The Masters of Cinema Series

An interview with Maurice Pialat

by Stéphane Lévy-Klein and Olivier Eyquem, 1974

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: The first rough-cut of La Gueule ouverte [The Mouth Agape / The Slack-Jawed Mug, 1974] came in at four hours in length. The distribution print doesn’t run any longer than 1h 20m. What happened between then and now?

PIALAT: That rough-cut couldn’t be edited in any case such as it is. When I’m cutting shots out, so I can see whole sequences, the reason for it is simply this: it’s because I find them bad or I find them good — and here I’m criticizing my way of shooting — because, not having taken enough care to make matching shots, I find myself sitting before scenes that slow the film down, distract and detract from the logical continuity of the narrative. (I’m not saying “of the plotline,” as there’s not any action, properly speaking.) The film could be longer. The first cut was nearly two hours and those who like it in its definitive form maybe would have even preferred it in that first version. But the whole first section seemed too long to me; you got bored waiting for the next part. Certain sequences messed up during the shoot make for an imbalance. Matching shots became impossible — we weren’t able to cut them together with anything that came before.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: You said in a previous interview that you sometimes have problems with matching shots?

PIALAT: Yes, and there are two reasons for this. The main one is that, without a doubt, I don’t devote enough time to preparing my scripts. At the beginning of my career, I thought that you could take your time shooting and do as little preparation as possible. To prepare was to get caught up in advance in something literary. Less and less do I think that’s the case; with experience, I notice that things which are written out, or which are at least conceived in advance, most of the time get filmed in a more satisfying manner. Unfortunately, I don’t have a sense of brevity. As a scenarist, I only have success with chronological narratives which more or less always stem from my own life. I repeat the same thing in several scenes and it’s only during shooting that I take notice of this dispersal. This autobiographical inspiration is one of the consequences of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble [We Won’t Grow Old Together, 1972]: in this film, I didn’t want to go into what actually took place, I wanted to stay faithful to my memories, and I thought that transposing several scenes or, when all was said and done, concentrating on a single sequence of events very closely (which is, dramatically speaking, the thing to do), came back to orienting the film toward a sort of theater in which I was denying myself. Frequently, I fight to recreate certain events that I’ve lived through, that seem to me to be moving and strong, and I realize that the emotion was only a product of my imagination and that there’s no other way to get it back, and this for good reasons: shortcomings of the director — this can happen; problems with the actors; deficiency in the material allowing the scene to develop; etc. In short, moments that I thought were strong turn out to be unusable. The consequence is that in the editing I’m really very hard on myself, too much so maybe, since I’ve never had the temptation on one single film to keep elements in that didn’t satisfy me. Here, the editing is entirely Arlette [Langmann]. She edited the film all by herself. I had complete confidence in her.

The editing wasn’t a technical problem. We were just dealing with a rough-cut of four hours in which a choice had to be made. We made this choice together while working, in particular, on the Parisian sequences, which hardly satisfied us, and which we were resolved to do away with after having taken a look at all the possible solutions.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: One thing strikes me: the suppression of any type of temporal, chronological, reference-point, especially with regard to the character of Philippe. One has the feeling that the film could just as well have been covering a period of 8 days as several months.

PIALAT: That isn’t intended. These reference-points exist, but I’ve shuffled them around. There are even moments where this can pass for continuity flaws. Thus, at the hospital, Nathalie tells Monique: “I’m going on vacation for two months; I’ll see you when I get back.” And yet it’s only much later that Philippe will announce to his mother Nathalie’s return. In reality, the dialogue isn’t far-fetched: he’s lying to his mother for not having told her Nathalie’s already been back for a long time, but that she can no longer bear seeing her.

[…]

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: In the editing, do you keep the chronology you’ve defined at the level of the scenario, or do you end up shuffling scenes around?

PIALAT: I switch sequences around pretty often. Not so much on La Gueule ouverte, but this has happened on occasion.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: At the outset, when you conceived the script, was the radiography sequence already meant to open the film?

PIALAT: Not at all. It was at the editing stage that I decided on it, such as it is. One of the first scenes of the film (where you see Philippe showing up in Auvergne and meeting up with his mother, who shows him her tumor) went somewhere else at this point. If I wasn’t afraid to make a film 1h 15m long — I’d even take out one more scene, the one of the encounter with the girl in l’hôtel de passe [i.e., a hotel specializing in ‘quickies’], which now falls like a hair in the soup, and no longer carries any big meaning.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: The scene where he solicits a prostitute at night would then become incomprehensible, as she constitutes a repetition of the first girl.

