFUS Look, I know it must be scary for a woman in the middle of a war. I shouldn’t expect you to understand.

ÉDITH Oh, I see. You think because I'm a wife and mother I should leave the fight to little boys like you. Meanwhile, I’ll just pass the time living in Hitler's Paris.

DREYFUS You're…married?

ÉDITH Is that all you heard?9p

Beat.

Don't look so crestfallen. It wasn't going to happen.

Pause.

DREYFUS Wait. If you have a husband and a child you have so much more to lose…

ÉDITH Don't.

DREYFUS I'm serious. You could get killed.

ÉDITH I know that, Dreyfus. You don’t think I know that?

Beat.

DREYFUS How many kids do you have?

ÉDITH I’m not telling you that.

DREYFUS How long have/you been with-

ÉDITH I’m not telling you that, either.

DREYFUS Can we just talk?

ÉDITH Why don’t you go kill something instead?

DREYFUS You’re being childish.

ÉDITH That’s funny, because you’re actually a child.

DREYFUS Édith.

ÉDITH Thirty-five rifles.

DREYFUS What?

ÉDITH Thirty-five rifles.

DREYFUS Please.

Pause.

Thirty-five rifles.

ÉDITH Fifteen pistols.

DREYFUS Fifteen pistols.

ÉDITH Seven land mines.

DREYFUS Seven land mines.

ÉDITH Ten knives.

DREYFUS Ten knives.

ÉDITH Ten grenades.

DREYFUS Ten grenades.

ÉDITH Say it back to me.

DREYFUS Thirty-five rifles. Fifteen pistols. Seven land mines. Ten knives.

ÉDITH What else?

DREYFUS If I don’t remember the last item you have to keep talking to me.

Pause.

Maybe I actually don’t.

Pause. ÉDITH is immoveable.

Ten hand grenades.

ÉDITH immediately gets up to leave. DREYFUS gets up and grabs her arm. She stops and looks at him. He lets go and ÉDITH moves to leave.

Scene V

DOM stops walking. They are themselves again, in the office in 1973. MELVILLE stands.

MELVILLE I think I’m finished with this experiment.

DOM Why?

MELVILLE You don’t have a clue what you’re doing. You think during the Resistance we just sat around in coffee shops talking about our personal lives? It’s not supposed to happen like this.

DOM How is it “supposed” to happen?

MELVILLE It’s a transaction. We were expected to be professional in the Resistance.

DOM But there’s more to it than that!

MELVILLE How the hell do you figure that?

DOM I could tell. From your rough draft.

MELVILLE “Rough draft?”

DOM There was something about the way they spoke to one another. I think you were lying about what was really going on between these two.

MELVILLE What do you mean “lying”? I made it up!

DOM You’re still lying.

MELVILLE Miss Peyroux, you are goddamned infuriating.

Beat.

If I walk away right now are you going to feel like you’ve won this argument?

DOM Oh, I already do.

MELVILLE Stubborn.

DOM Like you.

MELVILLE You are nothing like me.

DOM You mean I’m not a prick.

Beat.

MELVILLE There are other directors, you know. Ones that don’t mind working with women in creative roles. Ones that are aren’t “pricks”. If you

want to make a movie, there are a lot of scripts out there that do not belong to me. You are a nice person. I am not. Why degrade yourself like this?

DOM Because you’re Jean-Pierre Melville. I don’t care if you don’t want to make this movie. This movie deserves to be made. I think that if you have a story worth telling, then you have no right to keep it to yourself. In fact, it isn’t even yours; it belongs to the people who will watch it. Can you imagine if the world didn’t get to see Le Samuraï because you didn’t feel like making it? Fuck you, it’s not up to you.

Beat. MELVILLE laughs a little.

MELVILLE Le Samuraï…

DOM I saw it three times when it was in cinemas.

MELVILLE Really?

DOM Yes.

MELVILLE Why?

DOM I couldn’t…figure it out.

MELVILLE Say more.

DOM Okay, so the movie’s about the hitman, Costelo. He kills a club owner but things go wrong and he has to evade the police while tracking down his employer. But for the whole movie Costelo doesn't show any emotion. The whole time his face is totally impassive. And yet...I cared about him. I watched it over and over because I couldn't figure out how you did that.

MELVILLE Audiences instinctively want to care about the people they see on screen. In the absence of seeing a full personality we will fill in the blanks ourselves. You mentioned Alain's face. It isn't a face. It’s a mask. Like a samurai, he has only a face for the job he performs. We are left to wonder at the human underneath. And only in the end do I offer a glimpse of his true nature.

