Interview With Filmmaker Eric Rohmer
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Acclaimed French director Éric Rohmer once again explores the notion of love and fidelity in his epic romantic drama, The Romance Of Astrea And Celadon.
Catch the movie that was nominated for the Golden Lion at the 2007 Venice International Film Festival, on NDTV Lumiere TV Channel on 28th June at 10.00 pm
Below is an interview with the director, Eric Rohmer
Adapting Honoré d’Urfé (1568-1625)
For once, I wasn’t the one who came up with the idea for the subject matter; it was filmmaker Pierre Zucca (1943-95). He had originally proposed an adaptation of Honoré d’Urfé’s novel “L’Astrée” to our production company, Les Films du Losange, many years ago. But Margaret Menegoz felt the film would be too expensive and Zucca was forced to abandon the project. I, for one, consider Pierre Zucca and Jean Eustache to be the most important of the so-called “post-New Wave” filmmakers. Zucca and I shared a similar taste in literature – Blanchot, for example, or Stevenson. And I see the influence of screenwriter Paul Gégauff on Zucca’s films. Gégauff influenced all of the New Wave, with the exception of Truffaut. Or we, at least, all employed “Gégauffian” characters.
After Pierre Zucca’s death in 1995, it struck me that I should take a closer look at that literary classic. At that time, I was only familiar with the excerpts printed in the Chevaillier et Audiat anthology, the forerunner to the Lagarde et Michard textbook of literature. I had expected something rather off putting and I came to see that that was not the case at all! The dialogue, in particular, was astonishingly modern – even more so when it was spoken aloud, rather than being read. From that point on, the film seemed absolutely feasible to me, provided I focused on the Astrée and Céladon love story and scrapped all the rest. I didn’t even have to update the dialogue. When I came across the term “profundity” in the original text, I even thought Ségolène Royal, the candidate for the French presidential election, would love the word! So I contented myself with pruning. I completely appropriated the text and felt absolutely at ease with it. Yet my adaptation is very different than Zucca’s. I didn’t use his version at all. I was even amused to realize that they shared one single line of dialogue. But I really wanted to dedicate the film to him.
The Film’s Eroticism
It’s identical to the eroticism in the novel – no more, no less. I really don’t like directors, especially in the theater, who feel so comfortable with classical material that they throw in gratuitous nudity when it’s completely unnecessary. When Honoré d’Urfé writes that one of his heroines reveals a breast, I follow that to a tee; I don’t add a thing. But nudity isn’t taboo in Honoré d’Urfé’s writings, any more than it was in the painting of the time. So I had no reason to make it taboo. The text has a delicate, subtle eroticism; I had to represent that with the same light hand. And I saw that I was able to show things cinematically that might be vulgar, or even smutty, if they were expressed in contemporary terms. The build of desire, for example. But “L’Astrée” is not a licentious work; nor is it perverse.
Filming Nature
In my previous literary adaptations – Perceval, The Marquise of O, The Lady and the Duke – nature has either been stylized or barely present at all. Here, it’s essential. And the freedom of nature was constantly beckoning my filmmaker’s eye. For example, I loved shooting the wind but I was often at the mercy of disagreeable weather. Sometimes we had to wait for the wind to rise, and I enjoyed that waiting. Nature allowed me to, simultaneously, be in the period and to slip out of it. On one hand, the wind made the costumes, especially the scarves, flutter in the breeze exactly as they do in the engravings of the period. On the other hand, the splendor of that unspoiled nature gave the narrative a timeless dimension. That’s all thanks to the progress made on live sound recording. In the old days, as soon as the wind started blowing, you had to stop shooting because the mikes picked up every sound. Today, you can just keep on shooting. That’s a blessing. And since I hate dubbing… I absolutely wanted the entire film to be shot with live production sound, so we had lots of noise problems. That’s why it was impossible to shoot in the Forez, the former French province that stretched from what is now the Loire to the Haute-Loire. That’s where the book takes place. But it’s far too heavily populated and too ravaged by industrialization to be used today. That said, it took us three years to scout all the exterior locations. Coming up with the river was truly mind-boggling until we found La Sioule, a French river in the Auvergne. All the location scouts on this film were particularly long and difficult. Precisely because the presence of nature was so crucial. And we had to play with that contrast between unspoiled, virgin nature and the cultivated nature of the château gardens.
Silent Films
My film education came from silent films, at the Cinémathèque Française. I think the cinema has every interest in drawing from its own archeology. In the same way that its important to draw from ancient literature. That’s exactly what modern painters did. And the most modern are, in the end, the ones who best utilized the ancients. In the realm of cinema, Griffith certainly remains the great master of evoking nature. He was the first one who managed to record the movement of nature and to recreate its beauty.
Philosophy of Cinema
Over the course of my career, I don’t think I’ve ever stopped taking risks. But measured, well thought-out risks. In any case, my philosophy is as follows: to be really successful, a film must discover one thing that’s vital to it along the way. You always have to leave room for chance and the accidental, and to believe that your path will be strewn with nothing but happy accidents. I’ve often said, “In my films, everything is fortuitous except for chance.” From that point of view, I like actors who are able to use chance. What I don’t like is what I call “fake-natural” – those actors who deliver literary dialogue at breakneck speed to make it seem “natural.” Nothing’s more artificial than that. I ask them to do the opposite, to articulate and to slow down. And once they’ve understood that, they can very well do without my “direction of actors.” The most important thing to me is making the text comprehensible. As far as the risks I take go, I know all too well that some viewers may laugh at certain points in the film. But that doesn’t bother me at all. I’m even on their side, against the people who tell them to keep quiet. That happened on The Marquise of O. The viewers who laughed were right to do so. Kleist is a very funny writer. If people laugh here, all the better! Because there’s also a lot of humor in “L’Astrée”.
A Summary Film?
If I was drawn to adapt this text, it’s, of course, because I found numerous motifs from my previous films in it. For example, the central motif of fidelity. That theme is pretty much a constant in My Night at Maud’s, in A Winter’s Tale, in The Collector, in Full Moon in Paris. My only theater piece, Trio in E Flat, is constructed on a kind of suspense similar to that in “L’Astrée”. We watch a character dig his heels in, in a way that’s as crazy as Céladon’s, refusing to utter the one word that would trigger the phrase he awaits from his beloved. That phrase has to come from her alone. I still consider myself to be a Hitchcockian filmmaker. And yet what is Hitchcock, if not a creator of forms? I don’t claim to create forms in the same way he does.
But I can see that geometric motifs are always present in my films. They’re also in Honoré d’Urfé’s work. In the film, I tried to hold onto the omnipresence of the circle, in the glade; to the spiral, in the labyrinth; to the triangle, in the hut. It’s not an intentional thing; that would be artificial and totally without interest. But this film, like all my previous films, is organized around these huge geometric figures, with the decisive intervention of chance. The hut, for example, was completely designed and constructed by my art director. But in the cutting I had the pleasant surprise of discovering that it “rhymed” with the handkerchief placed over Astrée’s eyes as she sleeps in the previous scene. I also realized that there was this attraction-repulsion movement in L’Astrée – a constant motif in the work of Fritz Lang, another creator of forms.
So I wouldn’t mind if people say that this film is my Indian Tomb!
blogged by Shamath Mazumdar, NDTV Lumiere
Tags: World Cinema
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“To be really successful, a film must discover one thing that’s vital to it along the way. You always have to leave room for chance and the accidental, and to believe that your path will be strewn with nothing but happy accidents.”
I’d just like to believe it…
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