PIALAT: But all this is so weakly connected to what I wanted to do. We don’t understand why this guy all of a sudden has sexual problems, whereas in the original scenario these scenes have a precise sense: he’d been involved in several fiascos and he quickly evolved because his mother was coming to her end. He wasn’t really a cad, spending his time fucking, etc. It was closer to Turkish Delights [Turks fruits, Paul Verhoeven, 1973] than what you saw!

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: There are constant ‘side-notes’ regarding supporting characters, for example: the old woman in the hospital. Up to what point does it seem important to you to show these people?

PIALAT: That scene, where the old woman gets visited by her husband and his son, which begins with both of them arguing, anticipates the meeting between Deschamps and Léotard, but, at the point of departure, it was just a memory. I had lived a scene close to that one in the hospital. It was during shooting that I noticed that it was pure guignol — not that that aspect bothered me: it was an integral part of my bad taste. What’s more interesting is showing people who come to the hospital at the last minute, not knowing what to tell themselves, and in the end blowing up on one another to let off some steam. My father died a few weeks ago. For some time before his passing, when he was getting really ill, I’d go off to the Auvergne frequently, suspending all business; once I was there, we’d say three words to one another.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: There’s a scene about which I’d be curious to know whether it was done in one or several takes: it’s the one in the kitchen, between Nathalie and the father.

PIALAT: No, that wasn’t a single take.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: It’s very strange; Nathalie Baye seems to be caught off-guard at one point by Deschamps’ dialogue, and we have the distinct impression that a kind of complicity has been established between the one actor and the other.

PIALAT: That’s exactly it, but it’s a take which, once again, was done at the last moment. Anyway this film is full of this sort of thing. We never stopped having negotiation issues throughout the whole shoot and, while not lacking money, we still had to work with some haste. The hospital scenes — apart from the radiography — were wrapped in a single day; the one with the doctor was done in ten minutes. Each week brought about new problems. And yet I get things going pretty slowly, and they often go on into evening, and when this started to happen, I saw myself putting a stop on overage to avoid additional hours. The scene you’re talking about was shot at the end of the day, and the take you saw was the third or fourth. The preceding takes were disastrous. As it so happened, the final one went off like clockwork, and it came out exactly as you’ve experienced it.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: Does it often happen that you succeed with a shot the second or third time, whenever this sort of tension and urgency gets produced?

PIALAT: Yes, it happens because a director’s energy, his availability, constantly varies. I’m very irregular.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: You’ve known Deschamps for a long time — ever since you made your first professional film with him [Janine]. How did you cast the other roles?

PIALAT: I think Mélinand was the only actress capable of holding the role of the mother, which is ultimately really thankless. I brought her on right away, without seeing anyone else. I thought of Hubert right away because I was looking for someone slightly uncouth. Deschamps is the total opposite of a country man (he’s roved around Saint-Germain for years), but certain aspects of his personality agreed well with the role. What he does here has, it must be said, little relationship to what he typically does on the screen (and which he prefers, in any case).

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: He’s supposed to love — this is a euphemism — to ‘compose’…

PIALAT: Early on, I had some difficulty, because he had the tendency to ‘make his voice carry’. You’d hear it from all over the place. I liked Nathalie Baye a lot in La Nuit américaine [American Night / Day for Night, François Truffaut, 1973]. At one point, I was hesitating between her and Miou-Miou, but I settled on Nathalie before Miou-Miou was even signed on to Les Valseuses [The Nuts, Bertrand Blier, 1974]. I picked Philippe Léotard at the last minute. For a long time, it was Depardieu who was supposed to do the film.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: Did you do any rehearsals?

PIALAT: No.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: Do you throw people into the shot while only giving them the bare amount of what they need for the scene?

PIALAT: Often they only ever have a vague idea about what it is. Anyway this only bothers professionals, amateurs less so — quite the contrary.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: How does the rapport between professionals and amateurs get established?

PIALAT: The amateurs get on well with the professionals, but the reverse is rarely true. Deschamps really jerked us around. His leitmotif was: “So I’ve learned one profession, and you make me play a vintner; I don’t know how to trim the vine, etc.,” which is completely absurd. He was just angry to see the amateurs being better at it than he was!

