|
- I was looking for a subject for a film without really looking. It was a period of voracious
reading. I came across a collection of Joseph Conrad’s short stories that had just been published
by Gallimard. When I came to the one entitled The Return, in June 2003, it briefly crossed my mind
that this would make a good film, but you can’t constantly read with a view to turning what
you’re reading into a script, so I pressed on with the rest of the book and forgot the idea.
It wasn’t until December 2003 that I read the short story again, and I was totally thrown. Thrown
by the description of a man who is so terribly lost, thrown by his disappearance at the end, by
the enigma of the female character, by the few words she utters, by her return, by her indomi-
table strength and by a single line: 'Had I known you loved me, I’d never have come back.'
That’s when I first mentioned the book to Anne-Louise Trividic.
Fairly soon after, I called Isabelle Huppert to tell her I had thought of a part for her. We’d been in
contact for some time. The first thing I asked her was not to read Conrad’s story, in which
everything is seen from the man’s point of view. It’s told by him, felt by him. Isabelle was smart
enough to be patient and wait for her character to take shape and be reborn through the
process of writing the script. In the meantime, I had given the short story to Pascal Greggory to
read.
Anne-Louise and I got down to work separately. She soon suggested that we didn’t just need to
flesh out the female character but redefine the couple’s whole relationship. She also set about
finding an answer to the question that underpins the whole film: why does the woman come
back? It was like an exercise in tightly focused literary criticism of Conrad’s story. What does it
say about relationships that is still valid? Anne-Louise and I work by a kind of shuttle process:
she sends me lots of text, a great mass of material and ideas, then we gradually pare it down
until we are left only with what seems absolutely indispensable and what I can connect to the
most. Then, we cut and paste it all together. After Intimacy and His Brother, this is the third film
we have constructed that way.
Making a film happen, imagining it, dreaming it up, is a collective enterprise. For Gabrielle, it
started with Anne-Louise, followed by a lot of work with Isabelle and Pascal, and then Eric
Gautier before we went into production to find the right kind of lighting. At each stage, it’s like
giving yourself the chance for something new to emerge, to set out in a new, more surprising
direction each time. It may even be a working principle of mine, never to do the same thing twice.
With Gabrielle, I can honestly say now that I thought I was fighting a lost cause. Sure, after a
few months, we clearly had a great, well structured script but the dialogue was paradoxical,
unusually substantial, and perhaps the two actors were a little bit too ready. I shot this film very
quickly, without second thoughts, but with an intense feeling of panic. I had to take the plunge,
cast the film out into the water like a message in a bottle. My biggest surprise was the way in
which the actors put the ball back in my court. Everything about this project was paradoxical.
It was shot very quickly but with a very long fuse. That meant I spent a lot of time unable to get
into Isabelle, bouncing off her. Then, the scene in the bathroom where she confides in great
detail to her maid unblocked the whole situation. Isabelle came round to my side and I was able
to explore what she was going through, That’s when I glimpsed my film. Isabelle possesses a
huge range, as we all know, like the perfect acting machine. I wanted to throw a spanner in the
works. At the same time, I asked things of Pascal that I never asked of him before and he came
up with some beautiful inventions. I was very taken aback by Pascal and Isabelle and that was
very enjoyable.
On this film, I had the chance to use, in the open, all that the theater has taught me. From now
on, I feel I am free of the theater, free of what people regularly tell me about 'film-making that has
nothing to do, whatsoever, with the stage', free to be a film and stage director. It took a while,
but for the first time, I enjoyed flirting with my theater background, feeling able to dream up a
short, rigorously formal film that I had always pictured as intensely stylized. A film in which we
would depict in detail the customs of an exotic tribe: the rich and powerful in Paris around 1912.
Maids and ladies-in-waiting... I wanted to feel the impersonal, stifling luxury of the early 20th
century, like a tomb the man has dug to bury somebody alive - his wife. I wanted to watch with
the naked eye - like a chemistry experiment on two fine specimens, with the beauty of the cos-
tumes, their elegance and that of the sets, and with music omnipresent - as a world (his) crumb-
les and collapses and another (hers) painfully comes into being and grows. Sometimes, a lot of
speech, often a lot of silence.
I like dialogue in film. It can render situations mysterious rather than explaining them. I like Berg-
man, of course - I venerate him - but also great American films like those by Coppola, Scorsese,
Cimino and Leone, which dare to be very talkative. In France, we’ve probably become a little
scared of dialogue, scared of being theatrical, of getting too far away from what’s 'natural'. For
sure, it’s Important to seek out and find truth, but not what’s natural.
A final decisive element in Gabrielle was working on the photography with Eric Gautier and in
editing with Francois Gedigier. A film set in the Belle Epoque had to be worthy of that particular
appellation. We did research using period photos and constantly exchanged ideas. We then did
a lot of tests with different lighting set-ups. Eric talked to me about the light in the paintings by
Frantin-Latour, a light that you rarely see in the cinema today (everything comes from chan-
deliers on the ceiling). From a very early stage, as I told him, I wanted to experiment with a few,
powerful stylistic principles: starting the film in black and white before suddenly switching to
color, going back to black and white occasionally, not hesitating to use specific formal tech-
niques such as slow-motion, freeze-frame, or commenting on the action with intertitles on cards
that could also be used to pick out certain lines of dialogue. We tried all of these things with
Francois and the result is cinema in its purest form, while offering an insight into that which, in
my work on the text and photography and with the actors, took me back to the roots of theater
and drama.
I’m naturally very pleased that Gabrielle has been selected for the Venice Mostra. It will be the
first time that I take a film to Venice and, especially as I co-produced the film with Italy thanks to
Roberto Cicutto, and Fabio Vacchi composed the wonderful music, it seems natural for the film
to go back to Italy, and that is thanks to Marco Muller.
I would just like the film not to be a film about 'a woman of that period', but for it to have a uni-
versal calling, telling the story of a woman who returns to her home because love doesn’t live
there, and a man leaving it because it has always been devoid of life. I would like the film to
answer a question valid across all ages, to capture something that has an element of the in-
tangible, of the secrets of faces and actions. Everything is in the manner of exploring, in an out-
wardly rigid way, the muffled violence of this two-person civil war, of this golden prison in
which two beings are revealed and espouse hatred. To understand how to film these dinner
parties, this world laden with obligations, conventions and futile chatter, and allow us to under-
stand just how meaningful for us is the man’s madness and the woman’s empowerment. Two
beings never troubled by the slightest affection, who, in ten years of marriage, had never
dreamed of becoming a couple and had come to forget that they had a body.
|
