“I consider God the greatest director in the world!”
The way of the minion. Last year, he passed 70, but Claude Lelouch is not going to leave the cinema, even after he was first recognized as a living classic, and then called "the shame of French cinema"
Well, why, it would seem, the multiple winner of all awards and festivals in the world, the author of "Men and Women" continues to make new films, doomed to unfavorable comparisons with past masterpieces? However, Claude Lelouch cannot and does not want to stop. And he's right: he still has the best actors, and not only French ones (he recently worked, for example, with Jeremy Irons), and the audience is always loyal to him. She remembers that Lelouch is perhaps the only director in the world who was awarded a plaque during his lifetime. It hangs in the seaside Normandy Deauville, on the site where the best melodrama of the 60s, Man and Woman, was filmed 43 years ago.
He's back in Moscow this week: Lelouch will show his new film A Railway Affair, a wacky tragicomedy about a writer who churns out one detective best-seller after another and her new acquaintance, a murderous maniac who escaped from prison. Starring Fanny Ardant and Dominique Pinon. On the eve of the famous French director's next visit, he was met by a columnist for The New Times in Paris.
I trust my heart more
Critics like to write that you have been making your films for a long time not for the audience, but for yourself. This is true?
I make films for the public. I am not a fiction, all the stories I told are true. I have a lot of prizes: the Cannes Palme d'Or, two Oscars, three Golden Globes ... But the audience - the most severe critic - is more important to me than all the juries in the world.
So you are against elite cinema?
I am sure that cinema is a universal art. Cinema is the most natural of the arts, in this respect it surpasses painting, literature, and music. Therefore, I never approved of my peers in the New Wave movement, who tried to pass off the revolution of cameramen as a revolution of directors. I'm self-taught, so I don't like intellectuals. I am a man of action, not thought, and I trust intuition more than reason, and my heart more than my head. I refuse to explain my films: if the director is able to give such an explanation, then he is insincere. When I watch my own films, I see them as if for the first time and I am always surprised!
What exactly are you surprised about?
The creative process is generally not subject to retelling in words. You know, I never go to museums with excursions, I don’t read guidebooks. When I first went to Moscow, I was terribly curious, but I went without a rudder and without sails - without a map and a guide.
God is a serial killer
By the way, tell us about your first visit to Moscow. After all, it was then, according to your short film in the anthology “Everyone has their own cinema”, that you decided to become a director?
It's a long story. And true. I came to Moscow for the first time in 1957, and quite by accident a taxi driver helped me to get to Mosfilm. And there they filmed "The Cranes Are Flying." I met Mikhail Kalatozov, who was extremely surprised to see a living Frenchman. He did not drive me away from the set, but in the evening he took me to the editing room and showed me an hour of footage. I was moved to tears and later practically forced the Cannes Film Festival selectors to select this film for the competition. They listened to me, and The Cranes Are Flying became the first and only Russian film to win the Palme d'Or! It was on that day at Mosfilm that I decided to become a director. Before that, I only hoped to become an operator and earn extra money. After all, I ended up in Moscow with an almost criminal mission - to make a short film about the Soviet Union: one Canadian TV channel offered a reward of ? 10,000 for such work. A lot of money, by the way! Filming Moscow in those years was almost impossible to get. Most of all they wanted to see Stalin and Lenin lying side by side in the Mausoleum, and I completed this impossible task: I specially joined the French Communist Party, got into a tourist group and filmed illegally with a camera hidden under my jacket.
After half a century, can you formulate what interests you most in cinema?
Most of all - the person as such. And in a person, contradictions attract me. I love people strongly and sincerely, and I love scoundrels no less strongly than heroes. They need each other: no one could be good if there were no bad ones around. We are living an amazing film with six billion actors - all the inhabitants of the Earth, but for some reason each of them believes that he is playing the main role! Therefore, I consider God to be the greatest director in the world.
I remember that during your last visit to Moscow you called God in a different way - the most terrible criminal ...
Not certainly in that way. I called him the most notorious serial killer in the history of mankind. Six billion and they all die! And all because of him! And every kill will be perfect. Every kill is perfect for him. Life is an excellent thriller, we all just bathe in suspense that is not inferior to Hitchcock's.
Don't take it as an insult: death is perhaps the best invention in life. First, no one ever complained about his death. Secondly, only death prevents us all from being unbearable. I'm afraid of death, like everyone else, but at the same time I wouldn't want to miss it. Although I don't believe in the end. I hate movies that end well, and I'm no better off for those that end on a minor note! I am close to those films in the finale of which there is hope. As in all my paintings.
Other directors gain "immortality" thanks to remakes. Would you like today's viewers to know about your paintings thanks to their latest versions made in the States?
Now the Americans are going to shoot at least five remakes of my films. Give them free rein - they will remake everything in their own way. Well, I cheated in school too. And I would automatically give the directors of remakes a "deuce".
