01  SUMMER 2025

Our first issue is devoted to your work and that of Vittorio Cottafavi to whom you pay tribute in your film Les Sièges de l’Alcazar (1989). How did you first encounter Cottafavi’s work?

I met Cottafavi in Rome, but I began writing on his films before that. Truffaut had written a text about Traviata 53 (1953), and I managed to see the films, which was not so easy, because Italian melodramas were programmed dubbed into French.

Cottafavi was championed by a certain group of critics who were associated with the Mac-Mahon cinema. And you wrote an article in 1959 responding to these critics, and in particular to Michel Mourlet, entitled ‘Is pure cinema only a myth?’.

Sure. With cinema, it’s difficult to speak of pure art. That was the Mourlet way, and he chose to consider only four or five directors in the world. It was a critical line based on snobbism. I wasn’t on the same side as the Mac-mahonians and Mourlet. I have, I think, a larger view of the cinema, and I could write good things about Cottafavi’s films, but Mourlet didn’t appreciate some of them, like his film about Messalina [Messalina Venere imperatrice, 1960], which was underrated, or I piombi di Venezia (1953) [co-directed with Gian Paolo Callegari].

The Mac-mahonians didn’t like the pepla as much, but you wrote a very positive review of Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (1961) — those films were not highly rated even by the people who liked the melodramas.

Well, there were great directors in what we call minor lines, such as pepla, melodrama, science fiction, war films. There was not only Cottafavi in this category, but also directors like Mario Bava and Rafaello Matarazzo. Cottafavi was not always admired by Cahiers du cinéma. Truffaut was the first to write a good review of one of his films. Rohmer and Rivette were more interested in the official Italian cinema of Visconti or Antonioni.

You’ve singled out Maria Zef (1981) as Cottafavi’s best film.

Yes, he made it at the end of his life. It was a film based in the language of the Friulian countryside — Pasolini was also interested in Friuli — which was a different world at the beginning of the last century. It was a genuine film based on the work of an author from Friuli, Paola Drigo.

You also seem to have your own interest in the countryside and the peasantry.

Yes, there is a unique way of living of the people in the remote countryside.

Your second short, Terres noires (1961), was shot in a very rural place with no electricity.

Well, I am interested in not very well-known countries and not very well-known directors. Terres noires was made in a special part of the country of which my father was a son. My grandmother lived in a very little room with twenty inhabitants in a rotten borough at the beginning of the century. It was a very strange country, and different from Friuli, which had a larger population. But I like to seek out the unknown parts of movies and the unknown parts of countries. So I shot the film La Cabale des oursins (1992) in the mining region of France, the same region that Zola’s Germinal is set in.

You appear in a television film by Philippe Garrel from 1967 called Godard et ses emulés, about a young generation of filmmakers including you, Jean Eustache, Romain Goupil and others. Did you feel like part of a generational cohort of filmmakers at the time?

Well, we all worked in different ways. For instance, Garrel was outside the world — on drugs, in delirium, and shooting in places like Iceland. That was the beginning of his cinematic work. A film like Marie pour mémoire (1968) is a point of view of people outside of the mainstream. It was the cinema of drugs, of the Zanzibar Group. Afterwards, he changed and made films of a slightly more common appearance.

You stopped writing for Cahiers du cinéma around 1968.

Yes, because there was a complete change in the way of working at Cahiers, which became based on structuralism and Marxism. I have nothing against Marx, who I like. I made a film which was a copy of Marx, Genèse d’un repas (1979). But it is difficult to see the cinema only from this point of view. Godard had his Marxist period in the seventies and he changed completely after.

Did you participate in the events of May ’68 — in the occupations, for instance?

Well, I participated in the demonstrations, but it all fell down soon, and I was not interested in the theoretical vision of the whole cinema associated with that time.

That was around the time that you became involved in the Société des réalisateurs [Society of film directors], which came out of the États Generaux of film.

Yes. It was a way to meet many film directors who were not on the side of Cahiers. It was an amusing experience because there were movie makers who were a little old-fashioned, academic, or affiliated with the Communist Party, like Louis Daquin. This was the first step towards getting some money from the state, because I was secretary of the SRF and they knew I could make a movie with very little money. The same way Godard raised the money for Un film comme les autres (1968) or Letter to Jane (1972).

You’ve managed to continue to make films for a long time without ever having a lot of resources.

