Bertrand Tavernier: Interviews

By Lynn A. Higgins and T. Jefferson Kline

Bertrand Tavernier (1941–2021) was widely considered to be the leading light in a generation of French filmmakers who launched their careers in the 1970s in the wake of the New Wave. In just over forty years, he directed twenty-two feature films in an eclectic range of genres from intimate family portrait to historical drama and neo-Western. Beginning with his debut feature—L’Horloger de Saint-Paul (1974), which won the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize—Tavernier showed himself to be a public intellectual. Like his films, he was deeply engaged with the pressing issues facing France and the world: the consequences of war, colonialism and its continuing aftermath, the price of heroism, and the power of art. A voracious cinephile, he was immensely knowledgeable about world cinema and American film in particular. Tavernier’s roots were in Lyon, the birthplace of the cinema. He founded and presided over the Institut Lumière, which hosts retrospectives and an annual film festival in the factory where the Lumière brothers made the first films.

In this collection, containing numerous interviews translated from French and available in English for the first time, he discusses the arc of his career following in the lineage of the Lumière brothers, in that his goal, like theirs, is to “show the world to the world.”

It is no surprise, then, that an interview with Tavernier is a treat. Beginning with discussions of his own films, the interviews in this volume cover a vast range of topics. At the core are his thoughts about the ways cinema can inspire the imagination and contribute to the broadest possible public conversation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781496807694

Book preview

Conversation with Bertrand Tavernier

Jacques Demeure and Paul-Louis Thirard / 1974

From Positif, no. 156 (February 1974). Reprinted by permission. Translated by T. Jefferson Kline.

Jacques Demeure & Paul-Louis Thirard: Did your experience as a press agent help you to make your film?

Bertrand Tavernier: Yes and no. Yes, because Pierre Rissient and I never thought of our work as press agents as simply about publicity. We always tried to make it an extension of our position on esthetic and cinephilic questions. I know that sounds pretentious, but I can say that, in the majority of cases, I used my position to defend certain filmmakers, certain films and ideas I’d championed in the journals I’d written for—though with less success. In fact that’s what’s a little depressing when you’re writing for a journal: you have the impression you’re preaching in a void and that you’re not even read by the other critics who should be concerned with what you’re writing. How else can you explain that after dozens of studies, interviews, critiques, you find the same idiocies, the same historical errors. The article by Marcel Martin on Ford, for example …

Anyway, it was in this sense that our work went beyond promoting films. We developed connections with distributors, with producers, and tried to convince them to bring out such and such a film. At times we oversaw the contracts. So we were able to get released or re-released more than a hundred films that might never have been shown. May I make a little parenthesis? The critics who complain about the system or who moan about the horrors of exploitation, should get their hands dirty. Of course it’s more boring to do that than to hotly theorize about a film you’ve seen at the Festival of Toulon—it demands a lot of time and a lot of energy. You have to keep at it and sometimes it takes three years to get something done. You also have to come down out of your ivory tower and consent to having a few dust-ups over your ideas. It can be both exciting and depressing, but that’s one of the only ways to keep a certain kind of criticism going.

Anyway, this work put me in contact with some producers and distributers who were helpful to me when I wanted to make L’Horloger de Saint-Paul [The Clockmaker]. They’d already worked with me and had a certain amount of trust in me. Of course the negative side of this was that some of them had already labeled me as press agent and didn’t take seriously my desire to make a film.

D&T: So obviously it wasn’t easy?

BT: No. After having written a very short adaptation, I got Noiret to agree to work with me and found a producer. It’s after that that things got difficult. Things repeatedly fell apart. I got a large advance, thanks to the people at Pathé and Sirius, who signed on after reading the first fifty pages of the synopsis. But the producer got scared and disappeared. After several failures of this kind, Raymond Danon agreed to produce the film. He told me: You subject is not so bad. I said, No. So he financed the scenario. When he read it, he hated it, but he told me If the distributors are still interested, I’ll go along with it. I might be mistaken. And so I did the film. He gave me complete liberty on condition that I keep to the agreed schedule, which was very tight. I had in my contract that I’d be fired if I spent more than a third of the budget in the first two weeks. But in the end, I not only kept on schedule, but finished a day early, thanks to my cameraman, Pierre-William Glenn, and the whole team. I considered staying on schedule to be a moral issue. It was in relation to other guys who would be making their first film at Lira. I’ve seen the scorn that can be heaped on young filmmakers when someone abuses the schedule. It can mean others’ chances can get blocked. So I tried not to bungle it and to be as precise as