In general we say that they “forget the camera’s there.” That’s false, they’re very aware of it, but if they’re acting, it’s without craft, without effects. It’s not even necessary to cast them in their own roles; you can go very far with certain ones. It is, however, pretty difficult to get them to retake a scene.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: Where did the idea come from to film the exit from the church with that slow advance tracking-shot?

PIALAT: Initially, I was just supposed to do a shot in front of this rough, dark church, with people shaking hands with Léotard who, in the end, broke up with purely nervous laughter.

In seeing these places, I changed my mind. Angles have been sought out, and it’s at the last moment, in order to pass without a break from the shot of the crowd to the one of the family all around the van, that I did that tracking-shot.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: There are only about two or three other tracking-shots in the entire film, and we mostly notice the one of the departure from the town, which concludes the film as practically the last scene.

PIALAT: For me, the principal problem is avoiding placing the camera in places where it can’t materially be located: thus behind a bed, when the bed is against the wall. Here, I went against my principles, since I put the camera in the back trunk of a car. This shot was made at the last minute, and I slightly regret the hurried aspect of the parting in the boutique. I had come up with a longer scene in which Philippe and Nathalie were more insistent on the father coming back with them. We were supposed to stay for a little while in the boutique and when they leave, instead of cutting, we move away with the car. In a certain way, it was a technical hoax, but nothing could better express the sort of abandon that this produced. Once more, we were pressed for time: five minutes later, it was nightfall.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: What’s behind the phone call Philippe gets early on, during his lunch with his mother?

PIALAT: It’s a call he gets from la Télévision, and which is supposed to hold some implications for later on. In the scenario, there was a scene that followed, where we even found Philippe helping out, and we saw him on the set of a film.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: How do you prepare a plan-séquence [sequence-shot/long-take without cuts] as long as that one — 8-1/2 minutes?

PIALAT: The scene took a lot to produce, to the degree that I decided to retake it three or four times later. But in doing so, Monique and Philippe weren’t as good. At the start of production, the actors still aren’t broken in, it’s difficult for them to shoot in those conditions. Afterward, things go well for the most part. This type of scene rarely poses acting problems, which might seem surprising. Rozier asks me sometimes how I go about things, and is astonished that I don’t experience the urge to intercede. Well, I don’t! Once, though, on La Maison des bois [The House in the Woods, 1971], I found myself crawling underneath a billiard table to give a signal to an actor to stand up: you notice it in any case, because at that moment he sees me! With my two superstars, during a scene in Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, I had to cut and edit in shot-countershot because Marlène was frightened by the length of her text. And yet you can do anything in those instances — it’s always possible to breathe a little in the course of a take.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: How did you do the shot in the attic?

PIALAT: It was a shot I wanted to make for the sake of decor, to give some personality to the house. I had letters from my parents, back from the time of their engagement, certain ones among which were pretty nice: letters of the sort no-one writes anymore. Having forgotten about them, I had to be satisfied having them read a letter taken from the ones the town-folks had confided us with. There were three very long takes where neither Philippe nor Nathalie say anything very interesting and then, I don’t know why, Nathalie starts crying during one of the takes. She had to have been down in the dumps, no doubt because I had been a little hard on both of them.

I kept the shot, of course, and I cut it just after the sequence with the injection, with that glance of Nathalie’s that turns away from the mother, before she gets up and heads off toward her room.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: You’ve said that La Gueule ouverte got a little too close to Bresson, adding “alas.” What did you mean by this?

PIALAT: I was thinking of its form, which in the end is pretty elaborate. It’s a rather cold film, and one whose qualities rely for a good while on its aesthetic. For me, as a general rule, the text and the acting have to take the first position. I’m happy that the quality of the photography is satisfactory, but this isn’t what I’m looking for above everything else. There’s always too much aestheticism. What I’d like to do some day is a film where we’d shoot in the most natural way possible, sticking as close as we can to reality. My ideal is the single shot in which a point of view is expressed upon a thing being produced in the same instant. As soon as you cut it up, as you start to fragment it, as you come back on it from another angle, that truth slips away, since you’re starting over again upon what can only, by definition, be produced just once. That isn’t to say I was looking to let cables get into the shot, but there wasn’t any particular thought put into the framings. If I liked working with Almendros a lot on La Gueule ouverte, it’s because he went further than any other cameraman in the preparation of the natural lighting. In the colors, there are still a fair number of problems; we’ll have to wait many years before getting to something satisfying, and, in particular, before doing away completely with those lights, the introduction of which seems to me to be a bothersome artifice.