I don’t need much money and my principle was to spend little money to make the films, so that they could earn money more easily, like the B pictures of the United States made by studios like PRC — films like Detour (1945).

In the films you’ve made, at a certain point, you start appearing in front of the camera a lot more, which surely must save on costs.

Yes, not at the beginning, but later. It was novel in French film, but often done in Hollywood cinema, since John Ford, Raoul Walsh and Frank Borzage were actors as well as directors. And in the comedies, the actor is truly the director, like Keaton, Chaplin and Howard Lloyd. There are more recent director-actors working in comedy as well, such as Monteiro, Moretti, Mouret in France. And a documentary director who won the first prize in Cannes, a film made about industry in Michigan, I don’t remember the name [Michael Moore].

How much is the character you play in your films like the real Luc Moullet?

Well it’s partly fiction. In Ma première brasse (1981), I’m described as a man who is trying to learn how to swim. I am not interested in swimming at all, but it might be funny to see a man who tries to but cannot swim for nearly one hour. And many people found it very funny.

The dancing scene with ‘Popcorn’ in that film is very special.

Some people like the film only for this shot.

Guy Debord’s films are not often discussed by cinephiles, but you’ve praised his final film.

Yes! I like very much In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), because there are some contradictory aspects of life in it. We have both the splendor of Western films, and the character, apparently very strange, of these marvels, these waters. It’s a mix that is very strange and fascinating.

In many of your films and your memoirs, there’s a skepticism about technological progress. In a recent interview, you mention an interest in Ivan Illich.

Illich demonstrates that bicycles are more quick than cars because cars need more money — and it takes time to earn this money.

Where does your critique of progress come from? Is it related to your interest in the countryside?

Yes, I think that progress — Renoir said the same thing — creates more difficulties than a natural life. Informatics make the world more difficult to live in. And maybe it’s easier for Amish people today than for those of us struggling with technology.

Most of the filmmakers associated with the Nouvelle Vague took the camera into the city streets and into apartment buildings. In many of your films, you went to the countryside and the mountains. Where did this urge to leave the city come from?

It’s a world I know better than the world of the cities. It was as different a world as the world shown by Jean Rouch. In Billy the Kid (Une aventure de Billy le Kid, 1971) the mountains are supposed to represent somewhere very far from France. And it was interesting because this was a natural world which was not really shown and difficult to access. It would not be possible today, because I would need authorization. But it was an opening to a new landscape.

There are also writers from different countries who have this kind of setting, like Walser in Switzerland or Caldwell in the United States. In English literature you have these kinds of remote settings in the countryside, like in Thomas Hardy and Mary Webb. Even David Lodge had a limited setting with Birmingham, after he wrote books about other countries. It’s a part of the universe, which is enough to show the whole world. We see that also in books by Raymond Carver and many, many others.

On the subject of English authors, you’ve written about your affinity for English literature.

Well, in fact, I am very interested in literature by Chesterton, Tom Sharpe, and Barbara Pym. I studied these authors in school because I have a licence in American literature and I studied English literature too. The comic part of English literature we could find in Laurence Sterne, for instance.

Your film Le Fantôme de Longstaff (1996) is an adaptation of a story by Henry James.

It was amusing to make a film that is absolutely different from my other films. Great comic actors have made absolutely different films, such as A Woman of Paris (1923) by Chaplin.

Did you make the film to challenge yourself to do something completely different?

Well, it was amusing to try. People were rather puzzled. All my films were shown at the Rotterdam Festival, but not Le Fantôme de Longstaff, because it was so uncharacteristic of me. It was not a photocopy of my other films.

Are there any other stories that you’ve been tempted to adapt?

Yes, but it didn’t work. I tried to make an adaptation of Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy but it was too expensive and I couldn’t find the money.

In Le Prestige de la mort (2006) there are references to your desire to adapt that novel.

Yes, the idea was to make a version of the Hardy novel, but since I didn’t have the money, I did another subject with a few little similarities. We have the same thing in Oliveira, who wanted to make a film based on Madame de Lafayette, but he had no money and made something very different with the same subject [La Lettre, 1999].

Le Fantôme de Longstaff is far more classical than your other films. It more resembles some of the Hollywood movies you have championed in your critical writing. How do you see your films as relating to the films you care about and write about?

There are kinds of movies I can’t make, but which I admire.

Like those by King Vidor?

Yes. But there is a film by King Vidor which he made at the end of his life without any money, which was very interesting, Truth and Illusion (1964). I also very much like a film by Cecil B. DeMille which was not made in his general way of making films: Kindling, made in 1915 for even less money than my films.

[The phone rings. Moullet answers. It’s a cold call. He hangs up.]

It’s a trick. On the normal telephone, many, many times there are publicity tricks.

Do you see DeMille as an inspiration, especially those early films?

Well, there are some things I took from DeMille. For instance, in The Sign of the Cross (1932) there is the progression of a bottle of milk from the origin to the table to the bath of Poppaea. I took the idea for Genèse d’un repas from it. And I took something from The Golden Bed (1925), with the tricks of the woman who is with her lover and wants to avoid her husband’s arrival. It was in Le Prestige de la mort.

There’s this famous old quote from Godard where he says, in his early films, if he didn't know how to proceed, he would ask himself what Hitchcock would do in his shoes.

There are some shots inspired by Hitchcock in Brigitte et Brigitte (1966). There is the same gag as in Strangers on a Train, when the killer wants to find his lighter under the pavement. But I changed it completely, to finding a dictionary on top of the cistern of a W.C. Hitchcock’s is shot from underneath, while my point of view is in a place which is too high. And also in La Valse de médias (1987), when the students enter the library, we first see three or five and then ten or fifteen, and then fifty, like in The Birds (1963). We can take something from another author when the setting is very different. And in La Terre de la folie (2009) we have the route of the killer, after the murder, who walks dizzily in the street, like Buñuel’s Francisco Galvan in Él (1953). And the murders in La terre de la folie are like in Psycho (1960), when the pick is raised five or six times over the victim.

Your article about dispositivism references so many recent filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul. How much do you keep up with contemporary cinema?

Yes, I was very interested in Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I don’t like all his films. The most famous, Uncle Boonmee (2010), was difficult for me to understand. But the other ones, I like them very much.

Are there contemporary filmmakers who you’re particularly excited by right now?

In France, there is Dumont. In America, Kevin Smith.

One director you championed very early on was Alain Guiraudie. Have you seen his new film, Miséricorde?

Yes, it’s very interesting. I was the first to write on a Guiraudie film. That was twenty-five years ago and I’m still impressed by his films. I like to write the first great article on an unknown director such as Cottafavi, Matarazzo, or Fuller. Or an unknown film, like King Vidor’s Wild Oranges (1924).

Do you think that you were perhaps more interested in silent cinema than some of your peers? Because you’ve written about silent American cinema a lot. Do you think it was maybe more important for you than for some of the other directors of your generation?

I can’t say. The best period in American cinema was after 1935 because all the people who had to leave Germany went to the States. Such as Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang, Edgar Ulmer, and many others.

Many of your films are studies of places, like Foix (1994), Les Havres (1983) and Terres noires. You write in your memoir about your early interest in maps —

Yes. Because when I was very little I couldn’t read. The first thing I could read was maps. So, I had some relation to maps from when I was four.

[At this comment, Antonietta Pizzorno enters the room and displays Luc’s sizable map collection.]

The link between cinema and travel is shared by many filmmakers of your generation. For instance, Robert Kramer who you shared a cinematographer with [Richard Copans].

Yes, Robert Kramer gave me the idea to make Le Ventre de l’Amérique (1996) in the city of Des Moines. He thought it was better to see the remote America. He was sometimes produced by my producer, Les films d’ici, and I knew his first films before he went to France.

I especially like his film Guns (1980) because there are two stories. It’s interesting when books and films have two stories in them. Like Wild Palms by Faulkner and La Pointe Courte (1955) by Varda — the couple and the city of Sète — and a film by Chytilová, Quelque chose d’autre (1963), which she made before Les Petites Marguerites (1966). There are also films with diptychs like L’amore (1948) by Rossellini, with two stories, which have nothing apparently to do with each other.

La chouette aveugle (1987) by Raul Ruiz has two stories, one set in a mythical world of Sadegh Hedayat — a mystery and a ghost story — and a play by Tirso de Molina which had nothing to do with it, which was interesting. In that case, it was because the film wasn’t long enough and he introduced the other story.

Once you started working with Richard Copans, you made quite a few films together. He was coming out of militant cinema. What was your creative relationship?

It began with Genèse d’un repas. He was a member of Cinelutte which was a political group. And he was interested in Genèse d’un repas, which is a political film. And it was very good to make films with him, because he could do many shots in a short time that had not been pre-planned.