DOM That’s another thing. I don’t understand the ending. He goes to shoot the piano player at the end. But if he knows he’s going to die when he gets to the club…and he must know…why does he go to the nightclub at all? What does he expect to gain?

MELVILLE What do you think?

DOM I mean…I have an idea, but it’s kinda hard to explain.

MELVILLE Enlighten me.

DOM Do you know the parable of the scorpion and the frog?

MELVILLE smiles.

MELVILLE Refresh my memory.

DOM So…a scorpion needs to cross a stream, but it can't swim. The scorpion sees a frog in the water and asks for a ride on the frog's back to get across the river. The frog says “Of course not. You'll sting me and I'll die.” But the scorpion says “I won't. If I sting you while I am on your back, then you will die and I will drown.” The frog agrees with this logic and the scorpion gets on the frog's back. Halfway across the stream, the frog feels a sharp sting on it's back. As the frog is dying he says to the scorpion “You fool. Now we are both going to die. Why did you sting me?” And the scorpion says, “Because you are a frog. And I am a scorpion.”

Beat.

I think that’s why Costelo goes to the club in the end. It’s because it’s just who he is. And without that…what would he be?

MELVILLE I see.

DOM I think that’s why you’re here.

MELVILLE Why I’m here?

DOM You’re obviously not well. A rational person would stop and mind their health. Walk away. But I don’t think you’re going to do that.

MELVILLE My father died of a heart attack when he was fifty-five. My grandfather died of a heart attack when he was fifty-five. Do you know how old I am?

DOM Yes.

MELVILLE You’re right. I should be at home. With my family. But that’s not who I am. I am a filmmaker or I am nothing.

DOM Even at the end?

MELVILLE Especially at the end.

DOM You’re a scorpion.

MELVILLE I suppose.

DOM So…shall we continue? Or would you prefer to keep…(she lightly kicks the dilapidated projector)…reminiscing?

Pause. Eventually, MELVILLE smiles.

MELVILLE Clever, Miss Peyroux. (He laughs) The scorpion parable. Jesus…can’t believe I fell for that. Fine. Show me what you’re going to show me.

MELVILLE picks up the script.

DOM Yes! Good! Okay, so this scene is just/after-

MELVILLE What is this?

DOM shrugs.

Did you invent an entirely new scene?

DOM I had to!

MELVILLE You “had” to?

DOM Yes.

MELVILLE Unbelievable.

DOM Please, just let me show you.

He slips his shoes off. MELVILLE tosses down the script and walks over to her.

Scene VI

The two of them are ÉDITH and DREYFUS again. They are standing outside, on the street.

ÉDITH I don’t think the café is safe anymore. I thought we could find a different place.

Beat.

Is something wrong?

DREYFUS pulls a bloody knife from one pocket and a book from the other.

Christ! Dreyfus. What is that?

DREYFUS A book. Or no…the knife. Yeah…

ÉDITH Are you okay?

She takes the knife away from him and throws it away.

Why do you have a book?

DREYFUS I was coming from the book store when…

ÉDITH When what?

DREYFUS He’s dead.

ÉDITH Who is?

DREYFUS The…guy. Guy with the gun.

ÉDITH Oh. Okay. Good.

DREYFUS I did it.

ÉDITH I know.

DREYFUS Do we…get coffee?

She laughs involuntarily.

ÉDITH No, I think you should come with me.

DREYFUS Where are we going?

They exit.

ÉDITH brings DREYFUS into her apartment and sits him down on a couch. DREYFUS puts down the book. She helps him out of his coat and inspects his hand.

ÉDITH You’re bleeding.

DREYFUS Not my blood.

He looks down at his hand.

Oh. Yes, it is. I must’ve been clumsy.

ÉDITH Stay here and try not to bleed on anything.

ÉDITH rushes out and returns moments later with a pail of water, a cloth and a spool of gauze. She pulls a stool up to DREYFUS and begins to sop up his blood and squeeze it into the water. DREYFUS just stares at his hand.

You’re a damned fool.

DREYFUS Hm?

ÉDITH Just stabbing one of them like that. You should have found a way to keep running. You’re lucky.

DREYFUS Had to do something.

ÉDITH And where the hell are your shoes?

DREYFUS They…made too much noise. Hid around a corner.

Beat.

ÉDITH Clever.

Beat.

How did it feel?

DREYFUS What?

ÉDITH You gave me that whole lecture about doing whatever’s necessary. Was it as righteous as you imagined?

DREYFUS It was different from what I thought.

ÉDITH How did you think it would be?

DREYFUS Hard.

ÉDITH And it wasn’t?

DREYFUS No. It was kind of…exhilarating?

Beat.

Does that make me a monster? He hadn’t really…done anything.

ÉDITH No one’s innocent.

DREYFUS But he was just a man. A bit older than me, but…young. He grabbed my coat and he wouldn’t let go. Why did he do that?

She has finished cleaning the cut and is wrapping his hand with gauze.

He was scared.

ÉDITH He was probably trying to hurt you.

DREYFUS Maybe.

ÉDITH Definitely. Try not to think about it, Dreyfus.

DREYFUS Claude.

ÉDITH What?

DREYFUS My name’s Claude. Claude Dreyfus. It’s only fair you know my first name if I know yours.

ÉDITH smiles, thinking he is joking.

ÉDITH You don’t know my first name.

DREYFUS What?

Beat.

ÉDITH You don’t know my first name. Wait. Did you tell me your real name?

DREYFUS Édith isn’t your first name?

ÉDITH Christ! No! I like Édith Piaf.

Beat.

The singer? Oh my God, didn’t anyone tell you not to use your real name?

She paces around the room.

DREYFUS I just…thought I could trust you.

ÉDITH Because you’re a fucking idiot.

DREYFUS Don’t you trust me?

ÉDITH It’s not about that! Don’t you realize the danger you put yourself in telling me that?

DREYFUS smiles.

DREYFUS Are you planning on giving me up? Turning me in?

ÉDITH I…of course not, but-

DREYFUS Then I’m not afraid.

ÉDITH You think you’re being sweet but you’re really just being dumb.

DREYFUS It’s nice to be alone with you.

ÉDITH I can’t handle this. Does your mind ever wander from the goal of getting laid?

He shrugs.

DREYFUS I like you. I think you’re beautiful.

ÉDITH You’re a child. I’m forty-two years old, Claude. Dreyfus! Shit!

DREYFUS I killed someone today. Do I really seem so young?

ÉDITH Yes, you fucking do, Al Capone. Think you’re such a gangster.

DREYFUS Have you ever killed anyone?

ÉDITH I…don’t know. Yes. I may have.

DREYFUS Left them to die or something?

ÉDITH Let’s talk about something else. Anything else.

DREYFUS Where are we?

ÉDITH Anything but that.

DREYFUS Is this your apartment?

ÉDITH It’s not important.

DREYFUS You give me hell about telling you my real name and you brought me back to your apartment?

DREYFUS laughs.

ÉDITH Quiet! I wasn’t thinking, okay? We needed to get off the street and my place was close.

DREYFUS How close?

DREYFUS glances out the window.

Oh yeah, there’s the Corona right there!

She pulls him away by his arm.

ÉDITH Get away from there. They’re probably out there looking for you?

MELVILLE regards her touch. She drops his arm.

DREYFUS Are we in danger?

ÉDITH Yes.

DREYFUS Will they come here?

ÉDITH No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.

DREYFUS Where/are they?

ÉDITH /How the hell should I know, Claude? Roaming the streets, howling at the moon.

DREYFUS No, I meant…your family.

Beat.

ÉDITH They’re not here.

DREYFUS Did they get out? Of France?

ÉDITH They’re not here, Claude. Okay? We’re alone.

DREYFUS So…drinks? Music?

Beat.

Bad joke.

ÉDITH smiles.

ÉDITH At least you’re returning to normal. If I had anything to drink I would gladly volunteer it. God knows we could use some comfort.

Beat.

Actually…

ÉDITH takes the water and other things out of the room and returns with a small rectangle wrapped in foil and shows it to him.

DREYFUS Where did you get that?

ÉDITH I know someone.

She sits down on the bed with MELVILLE, unwraps the chocolate and breaks the bar in half. They eat.

DREYFUS This is amazing.

ÉDITH I was worried you’d pass out if you didn’t eat something.

Beat.

I saw a photographer in the park the other day. I guess he was taking pictures for a propaganda magazine because he had three teenage girls posing on a bench. Their hair was done up, they were wearing trendy clothing and they were-CUT holding chocolate bars.

It was a strange sight to see in the midst of all this. It reminded me of you.

DREYFUS Of me?

ÉDITH The world is upside down. And you always have this dumb smile on your face because to you it’s just the setting of a movie you’re watching in your head.

DREYFUS Should I stop having fun?

ÉDITH I just don’t understand you.

DREYFUS What’s to understand?

ÉDITH You’re happy. How do you manage to be happy?

DREYFUS I like being at war. It’s exciting. I suppose I should be ashamed of that, but I like it. Don’t you ever feel that way? Fighting is…meaning.

ÉDITH Maybe I did…at the beginning. I envy you. I miss having fun.

DREYFUS puts his bandaged hand on her leg. She looks at it. After a moment he pulls it away, but she takes it instead.

Does it hurt? Your hand?

DREYFUS A little.

She kisses his hand.

ÉDITH Now?

DREYFUS Better.

She kisses further up his arm.

ÉDITH Is that helping?

He nods. She slides her hand onto his crotch and rubs.

How about now?

DREYFUS Yes, that’s good too.

ÉDITH Are you ready?

DREYFUS Ready?

ÉDITH For the weapons manifest.

DREYFUS I don’t know if I can…

ÉDITH Claude, you need to be able to remember this. It doesn’t matter if you’re killing Nazis or if someone’s touching your penis.

Beat.

Thirty-five rifles.

DREYFUS Thirty-five rifles.

ÉDITH Fifteen pistols.

DREYFUS Fifteen pistols.

ÉDITH Ten knives.

DREYFUS Ten knives.

ÉDITH Ten hand grenades.

DREYFUS Ten hand grenades.

ÉDITH Seven land mines.

DREYFUS Seven land mines.

ÉDITH slides under the blanket and on top of DREYFUS. She pulls down his pants and they begin to have sex.

ÉDITH Repeat it back to me.

DREYFUS Oh shit. There were…rifles…

ÉDITH How many?

DREYFUS Thirty-five.

ÉDITH What else?

DREYFUS Pistols. Fifteen?

ÉDITH Good…

DREYFUS Uhh…just having a hard time concentrating…

ÉDITH Should I stop?

DREYFUS No! I can get it.

It becomes more intense.

Uh…shit…knives! Ten knives!

ÉDITH What else?

DREYFUS Um…grenades?

ÉDITH Smoke grenades?

DREYFUS Hand grenades! Ten!

ÉDITH Is that it?

DREYFUS I think so?

ÉDITH All together.

DREYFUS Thirty-five rifles…fifteen pistols…ten knives…ten hand grenades…

ÉDITH You forgot land mines.

DREYFUS Oh shit. Seven. Seven land mines.

ÉDITH I forgive you.

They finish. DREYFUS lies on the couch breathing heavily, on the verge of passing out.

So you’re going to blow up a train with that list of supplies?

DREYFUS We’re going to try.

ÉDITH What train?

DREYFUS is visibly lightheaded.

DREYFUS Why do you care?

ÉDITH You don’t trust me by now?

DREYFUS It’s a military supply train. We’re going to hit it just south of Montmartre. Wednesday night.

Beat.

I love you.

ÉDITH You love people touching your penis.

DREYFUS is drifting off. ÉDITH gets up.

DREYFUS What’s your name?

ÉDITH Édith.

DREYFUS Your real name.

ÉDITH I can’t tell you that, Claude.

DREYFUS I told you mine. You can trust me.

ÉDITH What does it matter?

DREYFUS It just does.

She laughs dismissively, but keeps pacing around considering it. Finally:

ÉDITH Okay, Claude. But you have to promise me…

Beat.

Dreyfus? Claude?

DREYFUS is asleep. She laughs quietly to herself.

What the hell am I doing?

ÉDITH studies DREYFUS’ face for a moment. She grabs her coat. She goes to the door and opens it tentatively, looking back at DREYFUS once before exiting.

Scene VII

We are back in MELVILLE’s office. MELVILLE stands up and paces. DOM re-enters. She studies him from across the room.

DOM Melville?

Beat.

Are you alright?

MELVILLE paces, staring at her.

Will you at least say something?

MELVILLE How did you know?

Beat.

DOM What?

MELVILLE Don’t do that, Miss Peyroux.

DOM Do what?

MELVILLE Obfuscate. You’re smarter than you pretend to be. Why don’t you just say what you clearly know?

Beat.

DOM Dreyfus. He’s you.

Beat.

MELVILLE He was.

DOM How did you know that I knew?

MELVILLE grabs his copy of the script and reads aloud.

MELVILLE “Dreyfus puts down the book. The camera lingers for a moment on the title:…The Confidence Man. Herman Melville.”

Beat.

My favourite author.

DOM “Melville”’s your code name, isn’t it?

MELVILLE Yes.

DOM You eventually got one.

MELVILLE Eventually.

DOM And you kept it.

MELVILLE After the war, I just felt more like Melville than…him.

DOM What is your real name? Is it Dreyfus?

MELVILLE Grumbach. Jean-Pierre Grumbach.

DOM Who was she?

MELVILLE Just a woman.

Beat.

A friend.

Beat.

But this…this did not happen. This is complete fiction. Miss Peyroux, you knew this script was about my life and yet you saw fit to change the story? What gives you the right? You think you can just invent things about my life?

