01  SUMMER 2025

To mark the publication of the inaugural issue of Narrow Margin, Luc Moullet — in town for a major retrospective of his own films at Film at Lincoln Center — programmed and presented a 35mm screening of King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1948), the subject of his book Le Rebelle de King Vidor (2009). What follows is a transcription of the Q&A session that followed the screening on August 11th, 2025 at Anthology Film Archives.

English questions edited for clarity and precision.

* * *

Narrow Margin: Vidor’s The Fountainhead is a film that you return to again and again throughout your career as a critic. In the ’62 edition of Cahiers you interviewed King Vidor and you wrote a capsule review of The Fountainhead, calling it one of the most complete works in the history of cinema. You return to it again in your chapter on Gary Cooper in Politique des acteurs and in 2009 you wrote a monograph on it, your only book devoted solely to one film. What keeps bringing you back to this film and why did you want to show it tonight?

Luc Moullet: The Fountainhead is one of King Vidor’s five major films. His career was rather uneven. He made fifty-five films, but, for me, his best films are The Crowd, Hallelujah, The Big Parade, Ruby Gentry, and The Fountainhead.

Narrow Margin: There is a question (from the audience) about a film which came out recently, The Brutalist, which also shares this central theme or motif of architecture and this individual of the architect. What relates this theme of man to architecture, and who is this architect in relation to cinema?

LM: Art and architecture are similar. All the arts resemble each other. The Fountainhead is a testament to the figure of the architect in cinema but also a parable for what was happening in the world of cinema.

One of the main problems that beset American cinema, and films in general, is the problem of the final cut: the filmmaker’s definitive version of the film. There were many films in history for which the director was not granted Final Cut, such as Stroheim’s Greed, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One, and Vidor’s An American Romance, a film centered on metal, steel, and earth that was mutilated by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which cut twenty minutes from the film. This concluded King Vidor’s relationship with MGM after a collaboration that had lasted twenty years.

Architecture faces the same problem, if less frequently. However, The Fountainhead presents a rather particular case, a paradox, as the building in the film is designed by someone but credited to another. Though it didn’t bear the name of Howard Roark, in the film, but that of Keating, the building’s financiers have a responsibility to honor the architect’s design. It is paradoxical in the sense that Roark, in a bid to affirm and defend the integrity of his design, goes so far as to blow up a building with a social function, simply because it does not conform to his will. These large public housing projects are a bit of a nightmare. In France, many of these buildings ended up being demolished. They were constructed for the so-called public good but inhabitants of these buildings found them alienating and soulless. So The Fountainhead is about the will of the individual creator against the so-called wellbeing of the multitude. That is why the film comes across as right-wing.

Audience: Could you speak about individualism and how that affects the dramaturgy between the characters?

LM: For the author of The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand, the source of life is the ego. In Vidor’s adaptation, Gary Cooper is the source of the building. There is this double significance, then. Ayn Rand was a refugee of Russian origin who was vehemently anti-communist — McCarthyist, even. We can debate the positions the film takes. Nonetheless, there is a splendor in creation that can bring about adhesion. We can adore religious films without adhering to any religion.

Audience: The romance at the heart of the film regards the idea of the artist and the critic becoming enmeshed together, could you reflect on this as both a critic and a filmmaker?

LM: There was a shift that occurred in France in the wake of May ’68. Up to that point in time, film critics sold the readers the egos of filmmakers like Eisenstein and Welles. But the revolution precipitated a desire to change this idolization of the figure of the filmmaker. Nevertheless, the creator gets deified. Abel Gance’s Napoléon, for instance, is a case where the filmmaker was deified for his film while the actual Napoleon was a horrible person who killed approximately a million and a half people. The film however is of continual interest and is characterized by a force that comes from its paroxysmic scenes.

Audience: Has an intervention from a studio head ever happened to you?

Laughter from audience

LM: I did not really encounter this problem except with my first two films, which the producer wanted to opt out of at some point. Being short films, I was able to finance their completion. Later I became more well-known and my films did not cost a lot of money to make, so I did not have any major problems. Financing problems tend to happen more with expensive films. In France, Godard’s Contempt faced that problem; so did Zurlini’s The Professor. There were also films whose shoots were interrupted by producers, but that happened less frequently than in Hollywood.

Audience: Could you talk about your encounter with King Vidor when you interviewed him, what was he like, and what was your perception of his filmography up to that point?

LM: King Vidor was an astonishing person. He was very gentle but his films were animated by fury. A contradiction between calm and fury. In his films — notably in The Fountainhead — there is this expression of the fury of love. He managed to evade the censorship laws of the Hays Code. For instance, we never explicitly see an erotic encounter. It is discreet, yet we understand everything. In the scene where Dominique is watching Howard drill into the rock, the sexual expression becomes more blunt. Vidor pushed the erotic encounter to the limit in Duel in the Sun, in the climactic, fatal gun battle between the lovers. There is a relationship there between Eros and Thanatos that one finds in Japanese cinema. In Ruby Gentry, another Vidor film, we do not see characters making love but there are always suggestions and astonishing shortcuts. Instead of a sex scene, all we see is black and a walk in the marsh. It is one of the most beautiful sequences in cinema. The Fountainhead is a somewhat macho film. Its final scene is taken from a scene in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, from 1923, where there is the same progression towards the top of a building. But Vidor’s take on it is more powerful.