French filmmaker Leos Carax spoke about the ups and downs of his 42-year career at the Marrakech International Film Festival on Sunday.
He has been open about the setbacks and doubts about his place on set in the early days of filming and his seven feature film credits to date boy meets girl (1984), the night is young (1986), Les Amants du Pont Neuf, Pole X, Tokyo!, Holy Engines and Annett.
“It’s true that I only did a few on each film, but I feel like a beginner, a bit of a fraud, so I have to do a lot of tests with the new tools and the cameras as the film progresses. the distance. I’m becoming a kind of technician,” he said.
Carax said that a series of chance meetings with people who would work with him for a long time were at the heart of his directing career.
Among them he mentioned the late cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, who directed three of his early films; Camerawoman Caroline Champetier, with whom he has been working ever since Tokyo!; Editor Nelly Quettier, who has since edited all his films Les Amants du Pont Neufand his actor “alter ego” Denis Lavant.
“I was lucky in my encounters. You can’t make cinema without such encounters,” says Carax. “Film is chaos, a lot of chaos. So you have to find people who are not unhappy in this chaos, who can find their place.”
The director described the late Escoffier, who died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 2003 aged just 52, as a big brother to him who helped him make the transition to color in his second film, The Night Is Young. (Mauvais Sang) after his black-and-white debut boy meets girl.
“He was 10 years older than me and my height, which is very important when you frame when filming. He didn’t do many films then either, but he had immense knowledge. We were both young. He became like a big brother.”
Carax revealed that his career-long partnership with Lavant got off to a lukewarm start when he played the standard actor in Boy Meets Girl alongside then-girlfriend Mireille Perrier.
“I had the girl, my girlfriend at the time, but I couldn’t find the boy. I looked at the street, among actors, among musicians. I went to the acting agency where actors looking for work leave their portfolios. I fell in love with Denis Lavant’s photo and thought he had a very special face.
“We met, he was interested in the circus and did theater and also wrote some lyrics. I don’t think he was seduced by cinema. I ended up almost defaulting to it because I couldn’t find anything better. He was my age and build. We took it on without much conviction.”
The conversation also touched on the difficult circumstances of the three-year production of Carax Les Amants du Pont Neuffor which he had the famous Paris Bridge and the banks of the Seine reconstructed in Lansargues, on the outskirts of Montpellier, in one of the most expensive sets in French film history at the time.
“It’s been three years and I think it’s three separate productions. There was tremendous support, but there was also hate, which is normal. The film started small and then grew after we built the set, an actor got injured (Lavant injured a tendon which delayed the schedule), and then there was the storm (which damaged the set). Did I learn anything, I’m not sure… it was hard. That meant I didn’t do a film for almost ten years.”
Carax admitted this after his next film, the 1999 sci-fi thriller Pole X turned out to be a box office failure, he was in the wilderness for a while, wondering if he could ever make another film.
He credited the late Japanese producer Michiko Yoshitake of Paris with getting him back behind the camera when she invited him to direct one of the parts of the three-part film. Tokyo!, Michel Gondry and Bong Joon Ho shot the other parts.
“No one offered me anything at the time. They gave me a free pass. The only condition was that it had to be shot in Tokyo. I was reunited with Denis. I had a lot of fun coming up with the language and the style. It was a lot of fun and good for me.”
Writer: Melanie Goodfellow
Source: Deadline
