Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (48 page)

Godard thought that Burton looked much older than Karina, when in fact he was born in the same year as Piccoli, in 1925. But Burton and Vartan were unavailable, so Godard approached Jean-Paul Belmondo instead,

In
Pierrot le fou
, Karina meets a bad end.
(Janus Films / Photofest)

telling him, “I have to make a film, you absolutely have to help me.”
²
But Belmondo, who was born in 1933, was and looked even younger than Piccoli. Thus, when Godard announced in New York in September 1964—while he was considering making
Bonnie and Clyde
—that the film would star Karina alongside Belmondo, he had succumbed to filming a “normal” couple and reoriented the subject accordingly.

The presence of Anna and Belmondo changed everything. I thought of
You Only Live Once
. Now, instead of the couple from
Lolita
or
La Chienne
, I wanted to shoot the story of the last romantic couple, the last descendants of
La Nouvelle Héloise
, of
Werther
, and of
Hermann and Dorothea
.
³

While the original story would have allegorized Godard’s catastrophe with Karina as that of a man doomed by lust for a younger woman, the new approach portrayed them as a man and a woman joined as equals, who still come to doom. Godard would present himself as neither a predator nor a fool, but rather as a victim deceived and betrayed.

U
NLIKE
A Married Woman
, the new film would be expensive to make: Belmondo’s salary alone was eighty thousand francs (sixteen thousand dollars), and this was a bargain rate that he offered against his agent’s wishes to the film’s producer, Georges de Beauregard. The shoot would require many locations and would be in color and widescreen. Also, as ever with Beauregard, the financing had to be cobbled together piecemeal, which caused delays. Godard returned to Paris and made
Alphaville
, while planning to direct this noirish love story as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

Godard needed a dummy script of White’s novel to be submitted to the CNC as well as to coproducers and distributors, and for this job, he turned to a longtime acquaintance, Rémo Forlani, a friend of Truffaut’s since the late 1940s. Forlani, a painter, was also a streetwise raconteur who had decided to try his hand at writing, and had been tapped through social connections to write several minor screenplays, the most recent of which attracted Godard’s attention for reasons other than its artistry. It was the script for
Le Voleur de Tibidabo
(The Thief of Tibidabo), made in Spain in the fall of 1964. It starred Karina and her new lover, Maurice Ronet (who also directed).

When Forlani got back to Paris, Godard invited him to lunch and advised him to see Beauregard about the adaptation of
Obsession
. Then Godard, as Forlani later recalled, got to the main subject: pumping him for information about what went on between Karina and Ronet in Spain: “How many times she made the trip from Paris to Barcelona. And if they love each other a lot or
just a little. And whether this skirt-chaser Ronet is making her happy or not.”
⁴

Forlani’s script sets the story in France rather than in the United States, but otherwise hews closely to the contours of the novel. Pierre, a bourgeois Parisian man who lost his job and despairs of a dull marriage, flees a dismal cocktail party and takes off with Lena, his children’s babysitter, for the south of France. Her former boyfriend, Joel, has underworld connections and causes trouble for the lovers on the run. When Joel catches up with them, Lena, pretending to visit Joel solely in order to square things with him for good, runs away with him and leaves Pierre behind. Pierre searches for them, finds them, kills them, calls the police on himself, and then—in Forlani’s conclusion—rigs the hideout with dynamite, ending the story with a vast conflagration.

However, Forlani’s text was a mere placefiller. Godard didn’t plan to follow it (and Beauregard didn’t expect him to do so), but he did make use of two elements from the script: the lead character’s name, Pierre (changed from the novel’s Conrad), which gave him a new title,
Pierrot le fou;
and the ending, with dynamite.

The title, which Beauregard announced in the February 27, 1965, issue of
La Cinématographie française
, aroused certain expectations: “Pierrot-lefou” was the nickname the French press had given to Pierre Loutrel, France’s Public Enemy Number One in the late 1940s, the leader of a violent, brazen gang of robbers. In the mid-1960s, he was still a legend in France, and journalists, learning of the film’s title, anticipated a biopic of the criminal band—a kind of French
Bonnie and Clyde
.

Forlani’s script helped Beauregard to raise the needed funds, but it also got Godard a scolding from the precensorship board at the CNC. The panel authorized Godard to begin shooting but cautioned him to direct with prudence a script which they called “a hymn to violence, to sensuality, to murder, without any redeeming moral.” As it turned out, sensuality in
Pierrot
would prove no less sternly moralistic than Godard’s previous work, and the many scenes of “violence” or “murder” would owe little to reality and much to Godard’s own enveloping sense of despair.

G
ENERALLY TENSE AND
choleric during shoots, Godard was also solitary and grief stricken during the filming of
Pierrot le fou
. The shoot was rendered all the more difficult by a number of exacerbating factors that played havoc with his mood, including his own doubts about how to make the film. As he later recalled: “When I began
Pierrot le fou
, one week before, I was completely panicked, I didn’t know what to do. Based on the book, we had already established all the locations, we had hired the people… and I was wondering what we were going to do with it all.”
⁵

Complicating matters, Godard had chosen to film in a new widescreen process, Techniscope, which, according to Raoul Coutard, his cinematographer, brought with it a new set of inconveniences, including the need to shoot with high-contrast side-lighting—“otherwise we would get a flat image, without definition. So it implied working at certain hours, changing axes, changing angles because we weren’t well-placed in the light.”
⁶
The resulting constraints slowed the production down and stifled Godard’s spontaneity.