DOM Do you?

MELVILLE Excuse me?

DOM You say that I’m inventing things about your life and I am, but you’re no better! There’s a story here, and maybe this isn’t exactly how it happened, but don’t pretend like your version was any more truthful. There’s a story here.

MELVILLE A story about…people touching each other? Is that what you think the Resistance was all about?

DOM I can’t know unless you tell me! I’m trying to find the story here.

MELVILLE Well you haven’t!

DOM So then help me.

MELVILLE Jesus…who told you this is an appropriate way to talk to people?

DOM You’re not going stand there and call me rude are you?

MELVILLE There are a lot of things I could call you.

DOM Bitch? Amateur?

MELVILLE Please. “Amateur” is a compliment. Any art with value always comes from amateurs, outsiders.

DOM I agree.

MELVILLE Oh, wonderful! Shall we be the best of friends?

Pause.

DOM Were you involved? With her?

MELVILLE Briefly.

DOM Was she a collaborator?

MELVILLE That’s what I was told.

DOM Look…I’m sorry.

MELVILLE For what?

DOM For the ruse, I guess. I didn’t think I could tell you right away.

MELVILLE You were right.

DOM But I don’t understand. What’s so bad about revealing yourself? Why can’t Dreyfus be Grumbach and Grumbach become Melville? It’s what happened, isn’t it?

MELVILLE Do you know what some people call me? Besides the obvious insults?

Beat.

They call me “the American in Paris”. That isn’t by mistake. I wear my Ray-Bans and my Stetson and I drive around in my ostentatious red Ford convertible precisely so I can control how people think of me. As Melville.

DOM But Melville isn’t real.

MELVILLE When I’m gone, and I will be gone soon, how will I be remembered? Melville’s an abstraction. That doesn’t mean he isn’t real.

Beat.

You were right. This story has to be told. But I’m not him anymore.

DOM I don’t believe you.

MELVILLE I don’t give a damn if you believe me. Are we finished, Miss Peyroux?

DOM No.

MELVILLE There are no other scenes between Dreyfus and Édith. He finds out from his boss that she was a collaborator and she’s executed off- screen.

DOM I disagree.

MELVILLE It’s history. You can’t “disagree”.

DOM Is that what happened then? Your boss told you she was a traitor and was never heard from again?

Pause.

He has to see her again.

MELVILLE But he doesn’t.

DOM I don’t care.

MELVILLE I’m not going to make this film with you. You actually think you’re going to bully me into letting you co-direct? I do not co-direct.

DOM Just/try and-

MELVILLE No, Miss Peyroux. I’m done humouring you. This film is dead.

DOM Then so is your career.

MELVILLE I will find someone to finance my films-

DOM Who? Who is going to let you into a room with them let alone offer you several million francs to make a movie no one gives a shit about?

MELVILLE Someone will/finance my-

DOM /No one, Melville. No one will take you seriously except me! I’m the only person who will give you the fucking time of day let alone a film contract. You are alone. So maybe you need to consider a different tactic than spitting in my face when I come in here offering you the chance to salvage your miserable career. You are mean, petty, pretentious and completely irrelevant to everyone except me.

Pause. DOM breathes heavily.

Look. Shit. I apologize for-

MELVILLE Nothing. You did not say anything untrue. Do you spend all your time apologizing for telling the truth?

DOM A lot of it. I would be out of a job, otherwise.

Pause.

We’re not done.

MELVILLE You think I’ll be convinced after one more scene? You think I’m going to say “yes, you understand my story”? “Let us be creative partners until the end of time”?

DOM I don’t know what you’re going to say. But I need you to see it.

MELVILLE Then you’ll leave me alone?

DOM Then I’ll leave you alone.

MELVILLE Get it over with, then.

Scene VIII

The café, once again. ÉDITH sits. She pulls out a book and begins to read. DREYFUS walks over and stands behind her. After a moment she notices his presence and spins around.

ÉDITH Claude!

DREYFUS Hi.

ÉDITH What are you doing here?

He sits with his cup of coffee.

DREYFUS Just getting a coffee.

ÉDITH You shouldn’t be here. People are looking for you.

DREYFUS Where should I be?

ÉDITH I don’t know. Anywhere else.

DREYFUS Isn’t it nice to see me, at least?

ÉDITH It is nice to see you. But you can’t just be wandering the streets. Someone could recognize you.

DREYFUS Like you?

ÉDITH No, not like me.

Beat.

Claude, how are you here? I heard that you and everyone else who went on the mission were arrested or shot.

DREYFUS We weren’t. The mission was successful.

ÉDITH What?

DREYFUS The Germans are saying that they thwarted an attack in Montmartre. We hit the train on Thursday. The Germans showed up on Wednesday and no one was there. Someone talked, but they got they day wrong. Lucky for us.

Beat.

ÉDITH Lucky.

DREYFUS You look surprised.

ÉDITH I…thought you were dead, Claude. I’m allowed to look surprised.

Beat.

DREYFUS I’m going to London.

ÉDITH Don’t tell me things like that, Claude.

DREYFUS Why?

ÉDITH I told you not to trust me.

DREYFUS You did. You did tell me that.

ÉDITH Are you going to meet DeGaulle?

DREYFUS nods.

Are you excited?

DREYFUS They have American movies there.

ÉDITH Of course. Meeting the leader of the Resistance is no big deal compared to that.

DREYFUS I’m just getting a little bored of Leni Riefenstahl.

ÉDITH I think we all are.

DREYFUS I miss Westerns.

ÉDITH Why Westerns?

DREYFUS They’re unambiguous. Gangster movies are fun, but you never quite know who the villain is until the end. In a Western you never have to wonder. Sherriff/Outlaw. Good guy. Bad guy. There’s adventure, but everything returns to normal.

ÉDITH Westerns always make me sad.

DREYFUS Why?

ÉDITH They seem to be aware that the world they live in is ending. Americans like to look back at the harsh frontier with fondness because they’re disappointed with the world around them today. We want an easy hero and an easy villain because today it’s hard to tell which is which anymore. When you watch some John Wayne movie you see good vs. evil, but I just see a wish for something impossible.

DREYFUS I didn’t know you like movies.

ÉDITH I don’t, really. My husband did. Does. What is it about men and cowboys?

DREYFUS “A time when men were men”?

ÉDITH Sounds terrible.

Beat.

How’s your hand?

DREYFUS Much better. I don’t remember you bandaging it.

ÉDITH What do you remember?

DREYFUS I remember eating chocolate. I remember…other things.

ÉDITH Did you remember the list?

DREYFUS I did.

ÉDITH Good.

DREYFUS Did I…tell you anything?

ÉDITH You told me that the mission was happening Thursday night.

Pause.

DREYFUS No. I made a mistake. I told you Wednesday…and that’s when they showed up.

Beat. ÉDITH gets up in her chair, but DREYFUS grabs her arm.

You don’t want to walk out that door.

ÉDITH Are you going to stop me?

DREYFUS The people outside might.

She sits.

ÉDITH You’ve been promoted. That’s why you’re going to London.

He nods.

Congratulations.

DREYFUS Is your family safe?

ÉDITH “Safe”?

DREYFUS They’re alive though?

Beat.

That’s something.

ÉDITH That’s something.

Beat.

I don’t regret anything.

DREYFUS Okay.

ÉDITH Will you?

Beat.

I have the list for you.

DREYFUS We don’t need it. We’re going to come and take everything/anyway.

ÉDITH Please. Just let me.

Beat.

DREYFUS Go ahead.

ÉDITH Twelve cases of ammunition.

DREYFUS Twelve cases of ammunition.

100

ÉDITH Fourteen rifles.

DREYFUS Fourteen rifles.

ÉDITH Six pistols.

DREYFUS Six pistols.

ÉDITH Ten hand grenades.

DREYFUS Ten hand grenades.

ÉDITH Have you got it?

DREYFUS I’ve got it.

Beat.

ÉDITH I’m glad it was you.

DREYFUS It’s time to go.

ÉDITH I’m not walking out that door.

DREYFUS You don’t have a choice.

ÉDITH What are you going to do? Take me to some…location? Make me disappear? I can’t disappear, Claude. They have to know. My family has to know. So do whatever you have to do, but I am not going for a stroll.

DREYFUS I have orders.

ÉDITH I don’t care.

DREYFUS Why did it have to be you?

ÉDITH It just did, Claude. You’re still so young.

DREYFUS I don’t feel young.

Beat.

ÉDITH Give me a cigarette.

101

DREYFUS You want to smoke?

ÉDITH No. I said “give me a cigarette”. You still have it, don’t you?

Beat.

DREYFUS No.

ÉDITH Claude…

DREYFUS I can’t.

ÉDITH I’m not leaving with you. So if you’re not going to use the gun in your pocket, you should give me a cigarette.

Pause.

It’s alright.

DREYFUS pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She inspects it to make sure it is the right one. She takes a matchbook from the table and lights one. As she holds the match:

ÉDITH Lucienne.

DREYFUS What?

ÉDITH My name. Lucienne. You asked.

She lights the cigarette and inhales deeply.

SHIFT: suddenly DOM and MELVILLE are themselves again. MELVILLE gets up and moves away quickly. He leans hard against his desk.

MELVILLE Enough. I don’t want to see anymore.

DOM What’s wrong?

MELVILLE “What’s wrong?” I’m entertaining a sick child’s delusions of grandeur while letting her tell lies about my life. I must be as sick as my doctor tells me I am because healthy, sane people would not put themselves through this.

DOM What was wrong with it? What was wrong with my scene?

MELVILLE It didn’t happen! That’s what’s wrong with it!

102

DOM Then what did happen? Tell me!

MELVILLE I put it in my version of the script.

DOM No, you didn’t. Your script is a lie and it’s a worse lie than this one, because you’re doing it on purpose!

MELVILLE What lie?!

DOM You saw her again. I know you saw her again. She wouldn’t be in the story at all if nothing else happened. I can tell.

MELVILLE How?

DOM I can goddamned feel it, okay? Tell me the truth. I’m close, I know I’m close!

MELVILLE Who the hell do you think you are?

DOM Who am I? Who the fuck are you? Melville? Dreyfus? Grumbach? You have no clue, do you?

MELVILLE I am Jean-Pierre Melville, I am-

DOM “Jean-Pierre Melville” is a suit and sunglasses and a stupid hat. I’m asking you what happened to this woman.

MELVILLE Why do you care?

DOM We’re talking about you.

MELVILLE No. Why, Dominique Peyroux? Why do you really want to make this film? Be honest with me for once. You keep saying there’s more to this story, but there’s more to you than you’re letting on isn’t there?

DOM looks incredulous, but MELVILLE is unmoved. She paces for a moment and stops.

DOM You’ve known my father for a long time haven’t you, Melville?

MELVILLE nods.

Did you ever meet my mother?

MELVILLE No.

103

DOM She died during the occupation. She was a collaborator too.

MELVILLE I didn’t know that.

DOM My father doesn’t talk about it. He’s ashamed. But I’m not.

Beat.

Was it wrong? Informing on our countrymen? Yes. But if she didn’t, then I wouldn’t be here. She gave me life and then insured that I kept it by any means necessary. You have the nerve to stand there and tell me I don’t understand this story but this story is my blood.

Beat.

This woman? “Édith”? She could be my mother for all I know. Do you remember her face?

MELVILLE Yes.

DOM I envy you. I wish I remembered hers.

Pause.

MELVILLE I didn’t know.

DOM I didn’t want you to know.

MELVILLE What was her name?

DOM Camille.

MELVILLE Do you have brothers and sisters?

DOM Yes. Thanks to her.

MELVILLE How did-…?/What happened?

DOM /We were living in Marseille. She left our apartment one afternoon and never came back.

Beat.

104

So what I showed you didn’t happen: okay. But if it did, in the film…how would you do it? If my scene doesn’t belong in the movie than show me the one that does. How would you do it?

MELVILLE I don’t know.

DOM Yes, you do. What do we see?

Beat.

MELVILLE An exterior.

Beat.

With rain.

DOM Tell me.

MELVILLE Wide shot full of people on the city street. We see Édith leave her shop and walk out of frame. Dreyfus steps into it and ties up his raincoat. He looks different now: a hat…glasses.

DOM grabs these things from the desk and brings them to MELVILLE. He puts them on.

Another agent follows, from a ways back. They both follow her for a long time.

DOM Show me.

MELVILLE puts a grocery bag in DOM’s arms.

MELVILLE She carries a bag of groceries. Dreyfus follows her along Avenue Montaigne.

DOM walks and MELVILLE follows. DOM walks slowly in a straight line towards the audience, with MELVILLE just behind.

Another agent is with Dreyfus, but he circles the block and runs ahead so he can approach her from the front. Dreyfus has asked the other guy to pull the trigger, because he can’t do it himself. As Dreyfus has been getting closer the shots have been getting closer too…claustrophobic, even. Then the score cuts out. We cut to one long uninterrupted shot that follows Dreyfus. The silence is deafening. He wants to run. To tell her to run. Wants everything that he can’t have.

105

Beat.

She sees the other agent, up ahead. Too early…

DOM sees “the other agent”.

…and she turns to run. Turns right into Dreyfus…

DOM turns and collides with MELVILLE.

…and for a spit-second…before she knew what he’s there to do…she smiles…

DOM smiles at MELVILLE. A gunshot. MELVILLE eases DOM to the ground.

DOM And then what do you do?

MELVILLE I run.

DOM So why aren’t you running?

MELVILLE I don’t want to.

DOM What do you want?