What inspired you to make Genèse d’un repas?

It was to find a new side. A documentary after a fiction film. A film made in Africa, South America and France, after films made in a little home, like Anatomie d’un rapport (1976) or Un steak trop cuit (1960).

How do you view Anatomie d’un rapport in relation to other films by your peers in that period about relationships between men and women after 1968 — for example, Eustache’s La Maman et la Putain (1973)?

Eustache and I made very different films, and we had very different lives.

You produced his film Le Cochon (1970).

Yes. It is also a way of showing a rural and remote setting.

Is it true that nobody can understand the dialect of French that the farmers speak in that film anymore?

Yes, but it’s interesting to make a speaking film in an unknown language. But we can perceive what they say, because it’s all in relation to the killing of the pig. And we have also films spoken in a strange language like Themroc (1973) by Faraldo, and there is a film in Esperanto, I don’t remember the title. I appreciated Mizoguchi’s Uwasa no onna (The Woman in the Rumor, 1954), even without subtitles, because the actors’ way of speaking is very clear to us, and we can guess what they are speaking about. Henri Langlois would cut the intertitles from silent films shown at the Cinémathèque — so that even in Gance’s La Roue (1923), there were no intertitles. Langlois thought that all was in the images. But if we take a film by Straub, it seems rather funny.

Is it true that a lot of the films Langlois showed at the Cinémathèque didn’t have French subtitles?

At the beginning of the Cinémathèque, yes, because it would be more costly to put subtitles in the films. And he didn’t think it was interesting to translate. This was Langlois’ conception.

We’ve heard that French critics paid such close attention to mise en scène because they couldn’t understand what was being said and therefore weren’t thinking about the script that much. Is this true?

Yes. There were discussions after the film to find out what the story of the film actually was. And there were many interpretations!

That would have been a good scene in Les Sièges de l’Alcazar!

We also have films with dialogue that is different from the language originally on the soundtrack, like Woody Allen’s first film (What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, 1966). Godard did a similar thing in his short film Une histoire d’eau (1961) where the commentary had nothing to do with what we see. In Ruiz’s La chouette aveugle there is also a dialogue which is very different in the subtitles from the original dialogue.

Did you know Raul Ruiz after he moved to Paris?

Yes, I knew him. His wife was the editor of Genèse d’un repas. And he was also interested in my films.

Does it surprise you that the films of the Nouvelle Vague have had such a long afterlife?

Yes. In fact, not all of them. I haven’t seen the film by the American director, Nouvelle Vague.

Richard Linklater.

Yes, I don’t know what was in it, if it’s about the New Wave or something very different. There is also Godard’s film Nouvelle Vague (1990), which has nothing to do with the Nouvelle Vague, but it was a title to sell to distributors, like King Lear (1987).

Will you see the Richard Linklater film when it comes out in France?

I don’t know if it’s… it’s a possibility… probably.

Our next issue is on Diagonale, the production company started by Vecchiali, who you overlapped with at Cahiers. Did you have much of a relationship with those filmmakers — and did you like their films?

He was a little far from Cahiers. He wrote some articles. But he had a different way in his films. I didn’t like them all, but I saw most of them. All are different. Some were made one after another, with the same technicians and actors so it was easier, like Wim Wenders’s film (Der Stand der Dinge, 1982) and Ruiz’s The Territory (O Território, 1981).

Have you seen anything new recently that you’ve been excited by?

Well, I saw three English films. One by Loach, another…what is the name of the official English director?

Mike Leigh?

Yes. Mike Leigh. And Andrea Arnold. I don’t like her American film too much, but the others, yes.

For our screening at Anthology, you’ve programmed The Fountainhead (1949) — a film you’ve written an entire book on. Could you say why this film is so important to you?

It was a film which was not always glorified, and which was interesting… It has a strong power. King Vidor was a man of cold and unexciting appearance, but his films are all lyrical, excessive, with a strength which is without equivalent. It was criticized as a right-wing film. I remember that Noël Burch hated this film.

Yeah, I suppose he would.

But Vidor worked on very different films. The Crowd (1928) and Street Scene (1931) are realistic films, and very strong. And there are also individual films like The Fountainhead and many others. It was a cinema which takes its strength particularly at the end of the film. We all remember the ends of Vidor’s films.