Dressing a location is, of course, a necessity. You always have to do it at the last minute and too late. If I were shooting in this room, I’d start by moving this table, I’d arrange these chairs in a different manner, and little by little I’d arrive at the tableau, at artifice…

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: Let’s talk a little about the locations in La Gueule ouverte. How did you select them?

PIALAT: It was really easy. I wanted a big residence, the sort where you wouldn’t have to choose any lens other than a 40 or 50mm. In interiors, I like to be able to constantly take characters from the feet up. The house we chose in Auvergne was being lived in; therefore you don’t sense the intervention of a set-decorator, which is always perceptible, whatever its benefits.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: Is the sound completely direct?

PIALAT: Yes, you hear the creaks, the groans, save for one shot, and that’s due to technical reasons.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: And the music, or rather the absence of music?

PIALAT: I didn’t want to put any in, outside of that short excerpt at the beginning from Così fan tutte [Thus Do They All, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1790]. Before doing the film, I was careful to use more music coming from natural sources. It’s true that this always poses technical problems, not to mention rights issues.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: In its final version, the film is organized a bit around a Paris-to-province commute.

PIALAT: That’s right. A double commute in the beginning, since Mélinand, at first, came to see the doctors who then reassured her and gave her balms, with everyone there already knowing she was a goner. She went back home for a month or two and, obviously not having experienced any relief, got worried and came back to Paris. It’s here that the film starts, in its definitive version.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: You end up only showing the village a very little bit.

PIALAT: I would have liked to shoot in my own village. The one we chose is more modern. It gave us some decent, interesting elements, a market, for example, that for an instant I thought about using. I also intended to shoot a scene in a brasserie. There Philippe would have discovered, in the middle of the night, a choir. He picked up one of the girls and made love to her in the toilets. There’s nothing to regret.

I don’t like working across a slew of locations. Running back and forth to shoot is disastrous. I get the best results filming in one precise spot. By the time we wrap up, half the day is spent just with commuting. You have to choose between taking your time and taking your money, on one hand, and safeguarding the essential things on the other.

In a few years, I’ll no doubt discover why I’m not satisfied with La Gueule ouverte. With Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, it was just sabotage carried out on the part of an actor. It’s not the same thing with this one. Throughout the entire shoot, I wielded absolute power. I could have shot all the sex scenes I was planning between Philippe and the girls, and I didn’t do it. It had nothing to do with fatigue; the crew were perfect; as for the actors, you can’t ever speak of perfect success, as there are always problems (we’re not dealing with robots, or with androids), but the situation as a whole was fine. So there was nothing other than those scenes to shoot, and I didn’t do them. How come?

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: Maybe there were problems with the acting?

PIALAT: Partly. I had the impression that Léotard had progressively lost the desire to film these scenes, whereas at the outset, he seemed ready to charge like a bull. But here again, it’s myself that’s to blame.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: Isn’t it also because the film had deviated toward something else?

PIALAT: Yes, perhaps. We felt quickly enough that we wouldn’t attain the desired tone in those scenes. It wasn’t enough that Philippe already had that tone in a few isolated passages — he needed it for the entire film. You really feel that the father is a guy who drifts through life, who’s always tried to fuck, to get shitfaced. This needed to already be tangible in the case of Philippe. In the end, the perspective of the film veered toward the father, especially in the final scenes. In the original script, the couple, as soon as they’ve left the village, start having a very violent argument. Up to the end of production, there was the question of doing this scene. Anyway, there was supposed to be one week of additional shooting, but, before setting out upon this, I decided to do some editing. Then while starting the editing, we dreamt of developing the hospital scenes in particular. (I also thought it would be a shame to end on the single final shot of Hubert in his boutique, and I wanted to show more of what a guy can go through, abruptly alone in a house, with the person he loved for thirty years at the bottom of a hole.) That argument scene not having been shot, you feel the friction between Philippe and Nathalie less. There’s no longer that violence that I had envisioned. You’re supposed to think that this couple, who are already barely holding together, are gonna break things off once and for all. The ostensible subject of the film was the story of a guy who takes things out on other people because his mother is dying, but the actual subject was the the story of a couple already too old, not close enough to one another and who detonate because the man is liberated.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: Does a subject like this one, at the current moment in France, pose particular problems with production?