MELVILLE To hold her. Just until she’s gone.

DOM What else?

MELVILLE Tell her I’m sorry.

DOM So do it.

MELVILLE I ran.

DOM Then lie.

DOM removes his sunglasses.

MELVILLE I’m sorry.

DOM For what?

MELVILLE I don’t know. Everything.

106

DOM You did what you had to.

MELVILLE But what were you supposed to do? Let your family die?

DOM I did what I had to do as well.

MELVILLE It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. It wasn’t any good after this. It wasn’t fun anymore. After this…there was just…him.

DOM “Melville”.

He nods. DOM stands up, but MELVILLE remains kneeling.

She must have known.

MELVILLE How do you know that?

DOM Deception is hard. You can only hide for so long.

MELVILLE In your scene…Édith tells me her name. Why does she do that?

DOM Just a fantasy I guess. But I liked the idea of it.

MELVILLE I did too.

DOM You know what bothers me? She left me her shares in our family’s company. She made sure to do the paperwork during the occupation. She knew.

Beat.

Someone needs to speak for her, Melville. Édith, my mother, all these people…they were wrong. But they weren’t cowards. You and I understand that. But who else does?

Beat.

So that’s it. There it is. My pitch. My changes to the script. Everything.

Beat.

MELVILLE You were right. I hadn’t found the story.

DOM Thank you.

107

MELVILLE Tell me what happens to Dreyfus. After this story ends.

DOM He keeps his codename. His armour. He builds his own movie studio and he makes brilliant films about men in raincoats: men for whom attachment is a death sentence. He survives.

MELVILLE Does he collaborate?

DOM That’s up to you.

MELVILLE What if I say no?

Pause. A realization.

DOM Then I’ll make it without you.

MELVILLE Will you really?

DOM Yes.

MELVILLE Good.

DOM What?

MELVILLE I was wondering how long it would take you to come to the same conclusion I did. CUT “THIRTY MINUTES AGO”

DOM What? You want me to direct your film?

MELVILLE Your film. You’ve spent this entire time convincing me that you’re the only one who can.

DOM I don’t understand. Why didn’t you just tell me?

MELVILLE Because I’m a prick. Because I wanted to be sure. Because I wanted to convince you that a good director doesn’t collaborate.

DOM You haven’t convinced me of that.

MELVILLE You’ll learn.

DOM But…no, that’s ludicrous. This script still has your name on it, the project belongs to you…

108

MELVILLE Is that what’s standing in your way? Names are disposable, Miss Peyroux.

MELVILLE pulls a pen from his jacket, takes DOM’s script and scribbles on the cover.

MELVILLE “Untitled Screenplay”…“by Dominique Peyroux.” You’ll need a better title.

Beat.

DOM ‘Collaboration’.

MELVILLE ‘Manifest’.

DOM ‘The List’.

Beat.

MELVILLE ‘Amateurs’.

DOM smiles. A moment.

DOM You’re really going to let me take this and do what I want with it?

MELVILLE Could I stop you?

DOM No.

Beat.

So is that it?

MELVILLE I want two things. One: keep my name out of it.

DOM Which one?

MELVILLE All of them. Two: don’t collaborate. Whoever works with you works for you. Remember that. Don’t compromise.

DOM I’m not like you.

MELVILLE Sure you are. You just don’t realize it yet.

Beat.

109

DOM So what happens when you’re a filmmaker who’s stopped making films?

MELVILLE What makes you think I’ve stopped?

DOM You’re a scorpion.

MELVILLE Like you.

Beat.

You see this projector? When I was a boy my father would take me to the local pub with him. There was this one place, whose name I can’t remember, and they would hang a white blanket against the back wall and play gangster movies on a piece-of-junk projector just like this one. It doesn’t work, of course, but after the fire I just couldn’t throw it away. (THIS JUST NEEDS TO BE BETTER)

Beat.

I should go.

DOM Where are you going?

MELVILLE I need to get across the water.

He extends his hand.

Miss Peyroux.

DOM Mr. Melville.

She shakes his hand. MELVILLE goes to leave.

Wait. I’ve never made a feature film. Do you have any…advice?

Beat.

MELVILLE Wear a raincoat.

MELVILLE exits. DOMINIQUE notices that he has left his hat, glasses and raincoat in the office. DOMINIQUE grabs the coat and moves to go after MELVILLE, but stops short. She looks at the raincoat and considers it. Her attention wanders to the broken projector on the floor.

110

She sits down next to the projector and begins to fiddle with it. After a moment, the projector suddenly rattles to life. Light spills from its lens. She watches the unseen film as the other lights go out.

END OF PLAY.