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Cinema made of Guru Dutt's imagination: A chat with Leos Carax
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  • Cinema made of Guru Dutt's imagination: A chat with Leos Carax

Cinema made of Guru Dutt's imagination: A chat with Leos Carax

Deepanjana Pal • October 29, 2013, 10:15:21 IST
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French director Leos Carax has made only five full-length films, but he’s something of a legend among lovers of world cinema. Here are selected excerpts from the session in which Carax was in conversation with film curator Ian Birnie.

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Cinema made of Guru Dutt's imagination: A chat with Leos Carax

French director Leos Carax has made only five full-length films, but he’s something of a legend among lovers of world cinema. Over the years, Carax has won the admiration of many – and not only because Juliette Binoche was head over heels in love with him at one point of time – with his beautiful and bizarre stories. His most recent film is Holy Motors, a surreal tale that takes William Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” very literally. Holy Motors was screened at last year’s Mumbai Film Festival and was part of this year’s Leos Carax retrospective (of sorts), which included the remarkable The Lovers on the Bridge. Carax was also in Mumbai for the duration of the festival and could be spotted around Liberty and Metro cinema, wrapped up in hat, coat and sunglasses. Here are selected excerpts from the session in which Carax was in conversation with film curator Ian Birnie. Why he chose Leos Carax as his name: It’s a secret. I changed my name when I was 13 years old. I didn’t know I’d make films, I was not interested in films, so it had nothing to do with the Oscars. In New York, someone asked me if Leos Carax was an anagram of ‘oral sex’. I didn’t know much about oral sex at 13. [Carax was born Alex Christophe Dupont.] How Carax became a filmmaker: [caption id=“attachment_1199519” align=“alignright” width=“380”] ![Leos Carax. Image: Mumbai Film Festival Facebook page.](https://images.firstpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/LeosCarax.jpg) Leos Carax. Image: Mumbai Film Festival Facebook page.[/caption] As a kid, I liked cinema. … I discovered cinema, I discovered there was someone behind the film late, when I finished school, when I was 16. I moved to Paris and I didn’t know anybody in the city so I would go to the movies. When I understood there has to be someone behind it, the film – … usually a man filming a woman. That’s what I wanted to do. I saw lots of films at that time, from 16 to 24. I saw lots of silent films, Russian films, American films, New Wave films. Then when I finished my second film, I decided I’d seen enough. … I started making films as I was discovering cinema. There are so many directors that I feel grateful to. It was a miracle for me to discover cinema. I see it as an island so this is the place I want to live, this island. It’s an island where you can see life, and death and love, from different points of view, from different angles. … There are many, many French and non-French directors that I’m grateful to. On the digital versus film debate: Basically, the only good thing about digital, for me, is that since I shoot in digital – I had made a short film in Japan a few years ago in digital – I don’t watch the dailies anymore. So I go much faster because I used to remake everything. I used to shoot and then remake everything when I was shooting on film. So my shooting on film was getting longer and longer. Now with digital, it’s getting shorter and shorter. … Digital is much poorer. Film was so rich. … Digital is poorer, but at the same time it’s richer because you can do anything with it. You can shoot a scene in daylight and make it nighttime. You can do everything in post-production, which makes people lazy. … I think young people, like my daughter, she’s young now, but in a few years, she won’t understand what I’m talking about – digital and film. I don’t like to be nostalgic so I’d rather be angry than nostalgic. I started shooting with digital about five years ago and I probably won’t make films with film anymore. But the essence of cinema is in film. … If we don’t blink, if our eyes don’t blink every minute, they become dry and you go blind. That’s what digital will do. On cinematography: I started with film, so I was lucky when I was young to to meet this director of photography, Jean-Yves Escoffier. He was 10 years older and he became my best friend and like a brother. We made three films together. So the thing is, before the shoot, that’s going to be the real work. The year before you start shooting, or six months before you start shooting. So before you do anything, you look at photos, you take photos, you look at paintings, you talk. We would smoke opium, go to the hamam. Whatever we did, we were making the film already. But that I only experienced with this man. Then I had different directors of photography after he died. … In a way, it was not so hard for me to go to digital because I didn’t have this man anymore. I felt it would anyway never be the same so. On scripts and storytelling: I always have a script. Basically, you always need a script because you’re not going to get money without a script. Then I rework it every day before shooting and also in edit. …Everything you make is from your limitations. I’m not a storyteller. I would love to be. I would love to be Hitchcock, let’s say, but I’m not. In a way, Hitchcock is not a storyteller. He’s much more a poet than a storyteller. That’s why it’s always very hard to say what a film is about. Birds, by Hitchcock, is not a film about birds. I love storytellers, but stories can be many things. So because I don’t have that gift of storytelling, I’ve to find other ways to tell my story. On the idea of making a film for an audience: The audience at some point is me. Then at a point, it’s others because you have to get money for it. So let’s say for Holy Motors, they ask, ‘What’s the story about? why should we give you money?’ If I say, ‘It’s a film about the experience of being alive today’, they won’t give me any money.’ But if I say, ‘There’s limousines and beautiful women’, then they put the money. Then of course when you edit, you start to think of the audience because I don’t edit alone. I edit with an editor, the same editor [Nelly Quettier] and if she doesn’t understand something, if she doesn’t feel what I’m feeling … then of course she shows it. The public exists. On love, a recurring theme in Carax’s films: Each of the [early] films [Boy Meets Girl, The Night is Young, Lovers on the Bridge] Denis Lavant, the actor, is called Alex. Each time he meets a girl but they all could have been called ‘Boy Meets Girl’. So yeah, it’s always this need to reinvent yourself, to go faster and lighter, not to be heavy. Like you look through the women, through love and you think, you can escape gravity. And then, what happens when you fall back? That’s what these films are about. On Pola X (1999), which is about incestuous love and is loosely-based on Herman Meliville’s Pierre: Or The Ambiguities: It was a novel I read when I was younger. When I arrived in Paris, some guy gave me this novel called Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. It’s a novel that Herman Melville wrote after Moby Dick. And because Moby Dick was such a failure, nobody read it. He decided he would write something popular and he wrote Pierre, which was a bigger failure. … When I read this book at 19 years old, I thought this was my book, this was like a brother. It has every question that a young man should ask himself. It’s like Hamlet. I thought I would never make a film again because you should never make a film out of importance, but after Lovers on the Bridge, I didn’t make films for 10 years. And I decided … if it was taboo, I should do it. The only fear was that I would never find the boy and the girl, but I did and I made it. It’s a brother-sister story. See, sister in French is ‘soeur’. You say ‘ame soeur’, soul sister. To me, soeur in French is the most beautiful word. It’s very close to heart, which is ‘coeur’. So you have coeur and soeur, and ’l’ame soeur’, soul sister. On Holy Motors, in which a man’s job is to play different roles, as though real life is a massive and complicated film set: Maybe because I started young – you know when I made my first film, I’d never seen a camera before, I didn’t study film, I didn’t go on shoots – so from the beginning, it was a kind of a bluff. …‘Give me money. I know how to make films.’ It’s always been like that in my mind. I don’t feel like a filmmaker, I’m someone who sometimes makes films. Each time, it’s like the first one’s the last one. I’m not a storyteller so I start with one or two images and one or two feelings. Then I try to mix these feelings and these images together. In Holy Motors, it was this old woman begging on the bridge… and of course these cars, these limousines. Putting them together, and the feelings obviously too. … In this film, it was what we call in French being tired of being yourself and the opposite feeling, the need to reinvent yourself. Many people have to reinvent themselves in order to survive. How do you do that? Do you have the courage and the strength to do it? Film is inventing a world, so you feel you have a project when you feel the world you have created, it’s coherent in itself. It doesn’t mean it’s coherent with reality, but it has it’s own reality. That’s when I can say that ok, I want to make this film. But the coherence or the relations between the sequences or the characters Oscar plays are very intimate. People ask me does he age, is there a chronicle? But it’s nothing like that. … I invented this job, of Mr. Oscar’s, where he goes from one life to another. If I didn’t do that, in a classical narration, I would need flashbacks. If the character was a butcher or a doctor, whatever, I would need flashbacks, he’d get younger, I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do it. So I imagined this world where in one day, you could see my feeling of what is life experience. All in one day. … We didn’t do it [the motion capture scene] realistically at all. We used black light and little white spots. But it is basically motion capture and motion capture, that’s why it shows in the film. It starts with a few shots of 19th century chronophotography by [Etienne-Jules] Marey, where you see people, a little child running. They’re the first images of cinema in history and that was already motion capture. That’s what cinema is, motion capture. Or emotion capture. … When we started to edit it, in my mind, the film was organic but it became like a series of sketches which it shouldn’t be. So it took a long time to find. And I did what I very rarely do at the editing – I re-changed scenes in places, the order of the scenes and sequences. I cut out more than usual maybe. I love editing, so I could edit the film all my life. I only stop because producers want the film to be ready. … Discovering the public as you edit is the thing. How long can you expect the public not to know anything about what they’re seeing, not to understand, to wonder where they’re going? I thought they could wonder for 20 minutes. On film-making in general: Now I’m in a position of someone who’s finished a film – not a good position. When you finish a film, there’s emptiness, there’s a disappointment. You have to get over that and move on to something new. To move on to something new you have to experience something new. As I said, I don’t want to be the same person, I have to think of myself as something else. It’s only if you’ll experience and travel that this will happen. So I have no idea now what I will do next. I think we forgot how much cinema is capable of. Cinema is amazing. It can do anything. We tend to forget that because we try to tell stories. … Cinema also has to reinvent itself all the time. The first images projected were a train coming into a station and people were afraid of the train. But that is how it was before. No one is afraid anymore. … So you have to reinvent this miracle of cinema, every generation has to reinvent it. Through techniques and through imagination. In India, there was a filmmaker called Guru Dutt who had this imagination and freedom. That’s what cinema is made of. On what he does when he isn’t making a film: I try to make films mostly. But also, I travel. I read, I write. I fall in love. I fall sick. I do what everybody does. But even if I didn’t have any trouble with finding money, I don’t think I would have made many films. Maybe a few more, but not that many more. I have to feel when I make a film that I’m not exactly the same person as the guy who made the film before.

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