PIALAT: You bet! Already, on paper, while it carried some “commercial attributes,” it was difficult to have it be accepted. If I had presented it in its actual form, I definitely wouldn’t have been able to shoot it, or rather would have had to shoot it with a pathetic budget.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: When did you come up with the subject?

PIALAT: I wrote it in ‘71.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: Was there an order, at the level of having conceived the project, between the three films you’ve shot [to date]?

PIALAT: La Gueule ouverte was written after the script for Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, but with the idea of shooting it before, just because I had to wait one year for my two superstars, and because I was bored sitting there with nothing to do. In the end, this didn’t happen, in part because I knew that the shoot was going to be a particularly rough one.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: At the outset did you stick to inscribing your films within a precise chronological sequence: childhood, the early part of adulthood, and maturity?

PIALAT: No. If those three films form a triptych, it’s not premeditated.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: What’s Philippe’s profession?

PIALAT: He’s — and I was one, among other things — a medical rep. A profession he doesn’t believe in, that he does to earn his bread. At one point, he was also supposed to do some theater. I’m bored seeing in half the films out there today characters practicing professions in the humanities: novelist, architect, etc. But, when it comes down to it, I’ve rubbed out every professional indication concerning him. It’s very delicate establishing a character professionally with believable dialogue. In every film, mine included, the characters are rarely anchored in a sufficient way within their profession. In Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, the couple was in an all-consuming brawl, and yet, in the course of a screening for the readers of Elle, I was reproached for showing characters who spend their time napping in the sun. It was entirely the opposite: they have constant problems, and spend their nights in chambres de passe [i.e., rooms in hotels for “quickies”], because they were cheaper. And yet Marlène changed her outfit incessantly, while Yanne sported brand-spanking-new get-ups. If a girl who earns four sous succeeds in being elegant, you have to take pains to create an equivalent for the guy.

At one point in La Gueule ouverte, Nathalie says: “I’m gonna ship myself back out in a box if I stay with you any longer.” It’s too pat: the weight of that reality needs to be felt more. In the beginning, I wanted to provide her with a precise profession she could be attached to.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: Wouldn’t this be getting away from the subject?

PIALAT: The real problem is inserting this within given limits, as I have the tendency to elaborate, to go overboard, very quickly. Getting caught up for an hour or two on one meticulously controlled shot is so difficult — every auteur knows it. It’s why, nowadays, I almost feel the necessity of shooting with a predefined framework that I wouldn’t finesse more than a smidge.

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: And now?

PIALAT: Now, I’d like to make (but I no doubt wouldn’t ever get to, for financial reasons) a chronicle of France from 1934 to 1950, that is, approximately from the period preceding the Popular Front to the one following the Liberation. What keeps me thinking about this project is doing it almost in the manner of a simple spectator. I would be in the film, but above everything else it would be the painting of an era. Once again, it would be autobiographical but, I think, having sufficiently taken some detachment vis-à-vis the autobiography, so as not to repeat the errors of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble. There is, in a certain way, someone who succeeded over Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble: and that’s Eustache, with La Maman et la putain [The Mama and the Whore, 1973]. There’s what I should have made: a four-hour film, a genuine catharsis letting you puke out your guts. And then refusing the stars anything that might sterilize it.

[…]

LÉVY-KLEIN / EYQUEM: [What are your thoughts on] collaborative work?

PIALAT: Up till now, I wrote all my scenarios by myself, but you never work in solitude. On La Maison des bois, I worked with Arlette, who rewrote the dialogue, along with Yves Laumet. On La Gueule ouverte, I really worked alone. It’s very difficult to find someone who agrees with you, but it’s certain that if I had a collaborator who was capable, taking off from my ideas, of building a script that was more produceable than the ones I deliver, I’d be very happy about that, and I’d have a lot less worry during production. This would give me a freedom I don’t have, since the writing problems would be resolved in advance and not at the last minute, as is often still the case with me.

I’ve had the fear of the blank page for a long time. Because of this I wasn’t able to write. It was a conditioned reflex: I saw myself as a schoolboy again, before I’d have even come up with anything. I needed a major event in my life to occur for me to decide to write my novel. Now, I feel the desire once again to write and to build…

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