By Godard’s relatively Spartan standards, the shoot itself was unusually long—eight weeks, running from May 24 to July 17—and complex. Because “fast” (highly light-sensitive) color negative film did not exist, interiors required a great deal of lighting, hence additional crew members and time. Much of the shoot was outdoors, so the camera could not be placed on a rolling dolly or handheld in a wheel chair for traveling shots; tracking rails had to be laid down instead, a slow and labor-intensive process. The crew was large, the equipment cumbersome, the frustrations built-in. And the cost of keeping a large crew and shooting in a wide range of locations meant that, despite the indeterminate script, Godard had to keep to schedule.

Godard, who was indifferent to the novel’s action and had lost faith in the noirish cinematic genre, added various forms of pageantry and burlesque to the already clotted plot. He recruited the comedian and monologuist Raymond Devos to do a solo turn and found a role for the popular dancer and choreographer Dirk Sanders and for his troupe of dancers. Godard had no intention, in this spectacle of despair, of sparing the spectacle; yet the cinematic excesses led to an even more intricate and burdened shoot.

Most crucially, the film starred a woman whom Godard loved and had lost. His wounded state of mind was apparent to his colleagues. His divorce from Anna Karina and her relationship with Ronet left Godard agonizingly alone, yet he was still bound to Karina, both by emotional and artistic bonds. Karina had a career apart from Godard but not a major one; and although Godard had proven that he could make films of prime importance without Karina, he had little interest in doing so. Asked by an interviewer before the beginning of the shoot about his choice of actresses, Godard answered in a way that suggested the complex and conflicting emotions—tenderness, jealousy, self-pity—that he then put on display in the film: “I need to love the people I film, that’s why I always take Anna Karina.”

He spoke of his divorce, joking that marriage is “an alliance for life… with the person with whom one is least-suited to live,” and followed up with a striking interpretation of why his relationship with Karina had ended through infidelity.

Fidelity is a rule and like all rules, it can admit of certain exceptions… What I desire to do… I can put into my films and so have a calmer life. Before being a director I needed more things… For a woman it may be different inasmuch as she does not create, she needs to externalize herself more.
⁷

In other words, Godard created drama in film, while Karina needed to create it in life.

G
ODARD’S SOLITUDE AND
lack of emotional sustenance at this time revealed itself in his quest for company. A number of people whose presence he sought out came to figure significantly in the making of
Pierrot le fou
, in particular a couple whose evident harmony shocked him and exacerbated the pain of Karina’s rejection.

Driving early in the morning in the south of France in the spring of 1965 in his Ford Galaxie convertible while scouting locations with his assistant director, Bernard Toublanc-Michel, Godard heard a song on the car radio and said that he wanted just that kind of music in
Pierrot le fou
. Toublanc-Michel replied that Godard was in luck: they were five minutes by car from the songwriter’s house. They dropped in on Serge Rezvani, a painter who wrote songs under the nom de plume of Bassiak (a song of whose was famously sung by Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s
Jules and Jim
),
⁸
and his wife, Danièle.

Rezvani played two songs. Godard immediately took both for the film (they would be sung by Anna Karina’s character—once by her, once by a singing double), but he was also impressed by something other than Rezvani’s songs. He asked the songwriter with astonishment, “You left Paris and you live here all year long, just the two of you with your dog and your cat?”
⁹
Soon thereafter, when Rezvani heard the film’s story, he understood Godard’s bewildered look at the contented couple in their rustic refuge—at the man who was an artist and the wife who was his inspiration and helper. That type of relationship was, in fact, the main subject of
Pierrot le fou;
in the film, Godard would show how the woman corrupts and undermines such a relationship. Gazing at the Rezvanis, Godard beheld, to his amazement, an artistic couple that was thriving. Godard’s subsequent contact with the couple, Rezvani noted, showed how consumed he was by the problem—by his failure and their success.

The search for companionship led Godard to turn
Pierrot’
s shooting locations in the south of France into something of an unofficial salon. He frequently saw Serge and Danièle Rezvani before the shoot and then received them on the set. Rezvani, in turn, brought two friends, the critic Alain Jouffroy and Jouffroy’s girlfriend, Laetitia, to meet Godard. A parade
of journalists from a diverse list of local and international publications came to the set, and Godard received them with an unusually patient solicitude. He allowed Alain Bergala, a local student and cinephile, to film the cast and crew at work.
¹⁰
Claude Lanzmann, then a journalist, came by to do a report for
Elle
magazine.
¹¹

When the shoot came to Paris in early July, Godard sought out the journalist and novelist Michel Vianey (whose detailed report on the shoot of
Contempt
had pleased him) and invited him to the set. Earlier, Godard had asked Vianey to follow him around during the shoot of
Pierrot le fou
and to write a book about what he saw, but Vianey was unavailable at the time. Now Godard met Vianey in Paris and, on July 14, granted an interview in which he said: “If I shoot films, it’s because I’m alone. I have no family. Nobody. It’s a means of seeing people. Of going places.”

In his loneliness, Godard also began to experience the role and the work of the filmmaker differently. He translated his personal solitude into a sense of artistic isolation, and responded by trying to involve his cast and crew more deeply in the filming than he had done before. As he told Vianey: