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How did you react when you were sent the screenplay for RED LIGHTS?
- Just after reading the script, I was sitting in my car, thinking about the part, with its vertiginous quality and I was listening to the radio: there was a programme about soldiers in the First World War as it was Armistice Day. It occurred to me that this character, with nowhere to go and the great big fear in him that he can only overcome by drinking was like a soldier in the trenches, he would need to become someone else for a while, outdo himself. I felt it was an epic parallel between the character and someone at the bottom of a hole in wartime. Except that in RED LIGHTS, he's dug his own hole.
How could a family man like that get himself into such a state?
- By being so decent. By trying to fit in with what society expects and that has made him paranoid. I liked him immediately; he's a tragic hero as far as I am concerned. He develops this crazed passion for self-sacrifice, for pain and fear… He emerges drained and distraught, he is returned to his wife and we find out that she has been through something much worse. He is not given the time to become a true hero. He doesn't even win in the suffering stakes. That is the cruelty of Simenon's world; he ridicules his characters by showing that their heroics are derisory. Derisory in comparison with other people's suffering, suffering that one is not aware of which turns out to be even more important than our own. Symbolically speaking, it's exemplary. The man has a moment's selfishness and it floors him.
But the ending of RED LIGHTS is a reconciliation.
- One might say that the ending is a happy one for both the man and the woman, who had forgotten who they were and recover some kind of humanity. In the way they touch, in their eyes, there is greater depth than the fifteen years together has given them. In the space of a few hours, they have become real to each other.
Your character is in a state of perpetual panic, ever in action.
- He is physically destroying himself. The strange thing is that destroying oneself over a long shoot requires a minimum amount of fitness. That was my challenge (laughs). I like the idea that one's entire being is required to play a character that is at his wits' end. That was the physical quality of the film and it was a challenge. One has to lay oneself bare. That was my agreement with Cédric Kahn, that I would be defenceless, open, vulnerable.
You carry the film, you are almost never out of shot.
- My character is load bearing. Even on set, I was there nearly every day, talking to the crew.
It is part of one's job as an actor, something one seeks out in fact.
Cédric Kahn gave you an opportunity.
- Cédric and I trusted each other from the start. Because Carole and I are both experienced actors, I think he was afraid that he would find himself having to deal with a block of fixed notions as to what his film should be. I could see he was surprised everything went so well.
But I have nothing to defend with regards my own personality, I have enough trouble finding the characters’. In this, Cédric and I were of the same view. We had the same open approach, a slight intuitive way of making a film. And that kind of mutual trust is rare.
With Carole Bouquet, the challenge was to make the life of a couple, a love affair, seem believable in very little time.
- Carole and I knew each other slightly at the Paris Conservatoire, but I was the only one who remembered that… (laughs) We work together as a couple because Carole is a very generous actress, very playful, who enjoys her partner. There was room for pleasure and game-playing between us, we really looked into each other, which is why the relationship works on screen and it's not so surprising that I should end up with Carole Bouquet. OK, she is one of the most beautiful women in the world and I look somewhat... neutral. (laughs) But why not? That gave us an identity too.
What will you remember about shooting RED LIGHTS?
- I could tell you the story of the shoot from the first day to the last. It's all in my head. To play that
character, at the time, was my main goal. However hard it may have been. You can experience
that range of emotion over a two-month period without feeling slightly shaky and worn at the end. We shot a great deal at night. We were tired. But in the end, I think it was worth it.
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