Marcel Ophuls Regis Dialogue with Philip Lopate, 1992 Phillip Lopate: It's both an honor and a bit daunting for me to be here questioning the great questioner, the great interrogator himself, Marcel Ophuls. Just to establish something of your background and the special circumstances that I think made for your unique perspective, I thought we would go through some of the basic biographical information of your childhood and upbringing. You don't have to lie down. You can sit up. It's fine. Marcel Ophuls: No, no. I can go through the Harpo Marx thing in The Night at the Opera, drinking water while you speak. Phillip Lopate: Poisoning. You were born in 1927 and born in Germany in fact, and I think of you as somebody who is a citizen of at least three countries, Germany, France, and the United States. Having spent your first six years in Germany and then your family left when Hitler took over and went to France and then stayed there for about seven years till 1940 and then moved to- Marcel Ophuls: 41. Phillip Lopate: 41, and then moved to the United States. Marcel Ophuls: It's important because if we'd come over in 40 my father would have been a draft dodger in France, which he wasn't. We didn't come over before the war. We came after the defeat. Phillip Lopate: After the defeat. Marcel Ophuls: So, that's politically important. Phillip Lopate: Oh, Okay. You, of course, your father was a great director. Max Ophuls. Marcel Ophuls: We may disagree on some things tonight, but we agree on that. Phillip Lopate: We agree on that. No, to me is one of the 10 greatest directors whoever lived. Nov 6, 1992 1 Marcel Ophuls: Right all. Phillip Lopate: And made movies such as Liebelei and The Earrings of Madame Dee and La Ronde and Letter from an Unknown Woman, another favorite of mine, and has become identified with a certain kind of romantic obsession or involvement. Someone who had a very worldly wise, gently pessimistic, you could say, take on the world. Famous also for the formal beauty of his movies, the wonderful tracking shots, the sense of fluidity. Things are always moving, but even if they're moving in a direction of sadness, they're always moving. Marcel Ophuls: You use the word pessimist a minute ago and just before that you talked about romantic. Well first of all I'd like to say, I think that my father was able to make what in his time were known as women's pictures. Men were not supposed to see them, because he was not a romantic because he always had the saying that if you're going to talk about it, that if you're going to show passion, and if you're going to show feeling, which is really what art is supposed to be about, you have to be like a captain on a sailing boat, sentiment being the wind. And you have to sail as close to the wind as you can, and if you go into sentimentality, then the sailboat capsizes. Phillip Lopate: Capsizes. Marcel Ophuls: Right. Phillip Lopate: Well he was one of those directors for whom women were at the center of his vision. You think of other directors like Mizoguchi and maybe Ingmar Bergman. Marcel Ophuls: More Mizoguchi then Bergman because Bergman I think is a conscious feminist. He is like Antonioni, they are militant feminists. Phillip Lopate: Right. Marcel Ophuls: My father was not a militant feminist, as a matter of fact he profited from women, and he saw his own times, I think he was very much a realist, like Chekov or Schnitzler. Anyway, you were saying something about pessimism. One of the things he said is that he couldn't possibly imagine, he couldn't find any example in literature, in great literature, of any writer he admired who had ever been an optimist. Phillip Lopate: We were talking about this earlier in the evening and I maintained that on some level, he was an optimist because at least his characters finally were touched by love even if they died in the process. So you could say in that sense it clashes, but did you have any of this sense when you were growing up that your childhood Nov 6, 1992 2 or your life was at all like a Max Ophuls movie? Did it feel, did it have any of this gaety, this gravity, this sense of Viennese elegance? Marcel Ophuls: Sure. He was manic depressive. Phillip Lopate: He was? Marcel Ophuls: Yes. Of course. He didn't talk for days and then when he would start talking then we would start having fun. What I miss most since he died, many, many years ago, is the laughter. When he was able to. Having tears streaming down my face, other people's faces, because he was so funny, and in several languages. It was very, very funny. Phillip Lopate: Well, we want to look at a clip from one of his movies, but before we get to that, just you spent those years in France when you were I think between the ages of, oh I don't know, six and 12 or 13 right. And then you came to the United States where your father sought work in Hollywood and not always successfully, I gather. Marcel Ophuls: There's that Burt Bryce, how does it go, about going to the marketplace in Hollywood. His famous poem about, yes. He was out of work for four years because we did come in 41 and not when the war started. And by that time the Jewish, the German Jewish quota and the French Jewish quota and the refugee quota was filled at the major studios. Marcel Ophuls: So, in spite of the great solidarity, which you know about because I think you're writing about it, between the refugees who tried to help each other including bringing the groceries over the weekend, we were sort of a golden welfare deadbeats. Phillip Lopate: Well, he had to learn the American way, just as you did. Marcel Ophuls: No, it wasn't that, I don't think so. No more than the others. No more than Billy Wilder, and the ones who came over earlier, we all had to learn the American way, but we also Middle European people, people whose inspiration came from Berlin and the Weimar republic, in fact, as we know from examples like Billy Wilder and Lubitsch adapted extremely well. That was a very good mix. It was a very rich mix for American culture in the 20th century. And it was usually work pretty fast. Marcel Ophuls: No, it was just that we came in the middle of a war, there were a lot of other refugees and my father at that time did not have the same kind of reputation that Fritz Lang or Jean Renoir had. And so he had to wait his turn. Nov 6, 1992 3 Speaker 1: What was it like for you when you first- Marcel Ophuls: Lonely. Because Los Angeles, as you know, is a town, first of all, you have to wait til you're 16 to get a driver's license and you can't really see any friends because everything's very far apart. And also I was very, I loved Paris and Paris was occupied and then the war was on and so I was a wallflower and I didn't play football so I decided to become a French snob. Marcel Ophuls: I decided that Hollywood high school was the dumps, which in many ways it was, and I decided to despise it all. Phillip Lopate: The idea of you as a graduate of Hollywood high school boggles the mind. Marcel Ophuls: Well, I don't, no, well later when I got into the American Army, then I started latching on to popular culture and jazz and Fats Waller because my best friend was Hal Greenberg, who was from Brooklyn and who was a piano player and who was playing piano with Art Tatum and in Tokyo we played in nightclubs and we had a wonderful time doing occupation duty in Japan, and then I became, not a militarist, but I was very happy in the American Army. I think I discovered this country and the American army was a much more interesting mix than Hollywood high school, Hollywood high school was repressive. Phillip Lopate: Did you have any famous classmates? Marcel Ophuls: Oh, you want any about Marilyn Monroe? Yes. Phillip Lopate: Wait, no, I heard that Ricky Nelson was going there the time you were. Marcel Ophuls: Yeah, no, well Norma Jean Baker supposed to have been there, but I've looked through a lot of old annuals and I couldn't find her, it was a very big place anyway. And as I say, I had a bad attendance record and so did she. Speaker 1: So after you got out of Hollywood high, you went directly into the army then, or you went to college right then? Marcel Ophuls: No, I went into the army and it was already the peacetime army, but legally speaking it was the wartime so that I had the privilege of studying for four years on the GI bill of rights, which was lucky because my father certainly wouldn't have paid for my studies. He didn't think that college was worth anything, unless you were Nov 6, 1992 4 going to study medicine or engineering or something like that.