Claude Chabrol: Interviews

By Christopher Beach

Claude Chabrol (1930–2010) was a founding member of the French New Wave, the group of filmmakers that revolutionized French filmmaking in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of the most prolific directors of his generation, Chabrol averaged more than one film per year from 1958 until his death in 2010. Among his most influential films, Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins, and Les Bonnes Femmes established his central place within the New Wave canon. In contrast to other filmmakers of the New Wave such as Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer, Chabrol exhibited simultaneously a desire to create films as works of art and an impulse to produce work that would be commercially successful and accessible to a popular audience.

The seventeen interviews in this volume, most of which have been translated into English for the first time, offer new insights into Chabrol’s remarkably wide-ranging filmography, providing a sense of his attitudes and ideas about a number of subjects. Chabrol shares anecdotes about his work with such actors as Isabelle Huppert, Gérard Depardieu, and Jean Yanne, and offers fresh perspectives on other directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Fritz Lang, and Alfred Hitchcock.

His mistrust of conventional wisdom often leads him to make pronouncements intended as much to shock as to elucidate, and he frequently questions established ideas and normative attitudes toward moral, ethical, and social behaviors. Chabrol’s intelligence is far-reaching, moving freely between philosophy, politics, psychology, literature, and history, and his iconoclastic spirit, combined with his blend of sarcasm and self-deprecating humor, gives his interviews a tone that hovers between a high moral seriousness and a cynical sense of hilarity in the face of the world’s complexities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jan 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781496826763

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Interview with Claude Chabrol

Michel Mardore / 1962

From Cinéma 64 (March 1962): 6–18. Translated from the French by CB.

Michel Mardore: Claude Chabrol, you have the floor.

Claude Chabrol: The beers they serve in France are pathetic. Do you see this little stoneware pot? Well, in Germany it would be big enough to hold a liter or more of beer. I had the chance to experience that in Munich during the shooting of The Third Lover (L’Oeil du Malin). We announced that there were 300,000 people in the film, and that was not a joke. I simply filmed the Beer Festival, where there really were 300,000 people. That’s better than any of the super-productions, right?

MM: Did you shoot that just to bring a picturesque note into the film?

CC: No. It is a picturesque element, but above all it is part of the substance of the film. This event is quite repugnant—you know, the Germans are very fond of it because of folklore and tradition, but on another level they are not very proud of it—and its character jibes perfectly with the meaning of the film. The Third Lover is definitely quite anti-German. I show how a German man, placed in a certain situation, can only act in a certain way. In my film, the husband takes the big kitchen knife, well sharpened, and goes quite calmly to cut his wife’s throat. That is a way of saying that the Germans are fearsome people, rather disturbing, and it is better to give them a wide berth. They have a terrifying logic inside them.

MM: Aren’t you afraid of publicly displaying the things you have contempt for? People really criticized you for a certain interview you gave after the release of Les Bonnes Femmes.

CC: Because I said that the public was stupid? What does that mean? I had to tell the people that they were stupid, because it’s true. Why should they get upset if you explain to them, for example, that they are stupid because they read idiotic things all day long? They should know that that isn’t contempt. I had some reasons for being in a bad mood after the reception my film Les Bonnes Femmes had gotten. Because I love to joke around, people think that, in my films, I am making fun of people.

MM: To be precise, as people discovered a message in your film, some of them thought you were showing contempt for the characters who seemed to be complicit in their own social alienation.

CC: I had to present some very cruel situations. In order to avoid falling into sentimentality, in order to preserve an objective vision, I had to force myself to take a certain distance. People believed that it was out of meanness, or fascism. Nothing could be more false.

Also, the puerility of some of the things they criticized in the film bowls me over. They were astonished, for example, by the absence of customers in the household appliance store. But customers were pointless, all the more so because the salesgirls don’t give a damn about the customers since they aren’t paid on a percentage basis. You can imagine fifty guys arriving in a line: Miss, I would like a refrigerator. Yes, sir. Should I wrap it? etc. I find those spectators who want to verify the accuracy of people’s movements in a film to be ridiculous. Parisians are very fastidious when it comes to Paris, but who verified the movements around San Francisco that Hitchcock chose in Vertigo? I am for unrealism, trickery. You have to cheat in order to get at what is essential.

MM: There is always something strange or fantastic in your films!

CC: Let’s be clear: realism already contains everything. Have you noticed that ringing sound that has been going off insistently, for a few minutes, at regular intervals? Well, in this café, isn’t that a bit bizarre? That is the fantastic.

The feeling of strangeness can be obtained by putting useless details together. Since the customers of the store play no role in the lives of the salesgirls, I left them out. That absence doesn’t seem natural, and it contributes to the feeling of unease. The whole film is built on rejections of this kind. The film gives the impression of being loose, while it is in fact tightly constructed, without any useless details. I sincerely consider it my greatest success. The mise en scène is much more pared down, more understated than in my previous films, without sacrificing any of its meaning. Because, I ask you, if the framing of a shot, a shooting angle, or a camera movement is gratuitous or interchangeable, what is the point of cinema?

MM: What do you think of your first films?

CC: It’s very simple: Le Beau Serge is unbearable. But it at least served a purpose: it completely de-Christianized me. I had filled the film with an imbecilic symbolism. I had to do it so that I could get rid of it. Now, it’s over. And then, at the time, I wanted to put in too many things which collided with each other. I had made a three-hour film, which I had to reduce to a normal length. That is unfortunate, because it was a hundred times more boring in the full-length version, but also a hundred times more authentic. I had, among other things, a ten-minute documentary on baking bread. It was very boring, but also more accurate, more true. In this context, my religious intentions worked better. Now, finally, I am cured of the pastors of cinema: I locked the church that Gérard Blain wanted to enter in Les Cousins in order to get revenge on Le Beau